(The CO2 lie: Renowned research team claims that alarm over looming climate-catastrophe is just panic-mongering by politicians)
By Dr Werner Weber, professor of physics at the Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany. Article published in a popular German newsmagazine
Does the human race face a self-made climate catastrophe? Or is global warming just a big CO2 lie by hysterical scientists? A team led by Hamburg's former environment minister Fritz Vahrenholt has given the all clear.
Climate alarmism is the invention of politicians and UN climate scientist. In truth, the sun is at least as responsible for the temperature fluctuations of the earth as CO2. Exclusive to BILD the authors have summarised their theses.
What the IPCC conceals
Climate horror warnings are raining down on us: heat waves, hurricanes, floods of biblical dimensions should soon plague the planet. It seems as if the apocalypse is near. Even school children are indoctrinated: it’s all our fault. By 2020, we, the developed nations will have to pay 100 billion dollars per year to developing countries to redress alleged climate damage.
One thing is certain: In the last 150 years it has warmed by an unwieldy 0.8 degree Celsius. The omniscient IPCC of the United Nations tells us that the warming has been caused almost entirely by evil CO2. And if our emissions have already caused almost a degree of global warming, then soon a few more degrees would be added by the end of the century.
But what if the UN organisation is wrong? Can we really trust these experts blindly? Are they really independent?
If you check the facts carefully, you arrive at a different result: Less than half of the current warming of 0.8 degree Celsius is probably man-made. With the other half, we have absolutely nothing to do.
Because the main culprit, when it comes to climate variability, is our sun.
The sun shines very evenly. Too evenly to produce large climate fluctuations. But the sun has sunspots. Sometimes it is very active and has many and great spots that create strong magnetic fields. Sometimes it has few and very small spots. This happens in 11-year cycles. There are other cycles, some last for centuries, while others last for millennia.
On Earth, the sun leaves behind traces of its activity. The active sun with its magnetic fields weakens significantly the cosmic radiation coming from outer space. This solar influence can be traced over many millennia by analysing soil layers. And it is proven that it has changed the Earth's climate: when the sun was less active, our planet was cool. And whenever the sun's activity increased, the earth warmed - long before humans increased the CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
1000 years ago, solar activity was much stronger for several centuries than before. During this "Medieval Warm Period", it was so warm that the Vikings could settle in Greenland and had agricultural farms there. But a few hundred years later, the sun became weaker during the "Little Ice Age". On Earth, it got icy cold. The Viking settlements in Greenland perished miserably. In Europe, there were massive crop failures. Hunger and diseases spread. The Thames was frozen over in many winters.
The question is: How much has the Sun contributed to global warming over the last centuries? It is established that its activity has increased sharply since 1700 and that in the two cycles prior to 1995 it has even reached the highest level for 400 years.
Pure chance, claim the IPCC’s climate experts. Without further ado, they ignore solar activity in their climate models. Thus they ignored the findings of the Danish physicist and climate researcher Professor Henrik Svensmark. He found strong evidence that clouds decrease according to solar activity and virtually form a radiation shield, dynamics that are remote-controlled by solar activity. In my own work, which were inspired by Svensmark’s work, I found further evidence for the climate relevance of solar activity.
And it gets even worse: leading solar physicists have found that the activity of the sun has been decreasing rapidly for about 15 years - and will continue to decline until at least 2030. So we slide into a decade-long lull sun.
And it comes in good time. For it will neutralize the CO2 warming for quite a while and bring our world probably a cooling phase. Only after 2040, it will warm again. And by 2100, temperatures may rise by a half to a full degree Celsius.
One thing is clear: we should do something about that. The shift away from oil, gas and coal to renewable energy is right. But the excessive warming forecasts by the IPCC are pure fear-mongering.
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China Bans Airlines From Joining EU Carbon Levies System
China is extremely sensitive about any external interference in its internal affairs. But the rest of the world is not far behind. The EU is headed for a bloody nose over this.
The irony that the old Peace of Westphalia is violated by the EU in this matter might also be noted. The Peace of Westphalia is of course a European treaty (or series of treaties) and its basic principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations has long been a keystone of international law. It was designed to end confict and has been influential in avoiding it. It takes the historical ignorance of the Green/Left to flout it for such little gain
China, home to the world’s fastest growing aviation market, banned airlines from taking part in a European Union carbon-emissions system designed to curb pollution, saying the program violates international rules.
The system contravenes the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and international civil aviation regulations, the Civil Aviation Administration of China said in a statement posted on its website today. Carriers were also barred from using the EU program as a reason for raising fares, it said.
The EU hopes to resolve the issue through negotiations or it may ultimately be ruled on by the courts, Markus Ederer, its ambassador to China, said at a press briefing in Beijing today. India, the U.S., Russia and global airlines have also objected to the levy, saying it will be less effective than a global solution.
“I believe all sides will negotiate again and find a solution,” said Chai Haibo, vice president of the China Air Transport Association. “I can’t imagine that the worst case, such as the EU grounding Chinese flights, could happen.”
The airline group has called on the government to oppose the EU levy and it is working on a legal challenge in Germany. Whether the lawsuit will continue will depend on the EU reaction to the China ban, Chai said. The group’s members include China’s big three state-controlled carriers, Air China Ltd., China Southern Airlines Co. and China Eastern Airlines Corp.
The EU added aviation to a wider carbon-trading system on Jan. 1. The move could cost Chinese airlines as much as 800 million yuan ($127 million) in 2012, according to the China airline group.
Based on current carbon prices and the fact that airlines will get some emissions allowances for free, the system would boost Beijing-to-Brussels ticket prices by 17.50 yuan, Ederer said.
Global System
Other nations’ carriers can be exempted from the EU system if their own governments introduce similar programs, he said. The International Civil Aviation Organization, a UN body, has said that it plans to form a global system.
The EU Court of Justice in December upheld the legality of the bloc’s drive to extend the world’s largest carbon cap-and- trade program beyond its borders. The system covers the EU’s 27 members as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.
China Southern Chairman Si Xianmin said last week that Europe’s emission trading program is not beneficial in the current economic environment or for Europe’s efforts to escape the sovereign debt crisis. He made the comments at a briefing also attended by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.
The carrier, Asia’s biggest by passenger numbers, flies to Amsterdam and Paris. It intends to start services to London this year. Air China, the nation’s largest international carrier, generated 11 percent of revenue in Europe in the first half of last year. Its destinations in the region include London, Paris and Madrid.
Countries outside the European bloc have said that the emission trading program is illegal because carriers are charged for pollution that happens outside of Europe, for instance, on the first part of a flight from Asia to Europe. The countries say this should only be regulated by the affected nations.
India has asked carriers not to give emissions data to the EU, K.G. Vishwanath, Jet Airways (India) Ltd.’s vice president for commercial strategy & investor relations, said in a Jan. 23 conference call. The country also plans to work with other nations opposed to the program, Environment Ministry Joint Secretary M.F. Farooqui told reporters in New Delhi last week.
Shinichiro Ito, president of All Nippon Airways Co., Asia’s largest listed carrier by sale, said last month that he favored a global system over a regional one. The carrier and the Japanese government are working on ways to oppose the system, he said without elaboration.
The U.S. House of Representatives last year passed a bill prohibiting the country’s airlines from participating in the EU carbon program after the industry estimated that participation in the system would cost U.S. airlines $3.1 billion from 2012 to 2020. Bills in the U.S. also need approval from the senate and president before they become laws.
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Climate concern is now largely a Democrat belief only
They're good at believing the impossible and improbable. They even thought President emptyhead offered hope and change
In March 1981, pollsters tucked the first question about global climate change into a national poll, asking 1,000 adults if they had "heard or read about the 'greenhouse effect.'" Fourteen percent replied either "a great deal" or "a fair amount." The majority - 62 percent - said they had never heard of it.
In the ensuing 30 years, some 300 polls have tracked the nation's opinion on this topic. Concern has waxed and waned, but it's never been much more than a blip on the nation's consciousness. Environmental concerns rarely crack the top 20 issues on national polls; among environmental issues, climate change rarely makes the top 10.
Now a group of sociologists have plumbed those polls to divine the factors driving public opinion on climate change.
A study published Monday in the journal Climatic Change finds that the economy, perhaps not surprisingly, is one of the biggest influencers, followed closely by "elite cues" – statements and actions from political leaders, celebrities, advocacy groups and the like.
Weather extremes and efforts to increase scientific literacy have minimal to no impact, the study concluded.
"When Congressional Democrats speak publically about the need for action on climate change, the public increases its perception of the seriousness of the issue," the researchers wrote in the study.
"When Congressional Republicans vote against key pieces of environment legislation, the public adjusts perceptions of the threat of climate change downward."
One surprising result of the analysis, said Robert Brulle, the study's lead author and a sociologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, is the volatility of public opinion.
Concern about global warming is driven by current events, he said, and has almost no relation to past levels of concern. That, Brulle added, is a sign that efforts to educate the public to climate science are not sticking and should be rethought.
"That's a really key finding," he said. "If you're going to have an information campaign, it's going to have to be constant.... It's not permanent. You're not going to convince the American public once and for all."
Ed Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, called Brulle's approach "very innovative" but was not surprised to see economics play such a large role.
"Particularly in bad economic times, there's a finite 'pool of worry,'" he said. "That dramatically reduces the bandwidth to think about other potential threats, such as climate change."
Radical polarization
But Maibach noted public perception of climate change has undergone a radical polarization in the past 15 years. When the Clinton Administration was negotiating the Kyoto Protocol, two out of three Americans felt climate change was a problem worth addressing, he said.
Since then, the proportion of Democrats concerned about the issue have moved from two out of three to closer to nine out of 10. Republicans, meanwhile, have shifted almost as dramatically the other direction, from two out of three to three out of 10, he said.
"There's been this divergence, and it's been a politically defined divergence," Maibach said. "That's given rise to the cues of the political elite that are so important."
The study looked at five factors that potentially account for changes in public concern about climate change: extreme weather, media coverage, science education, elite cues and advocacy efforts. It also examined external events, such as war, unemployment, and the price of oil.
It found media coverage to be a key driver – the greater the quantity of media coverage, the greater the level of public concern, the authors concluded. But that, Brulle said, prompts the question: What drives media coverage? That answer, he added, is clear. The most important factor is the "elite partisan battle over the issue," the study concluded.
"A great deal of focus has been devoted to the analysis and development of various communication techniques to better convey an understanding of climate change to individual members of the public," the report concluded. "These efforts have a minor influence and are dwarfed by the effect of the divide on environmental issues in the political elite."
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HadCRUT (UEA) Coverage: Worse Than It Seems
Warmist temperature reports are always given with great apparent precision. They have to do that because we live in an era of exceptional temperature stability -- so all actual average temperature changes are microscopic. But the precision is spurious. They don't have enough data to enable precision. Only a very rough estimate is possible
The map above shows typical HadCRUT land coverage in the 1860s. Land coverage is well below 10%, yet global temperatures are reported to 0.001 precision. A complete farce.
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Britain’s Wind Lunacy
THE big freeze has not just caused major disruption across the country. It has also exposed the hollowness of fashionable green rhetoric about global warming.
For years, environmental zealots have indulged in alarmist talk about relentlessly soaring temperatures caused by mankind’s destructive irresponsibility. Typical of this scaremongering was the claim made in 2000 by Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the university of East Anglia, that “children just aren’t going to know what snow is”.
How foolish those words now look more than a decade later as Britain is gripped by Arctic weather. Indeed, contrary to the green lobby’s shrill declaration that “the science is settled” on the reality of man- made global warming, there is now a wealth of evidence that earth is not heating up at all.
One recent study by the Met office, based on readings from 30,000 measuring stations, indicates that there has been no significant increase in temperatures over the past 15 years.
But nothing will halt the environmental fanatics who are driven by dogma rather than the search for the truth. That is why they are so keen on manipulating data, bullying their opponents and spreading lurid propaganda.
Our ruling political class has swallowed the green agenda because it gives them an excuse to grab more power while posing self-righteously as the saviours of the planet. In the name of protecting future generations they can pursue their favourite activities of imposing regulations, dishing out subsidies and raising taxes.
Always keen to expand the role of the state labour enthusiastically adopted this approach, especially when Ed Miliband was Climate Change secretary in Gordon Brown’s government until 2010.
But the coalition has been just as bad. Miliband’s successor, the liberal Democrat Chris Huhne, was an aggressive evangelist for green policies no matter what the burden to the public. since his resignation on Friday, Huhne’s place has been taken by fellow liberal Democrat Ed Davey.
Though he has been hailed as a more pragmatic figure than Huhne it is likely that Davey will pursue the same line. “I am determined to follow on Chris’s priorities,” he proclaimed on taking office.
Many Conservatives, however, are rightly disturbed at the Government’s continuing infatuation with expensive environmentalism. And their concern has focused on the ministerial obsession with wind farms, the most controversial, high-profile aspect of the fashionable green agenda.
OVER the weekend no fewer than 101 Tory MPs, along with a few politicians from other parties, wrote a letter to David Cameron urging that he cut the lavish, counter-productive subsidies given to wind power.
The rebellious Tories are right to challenge the coalition. The onward march of wind farms has been a disaster for the country, imposing savage increases on household electricity bills while doing nothing to enhance our energy supplies. Wind turbines are monuments of political folly, a triumph of dogma over common sense. Chris Huhne, with the characteristic fervour of a green extremist, called these massive structures “elegant and beautiful” but the truth is that they are unsightly monstrosities.
Paradoxically, for all the cheer-leading of the green lobby, they do terrible damage to the environment. They despoil the landscape, create noise pollution and are a men- ace to wildlife. It is estimated that 400,000 birds are killed every year in America by their revolving blades.
Moreover, wind farms are both costly and inefficient, which is why they have to be so heavily subsidised. The Government pours £522million every year into support for wind power, for which we all have to pay through increased electricity charges. Green politics operates like robin Hood in reverse, taking from the hard- pressed citizens through electricity bills and giving to rich landowners through handouts.
The outlay for this madness is likely to soar in the coming years as the coalition expands the role of wind power. There are already 3,500 turbines in Britain but the Government wants another 10,000 onshore and 4,300 offshore by 2020, a programme that will ultimately cost £140billion, the equivalent of £5,600 for every household. Within eight years wind subsidies will account for about a fifth of our electricity bills.
BUT the rush to wind makes little difference to energy generation. Despite all the profligate funding, wind turbines currently supply a pitiful 2.7 per cent of our electricity. Even if 10 per cent of the entire country was covered in wind farms they could still only provide a sixth of our needs. That is because turbines are so hopelessly unre- liable. on still days they produce nothing yet if the wind gusts at more than 56mph they have to be shut down because they become unstable
.
In 2010, onshore turbines operated on average at just 21 per cent of capacity, making a mockery of the greens’ claim that wind can ever be an effective source of power.
While we cripple ourselves in an expensive display of ideological superiority, nations such as China, India and Brazil are forging ahead. It does not have to be like this. We are a uniquely energy rich country with plentiful supplies of oil, gas and coal, as well as nuclear expertise.
We should be exploiting our resources to become richer, not submitting to green lunacy to make ourselves poorer.
SOURCE
2011, and the Unlucky Country finally gets a carbon dioxide tax
by Bob Carter
Australian voters entered 2011 with the pre-election commitment of Prime Minister Julia Gillard still sounding in their ears: "There will be no carbon [dioxide] tax under a government that I lead".
Nonetheless, cognitive dissonance had already arrived on the Canberra political scene, in the shape of the Multi-Party Committee on Climate Change (MPCCC) that was established in late 2010 in order to plan for the introduction of just such a tax.
Thereafter, the political year yielded a spectacular display of chicanery, scientific malfeasance, media bias and economic and social irresponsibility, all underpinned by a confusion of both purpose and morality and accompanied by an uncertainty of outcomes: and that’s just the global warming picture.
The way that science works
Climate change is self-evidently a natural process. Warmings, coolings, cyclones, floods, droughts and bushfires have been coming and going since long before human industrial processes started adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere; and, indeed, since before there were humans at all.
The appropriate question is therefore not whether climate change is “real”, but the more specific one of whether human-related greenhouse emissions are causing dangerous global warming.
Scientists assess such speculative ideas against a norm called the null hypothesis, which, following long historical practice, is fashioned to be the simplest interpretation of any given set of material facts.
The null hypothesis for today’s observed climate changes is therefore that they are of natural causation, unless and until specific evidence accrues otherwise.
Contrary to prevailing political belief, and to the alarmist messages that come from the UN’s discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), much amplified by environmental organisations and a compliant media, scientists have searched for this accrual in vain.
Instead, tens of thousands of scientific papers published in reputable journals delineate changes in climate and the environment, and ecological responses, that are entirely consistent with the null hypothesis of natural causation. In contrast, not a single paper exists that demonstrates an evidential cause-effect link between change in an environmental variable (be that more or less storms, floods, droughts, cyclones, honeyeaters or even polar bears) and warming caused by human-related carbon dioxide emissions.
Given the astonishing amounts of money that are now poured into climate change research, it is no surprise that 2011 saw the publication of several thousand more scientific papers that contain data relevant to this problem. But it may perhaps be to some readers’ surprise that these papers simply added yet more evidence in favour of the validity of the null hypothesis.
2011 in review: the two universes of climate change
The 33 selected discoveries and events discussed in the main review represent but a small part of the recent evidence that challenges the belief that dangerous global warming is being caused by human-related carbon dioxide emissions. Contradictions of nearly every shibboleth of the AGW faith are present on the list, and every argument that has been advanced in favour of the speculative dangerous warming hypothesis is now feeling the breeze of contradictory fact. Many additional articles that contradict the prevailing wisdom can be found in the more comprehensive reviews of the Non-governmental International Committee on Climate Change (NIPCC).
The 2011 climate year, then, as judged from both media coverage and new scientific literature, has confirmed the existence of two entirely parallel universes of climate thought.
In the first universe, independent scientific and public opinion are moving inexorably towards the rejection of climate alarmism and the costly measures that are perpetrated in its cause. An important manifestation of this opinion was the recent publication of a reasoned statement of disagreement with warming alarmism in the Wall Street Journal, signed by 16 independent scientists. Their conclusion is that global warming is not a serious problem, and that even if it were the solutions being offered wouldn’t fix it anyway.
In contrast, the IPCC and its supporters, who include the Australian government as one of the most faithful acolytes, continue to project unrelenting alarmism. Towards which end they encourage the implementation of expensive, unnecessary and ineffectual measures that they claim will mitigate dangerous warming, such as carbon dioxide taxation and the massive subsidisation of feel good eco-bling like solar farms and windfarms.
Yet the IPCC is a discredited organisation that remains under heavy attack, and its forthcoming 5th Assessment Report is facing a barrage of fundamental criticism even before its publication. For the distinguished Dutch chemical engineer and philosopher of science, Professor Arthur Rörsch, has issued a critique of the draft version of this report, entitled “Post-modern science and the scientific legitimacy of the IPCC’s WGI AR5 draft report”. Noting that the IPCC is a political organization that applies post-modern “logic” to the science that it summarizes, Rörsch calls for thorough independent investigations to be instituted into climate change policy in Europe, thereby mirroring conclusions drawn, and similar calls made, by independent scientists in Australia, Canada and other countries over the last five years.
The political costs of irrational climate policy
The huge social, environmental, economic and (so far limited, but increasing) political costs of pursuing irrational climate policies have to date simply been swatted aside, both in Australia and overseas.
But now that major discrepancies have emerged between genuine scientific knowledge and IPCC advice, sensible policy reappraisals are occurring in many countries. In these circumstances, the compulsive Australian self-harm of continuing to demonize carbon dioxide emissions has become politically enigmatic – not to mention the ultimate ironic twist that the emissions are actually environmentally beneficial, and additionally so at a time of likely global cooling.
When the accumulating new research knowledge, and the reassurance that it provides, are compared with the statements and actions of the Australian government during 2011, an enormous disconnect becomes apparent. And when measure is taken also of the present state of Australian public opinion, and of the rapidly shifting, worldwide political movement away from climate alarmism, and away from punitive measures against carbon dioxide, that disconnect morphs into full blown cognitive dissonance.
In which state of mind, the Labor-Independent-Green government in Australia last year passed what must be the worst legislative package ever approved by a federal parliament. “Worst” because it marks a direct attack on the cheap power prices that formerly underpinned the Australian economy, thereby being a direct attack also on the living standards of all citizens – and especially the less well-off.
Those with the most to lose include not only individual citizens, but also the very lobby groups that have so assiduously fomented the dangerous warming scare.
Including, in particular, environmentalists (because anti-carbon dioxide measures, and the destruction of wealth and landscape desecration that go with them, harm the environment), scientists (because piping a called tune is the very antithesis of science), business interests (because shareholder value is never going to be enhanced by encouraging large and irrational increases in the cost of power) and politicians (because their atavistic need to be elected will not be facilitated by sharply attacking the living standards of their constituency).
The way forward will be determined by an election
The Australian government and its climate-alarmist supporters are now trapped deep inside a blind alley with walls that are labelled “scientific consensus” and “public consensus”. These have always been political siren calls, but the first is a nonsense by definition, and, in that fickle fashion that public opinion often exhibits, the public consensus dramatically reversed its direction during 2009-2010, partly because of the Climategate affair and the attendant loss of IPCC’s virginity.
Former British PM Margaret Thatcher well understood that it is the nature of consensus policy-making to spawn legislative stupidities such as Australia’s carbon dioxide legislation. As she said so well:
"Consensus is the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot [otherwise] get agreement on the way ahead."
Well, people did object but a carbon dioxide tax has still become law, and as they pass from 2011 into 2012 Australian voters are probably less interested in pondering causes, consensual or otherwise, and more interested in action towards rectifying what they see as an economically damaging, expensive, regressive, ineffectual and unnecessary new tax.
They are therefore likely to be contemplating closely the carefully chosen words of Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott:
"We have a Prime Minister who is the great betrayer of the Australian people. She was absolutely crystal-clear before the last election – 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead'. We [the Coalition] can repeal the tax, we will repeal the tax, we must repeal the tax. I am giving you the most definite commitment any politician can give that this tax will go. This is a pledge in blood. This tax will go."
Barring unforeseen and extraordinary circumstances, and terminally bored though we all are with the debate already, the next Australian federal election will therefore be won or lost on the global warming/carbon dioxide tax issue.
By pulling out of the Kyoto protocol, and scheduling formal Senate hearings on global warming from independent scientists, as they did in December, Canada has blazed a new trail.
The question is whether Australia’s Coalition partners will now muster the courage to honour Mr Abbott’s pledge, and to administer the bureaucratic restructuring and legislative repeal that is needed to restore sanity to our national climate policy.
SOURCE
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Jim Hansen and his twin
