BAN AIRCRAFT!

This study could lead to some fun. The Greenies will want to ban jet aircraft now. Back to the DC3! Seriously, however, it shows yet another climate-influencing factor left out of the global warming "models" (i.e. guesswork). If a large part of the warming is due to contrails, it means that estimates of carbon dioxide involvement are seriously wrong. And that is a BASIC assertion that is wrong. It means that the Kyoto treaty is focusing on substantially the wrong thing in its (pathetic) attempt to influence climate

NASA scientists have found that cirrus clouds, formed by contrails from aircraft engine exhaust, are capable of increasing average surface temperatures enough to account for a warming trend in the United States that occurred between 1975 and 1994. "This result shows the increased cirrus coverage, attributable to air traffic, could account for nearly all of the warming observed over the United States for nearly 20 years starting in 1975, but it is important to acknowledge contrails would add to and not replace any greenhouse gas effect," said Patrick Minnis, senior research scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. The study was published April 15 in the Journal of Climate. "During the same period, warming occurred in many other areas where cirrus coverage decreased or remained steady," he added. "This study demonstrates that human activity has a visible and significant impact on cloud cover and, therefore, on climate. It indicates that contrails should be included in climate change scenarios," Minnis said.

Minnis determined the observed one percent per decade increase in cirrus cloud cover over the United States is likely due to air traffic-induced contrails. Using published results from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (New York) general circulation model, Minnis and his colleagues estimated contrails and their resulting cirrus clouds would increase surface and lower atmospheric temperatures by 0.36 to 0.54 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. Weather service data reveal surface and lower atmospheric temperatures across North America rose by almost 0.5 degree Fahrenheit per decade between 1975 and 1994.

Minnis worked with colleagues Kirk Ayers, Rabi Palinkonda, and Dung Phan from Analytical Services and Materials, Inc., of Hampton, Va. They used 25 years of global surface observations of cirrus clouds, temperature and humidity records from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis dataset. They confirmed the cirrus trends with 13 years of satellite data from NASA's International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project.

Both air traffic and cirrus coverage increased during the period of warming despite no changes in the NCEP humidity at jet cruise altitudes over the United States. By contrast, humidity at flight altitudes decreased over other land areas, such as Asia, and was accompanied by less cirrus coverage, except over Western Europe, where air traffic is very heavy.

Cirrus coverage also rose in the North Pacific and North Atlantic flight corridors. The trends in cirrus cover and warming over the United States were greatest during winter and spring, the same seasons when contrails are most frequent. These results, along with findings from earlier studies, led to the conclusion that contrails caused the increase in cirrus clouds. "This study indicates that contrails already have substantial regional effects where air traffic is heavy, such as over the United States. As air travel continues growing in other areas, the impact could become globally significant," Minnis said.

Humidity is the amount of water vapor in the air and determines how long contrails remain in the atmosphere. Contrails that persist for an extended period of time are most likely to impact the climate.

Contrails form high in the atmosphere when the mixture of water vapor in the aircraft exhaust and the air condenses and freezes. Persisting contrails can spread into extensive cirrus clouds that tend to warm the Earth, because they reflect less sunlight than the amount of heat they trap. The balance between Earth's incoming sunlight and outgoing heat drives climate change.

Source

(I can't help noticing that one of the researchers is a Vietnamese by the name of Dung Phan. I wonder how often he has to endure jokes about the s**t hitting the fan?)




Envirocrats and Their Wall of Fear

Greenies use irrational fear to block things that are friendly to the environment -- such as nuclear power

The coining of a new word in the English language - envirocrat - has become necessary since a vociferous minority has falsely captured the moral high ground of the environmental consciousness of the American people.

Americans, by culture and heritage, love the flora and fauna that surround their daily lives. Intelligent corrections to environmental threats have been addressed and resolved. An example is the catalytic converter. New exhaust standards introduced in 1994 have reduced pollutants from automobiles up to 97.5 percent in hydrocarbons alone and carbon monoxide by 96 percent. The U.S. General Accounting Office estimated in one 20-year period the U.S. government and private industry spent close to one trillion dollars on pollution control and continues to spend at a cost of hundreds of billions per year.

But is this ever enough in the eyes of the envirocrat? The money to solve America's pollution problems comes from one source - the free enterprise engine of the great American capitalist economy. The vociferous minority of envirocrats represents a political group with a hidden agenda. That hidden agenda is the total destruction of capitalism. Lenin and Trotsky started a system to destroy capitalism in 1917 and for 75 years it continued, eventually ending in absolute failure. The envirocrat gang is chameleon-like in nature. They are masters at color changes. Miraculously they changed from red, the traditional Marxist color, to green to match their envirocrat endeavors. Not satisfied with their own color change from red to green, they succeeded in changing the color of their political party from red to blue, with the help of a like-minded mass media, leaving Republicans with their old Marxist red. In essence, the envirocrats emerged as watermelon Marxists - green on the outside, red to the core, with a designated political party colored Republican blue.

The envirocrat's stated view of capitalism is found on website www.greenparty.org, "Toward Ecological Democracy," Page 6, Paragraph 5: "Capitalism creates a wealthy class of social parasites who make no productive contribution to society."

Any sane person who claims to be an environmentalist knows that solutions to environmental problems invariably are reduced to money. It follows, therefore, that capitalism and a safe environment go hand in hand. Nothing that capitalist America can do or spend to resolve real or perceived environmental problems will ever be acceptable to the Marxist envirocrat. They are like the man who is standing with a loaf of bread under each arm, crying he is starving to death. The envirocrat cries hysterically, "We don't want American children to breathe foul air or drink poisoned water." A noble plea, indeed, if in fact, American children were breathing foul air or drinking poisoned water. Even an idiot knows America has the safest drinking water on the planet. As for foul air, America has the cleanest atmosphere of any industrialized nation in the world. In addition, capitalist America is constantly striving and spending billions of dollars to provide further safeguards.

What have the vociferous envirocrats done to help? Better yet, what have the envirocrats done to obstruct solutions to eliminate the remaining atmospheric pollution? Their answer is emphatically to make the environment worse by burning high pollution fossil fuels for America's electrical energy. In doing so, the envirocrats have lit a flame of fear within this nation by equating atomic energy plants with the atomic bomb. This is tantamount to building a wall separating the people of America from the cleanest, safest, most efficient and cheapest method of production of electrical energy known to the mind of man. Through concerted fear mongering, envirocrats have forced America to use coal, the highest producer of pollutants and greenhouse gases of all fossil energy resources. Today, 53 percent of America's electricity is generated in coal-fired plants.

Studies at Ohio State University, conducted by Gordon J. Aubrecht, Department of Physics, determined that the amount of coal burned annually to produce electricity in America releases nearly 1,500 tons of cancer-causing uranium and over 3,500 tons of cancer-causing thorium, resulting in 50 fatalities, 120,000 cases of respiratory ailments, tens of millions of dollars in property damage, plus the emission of nitrous oxide equivalent to 40,000 cars per year.

Oddly enough, the claimed wants of the envirocrats are the same as honest American environmentalists. Their wants are: (1) air free of radiation, (2) air free of carbon dioxide, (3) air free of nitrous oxide, (4) air free of carbon monoxide, and (5) decreased respiratory diseases and deaths caused by all the above. The envirocrats say that's what they want, but in reality they obstruct all efforts to solve the pollution problem. What the nation needs at this point is atomic energy. Atomic energy answers the claimed wants of the extremist envirocrats.

Atomic energy, when correctly managed as it has been in the U.S. for generations, releases no radiation. In 55 years, only one accident in the whole world released radiation; Chernobyl, Ukraine, where 31 lives were lost. Radiation sickness affected many more, but nowhere near the numbers that hysterical envirocrats" claim. Compare this to the tens of thousands of lives lost around the world just in the processing and transporting of fossil fuels; losses in coal mine; oil field and gas line explosions; and the environmental damage caused by 1.5 billion gallons of crude oil dumped in the ocean. This is what the envirocrats have forced on the American public with their blunt denial of the use of atomic power. The wall of fear needlessly built by the envirocrats must be torn down.

Source






PERVASIVE GREEN PROPAGANDA IN AUSTRALIA

Green propaganda is now so pervasive in the media and public debate it has become part of the cultural background. Extraordinary errors and misrepresentations, on subjects such as global warming and native vegetation clearing, are regularly published without comment. Here's a story about just how hard it is to defend the truth against the Green spirit of our times.

On February 16, 2004 ABC TV's Four Corners aired a program about the Tasmanian timber industry. It is possibly the most biased Australian television program ever put to air. Called Lords of the Forest, its faults included a map that dramatically under-represented the amount of forest preserved in Tasmania, unsubstantiated allegations of criminal activity, the smearing of pro-logging speakers who appeared on the program, and emotive language. This included the following phrases: mushroom clouds, scorched-earth policy, an aggressive forest policy, a voracious appetite for timber, overwhelming devastation, absolute assault on the landscape and the senses, and corruption and cronyism.

Timber pays the wages of about 10,000 people in Tasmania. Many of them, their families and their supporters were appalled that the ABC could produce a program that treated their way of life with such contempt. But that was only the beginning.

Timber Communities Australia (TCA) is a volunteer organisation with a professional secretariat funded by the industry. It complained to the ABC about Lords of the Forests. Following an internal review, Geoffrey Crawford, director of corporate affairs, told TCA the corporation "cannot agree with your view that the program was unfair and impartial". All it would concede was that the map had been "oversimplified" and two other, minor, errors of fact. The ABC put a corrected map on its website but refused a request from TCA to correct any errors on air.

TCA and Forestry Tasmania, the state agency that manages public forests, then appealed to the Independent Complaints Review Tribunal. In stark contrast to the ABC's internal review, this one found, last December, "instances of serious bias, lack of balance and unfair treatment [the program] frequently casts doubt on the credibility of the 'Lords' and their supporters, but scarcely ever subjects their opponents to the same treatment". A complaint about the map was also upheld by the Australian Broadcasting Authority, which found last month that the program had breached the ABC code of practice and had "failed to present factual material accurately".

TCA again asked the ABC for an on-air correction, and was again refused. Apart from a short press release, the ABC did nothing in response to the independent findings. Its response can be compared with that of the British Broadcasting Corporation, which in 2002 also broadcast a biased and ignorant attack on the Tasmanian timber industry. In that case Britain's Broadcasting Standards Commission not only found against the program, it was able to order the BBC to run a summary of its finding on air after each of four subsequent programs, and publish a half-page summary near the front of The Times newspaper on June 2, 2003.

Strange to relate, while the Australian inquiries were under way, Lords of the Forest was one of a group of three programs from Four Corners that won the prestigious 2004 Australian Government Peter Hunt Eureka Prize of $10,000 for outstanding science communication. Following the damning findings of the two independent review organisations, last month TCA asked the Australian Museum, which administers the prizes, to have the decision reconsidered. The judges met and decided not to withdraw the prize, saying in a written statement that the factual inaccuracies upheld by the Independent Complaints Review Tribunal (including the map) were "relatively minor" and they did not believe the wording used in the program was unusually emotive.

This decision was supported in letters to Barry Chipman, Tasmanian state co-ordinator of TCA, by the museum's director Frank Howarth, and Brian Sherman, the president of the museum trust. Sherman wrote that "your suggestion that the museum overturn the reconsidered decision of a judging panel would, I believe, compromise the independence of the judging process and not be in the best interest of the integrity of the Australian Museum Eureka Prizes".

Following the ABA finding last month, Senator Ian Campbell, the Minister for the Environment and Heritage, intervened. He said he "was concerned that this prestigious award, sponsored by my department, has been given to a story that might not have met the highest standards of journalism". After writing to Sherman about the affair, Campbell added a member to the panel of judges: Professor Bob Carter, of James Cook University, an environmental scientist specialising in climate change. Campbell also demanded to see the criteria used for awarding the prize.

In December, Gunns Limited, the big Tasmanian timber company, launched a writ against 20 environmental activists and organisations - an action widely supported by the 10,000 people who live off timber, and their families and their union. To find the motivation behind the writ you need look no further than the frustration and bitterness created by years of media bias, typified by Lords of the Forest. The Tasmanians feel they have been betrayed by revered national institutions such as the ABC and the Australian Museum.

Anyone concerned by the left's domination of cultural institutions in this country will be further depressed by the sad example of this program, the cover-up afterwards, and the lack of interest in the whole sordid affair from the media.

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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