Attributing recent species extinctions to global warming has one large problem: Even the IPCC says that we have had less than one degree Celsius average temperature rise since the beginning of the 20th century. Saying that such a tiny warming has had any effect on anything is absurd. All animals encounter much larger temperature variations than that in the course of a single day, for instance. So it is clear that the extinctions and population reductions mentioned below were NOT caused by global warming. Much of the drop in amphibian populations was caused by fungi
It’s an uncomfortable thought: Human activity causing the extinction of thousands of species, and the only way to slow or prevent that phenomenon is to have smaller families and forego some of the conveniences of modern life, from eating beef to driving cars, according to Stanford University scientists Paul Ehrlich and Robert Pringle.
This extinction—the sixth in the 4-billion-year history of the Earth—"could be much more catastrophic than previous ones," says Ehrlich, author of the controversial Population Bomb, which predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s. That fate was forestalled by the green revolution in Asian agriculture, in which new strains of cereal crops plus enhanced use of fertilizer and irrigation allowed farmers to grow enough food to feed a burgeoning population. But this is a new threat: "Anything in the vicinity of the previous ones," Ehrlich says, such as the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous that killed half of all species, including the dinosaurs, "would wreck civilization."
Right now, at least 2,000 frogs, salamanders and other amphibians are in danger of going extinct, according to a survey by biologists David Wake and Vance Vredenburg, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. Coastal seas and estuaries have lost as much as 91 percent of certain species, such as oysters, according to another survey. And nearly 50 percent of all temperate grasslands and forests have disappeared.
But through it all the species responsible for this change—through overuse, pollution and other impacts—has continued to thrive and multiply, reaching roughly 6.7 billion in population and counting.
"The fate of biological diversity for the next 10 million years will almost certainly be determined during the next 50 to 100 years by the activities of a single species," write Ehrlich and Pringle in their proposal for addressing the biodiversity crisis. Adds Pringle: "The world's remaining wild areas and the species in them are being pulverized, and that's a multi-layered tragedy."
That’s why Ehrlich and Pringle call for educating women, which has slowed or stopped population growth in the developed countries of Europe. "Education and employment—for women especially—along with access to contraception and safe abortions are the most important components," they write. Adds Ehrlich: "The most basic response is to get going on stopping population growth and starting a decline. Second is doing something about consumption. If you don't do anything about those, then you are in trouble in all the others: more people, means more greenhouse gases, which means more rapid climate change."
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Sea level rise dies NOT indicate warming
Texas A&M professor Andy Dessler claims that rising sea level is evidence that temperatures are increasing. It is trivial to demonstrate that his claim is both incorrect and absurd.
Over the last 8,000 years, temperatures have steadily fallen – as seen above. At the same time, sea level has risen about 20 metres.
There is no correlation between rising temperatures and rising sea levels. Anyone with a basic understanding of science knows that ice melts above the freezing point – regardless of whether temperatures are increasing or decreasing.
Sea level will keep rising until the amount of new glacial ice formed each year equals the amount of melt. That circumstance would require a considerable amount of cooling from present.
SOURCE
Warmist crook Gerald North Caught Fibbing About Hockey stick
By S. Fred Singer
In responding to Congressman Joe Barton’s letter of Oct 12, Prof Gerald North (Letter, Oct 17) claims that “we have not found any evidence that his [Prof Michael Mann’s] results were incorrect or even out of line with other works published since his original papers.”
This statement is factually incorrect: There are numerous papers, published in peer-reviewed journals, which show clearly that the 20th century was not the warmest in the past 1000 years (as claimed by Mann). Medieval temperatures were substantially greater – and so were temperatures during the earlier Roman Warm Period.
All of this is in addition to the valid criticism of the statistical methodology used by Mann. Tellingly, Canadian Prof. Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick showed that even random data fed into the faulty Mann theory would always yield a record-warmest 20th century.
SOURCE
The Slow Death of the Environmental Movement
By Alan Caruba
“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.”—Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!
“If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels”. —Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund
If you want to understand how utterly soulless and nihilistic environmentalism is than you need only pay attention to what they say. (Click here for more such quotes)
My friend, Joseph A. Olson, PE, recently wrote of “Climate Science’s Worst Week in History” in which he noted a series of events such as the UK’s Royal Society’s step back from its former support of global warming.
This was followed by a Washington Post opinion editorial by one of its perpetrators, Michael Mann of Penn State University, pleading for a Democrat victory in the midterm elections so he could avoid being investigated by Congress.
That same week Dr. Hal Lewis, a renowned physicist, resigned from the American Physical Society, rebuking it for having been subverted to serve the global warming hoax.
Having observed the movement for decades, I think we are seeing a growing awareness that environmentalism is fear-driven, based on many false claims, a threat to the U.S. economy, fundamental freedoms, and humanity in general.
The environmental movement has its roots in what was formerly called conservation. Its great champion was Teddy Roosevelt and it was led by men like John Muir (1838-1914), a naturalist who advocated setting aside places like the Yosemite Valley, Sequoia National Park and other wilderness areas.
The objective was not only to preserve such areas, but to permit future generations to visit, enjoy, and be inspired by them. In creating national forests, it was understood they were to be managed in a fashion that yielded timber while providing opportunities for hunting, fishing, hiking and camping.
Muir founded the Sierra Club, one of the nation’s largest environmental organizations. Today there are so many environmental organizations and groups that you need a directory to sort them out. These groups, however, are now far more political than their original intent.
They are ministries of misinformation, disinformation, and outright scare mongering.
The movement as we know it today got a boost with the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s book, “Silent Spring.” It was an anti-pesticide diatribe whose claims have long since been disproved, but it set in motion a tsunami of fears regarding all chemicals and, beyond that, concerns about all kinds of manufacturing and technology; indeed anything involving energy resources.
Within eight years of the book’s publication President Nixon initiated the Environmental Protection Agency that has since metatisized into a rogue government agency intent on controlling all aspects of life in America. The EPA invents most of the science it cites and has an authoritarian contempt for the fundamental principles of science, the truth, and the process of legislating and regulating as set forth in the Constitution.
The scope of environmentalism is manifest in the United Nations Environmental Program of which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the source of the global warming hoax, has been the most visible of late.
We are witnessing, if not the death of environmentalism, at least its growing marginalization. The early signs are there to be seen. It will take a lot of time to rid ourselves of its excesses and idiocy because much of academia, the judiciary, the media, some churches, and our schools have been hijacked by the environmental movement.
Like socialism/communism, a political movement closely aligned with environmentalism, environmentalism not only does not work, but imposes restrictions that run contrary to economic growth, health, and fundamental freedoms. Its solutions are as often as not are the cause of mass death as in the case of the banning of DDT.
Ultimately, environmentalism is opposed to all the technologies that protect, enhance and extend life for everyone on planet Earth.
This is why we see, time and again, environmental opposition to anything that might ensure a steady, dependable source of electricity, the power that maintains everything upon which a modern society depends.
This explains why environmental organizations like Friends of the Earth are leading campaigns against the use of coal to generate electricity and other forms of power generation.
Environmentalists oppose oil and its derivative, perhaps one of the greatest inventions of the modern era, plastic.
It is why they advocate turning food, corn primarily, into an inefficient fuel called ethanol that can damage car engines. The diversion of massive amounts of corn has only served to drive up food costs.
It is why they advocate mass transportation and do all they can to impose new costs on the manufacture and use of automobiles.
It is why they advocate wind and solar power as viable sources of energy when neither would even exist without huge government subsidies. They are touted as a source of mythical “green jobs”, but Americans want real jobs and wonder why so few factories have been built here since the 1970s.
It has been environmentalists that foisted mandatory recycling programs that have proven as great a waste in time, labor and energy as the benefits they were purported to provide.
Was it a worthy goal to clean the nation’s air and water? Yes, without question, but by almost any standard one can name, that goal has been achieved. When the EPA announced recently that it was going to regulate dust, you had to know that it’s being run by crazies. The East Coast of America receives a lot of dust blown in from Africa!
The death of environmentalism began with the greatest hoax ever perpetrated in the history of modern man, global warming. It has taken decades for it to be exposed and its demise, along with other environmental “solutions” put forth are reaching a point of widespread public rejection.
That is a very good thing because at the very heart of environmentalism is the intent to reduce the human population of the Earth. It is human “consumption” that environmentalists hate whether it is the food you eat or the energy you use in your daily life.
It will take a generation or two or three to rid ourselves of the chains environmentalism has imposed on us and the economy, but it will happen. It took some seventy years for the former Soviet Union to ultimately implode.
Just as communism killed millions, so too has environmentalism. Both still exist in various places and various forms, but they will fail. Perhaps not in my lifetime or yours, but if we remain vigilant, if we resist, they too will die a deserved death.
SOURCE
Why climate change isn’t an election campaign issue
Following is from a Warmist
Coming into this year, conventional wisdom had it that if Democrats failed to get an energy and climate bill passed by this summer, a new attempt would have to wait until at least 2011. Think longer-term than that. Maybe a lot longer.
In his most recent reading of the political tea leaves, published Oct. 8, noted analyst Charles Cook of the Cook Political Report sees Republicans in the House picking up at least 40 seats – with 39 needed to take the majority. A headline on the Associated Press's latest analysis? "As Democrats' message lags, GOP awaits huge wins."
And not just at the national level. In a hard Senate fight in West Virginia, Democratic Governor Joe Manchin is running as fast as possible from any association with the concept of a cap-and-trade bill to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. In a campaign ad, Manchin literally fires a shot at the bill. Other Democrats are downplaying (or remaining silent on) climate change as a campaign issue.
Meanwhile, GOP candidates – incumbents and challengers – are lauding the benefits of carbon dioxide for creatures great and small, attributing global warming to sunspots (long discredited), and in general touting the notion of human-triggered global warming as a hoax.
Ironically, they seem to be out of step with much of the American public. In a new survey released by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, 63 percent of Americans agree that global warming is happening. A plurality (50 percent) agree that it's triggered by human activity, compared with 35 percent who say it's natural, and 7 percent who say it isn't happening at all. The survey, conducted from late June to late July included 2,030 adults in the US.
From the standpoint of solutions, large majorities agree that switching to green energy sources, preventing deforestation and other approaches would reduce global warming. But the study points out a majority of respondents (53 percent) either don't believe that large tax increases on fossil fuels would help, or they say they don't know.
And therein lies a great deal of the rub, according to the Council on Foreign Relations' Michael Levi. In a blog post earlier this year, he noted in effect that once again, "it's the economy, stupid."
Especially in lean economic times, a cap-and-trade bill (Republicans have dubbed it the Pelosi energy tax) designed to shift the economy to greener energy technologies injects too much uncertainty into the calculations of people who have jobs.
The switch by definition implies that some existing jobs will vanish. The thought of losing those jobs would be bad enough in economically good years. But when the unemployment rate hovers between 9 and 10 percent, and economic growth is expected to be anemic for some time? A double no-thanks on all your proposals.
And those who are unemployed and might benefit from the change are a smaller, less influential slice of the electorate.
If that's the case, the US currently may be experiencing in its own way an internal version of the arguments that have played out on the international stage between rich and poor countries on battling global warming.
When an economy is in the tank, either because of a near-depression or because a country is underdeveloped, it’s a lot tougher to sell what are perceived to be expensive environmental solutions whose benefits may not be seen for decades to individuals who are worried about their job today.
SOURCE
Another Warmist who is a prophet of Apocalypse and a believer in conspiracy theories
The Weather Underground launched in 1995, becoming the first commercial internet weather service, and among the first using real-time features of the internet for weather education. Today, it’s the 80th largest site on the internet, getting between 10- and 11-million page views a day and 15-million unique users a month.
Masters considers this another dream job, not only creating the programming but expanding his role to blog and generate content for the website.
Masters reads plenty of other blogs, and is a fan in particular of John Cook’s blogs at skepticalscience.com/. He also frequents realclimate.org, climateprogress.org, and desmogblog.com, which he thinks does well at unveiling climate deniers’ public relations campaigns intended to counter climate change science.
Masters says his blogs don’t “trash people” or question their motivations. “I’m just speaking the truth as I see it,” and presenting the best science, he says.
Masters considers himself different from most meteorologists, many of whom he says are unreasonably skeptical of climate change science. He says he thinks their skepticism stems in part from bachelors degree meteorology students’ not being required to study climatology or climate science as part of their formal degree requirements.
Masters says he believes that the conclusions of the IPCC report are “genuine, valid, and probably understated.” And he is critical of what he sees as well orchestrated and well funded climate misinformation campaigns.
“They’re able to persuade even intelligent people with a background in meteorology” that climate change isn’t occurring, he said. “It’s going to be a terrible wake-up call when the climate becomes unstable, and we’ll kick ourselves for being resistant to cutting our use of fossil fuels.”
He’s shared these views in his blogs, not surprisingly leading to hundreds of “hate e-mails” a year. Critics call him biased and chastise him for defending scientists named or involved in last fall’s hacked e-mails controversy at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. While he respects the right of these people to voice their point of view, he doesn’t pull punches: “The ignorance and greed that human society is showing in this matter will be to our ultimate detriment and possible destruction,” he says.
More HERE
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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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