MESSAGE FROM HONG KONG

After a few pink gins, perhaps

Mate, I live in Hong Kong. If you want an outlier for your global warming folks (and I reallly have no opinion either way vis-a-vis the rest of theplanet) but HK has added about 2 degrees Celsius in the last two decades, mainly through the building of an enormous amount of very tall buildings that block the normal wind patterns from cooling people as they should. A better heat island I dare you to find.

HK would tend, on a rather extreme scale, to suggest that readings from anywhere that tall buildings and bunches of concrete/heat-absorbing-bitumen exists cannot be taken as indicators of global warming; maybe global rapaciousness, but even that - as objectionable as it may be - is geographically confined.

The whole way this issue is being handled is completely wrong.

Sorry, BUT: Ask anyone if they give a rat's clitorus whether Tuvalu has any dry land in 100 years, even 10 years, and I would wager that unless it had direct access to the Chunnel you would hear a resounding 'Wha?!'

The bottom line is this: people don't care until it infringes upon their enjoyment of the planet.

Come to Hong Kong ... the place where Colonel Yang, one of the only bonafide Chinese astronauts, took a harbour cruise and had to have the view described to him. The harbour is only 1km wide in some places.

Don't argue about whether anthropogenic global warming is happening. That's a great topic for ologist barbecues. What about the fact that we can't see 3km? Isn't that infinitely worse? Why don't we concentrate on improving the view? Do that and everything flows from there.

(Name withheld to protect the guilty)






ERR.... YES

(From GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 33, L06718, 2006)

Long-term persistence in climate and the detection problem

Abstract

We have analyzed six recently reconstructed records (Jones et al., 1998; Mann et al., 1999; Briffa, 2000; Esper et al., 2002; McIntyre and McKitrick, 2003; and Moberg et al., 2005) of the Northern Hemisphere temperatures and found that all are governed by long-term persistence. Due to the long-term persistence, the mean temperature variations ?(m, L) between L years, obtained from moving averages over m years, are considerably larger than for uncorrelated or short-term correlated records. We compare the values for ?(m, L) with the most recent temperature changes ?T i (m, L) in the corresponding instrumental record and determine the year i c where ?T i (m, L)/?(m, L) exceeds a certain threshold and the first year i d when this could be detected. We find, for example, that for the climatologically relevant parameters m = 30, L = 100, and the threshold 2.5, the values (i c , i d ) range, for all records, between (1976, 1990) for Mann et al. (1999) and (1988, 2002) for Jones et al. (1998). Accordingly, the hypothesis that at least part of the recent warming cannot be solely related to natural factors, may be accepted with a very low risk, independently of the database used.

A spoof, of course






CHURCH OF ENGLAND HYPOCRISY?

The Archbishop of Canterbury has been accused of hypocrisy for lecturing politicians on global warming while the Church of England reaps millions of pounds from shares in oil firms. Rowan Williams warned last week that climate change was a "huge moral problem" that could cause billions of deaths. He said politicians who reject changes will face "a heavy responsibility before God". He added that the shortage of fuel supplies for high-fuel economies - "heavy-car-using economies to put it bluntly" - will be a factor in destabilising global politics in the next decade.

But an audit of the Church Commissioners' investments shows its oil shares increased in value by œ46.9m last year. Its portfolio includes more than 12 million pounds of shares in Exxon Mobil, the American oil group blamed for the world's biggest environmental disaster when the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground off Alaska in 1989. The firm, which has funded research groups that claim climate change is a "myth", is appealing against a 2.8 billion pound fine for the spillage in the American courts.

Williams is chairman of the commissioners, who also have investments in BP worth 140 million and shares in Shell totalling 80 million. Another investment is BAA, the airports group, which has been partly blamed for the rise in carbon emissions because of the way it has encouraged cheap air travel.

Dan Lewis, of the Economic Research Council, a think tank, said: "If anyone wanted proof that for some people global warming has become a religion this is it. It is hilarious that the church has shares in Exxon." But John Reynolds, chairman of the Church of England's ethical advisory group, said: "The investments we have allow us to have an active dialogue with the oil companies about the environment." A spokeswoman for Lambeth Palace said: "The archbishop's leadership has never been about micro-management and investment decisions. It is more about leading by example."

The Sunday Times






REALITY CHECK: BRITAIN PLANS FURTHER EXPANSION OF AIRPORTS

British Greens hate air travel

Britons are set to take more than half a billion flights a year by 2030, with thousands of homes across the country facing greater increases in noise and pollution than the government has forecast. The air transport White Paper just two years ago predicted that passenger numbers would double by 2030. Now at least 10 airports plan to handle a growth even higher than that.

Ministers will also reveal tomorrow that politicians and civil servants fly the equivalent of 100,000 trips to New York every year on business as they launch a new promise to offset the carbon emissions of all flights by paying for schemes to reduce emissions from other sources.

The new growth figures mean the government faces an even tougher battle to curb greenhouse gas emissions blamed for climate change - less than a week after admitting it will miss its key target to tackle the problem. 'If people thought the airport growth forecasts in the White Paper were bad enough, they will be shocked to find out that even those can be exceeded so substantially and so quickly,' said Anthony Rae, a regional air campaigner for Friends of the Earth. 'If you go beyond the 480m to 500m-520m [passengers a year], we don't know what the upper limit would be, it simply makes the problems worse.'

The White Paper controversially set out dozens of schemes to expand and build new runways and terminals to accommodate a central forecast rise from 200m passengers a year to nearly 480m. The forecast included a range of 400m to 600m passengers, but the 480m figure has become the widely used benchmark. The report also acknowledged the environmental dangers of flying, but said aviation was 'essential' to the UK economy, and proposed expansion should be accompanied by measures to reduce air and noise pollution. The most high-profile and controversial proposal was to build another runway at Stansted Airport north of London, and another runway at either Heathrow or Gatwick, but dozens more regional schemes were also given the go-ahead.

Since then, research by Friends of the Earth shows airports at Newcastle, Teesside, Leeds-Bradford, Liverpool, Blackpool, Southampton, Edinburgh and Glasgow have submitted 'master plans' for future growth which predict passenger numbers will rise beyond the White Paper projections. In addition, Doncaster Airport, which was excluded from the White Paper, now forecasts up to 14.5m passengers by 2030, and Coventry, which was a very small operation two years ago, is planning for 2m. Together, these airports are planning for an additional 39m passengers a year at least, which would take the government forecast over 500m.

Research by the Stop Stansted Expansion group also shows the government target to increase air travel from regional airports to 40 per cent of the national total by 2030 was already reached last year - largely driven by no-frills airlines.

Nationally the increase in aviation emissions would not be enormous, and currently aviation contributes less than 5 per cent of all UK greenhouse gas emissions. But the sector is already the fastest growing source of greenhouse gases. Aviation emissions are nearly three times more potent as greenhouse gases because they take place high in the atmosphere. Because of this, one report suggests aviation alone will use up the entire UK pledged carbon allowance in the second half of this century. A Department for Transport spokesman said the government 'stands by' its own forecasts, which were in a range of 400m-600m by 2030, and stressed that the more ambitious plans had not yet been approved. The scheme to pay to off-set the carbon emissions of all government flights will be launched by environment minister Elliot Morley, and is expected to cost more than 1 million pounds a year.

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.

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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