"The CRU webserver is gradually being rebuilt"

(CRU being the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, Holy of Holies in the temple of Warmism)

Or so we learn from their minimalist webite. One consequence of the "rebuilding" is that the picture of Phil Jones that I had at the top of this blog is now no longer hosted by the UEA. Amusing. Is the "rebuild" designed to distance the UEA from him? You decide. I have however rehosted the picture so it still appears in its accustomed place here. There is an even tinier picture of him hosted by the UEA here though.



I note that they have still got their amusing graphic of global warming up though. See above. Ignore the arbitrary horizontal line they have put through it, however, and you see that it in fact shows a steady process of warming from 1910 onwards -- not from the late 20th century as they usually claim and as their graphic purports to show. The warming began, in other words, long BEFORE the era of mass industrialization, so cannot be attributed to it. So even after all their "adjustments" to the raw data, it is still only chartmanship (deceptive graphics) that allows them to make their case! All the huge political activity over global warming depends on deceptively presented graphics!

There is actually a second deception in the graphic as well. And perhaps a worse one. Because mere tenths of one degree Celsius are graphed (in another classic tactic of chartmanship), the slope of the graph is vastly exaggerated. You would be unlikely to notice it, but from top to bottom the temperature rise over the entire century totals only about one degree Celsius. If the room you are in now warmed up by that tiny amount, you wouldn't notice it! The change is trivial in reality but made to look huge in the graph. If units of just one degree (which is probably what most people would expect) had been used, the graph would show a flat line instead of a rising one!






Climate Change: Hoax of the Century

Carbon dioxide, a benign, life giving molecule has been miscast by a world wide political movement to be an environmental hazard in what will soon be discovered to be the hoax of the century. This molecule, CO2 is vital to all life on earth. It is exhaled by all living things and even comes from nocturnal emissions by plants. It forms the bubbles in your soda, wine and beer. Standard air has 370 parts per million (PPM) of carbon dioxide of which 93% comes from “natural sources” which are all beyond human control. These sources include decomposition of organic matter, exhaling by living things and volcanic vents, which is by far the greatest atmospheric source.

The climate change hoax is based on faulty science from two things. First, hoaxers assume that ice layers give information on temperature like tree rings do with rainfall. Ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, from thousands of years of deposits, are measured for CO2 content of the air at the time the snow layer was deposited and thickness of the ice layers. The thickness of these snow fall layers is then assumed to be an indication of global temperature. There are numerous errors in this assumption, which have been presented in a more technical analysis, but for now pretend that this evidence is true. The hoaxers then show graphs over time with a near perfect match of CO2 levels and snow thickness and by implication the earth’s temperature.

The second bit of “proof” of human caused global warming is the Global Climate Model which is available to all at Wikipedia. By their own admission, this model was developed for SHORT RANGE weather forecasting and we all know how accurate that is. This formula, though not given on this web site, has a hundred parameters each with its own coefficient and exponent. By manipulating these numbers the hoaxers are able to “prove” that an increase of CO2 will raise world temperature.

The whole concept of “greenhouse gas” is absurd. The earth receives a full spectrum of electromagnetic radiation by day (Duh!) but by night only a portion, the infrared stored on the surface, is radiated back into space. There is no gaseous one way control of this energy. The atmospheric gasses can absorb or reflect some of this energy but can not increase the incoming amount. Carbon dioxide is a three-atom molecule that cannot possibly determine that all radiation should be allowed in by day, but none can escape by night. Consider the insulation or radiant barrier in your home’s attic. The radiant barrier bounces solar radiant energy away from your living space in the summer and bounces radiant energy trying to exit back into your house in the winter. Insulation does the same thing with convective energy, keeping heat out in summer and heat in during the winter.

The atmosphere behaves the same way. To claim that any gas, whether CO2 or methane or any other, can simultaneously allow energy in by day but block energy exit by night is absurd. To think that the hoaxers claim of a change in 10 parts per million of CO2 molecules could effect the earths climate in any way is insane. IF CO2 had these miracle properties then all double pane glass panels would be filled with CO2 and the magic molecules would work like little Venetian blinds allowing full heat by day and no loss at night. In fact, greenhouse glass does not block radiant heat loss at night, but only a fraction of convective heat loss that is trapped by the physical glass barrier.

If you Goggle the Last Glacial Maximum you will see maps of the thousands of square miles of ice and the ocean levels over 400 ft below current levels. All of this ice melted in 100 years. There is no evidence that humans caused this so we must look for the force that could cause this change. The earth does not rotate in a circle around the sun but rather in an ellipse, varying our distance between 91 and 93 million miles. Because of this we receive a 4% change in solar radiation every year but this has no effect on earth’s climate.

Our seasons are the result of the planets 23 degree axis of rotation. Our summer occurs when we are farthest from the sun. The southern hemisphere has summer when the planet is closest to the sun. There is little difference in latitude by latitude comparisons of these opposite globe seasons. Based on this fact, even a 10% change in solar activity would have negligible effect. A ten percent change is beyond any observed solar cycle. The earth’s crust is a 10 to 20 miles thick layer of solid rock that floats on 7000 miles of molten rock. Gravity cannot provide the pressure necessary to melt this much rock. What causes this rock to melt and the earth to have massive periodic climate changes is the irregular decay of uranium in our earth’s core.

A more technical analysis of this earth warming force has been presented to members of Congress and for scientific peer review but for this presentation just consider two elements that result from this uranium decay. Radon, the radioactive gas we are warned about constantly can only occur from nuclear reaction and has a half-life of 3.8 days. A one pound container of Radon would only weigh 1/8 of an ounce in just 23 days. The fact that Radon is a health hazard is proof of its daily production. Helium, another inert element, is eight times lighter than air and all helium released on earth is lost to outer space in just minutes. Helium does not come from the break down of any compound but only from nuclear reaction. It is occurs in natural gas deposits in just a few locations on earth.

The geo-nuclear energy that melts our core and creates these gases is also the greatest variable in the earth’s climate. This geo-nuclear energy is at present beyond human control or understanding. It is most convenient for the hoaxers to neglect this greatest variable in climate change from their defective climate model. The graphic match of CO2 and ice core layer thickness (earth’s temperature ?) is also matched by the amount of ash in the layer. When volcanic energy is released it produces large amounts of heat….and ash…. and CO2. Blaming CO2 for climate change is like saying ashes cause fire. CO2 is the effect of heat and not the cause.

Our democracy depends on informed consent. Informed should not be limited to lies told by a political movement. When the full scope of the scientific errors involved in this hoax are exposed everyone will realize this has been the greatest folly since the flat earth theory. We deserve a real debate. In this case, the truth will be very inconvenient.

SOURCE





Think the World Isn't Coming to an End? It's All in Your Head

The Green/Left always turn to sneers and contempt when the facts do not suit them

In the latest example of "accountability journalism," the Associated Press holds "ordinary folks" accountable for lacking "a sense of urgency" about global warming. The wire service puts us all on the couch:

It's hard for people to get excited about a threat that seems far away in space and time, psychologists say. "It's not in people's faces," said psychologist Robert Gifford of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. "It is in the media, but not in their everyday experience. That's quite a different thing." . . .

Janet Swim, a psychology professor at Pennsylvania State University, recalls a conversation from last month with a taxi driver in Cape Town, South Africa. "I don't think there's climate change," the driver said. "If there was climate change and sea levels were rising, I would have seen it."

He was going by his own experience, said Swim, who studies how people feel about global warming. "People experience weather on a day-to-day basis, and that's how they think about climate change," she said. In fact, it takes careful analysis of lots of data from lots of places to tease out the signal of global warming, she noted.

Right, careful analysis involving "tricks" to "hide the decline," and efforts to suppress alternative hypotheses and to ensure that "lots of data from lots of places" are never made public so that the conclusions can be checked by others. The AP story makes no mention whatever of the recent revelations of corruption by climate scientists--revelations that suggest ordinary people are a lot saner, or maybe just smarter, than the journalists who suggest they're crazy.

Radical cooling not predicted

Autumn ended with a brutal storm in the American Northeast, but the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Friday that not everyone saw it coming:

"This could wind up being a historic event," said Louis Uccellini, a winter-storm expert who is director of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, outside Washington. . . .

"It looks really impressive," said Henry Margusity, a meteorologist with Accu-Weather Inc., the commercial service in State College, Pa. . . .

The latest forecasts are starkly different from the outlooks earlier in the week when the computer models that meteorologists use to forecast the weather had the storm passing out to sea, with minimal impact on Philadelphia.

Uccellini said that some of the early model runs had heavy snow in Delaware and nothing in Philadelphia. However, subsequent runs have brought the snows farther north and west. "The computer models play their own games," said Margusity, "but the reality is they always come farther north."

If only they had a trick to hide the decline, we could have enjoyed a nice balmy weekend.

SOURCE






Green dream is just alien

By Andrew Bolt

MOST people will date the death of the great global warming scare not from the Copenhagen fiasco - boring! - but from Avatar. It won't be the world's most expensive warmist conference but the world's most expensive movie that will stick in most memories as the precise point at which the green faith started to shrivel from sheer stupidity. Avatar, in fact, is the warmist dream filmed in 3D. Staring through your glasses at James Cameron's spectacular $400 million creation, you can finally see where this global warming cult was going. And you can see, too, everything that will now slowly pull it back to earth.

December 2009. Note it down. The beginning of the end, even as Avatar becomes possibly the biggest-grossing film in history. Cameron, whose last colossal hit was Titanic, has created a virtual new planet called Pandora, on which humans 150 years from now have formed a small settlement. They are there to mine a mineral so rare that it's called Unobtainium (groan), of which the greatest deposit sits right under the great sacred tree of the planet's dominant species, humanoid blue aliens called Na'vi.

If Tim Flannery, Al Gore and all the other Copenhagen delegates could at least agree to design a new kind of people, they'd wind up with something much like these 3m-tall gracelings. The Na'vi live in trees, at one with nature. They worship Mother Earth and, like Gaians today, talk meaningfully of "a network of energy that flows through all living things". They drink water that's pooled in giant leaves, and chant around a tree that whispers of their ancestors. They are also unusually non-sexist for a forest tribe, with the women just as free as men to hunt and choose their spouse. Naturally, like the most fashionable of Hollywood stars, they are also neo-Buddhist reincarnationists, who believe "all energy is borrowed and some day you have to give it back". And, of course, the Na'vi reject all technology that's more advanced than a bow and arrow, for "the wealth of the world is all around us".

Sent to talk dollars and sense into these blue New Agers and move them out of the way of the bulldozers is a former Marine, Jake Sully (played by Australian Sam Worthington), who drives the body of a Na'vi avatar to better gain their trust. (WARNING: Spoiler alert! Don't read on if you plan to see the movie.) But meeting such perfect beings, living such low-emission green lives, Sully realises instead how vile his own species is. Humans, he angrily declares, have already wrecked their own planet through their greed.

"There is no green" on their "dying world" because "they have killed their mother". Now we land-raping humans plan to wreck Pandora, too, with our "shock-and-awe" bombings, our war on "terror" and our genocidal plans to destroy the Na'vi and steal their lands.

So complete is Cameron's disgust with humans - and so convinced he is that his audience shares it - that he's made film history: he's created the first mass-market movie about a war between aliens and humans in which we're actually meant to barrack for the aliens.

(WARNING: Second spoiler alert!) In fact, so vomitous are humans that Sully, the hero, not only chooses to fight on the side of the aliens but to actually become an alien, too. He rejects not just humans but his own humanity.

All of this preaching comes straight from what's left of Cameron's heart after five marriages and a professional reputation of on-set meanness. Avatar, he's said, tackles "our impact on the natural environment, wherever we go strip mining and putting up shopping malls", and it warns "we're going to find out the hard way if we don't wise up and start seeking a life that's in balance with the natural cycle on life on earth".

Mind you, most of this will be just wallpaper to the film's real audience, which won't be greenies in Rasta beanies or wearing save-the-whale T-shirts made in Guatemala. No, scoffing their popcorn as they wait impatiently for the inevitable big-bang shoot-'em-up after a fairground tour of some cool new planet will be the usual bag-laden crowd from the Christmas-choked megaplex - the kind of bug-eyed folk who thrill most to what Cameron claims to condemn, from the hi-tech to the militaristic.

Still, you can hardly blame them if they don't buy the message that Cameron's selling, since he doesn't really buy it himself. Here's Cameron condemning consumerism by spending almost half a billion dollars on a mass-market movie for the Christmas season complete with tie-in burger deals from McDonald's and Avatar toys from Mattel. Here's Cameron damning our love of technology by using the most advanced cinematographic technology to create his new green world. In fact, here's Cameron urging his audience to scorn material possessions and get close to nature, only to himself retire each night to the splendid comfort of his Malibu mansion.

Not even his own creations live up to the philosophy he has them preach. For all their talk of the connectedness of nature, the Na'vi still kill animals for food - although not before saying how sorry they are, of course, since we live in an age in which seeming sorry excuses every selfishness. Likewise, despite all their lectures on not exploiting nature, the Na'vi still come out top dog in the food chain. Even when they physically become at one with wild pterodactyls, by hooking up to them through some USB in their blue tails, they manage to convince their flying reptiles to act like their private jets.

Isn't this against the rules? I mean, in this caring and at-one-with-nature world, shouldn't a plugged-in pterodactyl just once in a while get to direct its human passenger instead - by either telling it to take a flying jump or to at least act like lunch?

In all of this, Avatar captures precisely - and to the point of satire - the creed of the Copenhagen faithful. Rewind what you've seen from those Copenhagen planet-savers in the past two weeks. There were the apocalyptic warnings of how we were killing the planet. There were the standing ovations the delegates gave last week to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's furious denunciations of capitalism, consumerism and the US military. There was Bolivian President Evo Morales' cry for a simpler life: "It's changing economic policies, ending luxury, consumerism ... living better is to exploit human beings."

THERE were great crowds of activists such as Australia's Professor Clive Hamilton, who, like Avatar's Jake Sully, sermonises on the need to embrace "Gaian earth in its ecological, cybernetic way, infused with some notion of mind or soul or chi". And there was the romanticising of the primitive by the demonstrators outside dressed as ferals and wild bears, as they banged tribal drums or chanted "Om" to Mother Earth.

Of course the Cameron-style have-it-both-ways hypocrites were there, too, luxuriating in the very lifestyles they condemned. Take Prince Charles, who flew in his private RAF jet to Copenhagen to deliver a lecture on how our careless use of resources had pushed the planet "to the brink". And then had his pilot fly him home to his palace.

But, yes, you are right. How can I say this great green faith is now toppling into the pit of ridicule, when Avatar seems sure to do colossal business? Won't a whole generation of the slack-jawed just catch this new green faith from the men in the blue costumes? That's a risk. But having the green faith made so alien and such fodder for the entertainment of the candybar crowds will rob it of all sanctimony and cool.

Would a Cate Blanchett really be flattered to now be likened to a naked Na'vi, running from a pack of wild dogs in a dark forest? Would an Al Gore really like to have millions of filmgoers see in 3D where his off-this-planet faith would lead them - up a tree, and without even a paddle? No, we can now see their green world, and can see, too, it's time to come home.

SOURCE






TIME FOR A CLIMATE PLAN B

By Nigel Lawson

The world's political leaders, not least President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are in a state of severe, almost clinical, denial. While acknowledging that the outcome of the United Nations climate-change conference in Copenhagen fell short of their demand for a legally binding, enforceable and verifiable global agreement on emissions reductions by developed and developing countries alike, they insist that what has been achieved is a breakthrough and a decisive step forward. Just one more heave, just one more venue for the great climate-change traveling circus-Mexico City next year-and the job will be done.

Or so we are told. It is, of course, the purest nonsense. The only breakthrough was the political coup for China and India in concluding the anodyne communiqué with the United States behind closed doors, with Brazil and South Africa allowed in the room and Europe left to languish in the cold outside.

Far from achieving a major step forward, Copenhagen-predictably-achieved precisely nothing. The nearest thing to a commitment was the promise by the developed world to pay the developing world $30 billion of "climate aid" over the next three years, rising to $100 billion a year from 2020. Not only is that (perhaps fortunately) not legally binding, but there is no agreement whatsoever about which countries it will go to, in which amounts, and on what conditions.

The reasons for the complete and utter failure of Copenhagen are both fundamental and irresolvable. The first is that the economic cost of decarbonizing the world's economies is massive, and of at least the same order of magnitude as any benefits it may conceivably bring in terms of a cooler world in the next century.

The reason we use carbon-based energy is not the political power of the oil lobby or the coal industry. It is because it is far and away the cheapest source of energy at the present time and is likely to remain so, not forever, but for the foreseeable future. Switching to much more expensive energy may be acceptable to us in the developed world (although I see no present evidence of this). But in the developing world, including the rapidly developing nations such as China and India, there are still tens if not hundreds of millions of people suffering from acute poverty, and from the consequences of such poverty, in the shape of malnutrition, preventable disease and premature death.

The overriding priority for the developing world has to be the fastest feasible rate of economic development, which means, inter alia, using the cheapest available source of energy: carbon energy.

Moreover, the argument that they should make this economic and human sacrifice to benefit future generations 100 years and more hence is all the less compelling, given that these future generations will, despite any problems caused by warming, be many times better off than the people of the developing world are today. Or, at least, that is the assumption on which the climate scientists' warming projections are based. It is projected economic growth that determines projected carbon emissions, and projected carbon emissions that (according to the somewhat conjectural computer models on which they rely) determine projected warming (according to the same models).

All this overlaps with the second of the two fundamental reasons why Copenhagen failed, and why Mexico City (if our leaders insist on continuing this futile charade) will fail, too. That is the problem of burden-sharing, and in particular how much of the economic cost of decarbonization should be borne by the developed world, which accounts for the bulk of past emissions, and how much by the faster-growing developing world, which will account for the bulk of future emissions.

The 2006 Stern Review, quite the shoddiest pseudo-scientific and pseudo-economic document any British Government has ever produced, claims the overall burden is very small. If that were so, the problem of how to share the burden would be readily overcome-as indeed occurred with the phasing out of chorofluorocarbons (CFCs) under the 1987 Montreal Protocol. But the true cost of decarbonization is massive, and the distribution of the burden an insoluble problem.

Moreover, any assessment of the impact of any future warming that may occur is inevitably highly conjectural, depending as it does not only on the uncertainties of climate science but also on the uncertainties of future technological development. So what we are talking about is risk. Not that the risk is all one way. The risk of a 1930s-style outbreak of protectionism -if the developed world were to abjure cheap energy and faced enhanced competition from China and other rapidly industrializing countries that declined to do so- is probably greater than any risk from warming.

But even without that, there is not even a theoretical (let alone a practical) basis for a global agreement on burden-sharing, since, so far as the risk of global warming is concerned (and probably in other areas too) risk aversion is not uniform throughout the world. Not only do different cultures embody very different degrees of risk aversion, but in general the richer countries will tend to be more risk-averse than the poorer countries, if only because we have more to lose.

The time has come to abandon the Kyoto-style folly that reached its apotheosis in Copenhagen last week, and move to plan B. And the outlines of a credible plan B are clear. First and foremost, we must do what mankind has always done, and adapt to whatever changes in temperature may in the future arise.

This enables us to pocket the benefits of any warming (and there are many) while reducing the costs. None of the projected costs are new phenomena, but the possible exacerbation of problems our climate already throws at us. Addressing these problems directly is many times more cost-effective than anything discussed at Copenhagen. And adaptation does not require a global agreement, although we may well need to help the very poorest countries (not China) to adapt.

Beyond adaptation, plan B should involve a relatively modest, increased government investment in technological research and development-in energy, in adaptation and in geoengineering.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of the Copenhagen debacle, it is not going to be easy to get our leaders to move to plan B. There is no doubt that calling a halt to the high-profile climate-change traveling circus risks causing a severe conference-deprivation trauma among the participants. If there has to be a small public investment in counseling, it would be money well spent.

SOURCE







The plight of the the green fashionista

Is fur making a comeback?

IT BEGAN with the gift of a vintage rabbit fur coat. Not for me; for my friend. Really, my friend. Who was faced with a modern-day fashion dilemma. For most of her life, she had been opposed to fur on the grounds that it was cruel, unnecessary, gauche. But this coat was so adorable . . . and so thin . . . and so warm. And it was vintage. Which means that, when you think about it, the rabbits were already gone. And when you compared her fur to the alternatives - the fleece sweatshirts that don’t biodegrade, the “vegan leather’’ jackets made from PVC - the winner of the do-good outerwear derby wasn’t entirely clear.

As the Copenhagen climate talks draw to a close, it’s worth noting how much our culture has come to value the merits of green - both because people truly care about the Earth, and because caring about the Earth has grown so chic. But the actual rules of green living are surprisingly hard to navigate, not least of all when it comes to choosing clothes.

Do you want to save the animals or the planet at large? Do you focus on your outfit’s origins, or its afterlife? Do you submit to the harsh realities of the food chain? Or do you fret about the death of cows and bunnies while the planet weeps over your petroleum-based pleather?

The decline of the anti-fur stigma shows just how complex the rules have become. Jo Paoletti, an American studies professor at the University of Maryland, recalls that she once gave away a vintage fur cape because too many people glared at her at parties.

But over the last decade, many fashion houses have begun to embrace fur again. Onetime PETA models Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford have fronted ad campaigns for high-end furriers. Bravo’s Rachel Zoe wears luscious fur vests in public with no apparent guilt. And when my friend started asking around about her coat, she found a lot of people who weren’t appalled by rabbit pelts. Someone told her that Canadians wear fur because it’s warmer than any alternative. Someone else pointed out that people eat rabbit, so why not use all of the rabbit?

These days, the fur industry seems especially emboldened. The Fur Council of Canada has launched an ad campaign declaring that “Fur is Green’’ - in the sense that trappers kill animals who might have overpopulated forests, and that fur breaks down in landfills, unlike performance fleece. The council also takes pains to claim that trappers and farmers treat animals humanely, a byproduct of shame for which animal-rights activists deserve some credit.

But PETA has devolved into self-parody of late, chastising the president for swatting a fly, putting too many naked models in lettuce bikinis, acting overzealous with red paint. When a furrier from Brookline died last month, his obituary ran after his funeral service had taken place, presumably to stave off protesters who had vandalized his store. It’s easier to sympathize with his family than with any friend of the minks.

When it comes to fashion, it seems, everyone has to decide how and when to be cruel, where to stake her own spot on the fur-to-leather-to-meat-to-clean-air continuum. Paoletti points out that, however “natural’’ fur may be, the fur-production process still takes a big environmental toll. But then “greenwashing’’ is rampant in the fashion world today, she says: Fabric made from bamboo is marketed as earth-friendly, but it’s chemically identical to rayon, and manufactured in a way that’s decidedly bad for the planet.

Besides, Paoletti notes, you can make a bigger impact with your laundry habits than with any piece of clothing you buy - and you can also help the Earth by buying fewer clothes in general. In that context, vintage fur could either be the world’s biggest cop-out or a brilliant solution, a way to embrace recycling and luxury at once.

Paoletti isn’t passing judgment, though she wishes my friend could wear a button on her rabbit coat that says, “It’s vintage!’’ Style still has a lot to do with what other people think. But my friend figures that if anyone looks sideways at her coat, she’ll simply tell them it’s a fake.

SOURCE

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