U.N. talks halt plans for ocean fertilization

Something that might reduce atmospheric CO2 and thus remove any reason for people to turn their lives upside down cannot be allowed of course

Reuters reports:

"Nearly 200 countries agreed on Friday to a moratorium on projects to fight climate change by adding nutrients to the seas to spur growth of carbon-absorbing algae. The surprise deal followed 12 days of haggling at the U.N.'s Convention on Biological Diversity conference where Australia, Brazil and China had opposed until the last minute, halting the controversial plans for "ocean fertilization".

History tells us many things, and we are sure if this idea had gone ahead to try and reduce the level of CO2 in the atmosphere by adding chemicals into the ocean, history again would have taught us something to learn from.

For those of you who were not aware of this absurdity and at what lengths the "Man Made Climate Change" industry are proposing to go to achieve there ultimate goal, we can assure you, "you aint seen nothing yet". They will not stop at nothing in this pursuit of madness called "Man Made Climate Change".

This pursuit of madness is on the basis that an increase in CO2 changes the Earth's Temperature, this meddling to offset the effects of the Sun is from now on referred to hereafter as nothing more and nothing less then 'Climate Alchemy'

The IPCC and Al Gore media and publicity machine, the machine that puts fear and anxiety into people, are now referred to hereafter as nothing more and nothing less then CLIMATE ALCHEMISTS.. Their obsession with CO2 mirrors that of the Alchemists, they wish to believe that the properties of CO2 can make changes to our climate in the same way Alchemists believed they could turn Coal into Gold.

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More on Warmists as Climate Alchemists

An email from Hans Schreuder

Warmism is pseudo-science in the name of science. Yet these pseudo-scientists call skeptics by the same name.

Skeptics are also called flat-earthers, yet it is the climate alchemists themselves who invest unwavering faith in the computers that draw projections on a flat earth. A flat earth with no night time; a flat earth with no North or South Pole, a two-dimensional disk receiving exactly the same solar energy over every inch of its vast flat surface. These models, just like those who both invent them and adjust their computing accordingly, cannot juggle anything more than a single flat plate. So who are the pseudo-scientists? The flat-earth modelers or the round-earth realists?

Not even skeptics will admit that the current hypothesis on how the earth acquires its temperature is physically untenable, nor that official explanations of radiative forcing are scientifically incoherent. Instead, they go along and attempt to calculate how many IPCC fairies can dance on a pinhead, proceeding on the shared premise that such entities exist in the first place. Aren't we all pseudo-scientists then?

Until such time as we fully grasp the complexity of our atmosphere and its interaction with the sun and earth, scientists should stop pronouncing so assuredly about our climate. And bureaucrats across the world would do well to stop their head-long rush into regulating carbon consumption and reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Carbon dioxide is a vital gas of life and carbon is the very basis of our existence - yet collectively we understand almost nothing about either. As scientists, true scientists, we must come to terms with our ignorance, or else, as of right now, cure cancer, create life and build fusion reactors, as well as predict with 100% accuracy what tomorrow's weather will bring.





The spotless sun



You probably haven't heard much of Solar Cycle 24, the current cycle that our sun has entered, and I hope you don't. If Solar Cycle 24 becomes a household term, your lifestyle could be taking a dramatic turn for the worse. That of your children and their children could fare worse still, say some scientists, because Solar Cycle 24 could mark a time of profound long-term change in the climate. As put by geophysicist Philip Chapman, a former NASA astronaut-scientist and former president of the National Space Society, "It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age."

The sun, of late, is remarkably free of eruptions: It has lost its spots. By this point in the solar cycle, sunspots would ordinarily have been present in goodly numbers. Today's spotlessness - what alarms Dr. Chapman and others - may be an anomaly of some kind, and the sun may soon revert to form. But if it doesn't - and with each passing day, the speculation in the scientific community grows that it will not - we could be entering a new epoch that few would welcome.

Sunspots have been well documented throughout human history, starting in the fourth century BC, with written descriptions by Gan De, a Chinese astronomer. In 1128, an English monk, John of Worcester, was the first person known to have drawn sunspots, and after the telescope's arrival in the early 1600s, observations and drawings became commonplace, including by such luminaries as Galileo Galilei. Then, to the astonishment of astronomers, they saw the sunspots diminish and die out altogether.

This was the case during the Little Ice Age, a period starting in the 15th or 16th century and lasting centuries, says NASA's Goddard Space Centre, which links the absence of sunspots to the cold that then descended on Earth. During the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, a time known as the Maunder Minimum (named after English astronomer Edward Maunder), astronomers saw only about 50 sunspots over a 30-year period, less than one half of 1% of the sunspots that would normally have been expected. Other Minimums - times of low sunspot activity - also corresponded to times of unusual cold.

The consequences of the Little Ice Age, because they occurred in relatively recent times, have come down to us through literature and the arts as well as from historians and scientists, government and business records. When Shakespeare wrote of "lawn as white as driven snow," he had first-hand experience - Europe was bitterly cold in his day, a sharp contrast to the very warm weather that preceded his birth. During the Little Ice Age, the River Thames froze over, the Dutch developed the ice skate and the great artists of the day learned to love a new genre: the winter landscape.

In what had been a warm Europe , adaptations were not all happy: Growing seasons in England and Continental Europe generally became short and unreliable, which led to shortages and famine. These hardships were nothing compared to the more northerly countries: Glaciers advanced rapidly in Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia and North America, making vast tracts of land uninhabitable. The Arctic pack ice extended so far south that several reports describe Eskimos landing their kayaks in Scotland. Finland's population fell by one-third, Iceland's by half, the Viking colonies in Greenland were abandoned altogether, as were many Inuit communities. The cold in North America spread so far south that, in the winter of 1780, New York Harbor froze, enabling people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island.

In the same way that the Earth shivered when sunspots disappeared, the Earth warmed when sunspot activity became pronounced. The warm period about 1000 years ago known as the Medieval Warm Period - a time of bounty in which grapes grew in England and Greenland was colonized - also was a time of high sunspot activity, called the Medieval Maximum. Since 1900, Earth has experienced what astronomers call "the Modern Maximum" - the 20th century has again been a time of high sunspot activity.

But the 1900s are gone, along with the high temperatures that accompanied them. The last 10 years have seen no increase in temperatures - they reached a plateau and then remained there - and the last year saw a precipitous decline. How much lower and for how long the temperatures will fall, if at all, no one yet knows - the science is far from settled on what drives climate.

But many are watching the sun for answers, and for good reason. Several renowned scientists have been predicting for some time that the world could enter a period of cooling right around now, with consequences that could be dire. "The next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do," believes Dr. Chapman. "There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the U.S. and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it."

We are now at the beginning of Solar Cycle 24, so named because it is the 24th consecutive cycle that astronomers have listed, starting with the first cycle that began in March, 1755, and ended in June, 1766. Each cycle lasts an average of approximately 11 years; each is marked by sunspots that first erupt in the mid latitudes of the sun, and then, over the course of the 11 years, erupt progressively toward the sun's equator; each is marked by a change in the polarity of the sun's hemispheres; each changes the temperature on Earth in ways that humans don't fully understand, but cannot in all honesty deny.

Source

Comment from a correspondent

What is the actual mechanism behind sunspot activity and the earth's climate? No one really knows. The radiative energy levels involved between the two events don't quite match, yet the connection seems undeniable. So I want to make a point.

If every time you flush the toilet the phone rings, you've got a solid correlation - despite the fact that you can't comprehend it. But do you therefore deny that it's happening? In my view, it is science's first obligation to go with the evidence at hand and only secondarily to provide an explanatory mechanism.

The link between ocean tides and the moon, for instance, was accepted as a practical reality long before a viable explanation could be offered. Yet "mechanism first" advocates would have dismissed that connection as astrological nonsense, just as they dismissed the phenomenon of rocks falling out of the sky.

If superstitionism knits causative connections between unrelated things - step on a crack, break your mother's back - is a rationalism that rejects the testimony of experience any better?

I think there's too much of that going on today. Climatologists are obliged to follow the evidence, whether there's a satisfactory explanation or not. Because the admittedly unknown why of earth's climate changes, the sun, is a hell of a lot more convincing than the allegedly known why of carbon dioxide levels.





Who'd've Discredited It?

'Case against climate change discredited by study' shrieked the Independent yesterday. That must be one hell of a study. Except that it isn't:

A difference in the way British and American ships measured the temperature of the ocean during the 1940s may explain why the world appeared to undergo a period of sudden cooling immediately after the Second World War.

Scientists believe they can now explain an anomaly in the global temperature record for the twentieth century, which has been used by climate change sceptics to undermine the link between rising temperatures and increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Not only does the study (published this week in Nature) not claim to discredit what the Independent's headline claims it discredits, but it doesn't even discredit what the scientists behind the study claim it discredits. Moreover, what the scientists claim their work does discredit was, according to prominent Environmentalists, discredited years ago. And finally, what everybody seems to be trying to discredit isn't even something that sceptics seem to be crediting in the first place.

Yes, sceptics are concerned about the post-war temperature slump, but not because of the sudden steep drop around 1945; it is the downward trend in temperatures between about 1945 and 1975 that they suggest needs explaining (which is actually longer than the upward trend between 1975 and 1998, just so you know), given that greenhouse gas emissions were rising throughout that period.

And as the graph used by the Independent to bolster its case (supplied by CRU, apparently) demonstrates, the Nature study does absolutely nothing to address that concern:



In fact, the most striking thing about the graph is that, once the sampling errors identified by the study have been taken into account, the period of warming in the latter half of the twentieth century was shorter than previously thought, and that the '45-'75 temperature slump is more pronounced.

According to Phil Jones, a co-author of the paper, the study

lends support to the idea that a period of global cooling occurred later during the mid-twentieth century as a result of sulphate aerosols being released during the 1950s with the rise of industrial output. These sulphates tended to cut sunlight, counteracting global warming caused by rising carbon dioxide.

"This finding supports the sulphates argument, because it was bit hard to explain how they could cause the period of cooling from 1945, when industrial production was still relatively low," Professor Jones said.

That might be so. But the aerosols issue is supposed to have been done and dusted long ago. One of the central criticisms aimed at the infamous Great Global Warming Swindle, for example, is precisely that it failed to entertain the idea that the post-1940 decline in global temperatures was the result of increases in sulphurous emissions that masked the forcing effect of rising atmospheric CO2. George Monbiot described the omission as 'straightforward scientific dishonesty'. After all, he said, that 'temperatures declined after the Second World War as a result of sulphate pollution from heavy industry, causing global dimming...is well-known to all climate scientists.' And as we have reported before, this was also one of the main points raised by the Royal Society's Bob Ward and 36 scientific experts in their open letter to Swindle producer Martin Durkin.

And yet, as we've reported elsewhere, other experts in the field just don't agree. UC San Diego atmospheric physicist Veerabhadran Ramanathan, for example, told us that the empirical evidence for the sulphate masking of warming is 'pretty flimsy'. We do not doubt that the Nature study is an important contribution to the field. (Although it's interesting that Steve McIntyre seems to have produced a similar analysis more than a year ago.) What we do doubt is that the headlines, soundbites, and wild interpretations from newspapers and scientists alike bear much relevance to what is a dry, technical, scientific study, which, while increasing our ability to understand and predict climate trends, says little in itself about the truth or otherwise of global warming.

That said, the BBC's Richard Black has demonstrated uncharacteristic reserve in his coverage of the paper, which includes the following quote from CRU's Mike Hulme:

Corrections for this measurement switch have not yet been applied to produce a new graph of 20th Century temperatures - that work is ongoing at the UK Met Office - but as the land temperature record shows a flattening of the upwards trend from the 1940s to the 1970s, clearly something did change around the 1940s to ameliorate the warming.

"It perhaps suggests that the role of sulphate aerosols, that cooling effect, was less powerful than we thought," said Mike Hulme from the University of East Anglia (UEA), who was not involved in the study.

George Monbiot and the Royal Society are just plain wrong - the science is plainly not 'settled'. And so is Steve Connor, the author of the Independent article. As he wrote last year in response to the Swindle:

The programme failed to point out that scientists had now explained the period of "global cooling" between 1940 and 1970. It was caused by industrial emissions of sulphate pollutants, which tend to reflect sunlight. Subsequent clean-air laws have cleared up some of this pollution, revealing the true scale of global warming - a point that the film failed to mention.

'Scientists' have 'explained' nothing of the sort. As this case shows, the science is not settled. Indeed science is never settled. It is constantly re-evaluating what it understands about absolutely everything. And that's especially crucial to bear in mind when the science in question has been bestowed with the kind of political significance that climate science has. To claim otherwise is to do a disservice to both science and politics. It reduces science to a flimsy fig leaf used simply to hide the embarrassing inadequacies of the latest political fad; and it reduces politics to an aimless exercise in number-crunching.

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Just say it: Kyoto's a crock

Comment from Canada

Stephen Harper should call the environmental accord what it is -- a train wreck. Could Prime Minister Stephen Harper or Environment Minister John Baird please explain what they mean when they say Canada continues to be a participant in the Kyoto accord? How can we be a participant when the PM has said we cannot do what Kyoto requires of us -- lower our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by an average of 6% below 1990 levels between now and 2012?

We're 29.1% above our Kyoto target. Achieving that target is the point of Kyoto. So what, exactly, are we participating in? Yes, the Liberals are hypocrites for ratifying Kyoto and then doing zilch to implement it. Yes, Liberal Leader Stephane Dion supports a carbon tax he once opposed. But the Conservatives have been no more coherent.

In opposition, they didn't complain the Liberals were doing too little to implement Kyoto, as they do now. They complained they were doing too much, consistent with Harper's views at the time that Kyoto was a socialist, money-sucking scheme.

Kyoto is a socialist, money-sucking scheme. Why don't the Conservatives just say it? I know -- I hear it from Conservatives supporters all the time -- Harper has to pay lip service to Kyoto to win the next election.

Nonsense. First off, voters know when politicians are bulls...ting them. If the Conservatives think they're getting a boost from pretending to support Kyoto, they're not.

More important, with the Liberals, Bloc, NDP and Green parties, and most of the provinces, all insanely worshipping at the altar of Kyoto and ready to "green" tax us to death, is there not one mainstream party with the courage to denounce Kyoto for the train wreck it is?

Look at the thing. Why do you suppose the main instigators of Kyoto -- the United Kingdom, the European Union and the United Nations -- happened to pick 1990 as the base year for reducing GHG emissions? It wasn't written in stone. Kyoto wasn't even agreed to until 1997 and didn't come into effect until 2005. The drafters could have picked any year as the base year. They retroactively chose 1990 because that was just before the Soviet Union imploded, meaning the European Union was able to take advantage of the dramatic drop-off in GHG emissions of the former Soviet satellites which later became part of Europe, countries which dramatically cut their GHG emissions not by doing anything, but by suffering a recession.

Also by 1990, the U.K.'s "dash for gas" was well underway -- again, unrelated to Kyoto. But by replacing coal power with natural gas, the U.K. was also able to benefit from Kyoto without doing anything. These countries, along with the UN, whose interest was transferring wealth from the First World to the Third, crafted the treaty right down to exempting the entire developing world, led by China and India, with one purpose in mind.

That was to damage the U.S. economy by putting it at a competitive disadvantage had the Americans been stupid enough to ratify Kyoto. But even with Al Gore as their vice-president, they weren't. We were. We ratified it because a reckless Jean Chretien was looking for an environmental legacy. Chretien's top political aide, Eddie Goldenberg, has since acknowledged the Liberals knew Canadians weren't ready for what Kyoto required when they ratified it in 2002. Of course, the Liberals weren't ready either, the proof being what they did to implement Kyoto after they ratified it. Nothing.

Ironically, even with all the advantages the U.K. and EU handed themselves in Kyoto, many of their own citizens are now revolting against the usurious carbon and green taxes they're being asked to pay.

Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism, under which developed countries fund environmental projects in developing ones, is rife with charges of corruption and profiteering.

Even if every one of the 37 member states in Kyoto (including us) required to reduce their GHG emissions (as opposed to the 143, which aren't) meet their emission targets (which they won't), the coal plants China and India alone are building will more than wipe out all the cuts Kyoto calls for. And this is the deal the Conservatives say we need to be part of?

Why? Are we nuts?

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Climate advice is poisoned by fear

(By atmospheric physicist Dr. Garth W. Paltridge, an Emeritus Professor from University of Tasmania, who was a Chief Research Scientist with Australia's CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research before taking up positions in 1990 as Director of the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies at the University of Tasmania and as CEO of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Center)

I HEAR on the scientific grapevine that CSIRO's biggest problem when providing formal advice to the federal Government on the matter of climate change is to say nothing that can be interpreted as giving aid and comfort to the army of irresponsible sceptics out there who are doubtful about the dreadful consequences of global warming.

One can only feel sorry for the Government. Where can it go these days to get unbiased advice on the issue of global warming? Its official sources are poisoned by the fear among many scientists that they may be labelled by their colleagues and by their institutions as climate-change sceptics.

Basically, the problem is that the research community has gone so far along the path of frightening the life out of the man in the street that to recant publicly even part of the story would massively damage the reputation and political clout of science in general. And so, like corpuscles in the blood, researchers all over the world now rush in overwhelming numbers to repel infection by any idea that threatens the carefully cultivated belief in climatic disaster.

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