Al Gore Challenged to International TV Debate on Global Warming

Gore won't accept. Monckton really knows science and Gore knows that Monckton would make mincemeat out of him





In a formal invitation sent to former Vice-President Al Gore's Tennessee address and released to the public, Lord Monckton has thrown down the gauntlet to challenge Gore to what he terms "the Second Great Debate," an internationally televised, head-to-head, nation-unto-nation confrontation on the question, "That our effect on climate is not dangerous." See here.

Monckton, a former policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher during her years as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, said, "A careful study of the substantial corpus of peer-reviewed science reveals that Mr. Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, is a foofaraw of pseudo-science, exaggerations, and errors, now being peddled to innocent schoolchildren worldwide." Monckton and Gore have once before clashed head to head on the science, politics, and religion of global warming in the usually-decorous pages of the London Sunday Telegraph last November.

Monckton calls on the former Vice President to "step up to the plate and defend his advocacy of policies that could do grave harm to the welfare of the world's poor. If Mr. Gore really believes global warming is the defining issue of our time, the greatest threat human civilization has ever faced, then he should welcome the opportunity to raise the profile of the issue before a worldwide audience of billions by defining and defending his claims against a serious, science-based challenge."

The arena of the glittering "Second Great Debate" will be the elegant, Victorian-Gothic Library of the Oxford Museum of Natural History, which was the setting for the "Great Debate" between the natural scientist T. H. Huxley and Bishop "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce on the theory of evolution, following the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. Lord Monckton says he chose this historic venue "not only because the magnificent, Gothic architecture will be a visually-stunning setting for the debate but also because I hope that in this lofty atmosphere the caution and scepticism of true science will once again prevail, this time over the shibboleths and nostrums of the false, new religion of climate alarmism."

Lord Monckton's resounding challenge to Al Gore reads as follows -- "The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley presents his compliments to Vice- President Albert Gore and by these presents challenges the said former Vice-President to a head-to-head, internationally-televised debate upon the question, 'That our effect on climate is not dangerous,' to be held in the Library of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History at a date of the Vice-President's choosing. "Forasmuch as it is His Lordship who now flings down the gauntlet to the Vice-President, it shall be the Vice-President's prerogative and right to choose his weapons by specifying the form of the Great Debate. May the Truth win! Magna est veritas, et praevalet. God Bless America! God Save the Queen!"

Source







EVEN THE EU PRESIDENT SAYS BRITISH CLIMATE POLICY THREATENS FREEDOM, TURNS OFF VOTERS

UK's climate change agenda 'is a turn-off' Britain's mainstream political agenda on climate change risks intruding into people's lives, threatens individual freedom and could turn voters off the fight against global warming, [the European Commission President] Mr Barroso warns.

As the architect of EU proposals on fighting climate change and measures to set tough binding limits and reductions for CO2 emissions, the Commission President's intervention is a particular setback for ideas given high-profile personal backing by the Environment Secretary, David Miliband, and the Conservative leader, David Cameron.

Mr Barroso hails cheap air travel as "a great thing for our civilisation" and expresses grave concerns over fashionable plans, floated by Mr Miliband, for personal carbon rationing. He suspects that the proposals to restrict CO2 emissions from an individual's activities will lead to intrusive surveillance into private lives. "I do not see any need to establish these intrusive approaches that may reduce the freedom of our societies," he says. "We have to find the right balance and I believe the right balance is not found if we start giving these kind of personal good or bad behaviour certificates to people."

Mr Barroso's views on tackling global warming also clash with Mr Cameron's plans to introduce green taxes and individual allowances on air travel should the Tories win the next election. "Cheap air travel is great for our civilisation. When we think now that people have the freedom to circulate instead of being confined to a small territory, it is great progress," he says.

He is convinced that targeting individuals with such measures will fracture the current popular consensus on climate change. "We should set binding standards and targets by law but to come to specific individual targets is counter-productive. It can turn people against the cause. Let's do it, collectively with a good spirit but without being intrusive in people's lives."

Recent polls have found that two thirds of Britons fear politicians will use climate change as the excuse to raise taxes and 60 per cent oppose higher levies on cheap flights.

Source. For the Telegraph's Barroso interview, see here








JPL Scientists Find Sun-Climate Connection in Nile Pyramids

The Greenie monomania about carbon dioxide completely ignores the fact that the big ball up in the sky changes too -- something we have known ever since Galileo first observed sunspots through his telescope

Long-term climate records are a key to understanding how Earth's climate changed in the past and how it may change in the future. Direct measurements of light energy emitted by the sun, taken by satellites and other modern scientific techniques, suggest variations in the sun's activity influence Earth's long-term climate. However, there were no measured climate records of this type until the relatively recent scientific past.

Scientists have traditionally relied upon indirect data gathering methods to study climate in the Earth's past, such as drilling ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica. Such samples of accumulated snow and ice drilled from deep within ice sheets or glaciers contain trapped air bubbles whose composition can provide a picture of past climate conditions. Now, however, a group of NASA and university scientists has found a convincing link between long-term solar and climate variability in a unique and unexpected source: directly measured ancient water level records of the Nile, Earth's longest river.

Alexander Ruzmaikin and Joan Feynman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., together with Dr. Yuk Yung of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., have analyzed Egyptian records of annual Nile water levels collected between 622 and 1470 A.D. at Rawdah Island in Cairo. These records were then compared to another well-documented human record from the same time period: observations of the number of auroras reported per decade in the Northern Hemisphere. Auroras are bright glows in the night sky that happen when mass is rapidly ejected from the sun's corona, or following solar flares. They are an excellent means of tracking variations in the sun's activity.

Feynman said that while ancient Nile and auroral records are generally "spotty," that was not the case for the particular 850-year period they studied.

"Since the time of the pharaohs, the water levels of the Nile were accurately measured, since they were critically important for agriculture and the preservation of temples in Egypt," she said. "These records are highly accurate and were obtained directly, making them a rare and unique resource for climatologists to peer back in time."

A similarly accurate record exists for auroral activity during the same time period in northern Europe and the Far East. People there routinely and carefully observed and recorded auroral activity, because auroras were believed to portend future disasters, such as droughts and the deaths of kings.

"A great deal of modern scientific effort has gone into collecting these ancient auroral records, inter-comparing them and evaluating their accuracy," Ruzmaikin said. "They have been successfully used by aurora experts around the world to study longer time scale variations."

The researchers found some clear links between the sun's activity and climate variations. The Nile water levels and aurora records had two somewhat regularly occurring variations in common - one with a period of about 88 years and the second with a period of about 200 years.

The researchers said the findings have climate implications that extend far beyond the Nile River basin.

"Our results characterize not just a small region of the upper Nile, but a much more extended part of Africa," said Ruzmaikin. "The Nile River provides drainage for approximately 10 percent of the African continent. Its two main sources - Lake Tana in Ethiopia and Lake Victoria in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya - are in equatorial Africa. Since Africa's climate is interrelated to climate variability in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, these findings help us better understand climate change on a global basis."

So what causes these cyclical links between solar variability and the Nile? The authors suggest that variations in the sun's ultraviolet energy cause adjustments in a climate pattern called the Northern Annular Mode, which affects climate in the atmosphere of the Northern Hemisphere during the winter. At sea level, this mode becomes the North Atlantic Oscillation, a large-scale seesaw in atmospheric mass that affects how air circulates over the Atlantic Ocean. During periods of high solar activity, the North Atlantic Oscillation's influence extends to the Indian Ocean. These adjustments may affect the distribution of air temperatures, which subsequently influence air circulation and rainfall at the Nile River's sources in eastern equatorial Africa. When solar activity is high, conditions are drier, and when it is low, conditions are wetter.

Source





Is Global Warming Really Just Global Brightening?

Post below from Cheat Seeking Missiles

Oh, it just gets complexer and complexer!

Now NASA tells us -- after nearly 30 years of attacking pollution -- that drops in pollution and global aerosols may actually be exacerbating temperature rise.

A new NASA study has found that an important counter-balance to the warming of our planet by greenhouse gases - sunlight blocked by dust, pollution and other aerosol particles - appears to have lost ground.

The thinning of Earth's "sunscreen" of aerosols since the early 1990s could have given an extra push to the rise in global surface temperatures. The finding, published today in the journal Science, may lead to an improved understanding of recent climate change. ...

"When more sunlight can get through the atmosphere and warm Earth's surface, you're going to have an effect on climate and temperature," said lead author Michael Mishchenko of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), New York. "Knowing what aerosols are doing globally gives us an important missing piece of the big picture of the forces at work on climate."

The study uses the longest uninterrupted satellite record of aerosols in the lower atmosphere, a unique set of global estimates funded by NASA. Scientists at GISS created the Global Aerosol Climatology Project by extracting a clear aerosol signal from satellite measurements originally designed to observe clouds and weather systems that date back to 1978. The resulting data show large, short-lived spikes in global aerosols caused by major volcanic eruptions in 1982 and 1991, but a gradual decline since about 1990. By 2005, global aerosols had dropped as much as 20 percent from the relatively stable level between 1986 and 1991.

The NASA study also sheds light on the puzzling observations by other scientists that the amount of sunlight reaching Earth's surface, which had been steadily declining in recent decades, suddenly started to rebound around 1990. This switch from a "global dimming" trend to a "brightening" trend happened just as global aerosol levels started to decline, Mishchenko said. (source)

Put another way, about the time everyone started fretting about global climate change because of big, bad humans, the nice humans were cutting pollution, causing more sunlight to hit the earth, and temperatures to climb.

So is global warming really just a dearth of volcanic activity? Or is it the fact that we're doing such a good job of cutting our pollution? Or is it cataclysmic changes in global patterns that will kill us all and make Al Gore rich?

It's anyone's guess, so count on opportunistic politicians and panic-prone lefties to call for cuts in industrial production, higher taxes and big government programs to attack the problem!

Gee, perhaps if we just took off enough of the pollution control equipment to let the atmosphere really gunk up again, we'd enter a period of global dimming, and voila!, no more global warming!





ASTRONOMERS BAFFLED BY 'IMPOSSIBLE' FINDING ON THE SUN

But I thought the science was "settled"??

The restless bubbling and frothing of the Sun's chaotic surface is astonishing astronomers who have been treated to detailed new images from a Japanese space telescope called Hinode. The observatory will have as dramatic an impact on our understanding of the Sun as the Hubble Space Telescope has had on our view of the universe beyond, scientists told a NASA press conference in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday. "Everything we thought we knew about X-ray images of the Sun is now out of date," says Leon Golub from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. "We've seen many new and unexpected things. For that reason alone, the mission is already a success."

Hinode (Japanese for "sunrise") was launched in September 2006 to study the solar magnetic field and how magnetic energy is released as the field rises into the Sun's outer atmosphere. The mission was formerly known as Solar-B.

Seething and swaying

The spacecraft carries an optical solar telescope (SOT), an X-ray telescope (XRT) and an ultraviolet spectrometer. It orbits the Earth in a permanent twilight zone between night and day, which gives it a continuous view of the Sun. Hinode has sent back startling images of the Sun's outer limb. Where astronomers expected to see a calm region called the chromosphere, they saw a seething mass of swaying spikes. "These structures are 8000 kilometres long and some extend twice that high," says SOT science team member Alan Title from Lockheed Martin Advance Technology Center in Palo Alto, California, US. "Their speed is such that if you sat on the end of one, which I don't recommend, you could travel from Washington, DC, to San Francisco in about four minutes. These things are really moving."

Crashing loops

Another surprise sighting is that of giant magnetic field loops crashing down onto the Sun's surface as if they were collapsing from exhaustion, a finding that Golub describes as "impossible". Previously, scientists thought they should emerge from the Sun and continue blowing out into space. "Almost every day, we look at the data and we say - what the heck was that?" says Golub, a member of the XRT science team.

Astronomers do not yet know what to make of the surprises, but they hope Hinode will help solve many big puzzles. One is that the temperature of the Sun's tenuous outermost atmosphere, or corona, is far hotter than the layers underneath, which are nearer its energy-generating core. Scientists believe that tangled magnetic fields must somehow dump energy in the corona. "Theorists suggested that twisted, tangled magnetic fields might exist," says Golub. "With the XRT, we can see them clearly for the first time."

Astronomers hope Hinode's clear view of the Sun will also help them identify the magnetic field configurations that lead to the most explosive energy releases of all. That would enable better forecasts of stormy "space weather", when solar eruptions can interfere with satellite communications and disrupt electricity supply networks on the ground.

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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