IN PRAISE OF "CANADA FREE PRESS"

Canada Free Press is proof that not all Canadians are lily-livered "liberal" conformists. It follows a vigorous conservative line on most issues of the day and has had a whole series of cover-stories up that criticize the global warming religion that is so prevalent in Canada. Below are some excerpts from their current front page


At the United Nations, the Curious Career of Maurice Strong

NEW YORK: Before the United Nations can save the planet, it needs to clean up its own house. And as scandal after scandal has unfolded over the past decade, from Oil for Food to procurement fraud to peacekeeper rape, the size of that job has become stunningly clear. But any understanding of the real efforts that job entails should begin with a look at the long and murky career of Maurice Strong, the man who may have had the most to do with what the U.N. has become today, and still sparks controversy even after he claims to have cut his ties to the world organization.

Climatologist Timothy Ball sends PhD to Canada Free Press

"Rubbish". That's what Dr. Timothy Ball calls detractors' charges that he is not a climatologist. "That's absolute rubbish. I have a PhD in Geography with a specific focus on historical climatology from the University of London (England), Queen Mary College," Dr. Ball told Canada Free Press (CFP) yesterday in a telephone interview. Thousands of letters of support flooded CFP when Dr. Ball's article, Global Warming: The Cold, Hard Facts? was posted on Monday's Drudge Report. In the space of two days, CFP received 1 million page views courtesy of Drudge.

More "work" for beggars

Ontario's program for returning liquor bottles is now in effect. Beginning yesterday, purchasers of spirits were charged an additional 10 to 20 cents a bottle that will be refunded when these bottles are cashed in.

Threat of climate change more about politics than science

Okay. I admit it. No, I proudly proclaim that I am a denier of the theory that the current change in the planet's climate is man-made. Rather than cower before the left-lib juggernaut that demand dumb, blind, obedient faith in the precepts set forth by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), I prefer to join the ranks of the skeptics.

Global warming ethics, pork and profits

The ink has barely dried on its new code of conduct, and already Congress is redefining ethics and pork to fit a global warming agenda. As Will Rogers observed, "with Congress, every time they make a joke, it's a law. And every time they make a law, it's a joke."

U.N. Report: Humans are to Blame for Global Warming

GIBSON: The big debate now, are humans to blame for all this extreme weather. Well that's what a new United Nations report on climate change tells us. Not only are scientists saying they believe global warming is man-made, they're also saying it's now too late, it's all unstoppable. But the global warming debate has gotten so ugly now, some people are demanding that anyone who doesn't believe in these theories of climate change should be punished. Is it a legitimate point of view to question if these extreme weather changes are really a product of man-made global warming?

Economic suicide for Europe and the US

Europeans have worked themselves into such a lather over "climate chaos" that they've set themselves up for a head-on collision between eco-ideology and economic reality. With the new Democratic Congress poised to ram through heavy-handed climate legislation, the US may be heading down the same path.

Should We Believe the Latest UN Climate Report?

The UN Climate Change panel is asserting—again—that humans are overheating the planet.ÿ Again, they have no evidence to support their claim—but they want the U.S. to cut its energy use by perhaps 80 percent just in case. Stabilizing greenhouse gases means no personal cars, no air-conditioning, no vacation travel. Nancy Pelosi says one-third of the Senate want this too.ÿ

Global Warming Hypocrisy

The up-tick in global warming propaganda in recent days is to set the stage for the release of the Fourth Assessment Report from the International Panel on Climate Change. Surprise, surprise, the report will say the sky is falling - faster and faster.

The Green Juggernaut

As the news poured forth about the devastation wrought last week by a huge storm that swept across central Florida, I wondered to myself how anyone with any common sense could think that humans are responsible for the weather? Responsible? We have zero control over these events. And yet...

Global Warming: The Cold, Hard Facts?

What would happen if tomorrow we were told that, after all, the Earth is flat? It would probably be the most important piece of news in the media and would generate a lot of debate. So why is it that when scientists who have studied the Global Warming phenomenon for years say that humans are not the cause nobody listens? Why does no one acknowledge that the Emperor has no clothes on?

Media Promote Global Warming Fraud

When it comes to Iraq, our media have been preoccupied with the issue of whether there was adequate intelligence to justify the invasion and if policy-makers made up evidence before the war. But on the matter of global intervention to stop global warming, there seems to be no need for scientific evidence to justify what is shaping up as a global carbon tax of 35 cents a gallon of gas on the American people. 

Climate Change's Carnival Atmosphere

The global warming carnival hits its full stride this week with the release of the long-awaited and much-hyped United Nations report on global warming. It’s unfortunate for the climateers that this week’s climate science doesn’t live up to all the hoopla.

A man-made morality tale

How the IPCC’s fairly sober summary of climate science has been spun to tell a story of Fate, Doom and human folly.

On 2 February 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a summary of a report due to come out in three months’ time (1). Events surrounding it show how far both the professional drafting and media interpretation of science have become infused with today’s anti-humanist politics.

Politically spun and politically interpreted, science is first made incontrovertible and put on a pedestal; turned, in a word, into scientism. Then, science is used to close down political debate. Finally, it is said to confirm the folly, hubris, selfishness and general dirtiness of mankind. Whatever our pretensions, we are now supposed to be pretty loathsome compared with the grandeur of the polar ice caps that now face ruin at our hands. And, in the same spirit, what mankind could really be doing with technology becomes trivialised.

According to the Financial Times, ‘The world’s leading climate scientists on Friday swept away the last doubts surrounding global warming’ (2). Indeed Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), a co-founder of the IPCC, says that the IPCC’s new report means that to resist laws making cuts in greenhouse gas emissions mandatory would now be ‘irresponsible’ (3).

So doubt, a key ingredient of the scientific method, is now out. Yet if science is abused in this way, it is also deified. UK environment minister David Miliband will make Britain the first nation in Europe to send Al Gore’s science slideshow, An Inconvenient Truth, to every school in the country. Even before that, Guardian columnist George Monbiot, in calling for a 90 per cent cut in CO2 emissions, insisted that this was ‘what the science appears to demand’ (4). Similarly, with last year’s Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, Sir Nicholas Stern declared that the structure of his economics was ‘essentially dictated by the structure of the science’ (5). From the bejeaned George Monbiot to the impeccably suited Sir Nicholas, climate science is now held to determine both politics and economics. Science seems to have become the Great Dictator, and no dissent can be allowed.

We refer to this as the New Scientism. We call it new to distinguish it from the old sort – the sort that, ironically enough, was organised by US imperialism in the Cold War. During that era, the RAND Corporation, a think-tank founded in 1948 by the US Air Force and loan guarantees from the Ford Foundation, ‘sought to reduce politics to a purely quantitative discipline, and… had no qualms about applying the most esoteric mathematical tools to the calibration of nuclear “collateral damage”’… It devised plans on how to ration access to nuclear fallout shelters. One of RAND’s suggestions was to let children into such shelters first, and then exclude their parents….’ (6)

Ironically, greens now rehabilitate the Cold War scientism of RAND, which they affect to hate so much, so as to legitimise not the Cold War, but today’s war on personal behaviour – the war to colonise people’s minds, make them internalise green mores, and make them spend all their time buying (and repairing) windmills, sorting their rubbish, and turning off their consumer electronics equipment. Instead of rationing access to fallout shelters, David Miliband wants a nationwide scheme to ration carbon. Why? To ‘empower’ individuals and local communities as part of ‘the mass mobilising movement of our age…cumulative, consistent radicalism’ (7).

As with the original Cold War scientism, the New Scientism perverts objective science towards questionable political ends. Consider the reaction to the IPCC report. Importantly, that report says, in bold type: ‘Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. This is an advance since the TAR’s [the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report, 2001] conclusion that “most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations”. Discernible human influences now extend to other aspects of climate, including ocean warming, continental-average temperatures, temperature extremes and wind patterns.’ (8)

First, it is not immediately clear, scientifically, how the IPCC went from ‘likely’ to ‘very likely’ on the question of the contribution of man’s emissions to climate change. It seems likely that political pressure played a role here. Secondly, how did the media universally translate the IPCC’s fairly careful account of ‘discernible human influences’? They translated it as mankind being, without doubt, ‘to blame’ for a future disaster. It seems the IPCC summary was not actually read, but rather simply corralled into the service of longstanding political views and prejudices.

Some have used the IPCC summary to assert that the debate on climate change is over. In part, this stems from the proclamations of the IPCC itself and its supporters. For example, Achim Steiner said that 2 February, the day the summary was published, would be ‘remembered as the day the question mark was removed’. Anyone interested in genuine scientific inquiry, not to mention political debate, should always be concerned when question marks are removed. And the chorus claiming that this is the ‘end of the debate’ overlooks the more tentative conclusions in the IPPC summary. When, as above, the IPCC uses terms such as ‘likely’, ‘very likely’ and so on, it does so as to indicate quantitative levels of probability. These levels sometimes have a basis in statistics, and sometimes represent an expert judgment. The number of times that each term is used in the report shows that its conclusions are built on a large number of probable lines of evidence. They are hardly definitive findings:

Neither in 2001 nor in 2007 has the IPCC itself asserted that debate on climate change is over (though it has moved in the direction of ‘removing question marks’, and thus helping to shut down discussion). Rather, advances in theory and observation, particularly around our understanding of atmospheric aerosol particles and the measurements of temperature taken by satellite, have allowed the IPCC to upgrade its levels of confidence from below 90 per cent to somewhere between 90 and 95.....

In principle the IPCC is supposed to be ‘policy neutral’, meaning that it is to present only the facts – the facts upon which policy can be based. But in today’s political culture, where so many insist that science should be read prescriptively, governments have taken a keen interest in IPCC Assessments, and the IPCC itself has become increasingly politicised. So although drafted by scientists, the summary now paraded by the world’s media is vetted line by line by government representatives, accompanied by observers from bodies including the International Chamber of Commerce, the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association and the International Aluminum Institute, as well as by observers from non-governmental organisations such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace (12).

The fact that governments may not, with any luck, intervene in this way in the full reports well captures official attitudes toward science today. The concern is not with science per se, but with the creation of a message that is usable for policy. We will have to wait until April and the full first volume of Climate Change 2007 to judge how far the summary is really an accurate digest of the evidence – or, indeed, whether the full volume is itself altered on the grounds of political expediency. We can however already see that despite some clear political compromises and expressions of green pessimism, it is a more sober document than most of the reporting of it, or of climate change in general, would lead us to believe.

By contrast with the forecasts made by others, those essayed in the summary are quite circumspect. We can see this, briefly, in its treatment of temperatures, and at greater length in its treatment of ice and sea levels. The potential temperature rises projected in the summary are not dramatically different from those in the IPCC’s 2001 Third Assessment Report. The ‘best estimate’ made by the summary is that of a temperature rise of between 1.8º and 4.0º by 2100. It considers ‘unlikely’ changes of less than 1.1º or more than 6.4º. Already this confirms the mischievousness of Monbiot and Stern. They mention figures as high as 11.5º (13).

What about ice and the sea? Gore warns that if Greenland’s or the Antarctic’s ice melt, sea levels would rise by up to six metres. His maps show the inundation of Florida, San Francisco, Beijing, Calcutta and the Netherlands. The front page of the UK Independent goes further. Invoking the summary as ‘the final warning’, environmentalist writer Mark Lynas says that, with a temperature rise of 5.4º, ‘the entire planet will become ice-free, and sea levels will be 70 metres higher than today’ (14). How do Gore’s six and the Independent’s 70 metres compare with the summary? It considers a variety of scenarios in which no special policies are implemented to deal with greenhouse emissions. Its conclusion: by 2100, sea levels could rise by between 18 and 59 centimetres.

All this is an order of magnitude less pessimistic than Gore and the Independent. When the summary speculates about ‘virtually complete elimination of the Greenland ice sheet and a resulting contribution to sea level rise of about seven metres’, that is in the context of melting being sustained not to 2100, but for millennia (15). And the Antarctic? The summary does say that a net loss of ice mass could occur if ‘dynamical ice discharge’ dominates the ice sheet – in other words, if bits of ice break off rather than melt. But it precedes that observation with the point that current global model studies project that the Antarctic ice sheet ‘will remain too cold for widespread surface melting and is expected to gain in mass due to increased snowfall’ (16).

Alarmists such as Gore make much of the recent suggestion that the world’s ice may be melting much more rapidly than previously thought. But once again the summary is more sober. It says: ‘Models used to date do not include the full effects of changes in ice sheet flow, because a basis in published literature is lacking. The projections include a contribution due to increased ice flow from Greenland and Antarctica at the rates observed for 1993-2003, but these flow rates could increase or decrease in the future.’ (17)

As for the newer studies, the summary suggests that increased melting might raise sea levels by between 10 and 20 centimetres. Larger values, it adds, cannot be excluded; but ‘understanding of these effects is too limited to assess their likelihood or provide a best estimate or an upper bound for sea level rise’ (18). All the most worrying scenarios for rises in sea levels rely on the melting of Greenland or Antarctic ice. As noted above, the IPCC suggests that such processes will take millennia. Gore, Monbiot and Stern and others claim that we should take seriously much shorter timescales. While the IPCC uses uncertainties about melting as a reason for withholding judgment, Stern, an economist, speculates that ocean warming and the acceleration of ice flows could lead to a ‘runaway discharge’ of ice.

As we have also seen, in 2001 the IPCC was merely 90 per cent confident that global warming had anthropogenic causes; but Stern chooses not to mention this. Instead, Stern arbitrarily bases himself on the chances of human extinction by the end of the century being almost 10 per cent; indeed, he maintains that that there was a weak case for them being ‘still higher’ (19). All of this degrades science. In the New Scientism, facts are cherry-picked always to show Fate and Doom. The content of the science barely gets a look-in.

More here





MONCKTON ON THE IPCC "SUMMARY"

(Lord Monckton served (1982-1986) as Special Adviser to the Rt. Honorable Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, in the Prime Minister's Policy Unit, 10 Downing Street, London)

Figures in the final draft of the UN's fourth five-year report on climate change show that the previous report, in 2001, had overestimated the human influence on the climate since the Industrial Revolution by at least one-third. Also, the UN, in its 2007 report, has more than halved its high-end best estimate of the rise in sea level by 2100 from 3 feet to just 17 inches. It suggests that the rate of sea-level rise is up from 2mm/yr to 3mm/year - no more than one foot in a century.

UN scientists faced several problems their computer models had not predicted. Globally, temperature is not rising at all, and sea level is not rising anything like as fast as had been forecast. Concentrations of methane in the air are actually falling.

The Summary for Policymakers was issued February 2, 2007, but the report on which the Summary is based will not be published until May. This strange separation of the publication dates has raised in some minds the possibility that the Summary (written by political representatives of governments) will be taken as a basis for altering the science chapters (written by scientists, and supposedly finalized and closed in December 2006).

The draft of the science chapters, now being circulated to governments for last-minute comments, reveals that the tendency of computers to over-predict rises in temperature and sea level has forced a major rethink. The report's generally more cautiously-expressed projections confirm scientists' warnings that the UN's heavy reliance on computer models had exaggerated the temperature effect of greenhouse-gas emissions. Previous reports in 1990, 1995 and 2001 had been progressively more alarmist. In the final draft of the new report there is a change in tone. Though carbon dioxide in the air is increasing, global temperature is not.....

FULL ANALYSIS here




Australia: Greenie dam-hatred hits power supply

The Queensland Government could be forced to mothball two power stations that produce a quarter of the state's electricity if dam levels continue to fall. The Tarong power station near Kingaroy has already cut its overall power generation by about a quarter, hoping to extend the life of the Boondooma Dam until a recycled water pipeline arrives in June 2008.

Energy Minister Geoff Wilson told Parliament it was predicted that Tarong would have enough water to generate power "this summer and the next". But Wondai Shire Mayor David Carter said he understood Tarong would be on borrowed time after November. He said it was a "big ask" to expect the dam to hold out until mid-2008. Several hundred people in Proston and the northern end of the shire have no bores and depend entirely on the Boondooma Dam. "We are concerned about what will actually happen," Cr Carter said. "There are some very, very serious decisions to be made about who gets water and who doesn't. Current predictions don't look good."

Tarong draws between 50 million and 80 million litres a day from Boondooma, which is at 16 per cent of capacity and dropping faster than 1 per cent a month. At that rate, the dam would reach its "dead storage" level of 4 per cent early next year - months before the pipeline is due for completion. Tarong has already applied to the Department of Natural Resources and Water to access water below the dead storage level, and has implemented measures it claims will further cut its usage.

Meanwhile, fears are held for the future of the nearby Tarong North facility which draws 20 million litres a day from an intake pipeline in the upper reaches of the Wivenhoe Dam. The Wivenhoe system - Wivenhoe, North Pine and Somerset dams - is at 22 per cent and falling 1 per cent a month. It was feared the pipeline would not work if Wivenhoe Dam fell below 14 per cent capacity. However, it is now believed pumping could continue, as water there has been isolated.

Shutting down the power plants has been downplayed by the Government because of the commissioning of the Kogan Creek power plant, scheduled for September. Yet figures show Kogan will generate only 750 megawatts, compared with Tarong's joint output of 1900 megawatts. Extra power will also be required in 2009 for water grid pumping stations, a desalination plant and a growing population.

Mr Wilson said lines linking southern and central Queensland would add 4500 megawatts, with a total supply of 11,000 megawatts being enough to meet last month's demand. A Tarong Energy spokesman said output would also be reduced during off-peak times to ensure customers were not affected.

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 generally 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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