More global cooling

Icy storm kills 23, thousands without power

A WINTER storm raging over the midwestern United States reportedly left nearly two dozen people dead and hundreds of thousands without power, as ice toppled trees and power lines and sent cars skidding off slick roads. Most of the fatalities were reported in Oklahoma, where authorities also said more than 600,000 people were without power. Electric company officials said it could take a week before power is fully restored. The storm has claimed at least 23 lives, CNN reported.

But there was some good news as temperatures climbed above freezing during the night. US President George W. Bush approved a request for an emergency declaration that frees up federal resources to help respond to the storm. Huge generators and drinking water were sent to Oklahoma, and blankets, cots and emergency food supplies were to be sent today. In Missouri, more than 100,000 people were without power, authorities said.

Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska and Illinois were also under storm warnings. "An extended area of winter storm and ice storm warnings ... as well as freezing rain advisories continue to be in effect from the panhandle of Texas across the central plains into the lower great lakes region," the National Weather Service said.

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GOP's Fred Thompson asserts skepticism on warming: 'We don't know to what extent it's due to manmade causes'

GLENN: I don't know who wouldn't take you up on that. However, we're losing -- it seems to me there's a -- well, let me just ask you the question. What do you think about this Al Gore global warming? To me it seems like it's global socialism and a total loss of sovereignty and not really about global warming at all.

SENATOR THOMPSON: Well, what troubles me about it is not the analysis and the debate over the analysis. I think that that can be a good thing. It's jumping from there to all of these solutions that people have because they're being proposed on the basis of inadequate knowledge.

We don't have all the answers by a long shot. We know the Earth is warming. We don't know whether or not it's a part of a cycle. We've had cooling stages before. We don't know to what extent it's due to manmade causes. We don't know what effect we can have on that. We don't know what the significance of it is going to be. You have everything, you know, coastline estimation from inches of water rising to feet and everything in the middle. All the answers are not there.

I resent trying to close off debate about all this, but a lot of people are trying to do that. Then they're jumping from that to solutions that are probably -- it's not a matter that it's a global thing as much as it is -- I think if it was a global deal that we could all come together and agree on, that would probably be a good thing. But what's really going to happen is that the United States is going to be pushed into making unilateral decisions that will hurt us and not help the overall problem.

We could do a lot of things here in the United States with the Chinese and Indians did not participate, it would more than swamp whatever benefits that we could come up with. So it's a big problem. A lot of people are going to have to work together on it, but we need to do it on the basis of complete information and all the best that science and research can teach us. And we've still got a long way to go there.

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Skeptical Scientists Urge World To `Have the Courage to Do Nothing' At UN Conference

Post below lifted from EPW blog. See the original for links

BALI, Indonesia - An international team of scientists skeptical of man-made climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore, descended on Bali this week to urge the world to "have the courage to do nothing" in response to UN demands. Lord Christopher Monckton, a UK climate researcher, had a blunt message for UN climate conference participants on Monday. "Climate change is a non problem. The right answer to a non problem is to have the courage to do nothing," Monckton told participants. "The UN conference is a complete waste of our time and your money and we should no longer pay the slightest attention to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,)" Monckton added. (LINK)

Monckton also noted that the UN has not been overly welcoming to the group of skeptical scientists. "UN organizers refused my credentials and appeared desperate that I should not come to this conference. They have also made several attempts to interfere with our public meetings," Monckton explained. "It is a circus here," agreed Australian scientist Dr. David Evans. Evans is making scientific presentations to delegates and journalists at the conference revealing the latest peer-reviewed studies that refute the UN's climate claims.

"This is the most lavish conference I have ever been to, but I am only a scientist and I actually only go to the science conferences," Evans said, noting the luxury of the tropical resort. (Note: An analysis by Bloomberg News on December 6 found: "Government officials and activists flying to Bali, Indonesia, for the United Nations meeting on climate change will cause as much pollution as 20,000 cars in a year." - LINK)

Evans, a mathematician who did carbon accounting for the Australian government, recently converted to a skeptical scientist about man-made global warming after reviewing the new scientific studies. (LINK) "We now have quite a lot of evidence that carbon emissions definitely don't cause global warming. We have the missing [human] signature [in the atmosphere], we have the IPCC models being wrong and we have the lack of a temperature going up the last 5 years," Evans said in an interview with the Inhofe EPW Press Blog. Evans authored a November 28 2007 paper "Carbon Emissions Don't Cause Global Warming." (LINK)

Evans touted a new peer-reviewed study by a team of scientists appearing in the December 2007 issue of the International Journal of Climatology of the Royal Meteorological Society which found "Warming is naturally caused and shows no human influence." (LINK) "Most of the people here have jobs that are very well paid and they depend on the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. They are not going to be very receptive to the idea that well actually the science has gone off in a different direction," Evans explained.

UN IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr. Vincent Gray of New Zealand, an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports since its inception going back to 1990, had a clear message to UN participants. "There is no evidence that carbon dioxide increases are having any affect whatsoever on the climate," Gray, who shares in the Nobel Prize awarded to the UN IPCC, explained. (LINK) "All the science of the IPCC is unsound. I have come to this conclusion after a very long time. If you examine every single proposition of the IPCC thoroughly, you find that the science somewhere fails," Gray, who wrote the book "The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of "Climate Change 2001," said. "It fails not only from the data, but it fails in the statistics, and the mathematics," he added.

`Dangerous time for science'

Evans, who believes the UN has heavily politicized science, warned there is going to be a "dangerous time for science" ahead. "We have a split here. Official science driven by politics, money and power, goes in one direction. Unofficial science, which is more determined by what is actually happening with the [climate] data, has now started to move off in a different direction" away from fears of a man-made climate crisis, Evans explained. "The two are splitting. This is always a dangerous time for science and a dangerous time for politics. Historically science always wins these battles but there can be a lot of causalities and a lot of time in between," he concluded.

Carbon trading `fraud?'

New Zealander Bryan Leland of the International Climate Science Coalition warned participants that all the UN promoted discussions of "carbon trading" should be viewed with suspicion. "I am an energy engineer and I know something about electricity trading and I know enough about carbon trading and the inaccuracies of carbon trading to know that carbon trading is more about fraud than it is about anything else," Leland said. "We should probably ask why we have 10,000 people here [in Bali] in a futile attempt to `solve' a [climate] problem that probably does not exist," Leland added.

`Simply not work'

Owen McShane, the head of the International Climate Science Coalition, also worried that a UN promoted global approach to economics would mean financial ruin for many nations. "I don't think this conference can actually achieve anything because it seems to be saying that we are going to draw up one protocol for every country in the world to follow," McShane said. (LINK) "Now these countries and these economies are so diverse that trying to presume you can put all of these feet into one shoe will simply not work," McShane explained. "Having the same set of rules apply to everybody will blow some economies apart totally while others will be unscathed and I wouldn't be surprised if the ones who remain unscathed are the ones who write the rules," he added.

`Nothing happening at this conference'

Professor Dr. William Alexander, emeritus of the University of Pretoria in South Africa and a former member of the United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters, warned poor nations and their residents that the UN policies could mean more poverty and thus more death. "My message is specifically for the poor people of Africa. And there is nothing happening at this conference that can help them one little bit but there is the potential that they could be damaged," Alexander said. (LINK) "The government and people of Africa will have their attention drawn to reducing climate change instead of reducing poverty," Alexander added.






The Pope condemns the climate change prophets



Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology. The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.

The German-born Pontiff said that while some concerns may be valid it was vital that the international community based its policies on science rather than the dogma of the environmentalist movement. His remarks will be made in his annual message for World Peace Day on January 1, but they were released as delegates from all over the world convened on the Indonesian holiday island of Bali for UN climate change talks.

The 80-year-old Pope said the world needed to care for the environment but not to the point where the welfare of animals and plants was given a greater priority than that of mankind. "Humanity today is rightly concerned about the ecological balance of tomorrow," he said in the message entitled "The Human Family, A Community of Peace". "It is important for assessments in this regard to be carried out prudently, in dialogue with experts and people of wisdom, uninhibited by ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions, and above all with the aim of reaching agreement on a model of sustainable development capable of ensuring the well-being of all while respecting environmental balances.

"If the protection of the environment involves costs, they should be justly distributed, taking due account of the different levels of development of various countries and the need for solidarity with future generations. "Prudence does not mean failing to accept responsibilities and postponing decisions; it means being committed to making joint decisions after pondering responsibly the road to be taken." He added that to further the cause of world peace it was sensible for nations to "choose the path of dialogue rather than the path of unilateral decisions" in how to cooperate responsibly on conserving the planet.

The Pope's message is traditionally sent to heads of government and international organisations. His remarks reveal that while the Pope acknowledges that problems may be associated with unbridled development and climate change, he believes the case against global warming to be over-hyped.

A broad consensus is developing among the world's scientific community over the evils of climate change. But there is also an intransigent body of scientific opinion which continues to insist that industrial emissions are not to blame for the phenomenon. Such scientists point out that fluctuations in the earth's temperature are normal and can often be caused by waves of heat generated by the sun.

Other critics of environmentalism have compared the movement to a burgeoning industry in its own right. In the spring, the Vatican hosted a conference on climate change that was welcomed by environmentalists. But senior cardinals close to the Vatican have since expressed doubts about a movement which has been likened by critics to be just as dogmatic in its assumptions as any religion.

In October, the Australian Cardinal George Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney, caused an outcry when he noted that the atmospheric temperature of Mars had risen by 0.5 degrees celsius. "The industrial-military complex up on Mars can't be blamed for that," he said in a criticism of Australian scientists who had claimed that carbon emissions would force temperatures on earth to rise by almost five degrees by 2070 unless drastic solutions were enforced.

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Chemist loves CO2

Analytical Chemist Hans Schreuder who publishes the website ILoveMyCarbonDioxide.com, rejected man-made global warming fears in 2007. "Any and all arguments put forward by the perceived consensus of scientists who still have their names engraved on the IPCC report are based on nothing more than theory and best fit computer modeling. Normally varying weather patterns are "blamed" on AGW without any scientific basis and for the sole purpose of scaremongering a gullible public," Schreuder wrote on December 10, 2007.

Schreuder also asserted that "ALL `proof' is based on theories and computer models, not actual direct evidence - cause there ain't none. ALL the records from the past show clearly that CO2 did NOTHING to `drive' or `force' any temperature changes. If it did, we would be as hot as hell by now and no life would be possible." See here

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