Tuesday, December 21, 2010

The Pyramid of Frauds

One of the fastest growing industries in the world is based on a pyramid of frauds and its inevitable collapse will be worse than the sub-prime crash.

The Global Warming Industry is now fed by billions of dollars from western taxpayers and consumers. It is based on the unproven and now discredited claim that man's production of carbon dioxide causes dangerous global warming.

The basic fraud is this:

There is no evidence that carbon dioxide controls world temperature – just a theory and the manipulated results from a handful of giant computer models that very few people have checked or understand. But there is clear evidence from historical records of atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature that carbon dioxide does not control temperature. Rather the reverse – as solar or volcanic heat warms the oceans, the waters expel carbon dioxide. Global warming causes an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, not the reverse.

Moreover, every day provides more evidence that current temperatures are not unusually high. Over the past 2000 years there have been two previous eras of warming ("the golden ages") separated by two mini ice ages ("the dark ages"). Both the Roman Warming and the Medieval Warming were warmer than today and there was no human industry causing that warming.

The next fraud, invoked as the first fraud started to falter, is the claim that carbon dioxide is a pollutant in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is the food for all plants and thus the food source for all life on earth. It is not poisonous at any level likely to be experienced in the atmosphere and there is clear evidence that more carbon dioxide makes plants grow faster and bigger, and makes them more tolerant of drought, heat and salinity. Current levels are below those optimal for life.

A related scientific fraud is the claim that grazing animals increase atmospheric carbon. Any competent biologist can debunk this fraud by explaining the carbon food cycle.

Built on these frauds are the fraud-riddled carbon credit and carbon trading empires. The revelations of massive fraud in European carbon credits and the collapse of carbon trading on the Chicago Climate Exchange are harbingers of crises yet to surface. Carbon credits have no intrinsic value – they are dependent on political support, and this will always evaporate in time.

The next level of fraud is the alternate energy industry. Despite decades of subsidies and tax breaks the wind/solar power industry cannot survive unless the handouts continue, and their coal competitors are taxed heavily. To call these activities "industries" is a fraud – they are corporate mendicants.

Finally, those who waste millions on projects designed to prove the feasibility of burying carbon dioxide are committing a fraud on taxpayers and shareholders. There are no benefits of burying atmospheric plant food from any source. With zero benefits and huge costs CCS can never be "economic" and it is fraudulent to pretend it can ever be otherwise.

The global warming industry is a huge pyramid of financial and political fraud resting on a quasi-scientific foundation of quicksand.

A press release from Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition Email: Info@carbon-sense.com




Losers! Environmentalists facing 'profound bout of soul-searching' after failure to enact climate regulations

As 2010 comes to a close, U.S. environmentalists are engaged in their most profound bout of soul-searching in more than a decade. Their top policy priority - imposing a nationwide cap on carbon emissions - has foundered in the face of competing concerns about jobs. Many of their political allies on both the state and federal level have been ousted. And the Obama administration has just signaled it may retreat on a couple of key air-quality rules.

Hence a shift of focus away from the toxic partisanship of Washington back to the grass roots and the shared values that gave the movement its initial momentum more than 40 years ago.

"Certainly I think we have figured out we need to find a way to really listen harder and connect with people all over America, especially in rural America," said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund. "I don't think we've done a particularly good job of that."

The change casts a sudden pall over environmentalists' top-down approach.

"The tragedy is that they spent the last 10 years on this and not anything else," said Clean Air Task Force Executive Director Armond Cohen, whose group has pursued an array of alternative strategies aimed at curbing climate change and air pollution.

Now, instead of spending millions of dollars seeking to win over wavering lawmakers on the Hill, green groups are ramping up their operations outside D.C., focusing on public utilities commissions that sign off on new power plants and state ballot initiatives that could potentially funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to conservation efforts.

The Nature Conservancy, for example, successfully championed a ballot initiative in Iowa this fall that will devote a portion of any future sales tax increase to land and water conservation initiatives. According to its president, Mark Tercek, a series of floods helped focus Iowans' attention on the benefits of preventing soil erosion and other problems.

"The average Iowan is not liberal," Tercek said, noting the initiative could generate $150 million a year for conservation. "They're saying through this, 'We need to invest in ecosystems.' "

The Sierra Club, meanwhile, is bolstering its long-standing campaign to block the construction of power plants across the country, assembling a team of 100 full-time employees to focus on the issue in 45 states.

"This is where the environmental movement will make the most progress in the next five years," said Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune.

350.org founder Bill McKibben, who has been trying to foster a global grass-roots movement, wrote in an e-mail he sees it as the only way to overcome traditional opponents who are far better positioned in Washington: "Since we're never going to compete with Exxon in money," he wrote, "we better find another currency, and to me bodies, spirit, creativity are probably our best bet."

This strategic reassessment also has given hope to those working on lower-profile environmental issues, which were largely sidelined during the climate change debate. Vikki Spruill, president of the Ocean Conservancy, noted that the combination of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the fact that oceans have "less partisan baggage" could enhance the prospects for marine conservation next year.

More HERE






Hype Versus Reality on Indian Climate Change

The Cancun global warming and wealth redistribution summit concluded last week, with little to show for two weeks of talking in 5-star hotels and restaurants, other than vague promises that countries will try to do something meaningful about the “threat” of “dangerous” climate change.

Indian Environment and Forests Minister Jairam Ramesh nevertheless praised the summit. Rich countries will finance global warming adaptation measures in poor countries, he announced, invoking the good will of “goddesses” of Mexico to achieve some degree of public relations success. (At least they promised, again, to provide some financing … someday … from somewhere.)

Meanwhile, the Northern Hemisphere was being blasted by record cold and snow, as Old Man Winter arrived early. Britain, the United States, other countries and even Cancun were pummeled by record cold, and early snowstorms shut down highways, airports and cities.

In India, at least three people died in the northwestern states of Punjab and Haryana, when night-time temperatures dropped by three degrees Celsius below normal. Cities from Hisar to Amritsar experienced record low temperatures of 3-7 degrees Celsius (5.4-12.6 F). In central England, the BBC reported, 2010 has ushered in one of the coldest starts to winter since 1659.

Is this how rising atmospheric CO2 increases global warming? A closer look at India’s history of climate change provides still more evidence that the “dangerous manmade climate disruption” thesis is backed by very little evidence.

The cold reality is that overall average Indian temperatures have increased by only 0.4 degrees C (0.7 F) over the past century, while northwestern India and parts of south India have witnessed cooling trends. Himalayan glaciers grew to their maximum ice accumulation about 260 years ago, according to the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, and their well-known retreats began as Earth warmed following the 500-year-long Little Ice Age – not because of human CO2 emissions.

Then why on Earth did Minister Ramesh work so hard to promote CO2-induced global warming, by issuing an official report, “Climate Change and India: A sectoral and regional analysis for 2030s,” just before Cancun? Why does he prefer to believe computer-generated scenarios of extreme warming 20-30 years from now, rather than rely on his country’s past climate variations? Is there a “goddess” in his computer who can foretell our future?

Apparently, there is much still to learn from Henry Blanford (1834-1893), the Geological Survey of India’s pioneering scientist, who wrote about Indian monsoons and climate change in Nature magazine in 1891:

“[T]his warning, alas! is no mere guesswork of credulous and speculative minds, such as in these latitudes certain of our would-be weather prophets love to put forth at hazard, to furnish the topic of a day’s gossip to the millions, or happy to win for themselves a summer day’s reputation with the uninstructed, in the event of a successful [prediction]. Certainly, indeed there is not and cannot be till science shall have extended its domain far beyond its present limits.”

Even today, we are far from having predictive capabilities, and even computer-generated threats of sea level rise do not match reality.

Tide gauge data collected over the past 20 years reveal that mean sea level rise averages only 1.3 mm per year along India’s coastline. By contrast, Environment and Forests Ministry computer models projected that India’s coastal sea level might rise by three times that amount: 4mm per year or 0.4 meters (1.3 feet) per century.

Two distinguished sea level experts from the University of Durham in Britain and University of Pennsylvania, USA analyzed past sea level studies based on dating coral, marine shells, beach ridges and coastal sedimentary sequences from the Northern Indian Ocean along India’s east coast and the coast of Sri Lanka. They found at least four periods, each one lasting 1000 to 1800 years, during the mid-Holocene period (7500 to 1500 years ago), when seas were one to three meters above current levels.

Another study by Peter Ramsay of Durban, South Africa produced a 9000-year record along the southern African coastline. It shows a 2500-year-long sea level rise of up to 3.5 meters (11.6 feet) during the early to mid Holocene, before sea level fell to current levels.

This evidence suggests that the Middle Holocene was warmer than today – and that “scary” CO2-induced sea level rises projected in the ministry’s 2030 Climate report are less than natural cycles of high and low seas that our ancestors faced in India and elsewhere.

Yet another study examined coastal erosion. Scientists from the Directorate of Water Management in Orissa found that 88% of stations along India’s tropical river basins had measured reduced sediment levels for the last three decades. But this had nothing to do with CO2 emissions. The actual cause was significant diversion and storage of runoff to meet increasing water demands for agriculture and industry – and the false cure of cutting emissions would not improve this situation.

The news media and environmental organizations repeatedly tell the “uninstructed” public that current global warming is unprecedented and threatens humankind and all life on Earth. However, past temperature and sea level changes were certainly more extreme than what scientists have observed in India during the past two centuries. More importantly, even the exaggerated computer model future for India in 2030 would not be extraordinary or unprecedented, and there is no evidence that human CO2 emissions caused recent or current (natural and cyclical) temperature and sea level fluctuations.

We survived those past global warming and cooling periods. With our scientific and technological advances, we will survive future changes, too – if we do not shackle our energy and economic development, thereby keeping billions of people poor and deprived of the ability to adapt. The ministry’s November 2010 climate change report says India’s average annual temperature could increase a minimum of 1degree to a maximum of 4 degrees C (1.8 to 7.2 F) by the 2030s. We seriously doubt that these higher temperatures are based on reality, but wonder if they might save lives, like those lost during Punjab’s cold spells in December 2010.

The report also says warmer temperatures will prevail during the nighttime over the south peninsula and central and northern India, whereas daytime warming is will occur in central and northern India. However, such diurnal warming patterns might simply be related to the distance from the sea, rather than to any CO2 global warming effects.

Like Henry Blanford, we believe India, the USA and the rest of the world need more paleoclimatology and field monitoring work, before anyone makes speculative predictions based entirely on CO2-driven computer climate model “scenarios” of the future. For countries to implement restrictive, punitive energy policies – based on such speculation – would be crazy and suicidal.

SOURCE




A Scientific Theory Is Judged By Its Predictive Power

The now notorious talk of snow in the UK becoming so rare that children would not experience it is looking a little foolish now that we have had two snowy winters in a row, especially since increased snowfall and colder winters were expected by others, not obsessed with CO2 at the expense of everything else, who noted solar and other cycles pointed towards a colder period due in the northern hemisphere.

Even the roughly 30 years patterns of minor warming and cooling we saw in the 20th century superimposed on the otherwise fairly steady warming observed since the early to mid 19th century, point to a cooler spell. These past two years, and the ironic coolings at the IPCC conferences in Copenhagen and Cancun, do not disprove the alarmist case, but they ought to weaken it and encourage more attention, and more funding, for those outside the very prosperous 'CO2 dominates the climate' camp.

The powerline blog expresses it thus:
'But snow isn't all bad. Those British kids who were never supposed to know the joys of sledding, skating and, above all, snowball fighting are in luck:

'It's fun to ridicule the warmists because they are so often wrong, but their errors are in fact significant: a scientific theory that implies predictions that turn out to be wrong, is false. A principal feature of climate hysteria is its proponents' unwillingness to be judged by the standards that govern real science.'

Donna Laframboise has dug out some of the absurdly confident assertions of the IPCC with regard to what we were going to experience thanks to global warming:
'the 2007 climate bible written by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It told us that winters would be warmer and less extreme. I invite you to take a look for yourself. This table is titled Temperature-Related Phenomenon and appears on a page titled: Some Unifying Themes. The table contains phrases such as: more frequent heat waves / hot spells in summer; more warm and fewer cold nights; fewer frost days; fewer cold outbreaks; fewer, shorter, less intense cold spells / cold extremes in winter

Across from those phrases, on a case-by-case basis, the IPCC tells us these phenomenon are either “likely” or “very likely.” So, for example, the IPCC said it was very likely that we’d experience fewer below-freezing days everywhere in the world. We were further assured that all of the IPCC’s climate models are in agreement on that point.

Similarly, George Monbiot’s 2006 book was titled Heat. Its subtitle was not: How to Stop the Planet from Freezing. Rather, it insisted the planet was in danger of burning. A year earlier, in a Guardian newspaper column, Monbiot told readers that “The freezes this country suffered in 1982 and 1963 are…unlikely to recur.”

As the final two weeks of 2010 count down, reality is not being kind to these prognosticators. Instead of sugar dustings of snow and mild temperatures, many parts of the world are in the grip of another unusually harsh winter:

new record-low temperatures are being set in a variety of locales, including: Cuba, China, Japan, the UK, Kentucky, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina

snow and ice are stranding motorists in their cars in: Italy, China, the UK, Canada, and Indiana

snow is interrupting air travel across Europe (more here with great pics)

communities are coping with unusual amounts of snow from Helsinki to New York, from Minnesota to the UK

people are dying of hypothermia in many parts of the US, including some unlikely ones: South Carolina, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin

wildlife is being adversely affected by the cold in the UK as well as in Florida (more here)

In the UK a recent newspaper headline read: Millions facing fuel rationing over Christmas as heating oil runs low. In one of the world’s wealthiest countries some households face a four-week-long wait for furnace oil shipments, and the price has nearly doubled.

Rather than being warm and comfortable, many people will spend their holidays cold and miserable – not to mention worried that their water pipes might freeze and burst (more here). Meanwhile, a women’s World Cup skiing event has been postponed due to too much snow in France.

Although the mass media barely mentioned this fact, it’s more than a little ironic that the Mexican resort town of Cancun broke cold weather temperature records six days running during the United Nations’ anti-global-warming summit earlier this month.

We’ve long been advised that the symptoms of climate change are all around us – and that global warming is happening faster than predicted. But Mother Nature, it seems, has a wicked sense of humour.

In related news, I love this headline on yesterday’s Christopher Booker column in the UK Telegraph: It’s ‘the hottest year on record’, as long as you don’t take its temperature

Back in January I wrote a lengthy blog post examining snowfall in Britain over the past decade. In the year 2000 the Independent newspaper interviewed climate scientists and then advised the public that soon children wouldn’t know what snow was. Global warming would result in “not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.” I examined every one of Britain’s winters since the year 2000, however, and found no shortage of the white stuff.'

Elsewhere, we hear of climate alarmists responding to the snow up to their ears to assert that that is exactly what we should, now, expect from global warming. In fact, that is just what we should, now, expect from global warmists.

SOURCE (See the original for links)




Britain's Met Office unbowed by its amazing record of wrong predictions

Met Office 2008 Forecast: Trend of Mild Winters Continues

Met Office, 25 September 2008: The Met Office forecast for the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average. It is also likely that the coming winter will be drier than last year.

Reality Check: Winter of 2008/09 Coldest Winter For A Decade

Met Office, March 2009: Mean temperatures over the UK were 1.1 °C below the 1971-2000 average during December, 0.5 °C below average during January and 0.2 °C above average during February. The UK mean temperature for the winter was 3.2 °C, which is 0.5 °C below average, making it the coldest winter since 1996/97 (also 3.2 °C).

Met Office 2009 Forecast: Trend To Milder Winters To Continue, Snow And Frost Becoming Less Of A Feature

Met Office, 25 February 2009: Peter Stott, Climate Scientist at the Met Office, said: "Despite the cold winter this year, the trend to milder and wetter winters is expected to continue, with snow and frost becoming less of a feature in the future.

"The famously cold winter of 1962/63 is now expected to occur about once every 1,000 years or more, compared with approximately every 100 to 200 years before 1850."

Reality Check: Winter Of 2009/10 Coldest Winter For Over 30 Years

Met Office, 1 March 2010: Provisional figures from the Met Office show that the UK winter has been the coldest since 1978/79. The mean UK temperature was 1.5 °C, the lowest since 1978/79 when it was 1.2 °C.

Met Office July 2010: Climate Change Gradually But Steadily Reducing Probability Of Severe Winters In The UK

Ross Clark, Daily Express, 3 December 2010:

"One of the first tasks for the team conducting the Department for Transport’s “urgent review” into the inability of our transport system to cope with snow and ice will be to interview the cocky public figure who assured breakfast TV viewers last month that “I am pretty confident we will be OK” at keeping Britain moving this winter. They were uttered by Transport secretary Philip Hammond himself, who just a fortnight later is already being forced to eat humble pie...

If you want a laugh I recommend reading the Resilience Of England’s Transport Systems In Winter, an interim report by the DfT published last July. It is shockingly complacent. Rather than look for solutions to snow-induced gridlock the authors seem intent on avoiding the issue. The Met Office assured them “the effect of climate change is to gradually but steadily reduce the probability of severe winters in the UK”.

Met Office 2010 Forecast: Winter To Be Mild Predicts Met Office

Daily Express, 28 October 2010: It's a prediction that means this may be time to dig out the snow chains and thermal underwear. The Met Office, using data generated by a £33million supercomputer, claims Britain can stop worrying about a big freeze this year because we could be in for a milder winter than in past years…

The new figures, which show a 60 per cent to 80 per cent chance of warmer-than-average temperatures this winter, were ridiculed last night by independent forecasters. The latest data comes in the form of a December to February temperature map on the Met Office’s website.

The Daily Telegraph, 28 October 2010:

Its “Barbecue Summer” was a washout while its “mild winter” was the coldest for 31 years, so you might be forgiven for taking the Met Office’s latest prediction with a pinch of salt. But the official forecasters have said that this winter could be unusually mild and dry, with temperatures at least 2C more than last year’s big freeze in which snow and ice caused travel chaos across much of Britain.

Although the Met Office no longer issues long-term forecasts, their latest data suggest a high probability of a warmer winter for London, the East of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The South West, Wales and most of the North of England are less likely to enjoy such relatively pleasant temperatures but still have a 40 to 60 per cemt chance of being mild.

The statistics were generated by the Met Office’s new £33million supercomputer built by IBM. Forecasters used it to analyse how likely temperatures and rainfall were to be above normal for winter but not how far above.

Reality Check: December 2010 "Almost Certain" To Be Coldest Since Records Began

The Independent, 18 December 2010: December 2010 is "almost certain" to be the coldest since records began in 1910, according to the Met Office.

Met Office Predicted A Warm Winter. Cheers Guys

John Walsh, The Independent, 19 January 2010:

Some climatologists hint that the Office's problem is political; its computer model of future weather behaviour habitually feeds in government-backed assumptions about climate change that aren't borne out by the facts.

To the Met Office, the weather's always warmer than it really is, because it's expecting it to be, because it expects climate change to wreak its stealthy havoc. If it really has had its thumb on the scales for the last decade, I'm afraid it deserves to be shown the door.

A Frozen Britain Turns The Heat Up On The Met Office

Paul Hudson, BBC Weather, 9 January 2010: Which begs other, rather important questions. Could the model, seemingly with an inability to predict colder seasons, have developed a warm bias, after such a long period of milder than average years? Experts I have spoken to tell me that this certainly is possible with such computer models. And if this is the case, what are the implications for the Hadley centre's predictions for future global temperatures? Could they be affected by such a warm bias? If global temperatures were to fall in years to come would the computer model be capable of forecasting this?

A Period Of Humility And Silence Would Be Best For Met Office

Dominic Lawson, The Sunday Times, 10 January 2010: A period of humility and even silence would be particularly welcome from the Met Office, our leading institutional advocate of the perils of man-made global warming, which had promised a “barbecue summer” in 2009 and one of the “warmest winters on record”.

In fact, the Met still asserts we are in the midst of an unusually warm winter — as one of its staffers sniffily protested in an internet posting to a newspaper last week: “This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”

SOURCE





Summer freeze in Australia!

Australia generally is having an unusually cool December. I cannot remember cool nights ever before lasting this far into December -- and I live in the subtropics! Or as it says here: "Brisbane is experiencing its coldest December minimums in nearly a decade, with temperatures five degrees below average. The city last night reached 14.7 degrees, far below the average December minimum of 20.3" -- JR

Thongs and board shorts gave way to beanies and scarves yesterday as summer gave way to a wintry blast of snow and icy temperatures in the country's southeast.

While the bitter freeze in Europe continues, Victoria and NSW have had a cold snap of their own, with off-season ski slopes transformed into winter wonderlands. About 30cm of snow fell at Perisher in NSW yesterday, while Victoria's Mount Hotham received a 10cm dusting on Sunday.

Charlotte's Pass in the NSW Snowy Mountains also received a 10cm sprinkling of snow, prompting would-be bushwalkers to don clothing more suitable for skiing.

It was surprising to see the Kosciuszko Chalet Hotel blanketed with snow at this time of year, resort manager Michelle Lovius told The Australian yesterday. "I'm sitting inside in my scarf and beanie," she said. "When you walk in it, it's up past your ankles and it's just started snowing heavily again. "

In Sydney yesterday, there were blustery winds and unseasonably low temperatures of just 13C. The western suburb of Horsley Park recorded 9.8C and the Blue Mountains dropped to -2C.

SOURCE

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