For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).
Yes, you did read that right. And also, yes, this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society's continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
In response to these facts, a global warming devotee will chuckle and say "how silly to judge climate change over such a short period". Yet in the next breath, the same person will assure you that the 28-year-long period of warming which occurred between 1970 and 1998 constitutes a dangerous (and man-made) warming. Tosh. Our devotee will also pass by the curious additional facts that a period of similar warming occurred between 1918 and 1940, well prior to the greatest phase of world industrialisation, and that cooling occurred between 1940 and 1965, at precisely the time that human emissions were increasing at their greatest rate.
Does something not strike you as odd here? That industrial carbon dioxide is not the primary cause of earth's recent decadal-scale temperature changes doesn't seem at all odd to many thousands of independent scientists. They have long appreciated - ever since the early 1990s, when the global warming bandwagon first started to roll behind the gravy train of the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - that such short-term climate fluctuations are chiefly of natural origin. Yet the public appears to be largely convinced otherwise. How is this possible?
Since the early 1990s, the columns of many leading newspapers and magazines, worldwide, have carried an increasing stream of alarmist letters and articles on hypothetical, human-caused climate change. Each such alarmist article is larded with words such as "if", "might", "could", "probably", "perhaps", "expected", "projected" or "modelled" - and many involve such deep dreaming, or ignorance of scientific facts and principles, that they are akin to nonsense.
The problem here is not that of climate change per se, but rather that of the sophisticated scientific brainwashing that has been inflicted on the public, bureaucrats and politicians alike. Governments generally choose not to receive policy advice on climate from independent scientists. Rather, they seek guidance from their own self-interested science bureaucracies and senior advisers, or from the IPCC itself. No matter how accurate it may be, cautious and politically non-correct science advice is not welcomed in Westminster, and nor is it widely reported.
Marketed under the imprimatur of the IPCC, the bladder-trembling and now infamous hockey-stick diagram that shows accelerating warming during the 20th century - a statistical construct by scientist Michael Mann and co-workers from mostly tree ring records - has been a seminal image of the climate scaremongering campaign. Thanks to the work of a Canadian statistician, Stephen McIntyre, and others, this graph is now known to be deeply flawed.
There are other reasons, too, why the public hears so little in detail from those scientists who approach climate change issues rationally, the so-called climate sceptics. Most are to do with intimidation against speaking out, which operates intensely on several parallel fronts.
First, most government scientists are gagged from making public comment on contentious issues, their employing organisations instead making use of public relations experts to craft carefully tailored, frisbee-science press releases. Second, scientists are under intense pressure to conform with the prevailing paradigm of climate alarmism if they wish to receive funding for their research. Third, members of the Establishment have spoken declamatory words on the issue, and the kingdom's subjects are expected to listen.
On the alarmist campaign trail, the UK's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, is thus reported as saying that global warming is so bad that Antarctica is likely to be the world's only habitable continent by the end of this century. Warming devotee and former Chairman of Shell, Lord [Ron] Oxburgh, reportedly agrees with another rash statement of King's, that climate change is a bigger threat than terrorism. And goodly Archbishop Rowan Williams, who self-evidently understands little about the science, has warned of "millions, billions" of deaths as a result of global warming and threatened Mr Blair with the wrath of the climate God unless he acts. By betraying the public's trust in their positions of influence, so do the great and good become the small and silly.
Two simple graphs provide needed context, and exemplify the dynamic, fluctuating nature of climate change. The first is a temperature curve for the last six million years, which shows a three-million year period when it was several degrees warmer than today, followed by a three-million year cooling trend which was accompanied by an increase in the magnitude of the pervasive, higher frequency, cold and warm climate cycles. During the last three such warm (interglacial) periods, temperatures at high latitudes were as much as 5 degrees warmer than today's. The second graph shows the average global temperature over the last eight years, which has proved to be a period of stasis.
The essence of the issue is this. Climate changes naturally all the time, partly in predictable cycles, and partly in unpredictable shorter rhythms and rapid episodic shifts, some of the causes of which remain unknown. We are fortunate that our modern societies have developed during the last 10,000 years of benignly warm, interglacial climate. But for more than 90 per cent of the last two million years, the climate has been colder, and generally much colder, than today. The reality of the climate record is that a sudden natural cooling is far more to be feared, and will do infinitely more social and economic damage, than the late 20th century phase of gentle warming.
The British Government urgently needs to recast the sources from which it draws its climate advice. The shrill alarmism of its public advisers, and the often eco-fundamentalist policy initiatives that bubble up from the depths of the Civil Service, have all long since been detached from science reality. Internationally, the IPCC is a deeply flawed organisation, as acknowledged in a recent House of Lords report, and the Kyoto Protocol has proved a costly flop. Clearly, the wrong horses have been backed.
As mooted recently by Tony Blair, perhaps the time has come for Britain to join instead the new Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (AP6), whose six member countries are committed to the development of new technologies to improve environmental outcomes. There, at least, some real solutions are likely to emerge for improving energy efficiency and reducing pollution. Informal discussions have already begun about a new AP6 audit body, designed to vet rigorously the science advice that the Partnership receives, including from the IPCC. Can Britain afford not to be there?
Source
THREE GREAT "JUNK SCIENCE" SCAMS OF OUR TIMES
(Post lifted from California Republican activist Stephen Frank)
The media is gullible--it believes all that it is told by leftists and automatically disbelieves the facts. In my life time, history will show three great scams of the leftist scientific community.
1. Rachel Carson and her "Silent Spring" scam against pesticides. She claimed that DDT was bad for health. Yet the facts are, that Leftists wanted to stop the use of DDT, a pesticide, in order to control the "wrong" population. Just like Marget Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood) used abortion to promote the killing of non-whites (she was a KKK type racist) Carson and her ilk were targeting the "over-population: of Africa by blacks.
From www.junkscience.com: The Leftists knew that stopping the use of DDT would cause an epidemic of malaria--a "simple" way of killing blacks. So, we ended the use of DDT and an epidemic of malaria hit Africa, killing millions--just as planned. Sanger and the KKK would be proud. "Population control advocates blamed DDT for increasing third world population. In the 1960s, World Health Organization authorities believed there was no alternative to the overpopulation problem but to assure than up to 40 percent of the children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the Agency for International Development stated, "Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing." But the media refused to report the facts:
* A committee of the National Academy of Sciences wrote in 1970, "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT... Indeed, it is estimated that, in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that would otherwise have been inevitable."
* DDT was not banned because there was evidence it harmed wildlife or humans. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency administrative law judge who listened to 9,000 pages of testimony over seven months concluded, ""DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man... DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man... The use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife."
* Despite the findings of the EPA judge, EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus banned DDT in 1972. Ruckelshaus never attended a single hour of the seven months of EPA hearings on DDT. His aides reported he did not even read the transcript of the EPA hearings on DDT. Ruckleshaus was a member and fundraiser for the Environmental Defense Fund -- a group who -- according to a deposition in a federal lawsuit -- conspired to discredit the scientists who defended DDT.
2. Then we have the "over population" scam. Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 book, "Population Bomb" thought that by the beginning of the twenty-first century hundreds of millions would starve to death. "Ehrlich penetrated the American consciousness with his 1968 book, The Population Bomb. Given the economic stagflation that struck the world in the 1970s, books with pessimistic outlooks claiming humanity had enormous problems to solve were to be expected.
Ehrlich went way beyond this and instead predicted famine and disaster on a scale unprecedented in world history. In the prologue to The Population Bomb he wrote, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..." (See here)
Not only was the world headed for catastrophe, but there was little that could be done to avoid it. Some parts of the world might see some minor and temporary recovery, but "a minimum of ten million people, most of them children, will starve to death during each year of the 1970s. But this is a mere handful compared to the numbers that will be starving before the end of the century" (emphasis in the original). (See here)"
Indeed, tens of millions did starve to death --due to government polices, like in Rwanda and the Sudan, and regulations in most of Africa due to non use of pesticides, causing fewer crops to feed an exploding population. Government, not nature, caused the human tragedy of Africa and the poorer nations of the world. White people, like Sanger, Carson and Ehrlich promoted "sensitive" policies that harmed people of color--as if this was an effort by the KKK (of the Left) to destroy minorities world wide. Yes, I am accusing Ehrlich, Carson, Sanger and their "kool-aid" drinking followers of racism and destruction of human beings. While it may not be their intention, it is the unintended consequence of their values.
3. The third scam history will note from our unenlightened, politically correct era, will be that of "global warming". The very same folks who thirty years ago said we were moving into an "Ice Age" have now concluded we are quickly burning up the Earth.
Some of these radicals, the PETA crowd, is working hard to outlaw cows (meat) by claiming that cow farts cause global warming. Any excuse or lie to promote a cause that will send the world back before the Industrial Revolution and quality foods. Yet, the facts show differently:
"Scientist: Let cows be cows":
"Meteorologist Augie Auer says farmers needn't beat themselves up about the possibility their animals are contributing to global warming. The former professor of atmospheric science at the University of Wyoming told an audience of dairy farmers at the Waimate West Demonstration Farm last week that the contribution cows make to the greenhouse gas layer with their emissions of methane is infinitesimal and that New Zealand's support for the Kyoto Protocol is misguided. In an absorbing address delivered in a manner he described as "kitchen physics", he advanced a plausible case for sunspots - explosions on the sun's surface - being a more likely contributor to global warming than greenhouse gases." (Taranaki Daily News)
The real first question is whether is not we have permanent temperature changes or if the changes we now notice are just cyclical. For documentation that "global warming" is nothing new, go here
Some want political gain, at the expense of our economy. Which is why the United States and Britain are the biggest losers of the Kyoto Treaty, while third world nations and China would be allowed to "pollute" all they want. Kill the economic stability of the free world by killing two capitalistic nations, and tyranny and dictatorship will flourish in the chaos created.
In California, Governor Schwarzenegger created a "California Climate Action Team" comprised of mostly his Administration appointees. In December, they recommended $7.9 billion in mandated retro-fitting of California businesses and a "public goods service charge" (a new tax, to real people) on oil products (gasoline). See here
Yet, the "final" report was vague on the costs, fee's and tax increases. When will we know? My best guess is sometime after mid-November, 2006. The bad news is that Nunez and Perata are trying to make it even more expensive! The bottom line is that both the Governor and the Democrats are headed the same way, on the same road, buying into the scam, that will if the Guv or Dems get their way, will dramatically cut jobs and further harm the California economy.
Todays San Diego Union Tribune brings reality into this issue:
But some scientists and businesses advise caution. If California reaches too far, industry could relocate to less-demanding states or countries. That would reverse any gains in California, they warn. "What California does could be sacrificial for no purpose," said Dorothy Rothrock of the influential California Manufacturers and Technology Association.
"The net gain would be nothing," argued Andy O'Hare, vice president of a Washington, D.C.-based coalition of 30 cement makers. It's not just industry representatives who question whether one state can accomplish much. (Editors note: the Governors proposal would close down all California cement manufacturers, and cause cement to be driven into the state, causing higher construction costs and more vehicle pollution)
Economic growth in China is expected to make that country the world's largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions by midcentury -- eclipsing cuts made by the Unites States and other industrialized countries.
"We can decide to go to zero and there still could be no net improvement," said Walter Oechel, a climate researcher at San Diego State University.
(Editor's note: China is exempt from most of the Kyoto treaty. In other words, the Treaty would transfer manufacturing jobs from the United States to China, as would the Governors proposal)
If you think businesses, big businesses are not looking to leave California, read this from Dan Weintraub, Apple Computer is about to go to Nevada because of our taxation and regulatory policies--another example of what is wrong in Sacramento:
All the way to Reno (From Daniel Weintraub's California Insider):
"Apple Computer has been a pioneer in computer hardware and software and in design. If it proves to be a leader in cash management as well, California's treasury could be in trouble. Business Week reports this morning that the growing electronics firm has created a Nevada subsidiary to manage its cash reserves, with the intent of getting more favorable tax treatment. The story is here.
Imagine California without any cows, cement or manufacturing --maybe then someone will speak up. The losers in the global warming scam, just like the DDT and population scam, will be minorities...those that stay behind in California will be relegated to low paying jobs--because that will be all available to those with limited, poor quality education and those that barely (if at all) speak English.
Feel free to give your own stories about the abuse of science, misuse of facts and statistics to promote radical political causes. This debate is one that will decide if California becomes a third world state and loses its ability to compete. Let your voices be heard on this, let the Governor and the legislature understand jobs and families before radical political agendas. In other words, liberals using "science" always find a way to harm minorities--I wonder why that is?
"VENUS' CLIMATE IS TELLING US THAT WE REALLY DON'T UNDERSTAND THE EARTH"
This week a European spacecraft will arrive for a date with Venus, our closest planetary neighbour. Scientists hope the mission, made on a shoestring budget, will reveal vital lessons on how unchecked greenhouse gases can turn a world into a blistering Hades. Robin McKie reports on a journey to the Forgotten Planet
On Tuesday morning, mission controllers in the European Space Agency's operations centre in Darmstadt will put the finishing touches to an international bid to study the ultimate neighbour from hell.
They will transmit a series of radio commands to a robot spacecraft currently hurtling towards the Sun. Its rocket engine will fire for 50 minutes as it passes Venus, slowing the craft down so that it can be captured by the planet's gravitational field. Once in orbit, the wardrobe-sized probe - Venus Express - will then study the planet's acid clouds, searing heat, crushingly dense atmosphere and hurricanes to find out why Earth's nearest neighbour has become a place of insufferable heat and poison. "Venus is very like Earth in that it is the same size and has an orbit round the Sun close to ours", said David Southwood, head of science at the ESA. "Yet Venus went wrong. We did not. We want to find out why Venus became our evil twin".
Venus and Earth are almost identical in size. In addition, both orbit the Sun in 'the Goldilocks zone', a swath of space in which conditions are considered by astronomers as being not too hot and not too cold to prevent the evolution of life. Venus should make ideal planetary real estate, in other words. Yet it is the solar system's most inhospitable planet. "It's very disturbing that we do not understand the climate on a planet that is so much like the Earth", said Professor Fred Taylor, a planetary scientist based at Oxford University and one of the ESA's chief advisers for the Venus Express mission. "It is telling us that we really don't understand the Earth. We have ended up with a lot of mysteries".
Such puzzles are recent, however. Throughout history, Venus has simply been seen as the heavenly embodiment of a deity. Intriguingly, this was invariably a female one. For example, the Babylonians, Ancient Greeks and Romans all linked it with their goddesses of love.
Venus was later revealed to be a planet, one that was assumed to be more or less the same as Earth. Only its permanent cloud covering prevented astronomers from working out the details of these similarities. Even in the Fifties, popular science books depicted a mist-shrouded world either of deserts or of swamps and ferns. A few more fanciful versions had dinosaur-like creatures lumbering about in the background.
Then the first robot spacecraft - built by Russia and the US - reached Venus and sent back data that astounded astro-nomers. The planet was unbelievably hot, dense, and had virtually no oxygen. Russia tried landing probes on the surface. All were crushed flat by the atmosphere's incredible pressure. 'On Earth, atmospheric pressure is one ton per square foot,' said Taylor. 'On Venus, it is 100 tons.'
Earth's sister was also found to have a surface temperature of 450C and a covering of thick clouds of sulphuric acid. As a vision of Hades, it could hardly be beaten. On top of these disturbing discoveries, scientists also found that a day on Venus - the time the planet takes to make one full rotation - is the equivalent of 243 days on Earth. By contrast, a Venusian year - the time it takes to make one revolution of the Sun - is a mere 225 days. Thus, on Venus a day is longer than a year. The planet also rotates on its axis in the opposite direction to the Earth, so the Sun - if it could be seen through the Stygian gloom beneath its thick cloud - would appear to rise in the west and set in the east.
However, the planet's principal problem - from a human point of view - lies with its greenhouse effect, scientists now realise. Venus's thick atmosphere traps solar radiation and heats the world to boiling point. Prospects of finding life here have since been rated - not surprisingly - as vanishingly low, and astronomers' keenness to study Venus has waned.
Yet several tantalising questions remain unanswered about our strange planetary neighbour and, as technology has progressed, instruments that can probe the planet through its thick cloud veil have been developed. So the ESA decided to send Europe's first probe to the planet. The decision followed the agency's triumph - in 2003 - with Mars Express, a spacecraft that is still returning reams of key data about the Red Planet. The probe showed that Mars was once awash with water and has raised hopes, shared by many scientists, that primitive life forms could still survive deep below the surface of Mars in buried lakes and springs.
The success of Mars Express has been matched by other European missions. It currently has a probe, Smart-1, in orbit around the Moon; it was responsible for building the Huygens probe that landed on Saturn's giant moon, Titan, last year; and it has launched a probe which will land on a comet and study its structure. Adding Venus to its list of destinations proved irresistible for its scientists. 'We had enough spare parts to go back to Mars with a second probe, but our scientists decided the time was ripe to investigate Venus,' said Don McCoy, project manager for Venus Express.
The result was the ultimate low-cost space mission. Venus Express was put together from old instruments left over from previous missions and in the end cost a mere 150 million pounds. 'It was cheaper to produce than Kevin Costner's Waterworld,' said Taylor. 'Ours is the better investment, however.'
Venus Express was blasted into space from Baikonur in Kazakhstan in November on a Soyuz launcher and has been hurtling on its 260,000,000-mile journey towards Venus ever since. Tuesday's rocket firing will be its most crucial manoeuvre, however. Nearly all the fuel on the 1.3-tonne probe will be used up to decelerate as it hurtles towards the Sun. Should something go wrong, Venus Express will sweep past its target. 'Without doubt this is the hardest part of the mission,' added Taylor. 'Everything depends on a successful burn of Venus Express's rocket engine on Tuesday.'
After the probe has reached Venus, it will swing into a highly elliptical orbit, ranging from 200,000 miles at its highest to 250 at its lowest point. Further firing of its rocket engine will stabilise this into a regular orbit over the poles. By June the craft will be in position, with its instruments ready to begin its survey of Venus.
'You can think of this mission as the Return to the Forgotten Planet,' added McCoy. 'We are going back to find answers to questions that are a lot more important to Earth today than they were 30 years ago.'
In particular, scientists want to understand how Venus became the victim of its greenhouse effect. 'Venus is the queen of the greenhouse,' said Dimitri Titov, a mission scientist for Venus Express. 'On Earth our atmosphere traps a little heat, and keeps us nice and warm. Morning on on Earth would be freezing cold if it was not for our greenhouse warming, which adds about 40C to average temperatures. But on Venus it adds several hundred degrees.'
It is not simply that our wayward sister gets more solar radiation than Earth, scientists stress. Yes, it is closer to the Sun, but the energy differential is not that great. Something else is involved - and the obvious candidate is carbon dioxide. Venus's thick atmosphere is almost entirely made of CO2, which is known to be highly effectively at trapping and holding the Sun's heat. Hence Earth's impending climate crisis as man-made emissions build up in our atmosphere.
But why has Venus got so much carbon dioxide? 'The answer may be that it lost its water some time in the remote past,' said Taylor. 'On Earth, carbon dioxide is absorbed by the oceans, where it forms carbonate minerals and over the millennia is deposited as rock. That process was arrested early on Venus when it lost its oceans.'
In other words, it was Earth - not Venus - that changed. Billions of years ago both had thick atmospheres of carbon dioxide but, thanks to our oceans, which continue to absorb the gas, we lost ours. Venus - with no oceans - kept its carbon dioxide. 'We should not be too complacent,' added Taylor. 'As temperatures rise, seas become less and less able to hold on to carbon dioxide. Soon they will absorb less of the gas and may eventually start to give it off. That will have a very serious impact on our planet.'
As to the cause of the disappearance of Venus's water, a key theory - to be tested by Venus Express - centres on the idea that the planet's upper atmosphere is battered by solar storms. Without a magnetic field like Earth's to protect it from these solar particles, water vapour was lost to space. Essentially the planet's oceans boiled dry.
And there is the question of those sulphuric acid clouds. Accounting for these takes more effort, though again scientists believe they have answers. Venus is assumed to be highly volcanic and is frequently racked by massive eruptions that vent vast amounts of material into the atmosphere, with sulphur a key component. Mixed with other gases, this falls as gentle sulphuric acid drizzle.
'We can see volcanoes on Venus from the radar images sent back by previous probes,' said Taylor. 'But these do not show if there are plumes of ash coming out or if molten lava is streaming down the sides of their calderas, so we don't know if the volcanoes of Venus are active. However, the infra-red detectors on Venus Express will show up features like that. Then we can start to understand Venusian volcanoes and the planet's internal structure.' In the end, however, it will be Venus Express's studies of the planet's runaway greenhouse effect that will dominate the probe's research activities.
'The Apollo mission had a huge impact on people in the Sixties,' said Taylor. 'For the first time, we could see Earth from distant space. You could see how small and finite it was. That affected people's thinking about the world. 'Venus should now have a similar impact on the public imagination,' he added. 'We are going to see - graphically - what happens when greenhouse heating runs out of control on a planet. That should concentrate a lot of minds.'
The Observer, 9 April 2006
HOW LOONY CAN YOU GET? OLIVE TREES TREATED AS A WEED!
So they're not native. But anywhere else they would be highly valued and carefully managed for profit
A local council in Adelaide's south is considering new ways to battle the spread of feral olive trees. Mitcham Council says it may allow olive harvesting on its reserves and promote olive wood as a firewood. But contrary to earlier media reports, people will not be permitted to cut down olive trees on council reserves. Mitcham's Mayor Ivan Brooks says private property owners are encouraged to clear their own wild olive trees and poison the remaining stumps. He says the feral olive trees are a pest and a fire hazard. "The native grasses are choked out by olives, they provide a step up for bushfires," he said. "On a horrific bad day the grass can set alight to the olives and they actually explode under certain conditions and burn the vapours that come out of them."
Source
***************************************
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
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
Jim Hansen and his twin
No comments:
Post a Comment