Saturday, January 08, 2011

‘Ozone hole’ hoax was the preview for ‘Global Warming’

I have been pointing out for years that there is no sign of the "hole" shrinking so I am pleased to see below that reality is having some impact among climate scientists too -- JR

Dr. Wil Happer of Princeton wrote “The Montreal Protocol to ban freons was the warm-up exercise for the IPCC. Many current IPCC players gained fame then by stampeding the US Congress into supporting the Montreal Protocol. They learned to use dramatized, phony scientific claims like “ozone holes over Kennebunkport” (President Bush Sr’s seaside residence in New England). The ozone crusade also had business opportunities for firms like Dupont to market proprietary “ozone-friendly” refrigerants at much better prices than the conventional (and more easily used) freons that had long-since lost patent protection and were not a cheap commodity with little profit potential”.

Even James Lovelock agrees. James Lovelock formulated the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the biosphere is a self-regulating entity with the capacity to keep our planet healthy by controlling the chemical and physical environment. He later became concerned that global warming would upset the balance and leave only the arctic as habitable. He began to move off this position in 2007 suggesting that the Earth itself is in “no danger” because it would stabilize in a new state.

James Lovelock’s reaction to first reading about the stolen CRU emails in late 2009 was one of a true scientist:
“I was utterly disgusted. My second thought was that it was inevitable. It was bound to happen. Science, not so very long ago, pre-1960s, was largely vocational. Back when I was young, I didn’t want to do anything else other than be a scientist. They’re not like that nowadays. They don’t give a damn. They go to these massive, mass-produced universities and churn them out. They say: “Science is a good career. You can get a job for life doing government work.” That’s no way to do science.

I have seen this happen before, of course. We should have been warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science in that was so bad that something like 80% of the measurements being made during that time were either faked, or incompetently done.

Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I’m not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It’s the one thing you do not ever do. You’ve got to have standards.”

On a March 2010 Guardian interview, Lovelock opined “The great climate science centres around the world are more than well aware how weak their science is. If you talk to them privately they’re scared stiff of the fact that they don’t really know what the clouds and the aerosols are doing... We do need skepticism about the predictions about what will happen to the climate in 50 years, or whatever. It’s almost naive, scientifically speaking, to think we can give relatively accurate predictions for future climate. There are so many unknowns that it’s wrong to do it.”

Will Happer further elaborated “The Montreal Protocol may not have been necessary to save the ozone, but it had limited economic damage. It has caused much more damage in the way it has corrupted science. It showed how quickly a scientist or activist can gain fame and fortune by purporting to save planet earth. We have the same situation with CO2 now, but CO2 is completely natural, unlike freons. Planet earth is quite happy to have lots more CO2 than current values, as the geological record clearly shows. If the jihad against CO2 succeeds, there will be enormous economic damage, and even worse consequences for human liberty at the hands of the successful jihadists.”

LIKE GLOBAL WARMING THE DATA DOESN’T SUPPORT THE THEORY

The ozone hole has not closed off after we banned CFCs. See this story in Nature about how the Consensus about the Ozone Hole and Man’s Role (with CFCs) May Be Falling Apart.



The size of the hole has hardly changed since 1990, as you can see from NASA’s site

“As the world marks 20 years since the introduction of the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, Nature has learned of experimental data that threaten to shatter established theories of ozone chemistry. If the data are right, scientists will have to rethink their understanding of how ozone holes are formed and how that relates to climate change. Markus Rex, an atmosphere scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, did a double-take when he saw new data for the break-down rate of a crucial molecule, dichlorine peroxide (Cl2O2). The rate of photolysis (light-activated splitting) of this molecule reported by chemists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California1, was extremely low in the wavelengths available in the stratosphere - almost an order of magnitude lower than the currently accepted rate.

“This must have far-reaching consequences,” Rex says. “If the measurements are correct we can basically no longer say we understand how ozone holes come into being.” What effect the results have on projections of the speed or extent of ozone depletion remains unclear.

Other groups have yet to confirm the new photolysis rate, but the conundrum is already causing much debate and uncertainty in the ozone research community. “Our understanding of chloride chemistry has really been blown apart,” says John Crowley, an ozone researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. “Until recently everything looked like it fitted nicely,” agrees Neil Harris, an atmosphere scientist who heads the European Ozone Research Coordinating Unit at the University of Cambridge, UK. “Now suddenly it’s like a plank has been pulled out of a bridge.”

Yet like the cultists whose spacecraft didn’t arrive on the announced date, the government scientists find ways to postpone it and save their reputations (examples “Increasing greenhouse gases could delay, or even postpone indefinitely the recovery of stratospheric ozone in some regions of the Earth, a Johns Hopkins earth scientist suggests” here and “Scientists Find Antarctic Ozone Hole to Recover Later than Expected” here.

“The warmers are getting more and more like those traditional predictors of the end of the world who, when the event fails to happen on the due date, announce an error in their calculations and a new date.” Dr. John Brignell, Emeritus Engineering Professor at the University of Southampton, on Number Watch (May 1) PDF

SOURCE (See the original for links)





James Cameron - Hypocrite







“We cannot continue using our atmosphere as a garbage can”

“We cannot continue using our atmosphere as a garbage can,” said Jos Lelieveld, a German atmospheric chemist"

Apparently Jos is unaware of the fact nature dumps more than thirty times as much CO2 into the atmosphere as humans. He also appears unaware of the fact that humans depend on fossil fuels for their very existence.

CO2 is a fundamental component of life. Global warming alarmism is the garbage.

SOURCE






Al Gore in China: “Efficiency is the Number One Solution” Praises Their “Unusual Success”

"Efficiency" was a great claim of the interwar Fascists too. And the prewar Leftist fascination with eugenics (practiced in the USA and Sweden as well as in Nazi Germany) is a close cousin of the Greenie population limitation push -- JR

Al Gore, the man formerly the next President of the United States (as he likes to joke), is currently in China attending the Global Urban Development Forum on ways to tackle global warming and other ‘related issues,’ reports Bloomberg.

Addressing the forum in Beijing, Gore praised the communist dictatorship for their “unusual success” and stressed that when it comes to tackling global warming “efficiency is the number one solution”.

Gore applauded the way China had taken a “strategic approach” to addressing global warming, and called on the United States and other nations to emulate them, saying that redesigning cities in an ‘eco-friendly’ manner would be the “number one solution”

“We have to change our thinking and adopt a strategic approach and the United States and China could do no better than to focus on cities as the principal venue in which these changes can be made,”

As Alex Jones reported recently, the design of “eco-friendly” cities is one of the new hot topics being discussed as a “number one solution” to global warming. Forum for the Future, a London-based organization that advises governments as well as multi-national corporations has produced a short video to explain it’s vision of this ideal city of the future, complete with calorie-ration cards and carbon allowances.

Am I the only one who gets creeped-out by the way these people always have to talk like this? In terms of “efficiency” and “number one solution”? Maybe. But as John Dewey pointed out years ago, ideas have consequences.

To take just one example. Al Gore’s praise of the Chinese dictatorship’s approach to tackling global warming reminds me of what is still a little-known fact: that China’s “one-child” policy was launched as a direct result of the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” 1972 manifesto for the world.

As Columbia University professor, Susan Greenhalgh has extensively documented, Chinese scientists used the warnings and projections of the “Limits to Growth” manifesto to impose their one-child policy, including forced abortions up to nine months, and forced sterilizations:

"In 1978-89 the Song Group used the COR [Club of Rome] notion of an “optimal population” determined by its environmental “carrying capacity,” as well as control theory, to perform two sets of crucial calculations . . . Their quantitative research showed that the “only solution” was a policy to encourage all couples to have one child beginning immediately, regardless of the cost to individuals and society."

You might think – “Yeah, that was awful, but China’s not as brutal now as it was in the past. I mean, even people like Al Gore are praising their approach to solving global warming these days”.

But news reports from November 2010 show that China’s “efficiency” still extends to tactics such as kidnapping relatives and holding them in detention centres until pregnant mothers come in for abortions and forced sterilizations, as women’s magazine Marie Claire revealed recently in an investigative report:

"Wei, a bird-thin woman with bobbed hair, let lunch burn on the stove as she heard more. “My husband said we had broken the law by having two children. The authorities were imprisoning his brother until we were punished,” she says. “As soon as I learned it was about birth control , I began to cry and shake.”

Family-planning officials in the southern county of Puning, in Guangdong province, were going to shocking new extremes to catch and punish violators of the country’s infamous one-child policy: They were seizing family members of women who had given birth illegally and were holding them hostage. The aim? To coerce the women into submitting to sterilization. Says Wei, “The officials said there was only one way to get my brother-in-law released: I had to undergo forced sterilization.”

As Donna Laframboise has observed, such shocking revelations are made even more chilling when we remember that Ted Turner, Chairman of the UN Foundation, called for the world to follow China’s example at the recent Cancun Summit on global warming:

"Mr. Turner – a long-time advocate of population control – said the environmental stress on the Earth requires radical solutions, suggesting countries should follow China’s lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time. He added that fertility rights could be sold so that poor people could profit from their decision not to reproduce."

It’s interesting that the same phrase runs throughout all these comments from those at the forefront of global warming -”Only solution” / “radical solution” / “Number one solution” /”Final Solution” (okay, I added that last one). Perhaps the “solution” they have in mind is a climate tax on children?

Planned cities, optimum populations, carrying capacity, sustainable development. These are all euphemisms with no real scientific content, only ideological content. But then, ultimately, ideological content is “the number one solution”.

SOURCE (See the original for links)





IPCC correct one of their grossly misleading tables

But fail to apologize or even announce the change

In August last year we notified the IPCC (see HERE and HERE) of a series of errors with Table 10.2 of its Assessment Report Four, Working Group 2 report. These errors (listed HERE) included missing and incorrect references, incorrect and misleading claims about warming in the Himalaya and the astounding claim that temperatures in Sri Lanka were warming at a rate of 2 degrees per year!

The complete corrected version of table 10.2 can be found HERE. We have not investigated other claims in the table.

The errors were discussed in a post on WUWT titled Himalayan warming – pulling another thread from IPCC’s fragile tapestry. Comments in this post clearly identified the source of the error in Sri Lankan temperatures, finding reviewers comments were ignored at least two times.

It's great to see the IPCC finally clean up these errors, however as of 8 January 2011 there has been no acknowledgement of the error, no editorial statement explaining the changes the IPCC has made to its table, the changes are not listed in AR4 WGII errata, and no there has been no recognition of the role of ABC NEWS Watch and WUWT in assisting IPCC correct its report.

You may recall discovery of the errors arose when the ABC attempted to back up a claim in a report it sourced from the BBC that suggested temperatures were rising faster at Mount Everest than the rest of South Asia. When ABC were requested to provide details of the “Studies” they cited Table 10.2 from IPCC's AR4 Working Group 2 report.

However, contrary to ABC’s claims this table (see the old version above) showed that the area of fastest rising temperature in South Asia was Sri Lanka, not the Himalaya (and hence not Mt Everest). Both claims have now been shown to be erroneous. Interestingly the original BBC report "Sherpas warn ice melt is making Everest 'dangerous'", has never been corrected.

SOURCE (See the original for links and graphics)





EPA versus the courts

On Dec. 30, a federal appeals court froze new EPA regulations on greenhouse gases. The team representing the State of Texas in this appeal is also the team managing the largest Obamacare lawsuit in America, led by a lawyer from the Reagan administration. This appeal is the latest reminder that America expects good judges to uphold the rule of law and stop President Obama’s ongoing power grab.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued its first round of anti-business, job-killing carbon regulations last year. Those rules were to go into effect this year, and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson—President Obama’s handpicked EPA head—has said additional rounds of massive regulations will be forthcoming. These regulations give increasing power to EPA over every CO2 source in America. This includes every car, truck, furnace, chimney and lawnmower, as well as every factory, tractor and assembly line. It’s a massive power grab that will drive up the costs of everything you buy.

The Democrat-controlled Congress couldn’t pass a law claiming such sweeping power, even with huge majorities led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. What infuriates conservatives about EPA’s Big Brother monstrosity is that when even a liberal Democratic Congress refuses to pass such a law, one of President Obama’s agencies just unilaterally claims the power to do it all by itself, bypassing Congress.

(To be fair, it must also be noted that in the worst administrative-law case in history, in 2007 the Supreme Court narrowly held that the EPA might have power under the Clean Air Act (CAA) to control carbon emissions. This narrow 5-4 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA is roundly criticized as a terrible decision that should be overruled.)

The State of Texas stood up against this power grab with a legal challenge. EPA did not allow a public “notice and comment” period as required by the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), instead summarily overriding Texas’ longstanding environmental regulations.

So Texas appealed, and on Dec. 30, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued an order staying the implementation of EPA’s new regulations. The D.C. Circuit’s temporary stay ordered the parties to submit briefs over the next few days to begin the review process of EPA’s rules.

Interestingly, Texas retained the law firm Baker & Hostetler, and specifically one of its partners, David Rivkin, to represent the Lone Star State before the D.C. Circuit. Rivkin is a veteran of the Reagan administration and a prominent figure in conservative legal circles.

Rivkin is also the lead counsel for the multistate lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare, currently being fought in the federal district court in Florida. That case was argued on Dec. 16, where a decision is expected within the next two months. After that decision, Rivkin will represent Florida and the other states (including Texas, incidentally) on appeal.

With this EPA appeal, now Rivkin’s team at Baker & Hostetler is spearheading the conservative pushback on a second front in the fight against Team Obama. Obamacare is illegal because it violates the Constitution to require people to buy healthcare insurance, to cripple local businesses that don’t offer insurance, and to coerce the states through a sweeping overhaul of the Medicaid system. The EPA’s new regulations are illegal because they didn’t follow the requirements of federal law in opening the rulemaking process to the public for scrutiny and comment. Both cases involve illegal power grabs by President Obama and his lieutenants.

This federal appeal in Texas v. EPA is the latest reminder that over the next two years Americans must look to the courts to uphold the rule of law and restrain the runaway power of this administration. It’s also a reminder that conservatives cannot succeed in beating this administration unless we fight for judges who will faithfully uphold the rule of law in the courts.

SOURCE




Australia: Another millionaire backer for the Greens

There is a lot of this in America. Elitists stick together

A MULTIMILLIONAIRE internet entrepreneur worried about climate change bankrolled the Greens' federal election surge last year by making the largest single political donation in Australian history.

Wotif founder Graeme Wood, whose wealth is estimated at $372 million, gave $1.6 million to fund the Greens' television advertising campaign, helping to significantly increase votes for the party in key states. The Greens will hold the balance of power in the Senate from mid-year.

Mr Wood's benevolence helped the Greens, led by Senator Bob Brown, boost their national profile. They captured their first lower house seat and, with key rural independents, gained increased leverage over government policy.

His donation easily surpasses the previous record for a single private political gift - $1 million handed to the Liberals at the 2004 election by conservative British politician Lord Michael Ashcroft.

Mr Wood's money enabled the Greens to run ads on high rotation on TV for the first time. Independent market research after the August election found the ads contributed to significantly higher swings to the Greens in the states where ads ran most heavily.

The donation will be revealed early next month when the Australian Electoral Commission releases the annual return lodged by the Australian Greens. Most major parties will not reveal big donations for the federal election until February 2012, when they disclose funding for 2010-11. But the Greens will effectively disclose their donations a year earlier under an internal three-month rule.

Mr Wood has emerged as one of Australia's leading philanthropists in recent years, having given $8 million to the University of Queensland, where he graduated, and another $15 million to establish the university's Global Change Institute.

His private Graeme Wood Foundation holds about $20 million in assets and gives away about $1 million a year to a range of arts, youth and environmental causes, including helping to buy 27,000 hectares of Tasmanian native forest from timber company Gunns last year.

Four years ago, Mr Wood stepped back from executive duties at wotif, the online travel company he founded in 1999, but he remains a director and retains a 23 per cent stake, valued at $222 million based on yesterday's share price of $4.63.

Speaking exclusively to The Age, Mr Wood said his donation was motivated by disappointment with Labor and Coalition policies on climate change and the environment. "I didn't think either of those parties were being effective," he said. "They were being driven by people with vested interests."

Helping the Greens to secure the balance of the power in the Senate was a "critical step," he said.

The Greens' vote tended to drop away in the final weeks of an election campaign as the bigger parties outspent them on advertising, and in May Mr Wood approached Senator Brown to propose that he help fund a "proper" Greens advertising campaign. In the end, Mr Wood provided the vast bulk of the campaign funding himself.

Mr Wood denied either he or wotif had anything to gain from his donation. "There's nothing in it for me financially," he said. "I'm not looking for any favours."

Senator Brown told The Age he would be "forever grateful" for Mr Wood's donation, which he said was selfless and hazardous. "There's nothing that Graeme could possibly gain personally out of this," he said, including influence over policy. "Not ever has Graeme said, 'I'd like you to do such and such'."

It was a historic election result for the Greens, transforming them from a minor party to the third party in Australian politics. In both houses of Parliament, the Greens secured the highest vote ever achieved by a third party in postwar political history, including the Democrats' best results, in 1990, and the DLP decades earlier.

The Greens' vote in the Senate rose much more in the states where the ads played in higher rotation - particularly South Australia (6.8 per cent), Queensland (5.5 per cent), Western Australia (4.7 per cent) and Victoria (4.3 per cent) - than in the states where there was less investment, particularly New South Wales, where the swing to the Greens was under 2 per cent because there was not enough money to cover the state.

SOURCE

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1 comment:

Jamal Munshi said...

The evidence does not support the Rowland-Molina theory of ozone depletion on which the Montreal Protocol is based. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2719537