A Modest Proposal: how to solve the CO2 crisis‏

With apologies to Jonathan Swift. Sent in by a reader

The use of oil, gas or coal wastes valuable resources, pollutes the atmosphere and tears up mother earth. Burning wood pollutes the earth and removes valuable trees needed to sequester CO2 and clean the atmosphere. Nuclear power generation with its safety, nuclear waste, and proliferation issues are unacceptable risks under any circumstances. Evil river-killing power generating dams kill fish and other wildlife and ruin our scenic rivers. Ethanol production causes food prices to rise, children to starve and rain forests to be cut down. Wind turbines kill birds, also many areas have zoning laws prohibiting such tall structures and powerful leftists like the Kennedy's not to mention your neighbors do not want them blocking their views. Solar panels would be great except they need horrible chemicals to make them work. A chemist friend once told me (in the 1980's) some of those chemicals could easily kill an entire city. So what is left? Animal power? PETA and other animal rights groups would not allow the use of animals for generating power. So here is my Modest Proposal.

Here in the USA a major problem has flared up with over active and/or obese children. Instead of using drugs to combat this problem I suggest installing treadmills and stationary exercise bikes in all schools and universities. These should be hooked up to power generators. The idea could be expanded to include office workers, bored housewives, internet web surfers, couch potatoes watching TV , Congress, people in nursing homes and even hospitals. Instead of protesters marching to protest they could go to designated protest sites and walk on treadmills.

This idea could be expanded. Instead of fighting wars armies could workout on treadmills and exercise bikes and the army that generated the most power would be declared the winner. This is also a solution to the high unemployment rates in some countries. Instead of government paid assistance the unemployed would be paid to generate electricity. It would also cut down on the population explosion because people, especially teens and unwed mothers on assistance, would be too tired at night to be interested in anything but sleep. With the billions of people in this world think of the tremendous amount of power that could be generated!

Now that I have solved the energy crisis without polluting where is my Nobel Prize.






A nice takedown from Taranto

Global Warmists’ Long Hot Summer

For more than 20 years, every hot summer day--at least in the Northeast, the region that contains America’s political and media capitals--has occasioned dire warnings from global warmists. This summer’s weather has been unusually cool, and the warmists are suddenly discovering the difference between weather and climate. The New York Times has one example:

William D. Solecki, a geography professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York and co-chairman of a mayoral panel on climate change, warned that this summer’s unusually mild temperatures should not buoy global warming skeptics. “Ask them to visit Seattle,” he said, where a record temperature of 103 was recorded on Wednesday.

Of course, that argument is just as valid in the other direction: If you’re in Seattle and you encounter global-warmist believers, “ask them to visit New York.” As an added benefit, if global warming is real, all this flying between the coasts may generate enough carbon emissions to produce a mild winter.

SOURCE






New York Times Blames 2009's Record Cold on Natural Factors -- But Blamed Record Warmth in 2000 on Man-Made Global Warming!

The media and climate fear promoters appear to be in overdrive trying to spin recent global cooling and particularly the "year without a summer" in many parts of the U.S. The New York Times reports that the record cold of 2009 is due to natural variations and even warned skeptics of man-made global warming not to be "buoyed" by the brutal cold.

The New York Times' remarkable front page article on July 31, 2009 titled "In New York, It's the Summer That Isn't" by reporter Sam Roberts detailed the record breaking cold summer in New York. The article warned "this could be the coolest summer on record" and "this will have been the coolest June and July since either 1903 or 1881."

But the 2009 article explained "this summer's unusually mild temperatures should not buoy global warming skeptics." Why? The Times has the answer, noting "a persistent high-level jet stream has sent cooler air streaming from the north and northwest." Ok. Fair enough, "natural variations" caused a record cold breaking summer in 2009, according to the Times. But the question looms, how did the paper explain record warmth nearly a decade ago? Surely, if natural variations in climate can cause a record-breaking cold summer, then it would stand to reason that record breaking warmth would have a natural cause as well?

Not exactly. The Times effortlessly attributed record warmth back in 2000 to man-made global warming, noting the warm temperatures were "consistent" with model predictions. [Climate Depot Editor's Note: At least NYT is light years ahead of the BBC, which in true "climate astrology" fashion, blamed "intense" deadly cold on global warming! See: BBC: '250 children under the age of 5 died' due to freezing temps in Peru -- 'Experts blame climate change for the early arrival of intense cold' - July 12, 2009]

A March 11, 2000 New York Times article by reporter William K. Stevens entitled "U.S. Sets Another Record for Winter Warmth" had no hesitation in blaming record warmth on man-made global warming.

The article from 9 years ago noted: "Shorter and milder winters are consistent with a century-long global warming trend that mainstream scientists believe has been at least partly caused by emissions of heat-trapping waste industrial gases like carbon dioxide." [Climate Depot Editor's Note: Are the recent global cooling and record breaking cold "consistent" with global warming climate models? See: U.S. Government Scientist's Shock Admission: 'Climate Model Software Doesn't Meet the Best Standards Available' ]

The New York Times article from 2000 continued: "The warming has been especially significant in the last quarter-century, amounting to more than three times the century-long warming rate of about 1 degree Fahrenheit. Computer models predict that the temperature rise will continue at that accelerated pace if emissions of heat-trapping gases are not reduced, and also predict that warming will be especially pronounced in the winter."

''We are beginning to approximate the kind of warming you should see in the winter season'' based on the model projections, especially over the land masses of the Northern Hemisphere, Mike Changery, [a climatologist at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C ] said" according to the 2000 article.

The New York Times article did -- belatedly -- add "the jury is still out" however on the complete causes of record warmth in 2000.

As the Earth has failed to warm, it continues to be great entertainment to watch the promoters of man-made climate fears and their message pushers in the mainstream media contort and squirm to explain the lack of heating. The media, sadly, continues to ignore major new develpments in the global warming debate.

SOURCE







Climate Change Timeline – 1895-2009

There is most certainly a pattern to climate change…but it’s not what you may think:

For at least 114 years, climate “scientists” have been claiming that the climate was going to kill us…but they have kept switching whether it was a coming ice age, or global warming.

* 1895 - Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again – New York Times, February 1895
* 1902 - “Disappearing Glaciers…deteriorating slowly, with a persistency that means their final annihilation…scientific fact…surely disappearing.” – Los Angeles Times
* 1912 - Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age – New York Times, October 1912
* 1923 - “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada” – Professor Gregory of Yale University, American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress, – Chicago Tribune
* 1923 - “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age” – Washington Post
* 1924 - MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age – New York Times, Sept 18, 1924
* 1929 - “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and that it will continue to get warmer” – Los Angeles Times, in Is another ice age coming?
* 1932 - “If these things be true, it is evident, therefore that we must be just teetering on an ice age” – The Atlantic magazine, This Cold, Cold World
* 1933 - America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise – New York Times, March 27th, 1933
* 1933 – “…wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather…Is our climate changing?” – Federal Weather Bureau “Monthly Weather Review.”
* 1938 - Global warming, caused by man heating the planet with carbon dioxide, “is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power.”– Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
* 1938 - “Experts puzzle over 20 year mercury rise…Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cities thuout the world which have been affected by a mysterious trend toward warmer climate in the last two decades” – Chicago Tribune
* 1939 - “Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right… weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer” – Washington Post
* 1952 - “…we have learned that the world has been getting warmer in the last half century” – New York Times, August 10th, 1962
* 1954 - “…winters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing” – U.S. News and World Report
* 1954 - Climate – the Heat May Be Off – Fortune Magazine
* 1959 - “Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures” – New York Times
* 1969 - “…the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two” – New York Times, February 20th, 1969
* 1970 - “…get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come…there’s no relief in sight” – Washington Post
* 1974 - Global cooling for the past forty years – Time Magazine
* 1974 - “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age” – Washington Post
* 1974 - “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed” – Fortune magazine, who won a Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics for its analysis of the danger
* 1974 - “…the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure…mass deaths by starvation, and probably anarchy and violence” – New York Times. Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age
* 1975 - Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable – New York Times, May 21st, 1975
* 1975 - “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind” Nigel Calder, editor, New Scientist magazine, in an article in International Wildlife Magazine
* 1976 - “Even U.S. farms may be hit by cooling trend” – U.S. News and World Report
* 1981 - Global Warming – “of an almost unprecedented magnitude” – New York Times
* 1988 - I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that thegreenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves. – Jim Hansen, June 1988 testimony before Congress, see His later quote and His superior’s objection for context
* 1989 -”On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” – Stephen Schneider, lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Discover magazine, October 1989
* 1990 - “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing – in terms of economic policy and environmental policy” – Senator Timothy Wirth
* 1993 - “Global climate change may alter temperature and rainfall patterns, many scientists fear, with uncertain consequences for agriculture.” – U.S. News and World Report
* 1998 - No matter if the science [of global warming] is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” —Christine Stewart, Canadian Minister of the Environment, Calgary Herald, 1998
* 2001 - “Scientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible.” – Time Magazine, Monday, Apr. 09, 2001
* 2003 - Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue, and energy sources such as “synfuels,” shale oil and tar sands were receiving strong consideration” – Jim Hansen, NASA Global Warming activist, Can we defuse The Global Warming Time Bomb?, 2003
* 2006 - “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.” — Al Gore, Grist magazine, May 2006
* Now: The global mean temperature has fallen for two years in a row, which is why you stopped hearing details about the actual global temperature, even while they carry on about taxing you to deal with it…how long before they start predicting an ice age?

The actual Global Warming Advocates' chart, overlayed on the "climate change" hysterics of the past 120 years. Not only is it clear that they take any change and claim it's going to go on forever and kill everyone, but notice that they often get the trend wrong...



Worse still, notice that in 1933 they claim global warming has been going on for 25 years…the entire 25 years they were saying we were entering an ice age. And in 1974, they say there has been global cooling for 40 years…the entire time of which they’d been claiming the earth was getting hotter! Of course NOW they are talking about the earth “warming for the past century”, again ignoring that they spent much of that century claiming we were entering an ice age.

The fact is that the mean temperature of the planet is, and should be, always wavering up or down, a bit, because this is a natural world, not a climate-controlled office. So there will always be some silly bureaucrat, in his air-conditioned ivory tower, who looks at which way it’s going right now, draws up a chart as if this is permanant, realizes how much fear can increase his funding, and proclaims doom for all of humanity.

* 2006 – “It is not a debate over whether the earth has been warming over the past century. The earth is always warming or cooling, at least a few tenths of a degree…” — Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT
* 2006 – “What we have fundamentally forgotten is simple primary school science. Climate always changes. It is always…warming or cooling, it’s never stable. And if it were stable, it would actually be interesting scientifically because it would be the first time for four and a half billion years.” —Philip Stott, emeritus professor of bio-geography at the University of London
* 2006 - “Since 1895, the media has alternated between global cooling and warming scares during four separate and sometimes overlapping time periods. From 1895 until the 1930’s the media peddled a coming ice age. From the late 1920’s until the 1960’s they warned of global warming. From the 1950’s until the 1970’s they warned us again of a coming ice age. This makes modern global warming the fourth estate’s fourth attempt to promote opposing climate change fears during the last 100 years.” – Senator James Inhofe, Monday, September 25, 2006
* 2007- “I gave a talk recently (on fallacies of global warming) and three members of the Canadian government, the environmental cabinet, came up afterwards and said, ‘We agree with you, but it’s not worth our jobs to say anything.’ So what’s being created is a huge industry with billions of dollars of government money and people’s jobs dependent on it.” – Dr. Tim Ball, Coast-to-Coast, Feb 6, 2007
* 2008 – “Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress” – Dr. John S. Theon, retired Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program at NASA, see above for Hansen quotes



Next time you see the usual "global warming" chart, look carefully: it is in tiny fractions of one degree. The ENTIRE global warming is less than six tenths of one degree. Here is the Global Warming Advocates' own chart, rendered in actual degrees like sane people use. I was going to use 0-100 like a thermometer, but you end up with almost a flat line, so I HELPED the Climate Change side by making the temperature range much narrower, and the chart needlessly tall to stretch the up-down differences in the line.

SOURCE





Chucking "Green" Smart Cars into Dutch Canals



Dutch media indicate that environmentally-friendly "smart" cars, tiny two-seaters, are being picked up by roving bands of "pranksters" and tossed into the city's canals.

According to the Dutch-language Telegraff, five of the smart cars have been thrown in the water in the past two weeks. Authorities fear the practice will spread to other locations.

Amsterdam police speculate that the youths perpetrating this vandalism may be doing it as a bet, and evidence from one of the cases indicates that a lone vandal is capable of flipping the car.

The police indicated that evidence from another scene clearly shows 4 vandals lifting the car clear off its wheels, carrying it 20 feet, and dumping it into a lake. Because of this, the city does not believe that installing higher guard rails will deter all "Smart Smijten."

While American SMART car owners don't have to contend with the deep canals that urban-drellers in Europe do, it is still possible that Smart Tipping could spread in a more literal sense. Since none of the vandals have been caught, it's not clear if the vandals are targeting that specific marque for its ease of vandalism, or for their disdain for the ideal behind the machine.

Interestingly, the car-chuckers are called pranksters whereas if they set the cars on fire, they would be called unemployed, disenfranchised youths protesting their poverty-stricken lives.

The Smart Smijten practice has been compared to the 1960s stunts of picking up and moving Volkwagen Beetles but there's a difference. As I recall, the Volkwagens floated. Smart cars don't and "any car that spends the night sleeping with the fishes at the bottom of a canal is very likely a total loss."

Nevertheless, I suggest that the problem of "pranksters" taking Smart cars would be prevented by providing the light-weight vehicles with beefy bicycle chains and locking them to fence posts or street lights. You're welcome.

SOURCE (See the original for links)






Australia: National Party leader targets Labor government on 'ridiculous' Warmist laws

BUSINESS groups and the Coalition have leapt on evidence of internal Labor unease over the potential of Kevin Rudd's emissions trading scheme to wipe out jobs in resources and energy. Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce said yesterday he was not surprised at dissent expressed by Queensland Premier Anna Bligh and NSW Treasurer Eric Roozendaal over the emissions scheme, because it would be "a job-destroying employment termination scheme".

The Australian revealed yesterday that Mr Roozendaal had written to federal Treasurer Wayne Swan in February to warn that the ETS could lead to "extreme losses" in the electricity and coal industries. Ms Bligh made similar comments in a letter last month to Assistant Climate Change Minister Greg Combet. "Both these people were at the Labor Party conference just a couple of days ago sitting alongside the culprits trying to introduce this ridiculous scheme," Senator Joyce said.

"Why was it that neither Mr Roozendaal nor Ms Bligh thought it necessary to bring this up at the premier Labor Party event designed to ventilate issues of public concern, but both are willing to express their concerns to the nation's newspapers? "It is completely irresponsible, in the middle of a global financial crisis, to be going forward with a scheme which will cut a swath of economic devastation through our nation."

The Senate is due to vote on the ETS next week, with Malcolm Turnbull insisting the Coalition will reject the scheme unless there are major changes.

Federal Climate Change Minister Penny Wong yesterday rejected Mr Roozendaal's concerns that the ETS could devastate electricity companies. She said there would be no change to the federal government's compensation package for the power sector. "Nearly $4 billion to the electricity sector -- we think that is a reasonable amount of assistance," she said. "It is not unknown in this debate for electricity owners to seek additional compensation from the government."

Infrastructure Partnerships Australia chief Brendan Lyon said Mr Roozendaal was right to point to the problem of investors fleeing from the carbon-intensive, coal-fired electricity generation sector if it were undermined by the ETS. "Between 2006 and 2020, demand will surge," Mr Lyon said. "That means we need to build this capacity through renewables, but also through traditional baseload power stations. "This uncertainty (over the ETS) is already being felt, with several energy generators expressing concern over their ability to refinance existing debt facilities," he said. "This has already seen the cancellation of maintenance programs, increasing the risk of major network failures."

SOURCE

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