PUBLIC OPINION: TIPPING POINT?

An email from Paul Stevens [pstevens2@gmail.com]:

I have been struck, recently, by what I think is a significant shift observable in the public media. I don't mean that suddenly all newspaper, television and internet outlets are suddenly printing anti-global warming pieces. Rather, it is in the comment sections under most internet blog and news items and in letters to the editors of hard copy news journals.

There now seems to be a preponderance of public comment that rejects the wilder claims of the AGW proponents and that recommend nuclear power as a clear and reasonable alternative to windmills and solar photovoltaic as primary generators of electricity. I would say this turnaround has occurred within the last year. It is now common to see more than five comments rejecting alternate energy solutions to every one supporting it. And an even higher ratio rejecting wild claims of doom for inevitable global warming for every one saying it is natural, or slight or something that can easily be accomodated in a world whose people are growing more prosperous.

This has been happening gradually for years, but in he last twelve months public opinon (as expressed in the available media) seems to have reached a tipping point. Maybe the climate change cheerleading squads are just tired, after hyping it for so long, with so little actual change. I wouldn't call this a rout just yet, as long as Obama feels he has to mouth platitudes about how the US will soon be leading the charge, but it is starting to take on the odour of one.






Hansen admits to guesswork about basic climate model inputs

On Mar. 11, Dr. James E. Hansen gave a talk at the Climate Change Congress in Copenhagen. It was titled "Air Pollutant Climate Forcings within the Big Climate Picture" It is available online here [PDF].

As Tom Nelson observes: "The stuff on pages 6-8 of the PDF really has to be seen to be believed. Hansen actually admits [Chart 9] that the IPCC aerosol estimate was "pretty much pulled out of a hat""

The commentary for Chart 8 is also a rather revealing admission:

"We do not have measurements of aerosols going back to the 1800s – we don’t even have global measurements today. Any measurements that exist incorporate both forcing and feedback. Aerosol effects on clouds are very uncertain"






FREEMAN DYSON: THE CIVIL HERETIC

[...] Formed in a heretical and broad-thinking tradition of British public intellectuals, Dyson left behind a brooding England still stricken by two bloody world wars to become an optimistic American immigrant with tremendous faith in the creative imagination's ability to invent technologies that would overcome any predicament. And according to the physicist and former Caltech president Marvin Goldberger, Dyson is himself the living embodiment of that kind of ingenuity. "You point Freeman at a problem and he'll solve it," Goldberger says. "He's extraordinarily powerful." Dyson seems to see the world as an interdisciplinary set of problems out there for him to evaluate. Climate change is the big scientific issue of our time, so naturally he finds it irresistible. But to Dyson this is really only one more charged conundrum attracting his interest just as nuclear weapons and rural poverty have. That is to say, he is a great problem-solver who is not convinced that climate change is a great problem.

Dyson is well aware that "most consider me wrong about global warming." That educated Americans tend to agree with the conclusion about global warming reached earlier this month at the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen ("inaction is inexcusable") only increases Dyson's resistance. Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus. The Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg admires Dyson's physics - he says he thinks the Nobel committee fleeced him by not awarding his work on quantum electrodynamics with the prize - but Weinberg parts ways with his sensibility: "I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice."

Much more HERE






PRAVDA'S SOLUTION TO GLOBAL WARMING

The erstwhile chief organ of the old Soviet leadership still has some ideas in common with the past. But this time they make more sense. Or they should to Leftists anyway

I think that the CO2-caused Global Warming theory is false and unproven junk science.

But let's suppose for a moment that the CO2 equals Global Warming equation is real. The wealthy elitists James Hansen, Al Gore, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, and the other high-profile cheerleaders for CO2 reduction are asking the poor and middle classes to suffer the consequences of a radical shutdown of global commerce and energy production in order to 'save the planet' from Global Warming. They want to make serfs of the masses of working people, while a privileged elite will be permitted to continue living in high style with a much larger 'carbon footprint' than the un-entitled lower classes.

We should never let that happen. The only way that 'carbon rationing' should be allowed is by assigning the exact same carbon limit to all people everywhere. Al Gore, Barack Obama, a London cabbie, and a Kalahari Bushman should all be assigned exactly the same number of 'carbon credits', period. Let them trade their credits with each other, but everyone should be restricted to the same limited 'carbon credit' allowance. The long-term ultimate effect of this would be an economic leveling of society; essentially global Communism. Under such a system, no one would be able to accumulate an excess of personal property or wealth because they could never accumulate enough 'carbon credits' to do so.

When Hansen, Gore, Blair, and Obama give up their patrician incomes and lifestyles and restrict their own 'carbon footprint' to the level of the common labourer or office worker, I will begin to believe that they are sincere about preventing Global Warming. Their obvious unwillingness to do what they are asking the rest of us to do proves that they are not sincere. They want the common people to sacrifice their lives to prevent Global Warming, while the wealthy retain their high-carbon consuming and producing privileges.

We cannot permit a privileged elite to enjoy a 'high-carbon' lifestyle while the poor are restricted by law to a 'low-carbon' lifestyle. Any effort by any government to impose carbon rationing with preferential treatment to any class of people should be seen as sufficient reason for an all-out French-style revolution in which the majority population dispossess the elitists of their wealth, their positions of power, and their privilege. In a world that is constantly threatened by Global Warming, we cannot allow a greedy few to consume or produce in excess of the average 'carbon footprint' of the world's population as a whole.

Barack Obama keeps the temperature at 78 degrees Fahrenheit in the Oval Office while telling the rest of us to turn our thermostats down. James Hansen has received grants amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote the Global Warming theory. Al Gore has invested heavily in the 'carbon trading' brokerage business. All of these men jet around the world, live in oversized houses, and ride in limousines. If the common people are to be required by law to reduce our 'carbon footprint', we need to demand that our leaders and the wealthy elite be restricted to exactly the same carbon allowance as everyone else.

We are not all together in the fight against Global Warming unless everyone is required to make the same sacrifices by sharing an equal 'carbon footprint' and an equal 'carbon ration', which should be assigned equally to every living person in the entire world. We need to hold the elitists' feet to the fire and require them to make exactly the same sacrifices as the rest of humanity.

Individual carbon limits and carbon rationing? Bring them on. Viva la Revolucion!

SOURCE





The Greatest Scam in History

Are you one of the victims of the "greatest scam in history"? I'm not referring to the scam conducted by Bernie Mad[e]off. I'm referring to what veteran meteorologist John Coleman calls the "greatest scam in history".

The victims of Mad[e]off's scam are typical of scam victims. They allowed their greed to override their common sense. They failed to consider the advice of the police that if some opportunity sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Victims of the global warming scam have done nothing to make themselves victims, particularly those who are unemployed through no actions they have taken.

Those who could have been employed constructing clean coal powered electric plants are unemployed because the perpetrators of the global warming scam have stopped construction of those plants. The need to supply equipment for such plants and goods and services to construction workers would have created more jobs.

According to the perpetrators of the global warming scam, there is supposed to be a total consensus that what they call "global warming" is a major threat to earth's future. Coleman is one of many meteorlogists who disagree with some or all of their claims. S. Fred Singer is another who questions such claims. The two of them together have over 100 years of experience studying weather. Coleman founded the Weather Channel. Singer was the first head of the National Weather Satellite Service.

The claim that the minor atmospheric gas carbon dioxide (CO2) can determine atmospheric temperature sounds so absurd that it is hard to understand how anyone with a logical scientific mind could believe it. Supposedly CO2 which comprises less than 400 parts per million of the atmosphere can cause higher temperatures by absorbing and reemitting low energy infrared radiation (IR) from earth's surface. They make this claim in spite of the fact that physicist R.W. Wood proved a century ago that trapping IR couldn't even cause heating in an enclosed greenhouse much less the atmosphere.

The equation they use to predict catastrophic warming contains a major flaw that NASA covered up until Ferenc Miskolczi left NASA and blew the whistle on them. The equation Arthur Milne developed in 1922 contains a serious flaw. Milne mistakenly solved the differential equation involved by assuming an infinitely thick atmosphere. NASA is a major player in the global warming scam. Some of its employees may have acted illegally.

Those who believe in global warming claim that a 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.5 degree Celsius) increase in what they call a global average temperature during the 20th Century indicates global warming. The fact is that even if the number they use had any mathematical value it would amount to only a 0.16 % change which would more likely be due to changes or deficiencies in equipment or changes in the area surrounding the equipment. Much of that equipment is in areas where maintenance is likely to be unavailable, but even the equipment in developed countries may be unreliable. There are documented problems with equipment and locations used to measure temperatures in the U.S.

Believers in global warming act more like religious fanatics than scientists. For them consensus is more important than facts. They call those who question their beliefs names like "contrarians" or "deniers" much like those who believed the earth was the center of the universe called Galileo and Copernicus "heretics'.

Those who question global warming have something else in common with Galileo and Copernicus. Galileo and Copernicus challenged the belief that the human inhabited earth must be the center of the universe the sun. Their persecutors believed the sun must revolve around the earth because the consensus view considered humans so important.

Those who claim humans are causing global warming believe humans are so powerful they can magically control earth's climate by manipulating a very minor atmospheric gas. They ignore the fact that earth's heat comes from the sun.

The so-called "deniers" believe that changes in the sun's output determine whether earth warms or cools. Some astrophysicists, who study the sun, believe that thousands of years of observation of the sun indicate the sun is about to enter a part of its cycle in which it will produce less heat as was the case in the 18th Century when Gen. George Washington's troops spent an extremely cold winter at Valley Forge.

The corrupt United Nations and other political organizations are pushing the scam. This is the same U.N. that was behind the oil for food scandals and scandals in UNESCO and UNICEF. The same U.N. that approved the U.S. invasion of Iraq to look for Weapons of Mass Destruction. There was more evidence for WMD in Iraq than there is for global warming caused by CO2.

Some financial interests, including the bankrupt Lehman Brothers, have been pushing the scam as means of increasing the value of a financial instrument they call "carbon credits". These carbon credits potentialty allow financial parasites to cut themselves in for a portion of the revenue of various companies. Carbon credits inflate the cost of goods and services and may force companies to lay off people who would otherwise not lose their jobs.

Supporters of the global warming scam claim they want to protect the environment, but they call CO2 a polutant even though it is essential to biological life. Plants need CO2 to produce the food we eat.

The scammers by emphasizing a non-threat to the environment divert attention from ways humans actually affect the environment such as the production of black soot in China's dirty coal electrical plants. Black soot mixing with snow in the Arctic converts sunlight into heat that melts the snow. Without the soot the snow would reflect the sunlight back into space.

SOURCE






U.N. CLIMATE PLAN WOULD SHIFT TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO FORM NEW WORLD ECONOMY

A United Nations document on "climate change" that will be distributed to a major environmental conclave next week envisions a huge reordering of the world economy, likely involving trillions of dollars in wealth transfer, millions of job losses and gains, new taxes, industrial relocations, new tariffs and subsidies, and complicated payments for greenhouse gas abatement schemes and carbon taxes - all under the supervision of the world body.

Those and other results are blandly discussed in a discreetly worded United Nations "information note" on potential consequences of the measures that industrialized countries will likely have to take to implement the Copenhagen Accord, the successor to the Kyoto Treaty, after it is negotiated and signed by December 2009. The Obama administration has said it supports the treaty process if, in the words of a U.S. State Department spokesman, it can come up with an "effective framework" for dealing with global warming.

The 16-page note, obtained by FOX News, will be distributed to participants at a mammoth negotiating session that starts on March 29 in Bonn, Germany, the first of three sessions intended to hammer out the actual commitments involved in the new deal.

In the stultifying language that is normal for important U.N. conclaves, the negotiators are known as the "Ad Hoc Working Group On Further Commitments For Annex I Parties Under the Kyoto Protocol." Yet the consequences of their negotiations, if enacted, would be nothing short of world-changing.

Getting that deal done has become the United Nations' highest priority, and the Bonn meeting is seen as a critical step along the path to what the U.N. calls an "ambitious and effective international response to climate change," which is intended to culminate at the later gathering in Copenhagen.

Just how ambitious the U.N.'s goals are can be seen, but only dimly, in the note obtained by FOX News, which offers in sparse detail both positive and negative consequences of the tools that industrial nations will most likely use to enforce the greenhouse gas reduction targets.

The paper makes no effort to calculate the magnitude of the costs and disruption involved, but despite the discreet presentation, makes clear that they will reverberate across the entire global economic system.

Among the tools that are considered are the cap-and-trade system for controlling carbon emissions that has been espoused by the Obama administration; "carbon taxes" on imported fuels and energy-intensive goods and industries, including airline transportation; and lower subsidies for those same goods, as well as new or higher subsidies for goods that are considered "environmentally sound."

Other tools are referred to only vaguely, including "energy policy reform," which the report indicates could affect "large-scale transportation infrastructure such as roads, rail and airports." When it comes to the results of such reform, the note says only that it could have "positive consequences for alternative transportation providers and producers of alternative fuels."

In the same bland manner, the note informs negotiators without going into details that cap-and-trade schemes "may induce some industrial relocation" to "less regulated host countries." Cap-and-trade functions by creating decreasing numbers of pollution-emission permits to be traded by industrial users, and thus pay more for each unit of carbon-based pollution, a market-driven system that aims to drive manufacturers toward less polluting technologies.

The note adds only that industrial relocation "would involve negative consequences for the implementing country, which loses employment and investment." But at the same time it "would involve indeterminate consequences for the countries that would host the relocated industries."

There are also entirely new kinds of tariffs and trade protectionist barriers such as those termed in the note as "border carbon adjustment"- which, the note says, can impose "a levy on imported goods equal to that which would have been imposed had they been produced domestically" under more strict environmental regimes.

Another form of "adjustment" would require exporters to "buy [carbon] offsets at the border equal to that which the producer would have been forced to purchase had the good been produced domestically."

The impact of both schemes, the note says, "would be functionally equivalent to an increased tariff: decreased market share for covered foreign producers." (There is no definition in the report of who, exactly, is "foreign.") The note adds that "If they were implemented fairly, such schemes would leave trade and investment patterns unchanged." Nothing is said about the consequences if such fairness was not achieved.

Indeed, only rarely does the "information note" attempt to inform readers in dollar terms of the impact of "spillover effects" from the potential policy changes it discusses. In a brief mention of consumer subsidies for fossil fuels, the note remarks that such subsidies in advanced economies exceed $60 billion a year, while they exceed $90 billion a year in developing economies."

But calculations of the impact of tariffs, offsets, or other subsidies is rare. In a reference to the impact of declining oil exports, the report says that Saudi Arabia has determined the loss to its economy at between $100 billion and $200 billion by 2030, but said nothing about other oil exporters.

One reason for the lack of detail, the note indicates, is that impact would vary widely depending on the nature and scope of the policies adopted (and, although the note does not mention it, on the severity of the greenhouse reduction targets).

But even when it does hazard a guess at specific impacts, the report seems curiously hazy. A "climate change levy on aviation" for example, is described as having undetermined "negative impacts on exporters of goods that rely on air transport, such as cut flowers and premium perishable produce," as well as "tourism services." But no mention is made in the note of the impact on the aerospace industry, an industry that had revenues in 2008 of $208 billion in the U.S. alone, or the losses the levy would impose on airlines for ordinary passenger transportation. (Global commercial airline revenues in 2008 were about $530 billion, and were already forecast to drop to an estimated $467 billion this year.)

In other cases, as when discussing the "increased costs of traditional exports" under a new environmental regime, the report confines itself to terse description. Changes in standards and labeling for exported goods, for example, "may demand costly changes to the production process." If subsidies and tariffs affect exports, the note says, the "economic and social consequences of dampening their viability may, for some countries and sectors, be significant."

Much depends, of course, on the extent to which harsher or more lenient greenhouse gas reduction targets demand more or less drastic policies for their achievement.

And, precisely because the Bonn meeting is a stage for negotiating those targets, the note is silent. Instead it suggests that more bureaucratic work is needed "to deepen the understanding of the full nature and scale of such impacts."

But outside the Bonn process, other experts have been much more blunt about the draconian nature of the measures they deem necessary to make "effective" greenhouse gas reductions.

In an influential but highly controversial paper called "Key Elements of a Global Deal on Climate Change," British economist Nicholas Lord Stern, formerly a high British Treasury official, has declared that industrial economies would need to cut their per capita carbon dioxide emissions by "at least 80% by 2050," while the biggest economies, like the U.S.'s, would have to make cuts of 90 percent.

Stern also calls for "immediate and binding" reduction targets for developed nations of 20 percent to 40 percent by 2020.

To meet Stern's 2050 goals, he says, among other things, "most of the world's electricity production will need to have been decarbonized."

By way of comparison, according to the U.S. Department Of Energy, roughly 72 percent of U.S. electrical power generation in 2007 was derived from burning fossil fuels, with just 6 percent coming from hydro-power and less than 3 percent from non-nuclear renewable and "other" sources. And even then, those "other" non-fossil sources included wood and biomass - which, when burned, are major emitters of carbon.

SOURCE

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