Bigmouth Warmist crumbles when he had to put up or shut up

by Ann McElhinney

Last March James Cameron sounded defiant. The Avatar director was determined to expose journalists, such as myself, who thought it was important to ask questions about climate change orthodoxy and the radical "solutions" being proposed.

Cameron said was itching to debate the issue and show skeptical journalists and scientists that they were wrong. “I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads," he said in an interview.

Well, a few weeks ago Mr. Cameron seemed to honor his word. His representatives contacted myself and two other well known skeptics, Marc Morano of the Climate Depot website and Andrew Breitbart, the new media entrepreneur.

Mr. Cameron was attending the AREDAY environmental conference in Aspen Colorado 19-22 August. He wanted the conference to end with a debate on climate change. Cameron would be flanked with two scientists. It would be 90 minutes long. It would be streamed live on the internet.

They hoped the debate would attract a lot of media coverage. "We are delighted to have Fox News, Newsmax, The Washington Times and anyone else you'd like. The more the better," one of James Cameron's organizers said in an email.

It looked like James Cameron really was a man of his word who would get to take on the skeptics he felt were so endangering humanity.

Everyone on our side agreed with their conditions. The debate was even listed on the AREDAY agenda. But then as the debate approached James Cameron's side started changing the rules.

They wanted to change their team. We agreed. They wanted to change the format to less of a debate—to "a roundtable". We agreed. Then they wanted to ban our cameras from the debate. We could have access to their footage. We agreed. Bizarrely, for a brief while, the worlds most successful film maker suggested that no cameras should be allowed-that sound only should be recorded. We agreed

Then finally James Cameron, who so publicly announced that he "wanted to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out," decided to ban the media from the shoot out. He even wanted to ban the public. The debate/roundtable would only be open to those who attended the conference. No media would be allowed and there would be no streaming on the internet. No one would be allowed to record it in any way. We all agreed to that.

And then, yesterday, just one day before the debate, his representatives sent an email that Mr. "shoot it out " Cameron no longer wanted to take part. The debate was cancelled.

James Cameron's behavior raises some very important questions. Does he genuinely believe in man made climate change? If he believes it is a danger to humanity surely he should be debating the issue every chance he gets ?

Or is it just a pose? The man who called for an open and public debate at "high noon" suddenly doesn't want his policies open to serious scrutiny.

I was looking forward to debating with the film maker. I was looking forward to finding out where we agreed and disagreed and finding a way forward that would help the poorest people in the developing and developed world.

But that is not going to happen because somewhere along the way James Cameron, a great film maker, has moved from King of the World to being King of the Hypocrites.

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Greenie hatreds bubble over -- open minds conspicuously absent

After the prearranged debate at the Aspen American Renewable Energy Day was cancelled, Marc Morano was at least given time to have his say in the form of a talk. Below is his report of the occasion

My presentation at Aspen American Renewable Energy Day (AREDAY) summit on Sunday August 22, 2010 at 5:30 was met by a rude moderator and hostile audience. I was offered the 90 minute time slot to present the skeptical view of man-made climate change after Hollywood director James Cameron's cowardly final cancellation of a pre-planned and agreed to global warming debate.

My PowerPoint presentation was repeatedly interrupted by ARDAY moderator Richard Greene and the audience was not receptive to me continuing my presentation. Instead, the bulk of my presentation turned into a disjointed moderator and audience rant session. I attempted several times to return to my presentation, but the crowd and moderator refused to cooperate and seemed completely uninterested.

One participant confused carbon dioxide with carbon monoxide. She suggested I kill himself by driving my car into my garage and then close the doors with the engine running. I twice attempted to explain to the ARDAY conference participant that there was a difference between carbon dioxide -- a harmless trace essential gas we exhale from our mouth-- and toxic carbon monoxide, but to no avail. I sadly shook my head and told the audience: "Wow, what a warm welcome I have gotten here."

In the end, the ARDAY's offer of 90 minutes for me to present the skeptical view of man-made global warming after Cameron's debate cancellation revealed itself to be essentially disingenuous.

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Has the Mainstream Media Trusted Enviro-activists for Advice on Listening to Skeptic Scientists?

A chronology of the smear campaign against AGW opponents

by Russell Cook

Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a concept supported by only two legs, a so-called consensus of climate scientists claiming it is proven, and the idea that skeptic scientists aren't worth listening to. Almost any internet article or blog written by an AGW believer boils down to that. Skeptic scientists, and those citing their research, are yanking out the first leg. Few focus on the other leg, except perhaps to note the bias given by the mainstream media to the AGW side. This is understandable, I also overlooked the accusation about big coal & oil corrupting skeptic scientists.

We know skeptic scientists did their research, and were later paid speaking fees by coal & oil companies because the companies agreed with them. How simple is that to understand? However, skeptics let this unrelenting accusation go unquestioned for far too long. What we fail to see is the sheer extent of AGW believers repeating the opposite: anti-AGW science reports and opinions are all fabricated under the direction of coal & oil companies.

Last November, I inadvertently to stopped my usual routine of comparing skeptic vs AGW viewpoints, to look directly into the accusation. What I discovered caused me to write two American Thinker articles and a few blogs there and elsewhere about the accusation's huge problems. A person reading my most recent blog pointed out how hard it was to follow, though.

Indeed, the explanation of this is greatly offset by the simplicity of the campaign behind the accusation. Its narrative has been so effectively pounded into practically every AGW believer that it can be regurgitated by the dumbest of believers in three points:

1. a scientific consensus says the debate is settled; Fact, end of story.

2. skeptic scientists corrupted by big coal & oil industries seek to 'reposition' the public into believing AGW is not a fact.

3. journalists don't have to give equal weight to skeptic scientists because of the previous two points; they're corrupt, and few in number.

That's it. You are not to question it, and the word "reposition" is the central-most part of it. But, when I did an internet search of the oft-repeated complete phrase, "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact", I didn't find simple explanations, I found unanswered contradictions....

This not the end by any means. Every time I dig into a name association or a new quote of the "reposition" phrase, it leads down more paths that prompt questions, not answers. Professional unbiased journalists need to start finding answers, while also asking the tougher "what did you know and when did you know it" questions. If they prove the skeptic scientists aren't corrupt and should have been listened to, then just how big of a problem do we have with the IPCC, various national academies of science, the mainstream media and any others who said it was imperative that we solve global warming?

Much more HERE (See the original for links)





Disaster Losses and Climate Change

The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society has just put online a review paper (peer reviewed) by Laurens Bouwer, of the Institute for Environmental Studies at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, titled, "Have disaster losses increased due to anthropogenic climate change?".

Readers of this blog already know the answer to this question, and here is Bouwers' conclusion:

"The analysis of twenty-two disaster loss studies shows that economic losses from various weather related natural hazards, such as storms, tropical cyclones, floods, and small-scale weather events such as wildfires and hailstorms, have increased around the globe. The studies show no trends in losses, corrected for changes (increases) in population and capital at risk, that could be attributed to anthropogenic climate change. Therefore it can be concluded that anthropogenic climate change so far has not had a significant impact on losses from natural disasters."

Bouwers rightly acknowledges that there are uncertainties in such studies, and in particular, there will be a need to refine efforts to evaluate changing vulnerability and exposure in future such work, especially as the signal of greenhouse gas driven climate change is expected to become larger. However, such uncertainties are not presently so large as to undercut Bouwers' conclusion, e.g.:

"A rigorous check on the potential introduction of bias from a failure to consider vulnerability reduction in normalization methods is to compare trends in geophysical variables with those in the normalized data. Normalized hurricane losses for instance match with variability in hurricane landfalls (Pielke et al. 2008). If vulnerability reduction would have resulted in a bias, it would show itself as a divergence between the geophysical and normalized loss data. In this case, the effects of vulnerability reduction apparently are not so large as to introduce a bias."

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Russian heat wave due to dramatic changes in solar activity

Interview with forecaster Piers Corbyn

This year Russia was hit by a record-breaking heat wave that led to wildfires which killed dozens and left thousands homeless. Weather forecaster Piers Corbyn says this is a result of weather cycles, not global warming.

“What we have is a tremendous amount of activity on the sun and that affects the rush of particles from the sun to the earth and that changes the ionosphere and that also changes the circulation patterns of the globe in what is known as the jet stream,” Corbyn explained. “And that caused a shifting of the weather patterns so the south wind in Western Russia terminated and instead we got a northwestern flow of thunderstorms and cooling.”

See below for the 12 min interview (inc. comments about SatelliteGate)



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Australia: Are seas the new green battlegounds?

The article below was written by a Greenie so he sees a conspiracy where there are only outraged fishermen who resent being locked out of places where they have been accustomed to fish

In case it passed you by in the recent, just cleared, political blizzard, there's been a shift in our domestic environmental battlefronts, to the sea. After decades as an election cutting point, forests were absent on Saturday. Instead the resource versus protection barney moved to Australia's marine domain. This contest has far to go.

In the past year, a politically sharp, well-funded recreational fisheries lobby has emerged for the first time to take on, and beat, scientists and environmentalists.

It snapped up support from both major parties, and by the campaign's climax had put marine protection on the radar of many politicians whose closest previous dealings with a fish were on a plate.

At the extremes of this argument, some fishers reject any blame for overfishing, while animal activists are opposing cruelty to sentient creatures. But the main game focuses on a national set of marine reserves that until now had bipartisan, if tediously slow, support.

Australia's ocean domain is, at 19 million square kilometres, more than twice as large as its landmass. Our seas range from tropical reefs loved by tourists to frigid deeps.

When Liberal environment minister Robert Hill released the National Oceans Policy in 1998, it claimed to make Australia "the first country in the world to deliver a comprehensive national plan to protect and manage the oceans".

The initial template covering south-eastern waters from Bermagui on the New South Wales south coast, around Victoria and Tasmania to South Australia was finalised years late in 2007. About 7 per cent of this two-million-square-kilometre region is closed to fishing.

Along the rest of the coast other "bioregions" are being studied, but so far the grand total of marine protected areas (not necessarily fisheries exclusion zones) is 765,000 square kilometres, including the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

States also set up their own marine protection. In NSW, 34 per cent of waters is in "parks", and 6.7 per cent in no-fishing sanctuaries, according to a 2009 count by the Australian Marine Conservation Society. In Victoria, 9 per cent of coasts is in parks and 5 per cent in sanctuaries.

Sound reasonable? Not to recreational fishers alarmed by the "no take" concept. The first sign that this lobby was mounting a serious effort came last summer, over mako sharks.

A ban on fishing for these internationally depleted fish fulfilled Australia's obligation under the Convention on Migratory Species. It's reversal by Environment Minister Peter Garrett met electoral imperatives.

Evidence that the debate was polarising came when shadow fisheries minister Richard Colbeck began to rail against the influence of "extreme" environment groups, such as the Pew Foundation.

Come the election campaign, the Australian Fishing Trade Association also popped up with a boatload of funding, warning fishing voters their children's right to hold a rod was under threat. "Fishing may never be the same again if the Greens or Labor get into power!" said their full-page advertisements.

AFTA is composed of recreational fishing trade suppliers who claim to be at the heart of a $1 billion industry. Executive director Doug Joyner said they had up to $450,000 to spend on countering the "Green grab" for 30 per cent plus of the seas.

The Greens do indeed argue for 30 per cent of the seas to go into no-take zones, claiming this is the best insurance policy for fishing in a future where over-fished stocks also face threats from climate change.

The Australian Marine Science Association has much lower ambitions, calling for effective protection of at least 10 per cent in no-take zones. Labor rejected arbitrary targets in the campaign, and pointed out that Commonwealth reserves began five kilometres offshore, beyond the reach of the average shore fisher.

But Liberal leader Tony Abbott immediately grasped the political value of a fishing rod, and now wants to shelve all marine reserve plans. Last week in Narooma on the NSW south coast he said: "I think that it's very important that we immediately suspend this marine protected area process. The fact is that it is needlessly threatening not just the livelihoods of people who live off the sea but it's immediately threatening the entire economy of the south coast."

Whether Labor survives in government or the Coalition prevails, clearly the setting has changed. "I fish and I vote" has become more than a car sticker. Expect to see more of the fishers, and their opponents, from now on.

SOURCE

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