More Greenie fraud

The Green/Left have always seen truth as being optional. And they get away with so much fraud that you almost can't blame them. Excerpts only below

“Dire Predictions” by Michael Mann and Lee Kump, sets out to provide an illustrated guide to the findings of the IPCC. It is a relatively simple volume, full of the promised pictures, small graphs to illustrate points and condensed comments on the different aspects of the climate change debate. In short it is the sort of text that might be provided to a class in the United States to help them understand the prevailing arguments about climate change.

It has some nice initial illustrations of the way in which climate is generated that are easy to follow and which are therefore initially persuasive. But my eye was caught, from the beginning by the different graphs that are scattered throughout the chapters. I was a bit surprised by the first graph, since it didn’t quite look like the graph of the temperature plots given by NOAA, so after looking at the two separately:

You can see quite a difference in the curves around 1940 – the actual peak back then has disappeared from Dr. Mann’s graph and if I superimpose them you can see how a fluctuating temperature record has been smoothed. (The heavy black line comes from the Mann and Kump curve)



The difference is more than subtle – the peak and stable or declining temperatures between 1940 and 1970 have been magically eliminated. But wait, those of you who have read the book respond – he puts a more detailed temperature plot on page 36.

But if you look at this figure – relative to the official plot you can see that while the official temperature is “debatably” flat in the official record, here the plot is steadily increasing from 1950.

Skipping forward through the book, let me pick out one more graph that caught my attention – the regional trends shown on Figure 71.

Again I won’t bother superimposing the pictures, but you can see that the trends that are actually occurring don’t quite follow the curves in the book. Having discovered which there really isn’t much point in continuing reading it, since it takes such liberties with easily verifiable figures, one is wondering what else has been “quietly adjusted” to make the facts more supportive of the argument.

Now it isn’t as though I completely agree with the official figures, given the corrections that have been imposed on the initial raw data, and that, as a result, trends appear that weren’t there before the “tweaking.’ But I do think that this book is taking the trend of “adjusting” the data just a bit too far in the process of making a point. There comes a point where this stops being Science and becomes Propaganda.

More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)





The next Greenie tyranny: Personal carbon trading

Excerpt below from a Greenie site. I see that their wisdom does not extend to knowing the difference between "muted" and "mooted"

A report published by the IPPR next week will say personal carbon trading may be the next step in tackling climate change. This week saw the launch of the 10:10 campaign by Age of Stupid film director Franny Armstrong, hailed as a real opportunity to re-engage individuals with the task of reducing domestic CO2 emissions.

To coincide with the launch, the Guardian commissioned a poll, presumably hoping to show people’s willingness to accept carbon reduction measures. But looking closely at the figures reveals instead the public’s resistance to some forms of carbon pricing. Although 85 per cent of respondents accepted the threat of climate change, just 33 per cent were willing to accept something like a pay per mile road charging scheme.

So if the necessary carbon reductions cannot be made through voluntary measures will it soon be time to reconsider compulsory carbon allowances? Despite initial enthusiasm for a Personal Carbon Allowance (PCA) from former Environment Secretary David Miliband, Government support has now waned. Under such a scheme, every individual would be given a set allocation of carbon credits, which they could use to 'pay' for purchases like home energy usage and petrol. Those with low carbon usage would be able to sell their surplus credits on a carbon market, whilst those with high carbon consumption levels would have to buy credits.

Having initially muted [mooted?] the idea, Defra then just as quickly dismissed it. A report published in 2008 said it was too costly. An RSA trial published at the end of 2008 has since contradicted this judgement saying it would be, ‘relatively quick and easy to automatically capture and report personal carbon emissions for all UK citizens.’

But, David’s brother Ed Miliband who took over the climate change brief last year indicated it was more about public acceptability, saying it was ‘an idea for the longer term’.

More HERE. Similar proposals are gaining momentum in Germany too.




Signs of recent Ice Age noted on Mars

How odd that both Earth and Mars have recently (in geological time) come out of an ice age! It wouldn't be that pesky old sun that is responsible for global temperature variations on both planets, would it?

Mars has appparently undergone a recent Ice Age, scientists say. Researchers drew the conclusion based on the distribution of ice at and slightly below ground level near the Red Planet's polar regions. Two hypotheses have been suggested to explain this ice: that it fell there as precipitation during recent ice ages, or that water vapor spread through the surface rocks, gravel and soil.

To find out which alternative was correct, Samuel C. Schon of Brown University in Rhode Island and colleagues used data from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, an imaging instrument aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. The group examined the structure of exposed subsurface Martian terrain. The researchers noticed that the terrain features layered deposits many meters (yards) thick that stretch over many hundreds of meters.

They suggest that climate variations are most likely the source of this stratification. The layers probably formed as dust, ice, and snow were deposited on the ground during recent ice ages, which occurred during periods when Mars's axis of rotation was more tilted than usual, the scientists argued. Vapor diffusion would be unlikely to result in the layered structure, they added.

They note that the observations also suggest that significant subsurface ice may remain in the 3050 degrees midlatitude regions. The findings were published Aug. 6 online in the research journal Geophysical Research Letters.

SOURCE






Hilarious! "Big oil" proving how evil they are again. They are PRODUCING and constructively using that hated CO2

But wait a minute! They are pumping it into the ground! A lot of Greenies want to do that too! Don't hold your breath waiting for a meeting of minds on the matter, though

Rising oil prices are prompting costly efforts to enhance production from marginal reservoirs, using methods such as carbon-dioxide flooding to boost oil production. In response, suppliers are investing in or making plans for new CO2 wells, pipelines, compression facilities and other infrastructure.

“We are certainly seeing opportunities in this emerging market,” says Rob Smith, senior vice president of energy, chemicals and industrial at CH2M Hill, Denver, which is performing front-end engineering design for several CO2-related projects.

Most activity is centered around oil fields in Texas and major CO2 fields in Colorado, Mississippi and Louisiana. “It’s still a relatively small part of our portfolio at this point, but it’s growing significantly. We have recently seen several requests-for-proposals related to the CO2 market,” says Smith.

Major CO2 producers such as Kinder Morgan LLC and Denbury Resources Inc., both of Houston, indicate new investments for expansion and new construction of CO2 drilling and transportation infrastructure this year and next.

Denbury plans to invest $700 million to construct a 314-mile, 24-in. pipeline to pump CO2 from fields near Donaldson, La., to the Hastings oil field near Houston. Kinder Morgan is investing in CO2 drilling and transport operations in southern Colorado, with plans to expand infrastructure, such as new pressurization and dehydration facilities along its 504-mile CO2 pipeline from Cortez, Colo., to the Permian Basin oil fields in western Texas. The $200-million expansion includes more than a dozen new CO2 wells, and 10 miles of added pipeline.

Among oil producers “there is a tremendous push to convert from water flooding to CO2 flooding,” says Tim Bradley, president of Kinder Morgan. “Right now, there is big activity in the market in oil fields in Texas, Wyoming and Mississippi.”

Oil producers pump CO2 deep into oil fields, where the gas mixes with and swells the crude, decreasing its viscosity and enabling it flow more freely, greatly increasing recovery over the traditional water-flooding method. Doug McMurray, Kinder Morgan’s vice president of minerals business, points to examples of oil wells where production was increased by as much as 20,000 barrels per day through CO2 flooding. “There are formerly dead fields in Mississippi where wells had dried up that are now able to produce up to 4,000 barrels per day with CO2 flooding,” McMurray says.

“There is a lot of interest in CO2 happening quickly,” says Roy Long, oil and gas exploration and production technology manager at the National Energy Technol-ogy Laboratory, Morgantown, W.Va. Not only the major producers want CO2,“small oil operations in Oklahoma are having CO2 shipped in by truck,” he says.

Driven by concern over climate change, the growing interest in CO2 has sparked a rush of research for technology to make commercial use of industrial CO2, Long says. “There are still challenges to making industrial CO2 emissions viable, but there have been some promising developments in capturing CO2 from natural-gas and coal-gasification operations,” Long says.

Kinder Morgan and Denbury both operate facilities to separate CO2 from natural-gas processing facilities. Alstom Energy Inc., Windsor, Conn., has several pilot projects for a chilled-ammonia process that can be retrofitted to coal plants to capture CO2.

CO2 costs about $2 to $3 per thousand cu ft, according to NETL. “It has become a valuable commodity,” Long says. Extracting CO2 from coal gasification plants “is still currently cost-restrictive to commercial viability, but time will tell how quickly industry and technology will respond.”

SOURCE






British mayor poo-poos global warming 'scam'

Mayor Peter Davies has urged local residents to halt plans for wind farms 'blocking out sunlight' and encourages driving as we are 'in the age of the car'

The newly elected mayor of Doncaster has described global warming as a "scam", posing a direct challenge to the town's MP, climate change cabinet minister Ed Miliband. While Miliband pursued international diplomacy in India, ahead of December's crucial climate change summit in Copenhagen, mayor Peter Davies urged local residents to use the law to halt the building of wind farms whose effects he said included "blocking of sunlight". On hearing of Davies's intervention, Miliband replied immediately on Twitter: "Disgrace given the science and the scale of the threat."

Davies's comments came in a statement issued earlier this week making clear to voters where he stood on forthcoming plans to erect wind farms in the Doncaster region. Davies, who represents the English democrat party, made clear neither he nor his council had a role in the decision-making process but said; "These [wind farm] developments have little or no benefit in terms of contributing to decreased energy consumption, nor do they have any beneficial effect on the planet's climate in response to the great global warming scam."

Davies went on: "I would certainly not want one of these monstrosities anywhere near my property, nor do I want to see them blotting the landscape of the English countryside and waterways and causing grief and concern to local people in terms of noise and the blocking of sunlight. "I therefore urge the public to oppose these developments through legal means provided so that good old-fashioned English justice and common sense may prevail."

Davies was elected in June with 25,344 votes as mayor and his cabinet oversees the carbon intensive portfolio of transport. In a recent newspaper interview he suggested he wanted to encourage car use within Doncaster, saying it would boost business. "Like it or not," he told the Daily Mail, "we live in the age of the car". Under his stewardship, Doncaster council has announced plans for more parking spaces and a review of bus-only routes. Doncaster's town centre is currently pedestrianised.

Since entering office he has cut his own salary by 60% from £73,000 to £30,000; given up the use of a chauffeured mayoral car and abolished the council's free newspaper.

In a full statement, Miliband said the greatest threat to Doncaster's natural environment was climate change not wind turbines. Miliband has previously said in March that opposing wind farms should become as socially unacceptable as failing to wear a seatbelt.

SOURCE






THE AGE OF CATASTROPHIC THINKING

"Probably," Norman Mailer wrote in 1957, "we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years." Today, however, we have something like an answer: We are living in an age of catastrophic thinking. Our social and cultural discourse on any number of subjects-the environment, the economy, public health, technology-is defined by a vocabulary and a worldview that can only be described as apocalyptic. The world, we are constantly told, is in a state of mortal crisis, and unless we act fast enough to stop it, we are all facing disaster and oblivion. Everything, it seems, is swiftly accelerating toward a terrible end.

While catastrophic thinking has become ubiquitous on any number of issues, it is nowhere more apparent than on the subject of the environment, especially the topic of global warming. Of course, this appears most explicitly among the various groups specifically dedicated to the cause of environmentalism, but the sentiment has already become a worldwide phenomenon. Perhaps its most famous exponent, former United States vice president Al Gore, used explicitly apocalyptic language to describe the problem in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth.

Global warming, however, is only the most popular vehicle for prophecies of environmental disaster. Overpopulation, we are told, will soon cause unprecedented starvation, war, crime, and mass extinctions. And chemical pollution, for its part, is said to affect the hormonal makeup of our bodies, resulting in the "feminization" of the species, so that sooner or later we will produce only female offspring, and the human race will lose its capacity to reproduce. [...]

These various examples of apocalyptic anxiety may at first seem unrelated. In fact, they are remarkably similar. All of them predict a coming global disaster; all of them use ominous rhetoric and imagery to give weight to their prognostications; and all of them claim that mankind has only a very short time left to take action in order to prevent the cataclysm they are sure is coming. In light of this, one cannot help but wonder how and why catastrophic thinking has become such a prevalent feature of our day and age-and what effect this new zeitgeist may have on our lives. [...]

Certainly, fear of impending disaster is usually seen as a negative emotion. In fact, however, it has unquestionably positive aspects. First and perhaps foremost, it is exciting. In a world given over to comfort and entertainment, in which we are more and more interconnected while having less and less to say, fear provides a profound antidote to boredom and stasis. It motivates people and convinces them that their lives are important and meaningful.

This is especially true if catastrophic thinking is combined-as it almost always is-with the belief that the disaster can be averted. All of today's popular apocalyptic scenarios make the claim that if we act now, and above all act together, there is a chance of preventing the end. The task of prevention, in turn, provides a sense of purpose, however misguided it may be. Moreover, it gives people the feeling that they have power over their surroundings, that they can influence the world around them for the better through conscious action. In many ways, this bears a strong resemblance to the religious impulse, especially in its need to proselytize.

It also serves to ameliorate another universal source of distress: the sense of alienation that haunts the modern world. Indeed, Dr. Chan reflected this malaise when she spoke of potential disaster as "an opportunity for global solidarity." As she correctly perceived, the fear of a worldwide calamity unites us by putting us all under the same threat and, thus, in the same boat. It provides a very real sense of global brotherhood and the feeling that one really is a part of all humanity. And, it must be said, this feeling is not entirely an illusion. People who join activist groups, political parties, and religious organizations usually do exhibit a communal spirit that is lacking in other aspects of their lives. Even in the face of calamity-perhaps especially so-comradeship can be forged between strangers. Indeed, apocalyptic trepidation may well be the only way that many people today can even conceive of a single destiny for all of mankind.

It is difficult, however, to be entirely sanguine about the phenomenon as it exists today. Panic is not only a cheap and somewhat dishonorable way of motivating people. It is also a dangerous one. Fear, especially irrational fear, can be easily harnessed for nefarious purposes, as the history of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century amply demonstrates. People in the grip of apocalyptic terror are quite often willing to take extreme measures in order to prevent or even hasten the end they are certain is coming. The enthusiasm generated by catastrophic thinking can motivate people to do good, but it can just as easily give license to evil.

The most harmful aspect of all this, however, is that, while such thinking may bring us closer, in certain ways, to other people, it also fundamentally cuts us off from life. A life lived in fear, after all, is a wretched thing. Constant dread destroys any real possibility of a dynamic, spontaneous existence. That is to say, any life that is truly worth living. As a result, catastrophic thinking leads to a form of psychological oppression that is, perhaps, just as bad as the apathetic, sated mentality it seeks to replace. Real life, if it is to be more than mere existence, requires curiosity and courage. It demands an adventurous spirit. Whether these attributes can survive our current culture of catastrophic thinking is something all of us, for our own good and for others', should be asking ourselves.

More HERE

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