"The Never-Never Declaration - An APEC Reality Check"

A press release below from Australian group, "The Carbon Sense Coalition" (info@carbon-sense.com) -- in the wake of the strong climate focus during the recent APEC meeting of heads of government in Sydney

The Carbon Sense Coalition today called for a Royal Commission of Enquiry [an independent but government-funded judicial enquiry with wide powers] into the scientific evidence for man-made climate cvhange. The Chairman of "Carbon Sense", Mr Viv Forbes, said that the Sydney APEC Declaration was a clear signal that most APEC nations are not going to swallow the pseudo-science and economic poison being peddled by Dark Greens from yesterday's states like Europe and New Zealand.

The APEC nations told Australia, as politely as possible "You may commit economic suicide if you wish, but we are not going to put our feet on the sticky paper." This "Never-Never" declaration is a warning call that Australia should re-examine the basis for its enormous waste of money on "Global Warming".

China and India recognise clearly that "Global Warming" is just another European plan to hobble economic competition from Asia. The Global Warming Scam would deny cheap clean power to millions of energetic Asians.

France closed its last coal mine in 2004 and is now heavily dependent on nuclear power. German coal mines are no longer economic, and even in Britain, fewer than 5,000 coal miners work the mines that once fuelled an empire. Thanks to their Dark Greens, Europe is now dependent on imported coal for steel production and gets its power from imported uranium and gas piped in from Russia and beyond.

France has always envied and feared the cheap and abundant coal of the Anglo American world. The world dominance of Britain and then America in steel, manufacturing, metals, steam, railways, electricity and naval power was fuelled by coal, supported later by oil. China and India are about to tread the same road. The Dark Greens of Europe, secretly supported by their decaying industrialists, fear the growing power, energy and competitiveness of these emerging giants.

This is not about climate - it is about using public hysteria to benefit certain countries, business interests and ideologies. There was no declaration of carbon emission targets from last week's Russian delegation to Queensland. Russian scientists are not sucked in by distortions, exaggerations, half truths and poor science being peddled by the likes of Al Gore and Bob Brown.

The Russians, the Arabs, the Indians and the Chinese cannot believe the apparent stupidity of the English speaking world. They have no intention of adding to their energy costs or forcing their businesses to waste money on dreamtime research such as carbon sequestration - they are cynically planning exploit the declining competitiveness of western industries and to milk stupid westerners of any "carbon offset credits" they can find or invent.

There is already a groundswell of opposition from well informed scientists, engineers and individuals all over the world to the lack of evidence supporting the Greenhouse Religion. A recent scientific conference in Melbourne organised by the Lavoisier Society drew scientists and delegates from all over Australia and South Africa. Even the PM's own backbench contains well informed climate sceptics, and the ranks of scientific sceptics are growing all over the world.

A Royal Commission taking evidence from more than a few government or United Nations hacks would soon establish the facts that:

* 1934 was the hottest year of the twentieth century.

* There was no global warming from 1940 to 1980, a time when CO2 emissions grew strongly.

* There has been no global warming since 1998.

* Current temperatures are not extreme or unusual.

* Past records and scientific evidence show that changing surface temperature is more likely to be a cause (not a result) of increased CO2 in the atmosphere.

* CO2 and water vapour have always been essential components of the atmosphere. Neither is toxic, both tend to retain some of the sun's warmth, and both are absolutely essential and beneficial to all life on earth.

* The most likely causes of variations in surface temperature are connected with solar cycles, variations in the heat output of the sun and eras of volcanic activity.

* More CO2, water vapour and warmth in the atmosphere would be a boon to most of humanity.

* There is empirical evidence to suggest that earth's temperature is more likely to fall than rise - ice ages are more normal than today's balmy climates.

* There is significant scientific opposition to the proposition that man's emissions of CO2 are causing global warming or any other harm.

Earth's climate is always changing and we must do what every generation of our ancestors did - "adapt to whatever nature has in store for us". Our ability to adapt is severely reduced by crippling our economy and misdirecting billions of dollars of research funds into nonsense like carbon sequestration or rich man's toys like windmills and solar panels.

While billions of dollars are being spent on na‹ve attempts to build ever more complex computer models of atmospheric heat circulation, our oceans are largely unexplored. The vast deposits of methane under our oceans are both a threat and a promise for future generations, but too little research is being done in this field. And the hundreds of thousands of undersea volcanoes, which may hold the key to past and future climate change, remain largely unmapped and un-monitored.

Australia, an island almost alone in the Great Southern Ocean which circles the globe, should take the lead in ocean research instead of letting scheming politicians from abroad mis-direct our research priorities to spurious questions.





'More Art Than Science'

Pointed comment below lifted from Taranto. See the original for links

So a couple of weeks ago we were in New Orleans, on the precise anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall two years ago. And the weather wasn't bad. What happened? Isn't it hurricane season? And weren't hurricanes supposed to get even worse courtesy of "global warming"? It didn't quite work out that way, as Bloomberg reports:

Hurricane researchers, who forecast seven more storms this season, have flubbed the past two annual estimates because of unusual El Nino and La Nina weather phenomena in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

The predictions reflect variables that make this kind of weather forecasting "more art than science," said Eric Blake, a hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. Two of the nine Atlantic hurricanes predicted already have occurred for the season that ends Nov 30. Last year, five storms emerged after nine were anticipated.

Remember that: Weather forecasting is "more art than science." Except of course when the forecasters want to dismantle our entire industrial economy. Then it's settled science that no one may even question.






BOGUS NASA STUDY

I've been thinking about my criticism of a U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) study of tornadoes and hail in the previous post. I realize now that I was far too lenient on those who conducted the study. The study should never have been funded. It should never have passed the peer review process and it should never have been published in any scientific journal.

The authors apparently are ignorant of the fact temperatures in most of the U.S. change drastically over a year's time. Seasonal changes are particularly drastic in "tornado alley" in the central U.S. A mere 5F (2.5C) increase in temperature would only mean that spring and summer might occur a few days earlier. Passage of a cold front or warm front can change the high temperature by 10F (5 C) or more in a single day. A strong cold front of the type that sometimes produces strong tornadoes may have a 30 F (15 C )or more difference in temperature in areas only 50 miles (70 km) apart. (NOTE: metric measures not intended to be exact equivalents).

If researchers want to study tornadoes and hail under different temperatures they don't need any elaborate computer program. They just need to compare the number of tornatoes and amount of hail that occur on days with different temperatures, including different upper air temperatures. For example, the day before an EF 5 tornado destroyed Greensburg, Kansas, on May 4, temperatures in Dodge City ( to the west) and Wichita ( to the east) were in the mid 60's to 71 F. ( 19 - 21.7 C) The high temperatures the day of the tornado briefly reached 84.9 (29.4) (Dodge City) and 80.1 (26.7) (Wichita) before dropping to 69 (21) (Dodge City) and 73.9 (23.3) (Wichita) at the time of the tornado about 10:00 PM. CDT.

Strong tornadoes that just missed my hometown of Hutchinson, Kansas, in the early 90's occurred on days when the temperature only reached into the low 70's (around 22 C). One of them briefly was as strong as the Greensburg tornado . The biggest tornadoes generally occur in the early spring months when the air coming in from the north is still 20 - 30 F (10 - 15 C) or more below the temperature to the south. Generally the most important characteristic of the air from the south is the dew point rather than the temperature. All the tornadoes mentioned above occurred with dew points in the upper 60's (around 18 C).

Source




'FEEL GOOD' VS 'DO GOOD' ON CLIMATE CHANGE

After looking at one too many projections of global-warming disasters - computer graphics of coasts swamped by rising seas, mounting death tolls from heat waves - I was ready for a reality check. Instead of imagining a warmer planet, I traveled to a place that has already felt the heat, accompanied by Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist and scourge of environmentalist orthodoxy.

It was not an arduous expedition. We went to an old wooden building near the Brooklyn Bridge that is home to the Bridge Cafe, which bills itself as "New York's Oldest Drinking Establishment." There's been drinking in the building since the late 18th century, when it was erected on Water Street along the shore of Lower Manhattan.

Since record-keeping began in the 19th century, the sea level in New York has been rising about a foot per century, which happens to be about the same increase estimated to occur over the next century by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The temperature has also risen as New York has been covered with asphalt and concrete, creating an "urban heat island" that's estimated to have raised nighttime temperatures by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. The warming that has already occurred locally is on the same scale as what's expected globally in the next century.

The impact of these changes on Lower Manhattan isn't quite as striking as the computer graphics. We couldn't see any evidence of the higher sea level near the Bridge Cafe, mainly because Water Street isn't next to the water anymore. Dr. Lomborg and I had to walk over two-and-a-half blocks of landfill to reach the current shoreline.

The effect of the rising temperatures is more complicated to gauge. Hotter summer weather can indeed be fatal, as Al Gore likes us to remind audiences by citing the 35,000 deaths attributed to the 2003 heat wave in Europe. But there are a couple of confounding factors explained in Dr. Lomborg's new book, "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming." The first is that winter can be deadlier than summer. About seven times more deaths in Europe are attributed annually to cold weather (which aggravates circulatory and respiratory illness) than to hot weather, Dr. Lomborg notes, pointing to studies showing that a warmer planet would mean fewer temperature-related deaths in Europe and worldwide.

The second factor is that the weather matters a lot less than how people respond to it. Just because there are hotter summers in New York doesn't mean that more people die - in fact, just the reverse has occurred. Researchers led by Robert Davis, a climatologist at the University of Virginia, concluded that the number of heat-related deaths in New York in the 1990s was only a third as high as in the 1960s. The main reason is simple, and evident as you as walk into the Bridge Cafe on a warm afternoon: air-conditioning.

The lesson from our expedition is not that global warming is a trivial problem. Although Dr. Lomborg believes its dangers have been hyped, he agrees that global warming is real and will do more harm than good. He advocates a carbon tax and a treaty forcing nations to budget hefty increases for research into low-carbon energy technologies.

But the best strategy, he says, is to make the rest of the world as rich as New York, so that people elsewhere can afford to do things like shore up their coastlines and buy air conditioners. He calls Kyoto-style treaties to cut greenhouse-gas emissions a mistake because they cost too much and do too little too late. Even if the United States were to join in the Kyoto treaty, he notes, the cuts in emissions would merely postpone the projected rise in sea level by four years: from 2100 to 2104.

FULL STORY here




IPCC PEER REVIEW PROCESS AN ILLUSION, CRITIC CLAIMS

Climate data analyst John McLean has written an analysis of the reviewer comments to the UN's most recent IPCC Assessment Report released in April. In "Peer Review? What Peer Review?" McLean writes, "The IPCC would have us believe that its reports are diligently reviewed by many hundreds of scientists and that these reviewers endorse the contents of the report. Analyses of reviewer comments show a very different and disturbing story."

In Chapter 9, the key science chapter, the IPCC concludes that "it is very highly likely that greenhouse gas forcing has been the dominant cause of the observed global warming over the last 50 years". The IPCC leads us to believe that this statement is very much supported by the majority of reviewers. The reality is that there is surprisingly little explicit support for this key notion.

Among the 23 independent reviewers just 4 explicitly endorsed the chapter with its hypothesis, and one other endorsed only a specific section. Moreover, only 62 of the IPCC's 308 reviewers commented on this chapter at all. As with other chapters, simple corrections, requests for clarifications or refinements to the text which did not challenge the IPCC's conclusions are generally treated favourably, but comments which dispute the IPCC's claims or their certainty are treated with far less indulgence.

In a related finding, McLean observes, "The dominance of research presupposing a human influence also means that the IPCC editing teams are likely to consist of people predisposed to view the situation in that light." Adds McLean, "The problems continue into the authorship of these reports. According to IPCC documents, scientists are nominated by governments or explicitly invited by scientists already associated with the IPCC. What a wonderful way to position scientists who support a government agenda on climate and then fill out the IPCC with like-minded individuals."

Concludes McLean, "The IPCC reports appear to be largely based on a consensus of scientific papers, but those papers are the product of research for which the funding is strongly influenced by previous IPCC reports. This makes the claim of a human influence self-perpetuating and for a corruption of the normal scientific process."

The full paper can be read here

Source

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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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