GLOBAL WARMING NOT WORKING FOR SPAIN

Global warming should lead to increased evaporation off the oceans and hence increased rainfall. Instead we find a record drought:

Spain's cities are so polluted that they cause 16,000 deaths every year. A European Commission report also said that 15 million people - a third of Spain's population - are at risk of cancer, heart problems and asthma as a result of the polluted air over Madrid, Barcelona, Seville and other major cities. According to one estimate, breathing the air in Madrid is equivalent to smoking 11 cigarettes a day.

The record levels of air contamination can partly be blamed on the ongoing and devastating drought - the worst since records began - and on sand-borne particles blown in from the Sahara Desert. Last year, a United Nations report said that Africa's deserts were poised to jump the Mediterranean and up to a third of Spain could soon become desert.

But there are also man-made causes for what has become known as the "grey beret" - the cloud of air pollution that hangs above the country's cities.... "After we clean the windows here, in two hours they're covered in black dust," Alfonso Herranz, a resident of the Madrid barrio of Plaza de Luca de Tena told Spain's El Pais newspaper. Pollution in the area exceeded safe levels on 124 days last year....

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A COMEBACK FOR GLOBAL COOLING?

Politicians regard the studies by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the ultimate climate bible. Unfortunately, they do not read the comprehensive reports which form the basis of the whole exercise. They only read -- if at all -- the alarmist passages in the "Summary for Policy-maker", which have been skewed through an elaborate and sophisticated process of spin-doctoring. Details of this practice have recently been revealed by the French climatologist Marcel Leroux in his book, Global Warming - Myth or Reality? The Erring Ways of Climatology.

Disapproving these practices, various renowned scientists have distanced themselves from the IPCC. In the US, Chris Landsea, a hurricane expert, is one example. In the Netherlands, Henk Tennekes, former director of the research department of the Royal Meteorological Institute, and Hans Oerlemans, glaciologist and laureate of the prestigious Spinoza Award, have done the same.

Political leaders assume that climate science is sufficiently advanced to legitimize all kinds of draconian measures which have a profound impact on our society and economy -- measures which, moreover, encroach upon the liberty of the individual citizen. But if we take a closer look, this appears not to be the case. Contrary what is often argued, there is no consensus among scientists on the man-made global warming hypothesis.

Ironically, just as global warming scare-mongering reaches new heights, the global cooling hypothesis is making a come back. It should be recalled that the frightening images of imminent global warming disaster are of fairly recent vintage. After all, in the 1960s and 1970s various prominent climatologists held the view that it was not global warming that formed a mortal threat to humanity but global cooling.

Recently the astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov of the Pulkovo Astronomic Observatory in St. Petersburg declared that the Earth will experience a "mini Ice Age" in the middle of this century, caused by low solar activity. Temperatures will begin falling six or seven years from now, when global warming caused by increased solar activity in the 20th century reaches its peak. The coldest period will occur 15 to 20 years after a major solar output decline between 2035 and 2045, Abdusamatov said. This view is shared by the Belgian astronomer, Dirk Callebaut, who expects a "grand minimum" in the middle of this century, just like the Maunder Minimum (1650-1700), a period during which the Thames, the Seine and the Dutch canals were frozen in winter.

If these astronomers are right, the hundreds of billions of dollars the world will spend every year on the fight against global warming will have gone down the drain. But, of course, we are not sure of imminent global cooling. On the other hand, we are not sure whether there will be catastrophic global warming either.

What to do in the face of this uncertainty? The earlier-mentioned climatologist, Henk Tennekes, recently argued in an interview in the most prominent Dutch weekly, Elsevier: "We only understand 10 percent of the climate issue. That is not enough to wreck the world economy with Kyoto-like measures."

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CLIMATE CATASTROPHISM RUNNING OUT OF THEORIES

Gassy emissions no longer in suspect dock for melting the last ice age

Methane escaping from the sea floor to the atmosphere has been a popular suspect for causing rapid climate changes during and at the end of the last ice age. But new data derived from a Greenland ice core have delivered a killer blow to the idea.

Methane (CH4) is a much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It is usually released from swamps or through biomass burning. But it is also trapped in huge amounts in some ocean-floor sediments, where it lies buried in a strange kind of ice known as 'methane clathrate'. These clathrates are stable only within a certain range of temperatures and pressures; when brought to the surface, they melt rapidly and release burnable gas to the air.

A catastrophic release of trillions of tonnes of methane is thought to have triggered a temperature jump some 55 million years ago in an already warm climate at the Palaeocene/Eocene boundary (see 'Gas leak!'). But some scientists suspect that similar methane bursts, triggered perhaps by submarine landslides, sea-level drops or changes in water temperature, may also have caused a number of rapid warming episodes during and at the end of the last glacial period.

The theory has been popularized as the 'clathrate gun hypothesis'1. But now an isotope analysis of methane trapped in bubbles of a Greenland ice core seems to disprove the idea.

No sign of a burp

Todd Sowers, a palaeoceanographer at Pennsylvania State University in Philadelphia, measured hydrogen isotopes of atmospheric methane from three distinct warming episodes, 38,000, 14,500 and 11,500 years ago. Methane from clathrates contains more deuterium (the heavy form of hydrogen) than methane from land-based sources, thanks in part to the bacteria that create the gas on the sea floor, and the material they consume.

He found no evidence whatsoever in the data for increased amounts of methane from marine clathrates. "This means that seafloor methane reservoirs must have been stable at these times, or at least that no significant amounts of methane escaped the ocean," says Sowers, whose study is published in Science this week2.

"The data are convincing," says Kai-Uwe Hinrichs, a geochemist at the University of Bremen in Germany. "They won't exactly increase the attractiveness of the clathrate gun hypothesis." At least for the three periods Sowell has looked at in high resolution, they may even be a "killer argument", adds Jerome Chappellaz, a geochemist at the CNRS Laboratory of Glaciology and Geophysics of the Environment in Grenoble, France....

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SOMETIMES GREEN COMES FROM MOULD

And the Greenest Church of all sure is mouldy -- mouldy with inertia and loss of faith. Post lifted from Scott Burgess:

As I'm not an adherent to any organised religion - finding the manifestations thereof often ludicrous and not infrequently terrifying - it's with some amusement that I regard the current campaign of the Archbishop of Canterbury to present the Church of England in the most ridiculous possible light. Were I an Anglican, I'd most likely be saddened - and even this committed secularist does feel a tinge of pity when considering those who do in fact have a sincere emotional (dare I say 'spiritual'?) attachment to the church.

No doubt the Archbishop's programme predates my having noticed it, but it first came to my attention in July of 2004, in the form of an article in the Daily Telegraph, which begins:

"Church of England harvest festival services could soon expect worshippers not only to thank God for an abundant crop but also to repent for sins against the environment and for oppression and inequality.

"Congregations which traditionally gather around piles of bread, fruit and vegetables to sing 'We plough the fields and scatter' will be asked to acknowledge their 'selfishness in not sharing the earth's bounty fairly'. They may also apologise for 'our failure to protect resources for others' and for 'inequality and oppression in the earth'."

The same month saw an injunction that the clergy be discouraged from conducting cremations, on the grounds that ... can you possibly guess? On the grounds that cremations release unacceptable levels of greenhouse gases.

This was followed shortly thereafter - in February of 2005 - with recommendations that organic bread and wine be used at Holy Communion, that church f^tes concentrate on selling fairly traded products, and that the Church adopt "creation care prayers", which now no doubt accompany the heartfelt apologies for inequality and selfishness. In addition, according to the Independent:

"Christians will be asked to praise the work of the Body Shop which is described as a 'brave exception' for getting people to consider the ethics of their shopping choices."

It's unclear whether this "praise" would take the form of a special Body Shop hymn, an addendum to the Book of Common Prayer ("give us this day our jojoba extra rich night cream, and deliver us from wrinkles") or earth-toned liturgical banners bearing iconography of Anita Roddick - perhaps, in the spirit of the democratic ethos, individual congregations will be allowed to choose their own devotional means.

Needless to say, merely singing the praises of the Body Shop and repeating creation care prayers proved insufficient to absolve the Church of its overwhelming sense of guilt, and September of last year brought more calls for apology - this time for the war in Iraq. The Times reports:

"BISHOPS of the Church of England want all Britain's Christian leaders to get together in public to say sorry for the war in Iraq and its aftermath.

"The bishops say that the Government is not likely to show remorse so the churches should. They want to organise a major gathering with senior figures from the Muslim community to make a 'public act of repentance'."

The bishops' report recommended meeting terrorists' demands ("addressing of long-standing grievances") and "perhaps" giving them "economic support" as being crucially important in overcoming terrorism (PDF - page 73). The report - which, according to the official CofE website, maintains that "the churches' tradition of self-examination and penitence could make a distinctive contribution to the quest for reconciliation" (read: "if we apologise often enough, maybe they won't blow us up") - also recommends bribing Iran not to build nukes:

"Tehran might forgo a nuclear weapons capability, if the EU-3 delivered a suitably attractive incentive package."

By November, the Archbishop was attacking the Anglican missionaries of the 19th century for teaching natives indigenous peoples English hymns, an act which he sees as a "sin":

"In all sorts of ways the Church over the centuries has lent itself to the error, indeed the sin, of trying to make cultural captives, whether it is the mass export of Hymns Ancient and Modern to the remote parts of the mission field, or the abiding colonial shadow, the shadow of the British Empire that still hangs over our Communion."

While most would see these attempts to further the apparent goal of the Archbishop as indisputably impressive, he seemingly finds them lacking, as this week has seen an extraordinary flurry of activity on his part. As we've seen, Monday saw his support of the plan to divest CofE funds from Caterpillar (because bulldozers produced by that company are sometimes used to dismantle the homes of Palestinians), and on Tuesday he took the entire Western world to task for being uncivil to Muslims.

(Incidentally, neither the bishops' report nor the Archbishop's concern for the Palestinian cause should be construed as supportive of terrorism. Although Dr. Williams does speak of the "serious moral goals" of terrorists (who often have no choice but to act as they do, since they "experience their world as leaving them no other option"), and the possibility of using terror to "pursue an aim that is intelligible or desirable", he definitely thinks that terrorists are bad. Excepting, presumably, those who award him medals):
"President Yassir Arafat Awarding the Palestinian Medal, Bethlehem 2000, to the Bishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in his office in Ramallah." Today brings news of the latest manifestation of the pathology of guilt that infects both the Archbishop and the broader Church leadership. At the urging of its leader, the General Synod - sharing "the shame and sinfulness of our predecessors" - voted unanimously to apologise to the descendants of slaves, as the Church had at one time profited from ownership. (It's difficult to determine the extent of these profits, but in one case a bishop and three colleagues were paid 13,000 pounds in compensation when their slaves were emancipated in 1833).

The Church and the Archbishop would seemingly be less susceptible to charges that this is nothing more than politically correct grandstanding if they were to take concrete action, as opposed to the symbolic self-flagellation in which they so clearly revel. For example, a donation of 9.6 million pounds - the return on 13,000 pounds invested at 5% interest, compounded quarterly - could be made to an anti-slavery charity (or used to establish one). What do you suppose the chances are?

It wouldn't surprise me in the least if all this ridiculous gesturing, absurd self-loathing and despicable cravenness was in large part responsible for the decline in Church attendance over the last few decades. After all, the Muslim community shows none of those attributes (except, perhaps, for the first), and mosque attendance in the UK now exceeds that of the CofE.

UPDATE: I feel so guilty. I'm sorry - I'm really, really sorry that I didn't make the point so succinctly made by commenter JohnM:

"Given that slavery has been ubiquitous in history, shouldn't the CoE be crowing that the West are responsible for its abolition in most of the world? Should we be ashamed that Anglican missionaries did so much to marginalise its practice in Africa amongst other places?"

Actually, I think that the original intent was simply to commemorate abolition - then the Archbishop and others decided that the customary apology was the correct course of action.

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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.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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