'Consensus' Takes Another Hit! More than 60 German Scientists Dissent Over Global Warming Claims!

Call Climate Fears 'Pseudo 'Religion'; Urge Chancellor to 'reconsider' views. 'Growing body of evidence shows anthropogenic CO2 plays no measurable role'

More than 60 prominent German scientists have publicly declared their dissent from man-made global warming fears in an Open Letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The more than 60 signers of the letter include several United Nations IPCC scientists.

The scientists declared that global warming has become a “pseudo religion” and they noted that rising CO2 has “had no measurable effect” on temperatures. The German scientists, also wrote that the “UN IPCC has lost its scientific credibility.”

This latest development comes on the heels of a series of inconvenient developments for the promoters of man-made global warming fears, including new peer-reviewed studies, real world data, a growing chorus of scientists dissenting (including more UN IPCC scientists), open revolts in scientific societies and the Earth's failure to warm. In addition, public opinion continues to turn against climate fear promotion. (See "Related Links" at bottom of this article for more inconvenient scientific developments.)

The July 26, 2009 German scientist letter urged Chancellor Merkel to “strongly reconsider” her position on global warming and requested a “convening of an impartial panel” that is “free of ideology” to counter the UN IPCC and review the latest climate science developments.

The scientists, from many disciplines, including physicists, meteorology, chemistry, and geology, explain that “humans have had no measurable effect on global warming through CO2 emissions. Instead the temperature fluctuations have been within normal ranges and are due to natural cycles.”

“More importantly, there's a growing body of evidence showing anthropogenic CO2 plays no measurable role,” the scientists wrote. “Indeed CO2's capability to absorb radiation is already exhausted by today's atmospheric concentrations. If CO2 did indeed have an effect and all fossil fuels were burned, then additional warming over the long term would in fact remain limited to only a few tenths of a degree,” they added.

“The IPCC had to have been aware of this fact, but completely ignored it during its studies of 160 years of temperature measurements and 150 years of determined CO2 levels. As a result the IPCC has lost its scientific credibility,” the scientists wrote.

“Indeed the atmosphere has not warmed since 1998 – more than 10 years, and the global temperature has even dropped significantly since 2003. Not one of the many extremely expensive climate models predicted this. According to the IPCC, it was supposed to have gotten steadily warmer, but just the opposite has occurred,” the scientists wrote.

“The belief of climate change, and that it is manmade, has become a pseudo-religion,” the scientists wrote. “The German media has sadly taken a leading position in refusing to publicize views that are critical of anthropogenic global warming,” they added.

“Do you not believe, Madam Chancellor, that science entails more than just confirming a hypothesis, but also involves testing to see if the opposite better explains reality? We strongly urge you to reconsider your position on this subject and to convene an impartial panel for the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, one that is free of ideology, and where controversial arguments can be openly debated. We the undersigned would very much like to offer support in this regard.

More HERE





Obama's Big Lie: "Green" Jobs

By Alan Caruba

If there is one thing Americans began to rapidly conclude following his inauguration in January, it is that President Barack Obama lies all the time and that those lies are often blatant.

In pursuit of the “Cap-and-Trade” act that is a huge tax on all energy use in America, Obama’s favorite mantra is that massive subsidies to wind and solar energy producers, as well as biofuel producers, will generate millions of new “green” jobs. Perhaps the worst part of this lie is that they will actually destroy jobs.

In the July edition of Energy Tribune, Michael Economides and Peter Glover co-authored “Green Jobs: Fast-Tracking Economic Suicide.” I know Economides and he is internationally recognized as one of the world’s authorities on energy issues.

“Creating ex nihilo—literally, out of nothing—used to be a theological concept, God’s prerogative. Today, it seems, President Obama and certain Western politicians claim to possess the ability to do it,” write the article’s authors. “Against all the laws of economics and the marketplace, President Obama and others believe they can create millions of ‘green’ jobs ex nihilo, literally out of thin air, via cap and trade.”

There are two driving forces behind Cap-and-Trade. One is the claim that “green” energy producers will generate new jobs if the government just provides a combination of legislative mandates for its use (wind and solar) and, two, that a massive new trading apparatus in “carbon credits” for the generation of “greenhouse gas emissions” will protect the Earth against “global warming.”

It is increasingly obvious to everyone that the Earth is cooling, breaking thousands of previous records for cool weather in cities around America and similar conditions worldwide. The tide, too, is turning against the “global warming” hoax that is failing in the face of the obvious cooling weather and climate.

Using “global warming” to justify any government mandates or to empower the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon dioxide as a “pollutant” is a lie. It is a very big lie. Carbon dioxide is vital to all life on Earth.

As the Energy Tribune authors point out, “To generate real industrial jobs, however, you need a basic commodity to trade, such as oil, gas or coal.” This is in marked contrast to wind and solar energy. “The trouble is that alternative energy technologies currently don’t work. That is to say, they remain inefficient, offering a very poor energy return on investment.”

“Cut off the flow of public subsidies and the alternative energy industrial revolution would grind to a halt tomorrow.”

In the real world, in 2008 the Marcellus gas industry in Pennsylvania generated $2.3 billion in total value added, more than 29,000 jobs, and $240 million in state and local taxes. If you extrapolate that to other sectors of the energy industry, you would be looking at thousands of real jobs, not lost jobs, but President Obama and his sycophants would rather you not know about that.

If you had a choice, would you prefer to see wind, solar and biofuel energy producers receive billions in taxpayer subsidies or would you prefer to see independent energy producers permitted to extract oil and natural gas or the coal industry have access to the U.S. reserves that would provide electricity for centuries to come?

This is not mere conjecture. The experience of European Union nations demonstrates that “for every green job created, a real job is destroyed elsewhere in the economy.” Carbon regimes drive manufacturing to nations that do not impose limits on coal, oil and natural gas.

For example, “Germany’s Angela Merkel is insisting on major exemptions for German heavy industry come December’s global climate summit in Copenhagen. Merkel’s government is also supporting the building of 26 new coal-fired power plants across Germany.” Compare that with one hundred such plants whose construction was thwarted in the United States by environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth.

“In June, deputy head of Poland’s Solidarity trade union, Jaroslaw Gresik, estimated that the EU’s climate policy would cost 800,000 European jobs.” Widely circulated data from a study of the heavily subsidized wind and solar energy industry in Spain revealed that its alternative energy program destroyed nearly 110,500 jobs elsewhere in its economy or 2.2 jobs destroyed for every ‘green job’ created. Consumers there have seen their electricity rate increase by 31 percent.

Other independent studies reveal that Obama’s claim of five million new “green” jobs would cost an estimated $500 billion to create.

Wake up, America! The Big Lie about “Green jobs” is going to cost jobs. The Cap-and-Trade bill is a massive tax increase.

The summer recess is the time to contact your Senator and Representative and tell them you oppose Cap-and-Trade. If it is passed, it will undermine the economy, cost jobs, and leave the nation increasingly dependent on the import of energy resources while our own lay underground, unexplored, untapped, unused.

SOURCE






Uranium Truck Crashes in West Virginia. No spill

Shortly after midnight Sunday morning, a tractor-trailer carrying uranium hexafluoride (UF6) overturned on Interstate-64, prompting evacuation of the town of Sandstone and surrounding areas.

A news release from the West Virginia State Police says the driver of a pickup truck headed west on I-64 was drunk when he ran off the road and struck a guardrail, causing his truck to roll over through the median, landing in the shoulder of the east bound lanes.

The driver of the tractor trailer was headed east and locked up his brakes to avoid the debris from the pickup truck that was left in the road. The tractor trailer then veered to the right and hit a rock embankment, overturned and caught fire.

The tractor trailer was carrying a corrosive material that has been determined to be radioactive.

Just before 3:30 a.m., HAZMAT crews reached the scene and determined that the container holding the material was not damaged and none of the material leaked. The crews also tested the air around the wreck and found no contamination.

The key point of this report is that the uranium slurry, a mid-stage product in the enrichment process, was adequately protected by the design of its container.

SOURCE






Global Warming and the Poor

Why India and China don’t care much about climate change

A funny thing happened on the way to saving the world’s poor from the ravages of global warming. The poor told the warming alarmists to get lost. This spring, the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum, led by former U.N. General Secretary Kofi Annan, issued a report warning that “mass starvation, mass migration, and mass sickness” would ensue if the world did not agree to “the most ambitious international agreement ever negotiated” on global warming at a forthcoming conference in Copenhagen.

According to Mr. Annan’s report, climate change-induced disasters now account for 315,000 deaths each year and $125 billion in damages, numbers set to rise to 500,000 deaths and $340 billion in damages by 2030. The numbers are hotly contested by University of Colorado disaster-trends expert Roger Pielke Jr., who calls them a “poster child for how to lie with statistics.”

But never mind about that. The more interesting kiss-off took place in New Delhi late last month, when Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh told visiting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that there was no way India would sign on to any global scheme to cap carbon emissions.

“There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have among the lowest emissions per capita, face to actually reduce emissions,” Mr. Ramesh told Mrs. Clinton. “And as if this pressure was not enough, we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours.” The Chinese—the world’s largest emitter of CO2—have told the Obama administration essentially the same thing.

Roughly 75% of Indians—some 800 million people—live on $2 a day or less, adjusted for purchasing power parity. In China, it’s about 36%, or about 480 million. That means the two governments alone are responsible for one in every two people living at that income level.

If climate change is the threat Mr. Annan claims it is, India and China ought to be eagerly beating the path to Copenhagen. So why aren’t they?

To listen to the climate alarmists, it’s all America’s fault. “What the Chinese are chiefly guilty of is emulating the American economic model,” wrote environmental writer Jacques Leslie last year in the Christian Science Monitor. “The United States passed up the opportunity it had at the beginning of China’s economic transformation to guide it toward sustainability, and the loss is already incalculable.”

Facts tell a different story. When Deng Xiaoping began introducing elements of a market economy in 1980, Chinese life expectancy at birth was 65.3 years. Today it is about 73 years. The numbers are probably a bit inflated, as most numbers are in the People’s Republic, but the trend line is undeniable. In India, life expectancy rose from 52.5 years in 1980 to about 67 years today. If this is the consequence of following the “American economic model” then poor countries need more of it.

But what about all the pollution in India and particularly China? In Mr. Leslie’s telling, CO2 emissions are part-and-parcel with common pollutants such as particulate matter, toxic waste, and everything else typically associated with a degraded environment. They’re not. The U.S. and China produce equivalent quantities of carbon dioxide. But try naming a U.S. city whose air quality is even remotely as bad as Beijing’s, or an American river as polluted as the Han: You can’t. America, the richer and more industrialized country, is also by far the cleaner one.

People who live in Third-World countries—like Mexico, where I grew up—tend to understand this, even if First-World environmentalists do not. People who live in oppressive Third World countries, like China, also understand that it isn’t just greater wealth that leads to a better environment, but greater freedom, too.

To return to Mr. Leslie, his complaint with China is that it has become too much of a consumer society, again in the American mold. Again he is ridiculous: China has one of the world’s highest personal savings rates—50% versus the U.S.’s 2.7%. The real source of China’s pollution problem is a state-led industrial policy geared toward production, and state-owned enterprises (especially in “dirty” sectors like coal and steel) that strive to meet production quotas, and state-appointed managers who don’t mind cutting corners in matters of safety or environmental responsibility, and typically have the political clout to insulate themselves from any public fallout.

In other words, China’s pollution problems are not a function of laissez-faire policies and rampant consumerism, but of the regime’s excessive lingering control of the economy. A freer China means a cleaner China.

There’s a lesson in this for those who believe that the world’s environmental problems call for a new era of dirigisme. And there ought to be a lesson for those who claim to understand the problems of the poor better than the poor themselves. If global warming really is the catastrophe the alarmists claim, the least they can do for its victims is not to patronize them while impoverishing them in the bargain.

SOURCE






NZ PM derides Greenpeace campaign

Whale Rider star Keisha Castle-Hughes might be one of New Zealand's most celebrated young icons but her stance on climate change is not appreciated by her prime minister. "My advice to Keisha is this: Stick to acting," John Key told a gathering of 500 business people in Brisbane.

Castle-Hughes, an Oscar nominee for her role in the 2002 Kiwi movie Whale Rider, has been a vocal advocate for Greenpeace's Sign On campaign, which calls for a 40 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

But Key is clearly unimpressed by the target or her work raising the profile of it, making a joke of her efforts at the Australian meeting.

New Zealand is expected to release a considerably lower target at informal climate change talks in Copenhagen next week. Key told the business meeting he wasn't optimistic about the outcome of the Danish talks, saying "There will be an outcome - I'm just not sure it will be in 2009 at Copenhagen." He expected it would spill over into 2010, saying a watered-down commitment from developed countries was likely.

Castle-Hughes joined the Greenpeace boat Esperanza for its tour through the Cook Islands to raise awareness of global warming, concluding that "our Pacific neighbours are suffering". "I saw the real and devastating impacts of a changing climate - coral bleaching, homes battered by cyclones, erosion and food crops affected by rising sea levels," she said on her return.

The 19-year-old mother-of-one vowed to meet with Key to discuss the issue but the prime minister suggested she make a submission through the climate change minister.

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Damn, it's easy being green when someone else pays the bill

Andrew Bolt comments from Australia

STUPIDITY can be expensive. In fact, we've just been told it's cost us another $400 million. That's how much the price of Victoria's desalination plant went up last week - even before a single brick has been laid or strike called.

Ah, if only that were all this State Labor Government cost us by deciding purely for religious reasons we could never get another dam, no matter how close we got to running out of water. But, no. With Premier John Brumby announcing last week he'd signed a deal to build his desalination plant near Kilcunda for $3.5 billion - rather than the $3.1 billion he'd promised two years ago - we know the full catastrophe.

We know Brumby is in fact paying three times as much for a third of the water he'd have got from a new dam on Gippsland's fast-flowing Mitchell River, which in 2007 had more water flow to waste in just one flood than Melbourne uses in a year. We know, of course, that the reason this Government refused to even ask for a cost-benefit analysis of a dam that Melbourne Water admitted would cost just $1.4 billion was that just to think of damming a river was a green sin.

A dam would - horror! - take "water currently being used by the rivers" to . . . er, wash fish? Or as two government water strategy committees added, a dam would have an "unacceptable environmental and social cost" and was "no longer . . . socially acceptable".

So work out what that foolishness has cost us. A couple of billion, I'd guess, especially if you add the cost of the water shortages caused by the Government's insistence for so long that we could simply make do with less.

So perhaps we might now learn to stop such green idiocy before it's too late to do anything but pay billions. What idiocy, you casually ask? I mean idiocy best summed up this week by this paragraph in the Sunday Age:

"The Federal Government has warned that Australian icons such as the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu National Park, the Tasmanian wilderness, Carlton Gardens and the Sydney Opera House could be damaged irreparably if the Coalition fails to support Labor's emissions trading scheme.

Can anyone, even Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, claim hand on heart this is true - that if the Coalition this month votes against Kevin Rudd's job-killing scheme that the reef could as a consequence die, the Carlton Gardens wither and the Opera House collapse?

Ignore the fact that the world has actually cooled over the past eight years. Is it remotely possible that Rudd's plan to cut the gases of insignificant Australia will of itself change the world's climate in any way that could "save" a reef or spare the paintwork of the Opera House?

How is this kind of nonsense now reported as fact? Yet clever people - including many who'll make billions from this green scare, clearly think it is believed, which is why they feed you such falsehoods by the panicky day.

And that's also why, should we not regain our senses, we will one day get a bill for this green faith that will make Brumby's wasted billions seem but a drop in the dam he would not build.

SOURCE

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