A major Greenie fortress crumbles

"Nature" magazine is the house-journal of the Warmists so their publication of the article below is a big deal -- particularly since they are now parroting the line of -- no, no, it can't be true -- GEORGE BUSH!

TWO British experts have backed the Australian and US governments' refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, saying emissions caps are the wrong tool for tackling the problem. "Time to ditch Kyoto," British social scientist Gwyn Prins of the London School of Economics and leading climate change researcher Steve Rayner of Oxford University, who holds dual US-British citizenship, wrote in the journal Nature. "The Kyoto Protocol is a symbolically important expression of governments' concern about climate change. But as an instrument for achieving emissions reductions, it has failed," they wrote. They said the world should instead raise spending on clean energy research to tens of billions of dollars a year as part of a broader plan "on a wartime footing".

Governments should view global warming as a strategic challenge, like the US drive to put a man on the moon in 1969 or to help Europe recover after World War Two, and move away from Kyoto-style caps on greenhouse gas emissions, they said.

The 1997 Kyoto pact obliges 36 industrial nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. Australia and the US have refused to sign up to the agreement. But many nations are over target in a sign that Kyoto is no "silver bullet" for slowing climate change, Mr Rayner told Reuters.

The two urged governments to consider carrying out more research instead of tightening Kyoto-style caps. The world's environment ministers will meet in Bali, Indonesia, from December 3-14 to launch negotiations on a successor to Kyoto. "Investment in energy research and development should be placed on a wartime footing," the experts wrote of efforts to create clean energy such as wind and solar power. "It seems reasonable to expect the world's leading economies and emitters to devote as much money to this challenge as they currently spend on military research - in the case of the United States, about $80 billion a year," they said.

They said Kyoto had been modelled on treaties for protecting the ozone layer and curbing acid rain that focused on cuts in a few pollutants. But climate change affected the entire economy and solutions had to be more complex than caps on a few gases.

As part of the answer, they said the world should focus on curbs by top emitters rather than seeking agreement among 176 states that have ratified Kyoto. The top 20, led by the US and China, account for 80 per cent of all emissions.

Mr Prins and Mr Rayner noted that many Kyoto backers had criticised President George W. Bush for bringing major emitters together for talks in Washington last month. But such talks may be a necessary first step to a broader deal, they said. Mr Bush rejected Kyoto in 2001, saying its emissions caps would be too costly and that Kyoto wrongly omitted goals for poor nations. Kyoto backers see it as a tiny first step to slow the effects of climate change such as more floods, heatwaves and rising seas.

But Ben McNeill from the Climate Change Centre at the University Of New South Wales defended Kyoto today, saying the clean development mechanism and targets were important keys to slowing global warming. "Emissions targets dictate for example how effective a carbon emissions trading scheme is. In other words a carbon trading price, and that's a very important part of our strategy in the next decade or so to reduce carbon emissions and combat global warming," Dr McNeill told Radio Australia.

The two experts said the world should create markets in greenhouse gases but efforts so far had failed to produce stable prices high enough to spur a major shift away from the fossil fuels widely blamed for causing global warming. They said that, instead of ordering deeper Kyoto-style cuts in emissions beyond 2012, countries should develop policies only after experimenting with various ideas. "Although a bottom-up approach may seem painfully slow and sprawling, it may be the only way to build credible institutions that markets endorse," they wrote.

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Duluth weather anchor calls Gore a "left-wing nut"

TV meteorologist Karl Spring's characterization of former Vice President Al Gore as a "left-wing nut" has taken on a life of its own in the blogosphere. Spring, chief meteorologist at KBJR-TV, Channel 6 - the Northland's News Center - made the comment on a local radio show the day Gore's co-selection for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was announced.

Once a year, KUWS News Director Mike Simonson invites a panel of meteorologists on his weekly show "Final Edition" to talk about what the year's weather might bring. This year's conversation, on Oct. 12, grew unusually spirited when the topic turned to the Nobel Committee's announcement about Al Gore and the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Simonson's guests began debating not so much whether global warming is real but about the science portrayed in Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." "This debate is being driven a lot by politicians," not by scientists, said Kyle Underwood, meteorologist with WDIO/WIRT, Channels 10/13.

Spring then dropped the "left-wing nut" comment and said that, although he hadn't seen the movie, he believes Gore "takes facts and extrapolates them to such extremes" that they don't make any sense, and project "a doomsday scenario." "He used this movie for a political agenda," Spring said.

After Simonson sent a segment of the program to the Wisconsin Public Radio station in Madison, from which it was broadcast across the state, he started getting complaints. Simonson said his station has received about a dozen calls and e-mails about the conversation, "and that's a lot, for us," he said.

Blogged discussions about the radio show have blossomed on the Minnesota Monitor Web site, a left-leaning political blog, and on the local Web site www.perfectduluthday.com. Reactions mostly center on Spring's "left-wing nut" comment.

Spring said on Simonson's show that Gore exaggerates the impact of global warming. Later in the program, Carol Christenson of the National Weather Service and KQDS FOX-21 forecaster Todd Nelson added their views. The News Tribune and Fox-21 have a news-sharing partnership.

"Whether you like Al Gore and his politics or not, he probably has skewed a lot of the statistics quite a bit, but maybe that's a good thing to get people to act," Christenson said.

Nelson said Gore's movie is important. "Before the movie, people were kind of talking about it, but now that the movie is out there in the mainstream media, people are talking about it every single day."

"It was a little sharp," Simonson said of Spring's comments. "But to me, he has a right to say it. It represents what part of the population has to say about Al Gore."

On Thursday, Spring declined comment, saying he was too busy monitoring active weather systems. Station manager Dave Jensch could not be reached for comment. Spring joined KBJR-TV as chief meteorologist in March 2006. He graduated from Augsburg College in Minneapolis and earned his American Meteorological Society and National Weather Association television seals of approval.

But perhaps the influence of "An Inconvenient Truth" and the conversations it's spurred about global warming have had an impact already, Simonson said. "Two years ago when I did this show, not everyone agreed that global warming existed," he said.

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Spanish Opposition leader says climate change 'no problem'

Spain's conservative opposition leader Mariano Rajoy, who wants to be the country's next prime minister, has sparked controversy by saying that climate change was not "a big global problem." Spanish media Tuesday gave ample coverage to the comments of the former interior minister, the leader of the main opposition People's Party (PP), who spoke at a congress in Palma de Majorca on Monday.

"No scientist has guaranteed to me what the weather will be like tomorrow in (the southern Spanish city of) Seville," Rajoy said at the event, which was also attended by former US Vice President, Nobel peace laureate and environmental campaigner Al Gore. "How can anyone know what will happen in the world within 300 years? We have to pay a lot of attention to this matter, but we cannot turn it into a big global problem," Rajoy said.

Gore later warned against "right-wing ideologists" who tried to block government attempts to fight global warming, according to the daily El Pais.

Socialist Environment Minister Cristina Narbona said Rajoy's opinions were "eccentric and incredible," while Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba described them as "provincial" on Tuesday.

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The often-predicted peak that never happens

These prophecies have been going on for around a century. But the predicted date always passes without the predicted crisis

The world has reached the point of maximum oil output and production levels will halve by 2030 -- a situation that will eventually lead to war and disaster, a report claims. The German-based Energy Watch Group released a report Tuesday saying the world's oil production peaked in 2006 and from now on will drop by around 3 percent a year. It says that by as early as 2030, the global availability of oil will be half of what it was at its peak. "It's a very serious result," said Hans-Josef Fell, a German lawmaker from the environmentalist Green Party who commissioned the report. "I fear the world will come into a big economic crisis in the coming years."

The report warns that coal, uranium, and other key fossil fuels are also in declining supply. It predicts the fall in fossil fuel production will bring with it the threat of war, humanitarian disaster, and general social unrest.

But Leo Drollas, who leads oil and gas market analysis and forecasting at the Center for Global Energy Studies in London, said there are plenty of supplies and no looming crisis. He said the report sounds like "scaremongering." Drollas says production could still slow one day, but only because new reserves will be considered too difficult or expensive to extract. "Oil could be left in the ground and we could move on to another fuel in the future, not because we're running out of oil but because, economically speaking, it is not worth extracting the oil," Drollas said.

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Bishop of the C of E (Church of the Environment) attacks Catholic cardinal

Having abandoned the Bible, the Church of England has turned to Environmentalism instead. Who wants to save those silly old souls when you can save the planet?

AUSTRALIA'S most prominent religious sceptic of climate change, the Catholic Archbishop George Pell, was out of step within his church and the global Christian community on global warming, a leading Anglican environmentalist says. The head of the Anglican Church's international body on the environment, George Browning, said Dr Pell's position on global warming defied scientific consensus and theological imperatives to protect the Earth and its future generations. It also made no sense and would be proven a mistake. Bishop Browning's stance came as the Australian Anglican church prepared to adopt its strongest position yet on climate change, committing 23 dioceses to initiatives reducing their carbon footprint.

But Dr Pell said last night he had every right to be sceptical about extravagant claims of impending man-made climatic catastrophes. "There are many measures which are good for the environment, which we should pursue," he said. "We need to be able talk freely about this and about the uncertainties around climate change. Invoking the authority of some scientific experts to shut down debate is not good for science, the environment, for people here and in the developing world or for the people of tomorrow. "My task as a Christian leader is to engage with reality, to contribute to debate on important issues, to open people's minds, and to point out when the emperor is wearing few or no clothes. "Radical environmentalists are more than up to the task of moralising their own agenda and imposing it on people through fear. They don't need church leaders to help them with this, although it is a very effective way of further muting Christian witness. Church leaders in particular should be allergic to nonsense."

Bishop Browning supported warnings that climate change refugees would, in the future, pose a bigger threat to world security than terrorism by triggering massive population shifts. He also warned Australia had to dump the "language of drought" because it offered false hope to farmers by implying that after drought would come flood and a return to normal farming life. The warming of the planet had triggered irreversible climate changes that warranted fundamental changes in farming and investment practices. Bishop Browning took issue with Dr Pell's Easter message this year at which the cardinal said Jesus had nothing to say on global warming. He told the Anglican synod meeting in Canberra yesterday he had written to Dr Pell after the Easter message because he found his statement "almost unbelievable". [I wonder could the good bishop point out the chapter and verse of the Gospels where global warming is mentioned? I rather foolishly thought that Jesus said "my kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36)]

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