New PBS series

See here. It is called "Journey To Planet Earth" and is just the usual Greenie hysteria, despite the veneer of factual reporting. But who expects anything else from PBS anyway? They are promoting DVDs of it as an educational aid, sadly.





New Climate Alarmist Movies About To Hit As Animals Freeze To Death And Barry Eats Well

Remember around 15 years ago, when the alarmists were still somewhat rational, and they came up with the brilliant plan to "spread awareness", rather than actually taking action in their own lives? And, if Something Wasn't Done, winters would be a thing of the past and we would all burn? Flash forward to today, and, nothing has changed

Two new documentary movies are due for broader release this month in the United States. Two movies that want to save the world, but, if their trailers are anything go by, their proffered solutions are radically different to one another. Carbon Nation is about technofix, "We already have the technology to combat most of the worst-case scenarios of climate change, and it is very good business as well." Whereas I Am is about community; "contrary to conventional thinking, cooperation and not competition, may be nature's most fundamental operating principle." To grossly generalise, one movie explores product, whilst the other people. Of course, the real solution will. no doubt, be an intimate blend of the two.

Both movies discuss ways that Someone Else can take action, preferably at the hands of Big Daddy Government. But, excuse me for being rather skeptical, but, doesn't showing movies use quite a bit of power, generating vast amounts of CO2? All the people heading to the theaters in their fossil fueled vehicles, electricity for the movie house, and so on? Perhaps instead of doing this, they could all live their lives like it is 1299, like they want everyone else to do. Meanwhile

As record-breaking cold weather strikes throughout North America, dropping snow and bringing cities to a standstill, humans certainly aren't the only ones feeling the chill. In Northern Mexico, the lowest temperatures in 60 years have claimed the lives of thirty-five animals housed at the Serengeti Zoo, located in the state of Chihuahua. The incident raises concerns not only of the impacts severe weather on vulnerable species, but of the quality of protection received by animals confined to zoos throughout the world.

You do know what caused this, right?

Regardless of whether negligence is ultimate deemed to have contributed to the animals' deaths or not, such an incidence raises concerns as the the quality of protection being offer to zoo animals throughout the world, particularly as weather extremes become an all too frequent occurrence.

And the phrase "weather extremes" is part of the Warmists' anthropogenic global warming lexicon these days, because someone, say, Kevin Aylward, drove a car, and those greenhouse gases, made it so hot it became cold. Or, it could be President Obama's fault

The rest of the menu for the 100 or so guests at the White House bash is tailgate-friendly even if served inside the Executive Mansion: bratwurst, kielbasa, cheeseburgers, deep-dish pizza and Buffalo wings with sides of German potato salad, twice-baked potatoes and assorted chips and dips.

Besides the fact that this totally goes against Michelle Obama's eat better nanny-stateism, eating meat is bad for globull warming. Remember, though, in Liberal World, it is all about someone else changing their behavior, not the person who is pushing the meme.

SOURCE




Warmist hysteric going to the Tabloids to be heard

The fact that his 2011 pronouncements are the opposite of what he said in 2004 doesn't seem to bother him

It used to be that scientists communicated their knowledge through reliable professional journals, which then communicated to the media.

Apparently climate scientists are getting increasingly desperate, and so they are now going directly to the very bottom of the media chain and giving interviews to the mass-market, most sensationalist of the tabloids. Such is the latest with James E. Overland and Germany’s no. 1 tabloid Bild in a story titled:

Who would have ever thought it? Scientists from (once) one of the the world’s most prestigious scientific organisations, now have to go to the yellowist of tabloids to be heard.

Bild, the flagship publication owned by Axel Springer, has a circulation of over 4 million, more than the Wall Street Journal and USA Today combined. It is the paper of choice among the lesser educated in Germany.

In the Bild interview James Overland warned: “Things are going to get a lot worse.”

In the past, warm events were cited as mounting evidence of man-made global warming. But as these events diminish and cold events start piling up, desperate global warming scientists like Overland have been forced to concoct dubious science theories, and now claim the cold events are suddenly sure signs of warming. This is what Overland tells Bild over and over. Bild starts with: Now a US climate scientist warns: ‘This turbulent weather is only the beginning!’ “

Overland claims that all the cold weather can be explained by a newly found theory: The melting of the Arctic sea has led to a complete collapse of Arctic and Northern Hemisphere air patterns – “the biggest collapse since the start of weather records 145 years ago.”

Overland warns: "The disappearance of the currents paired with the extreme winters are signs of something bigger and organised. It is almost frightening.”

It obvious by now that Overland’s “climate science” and tabloids were made for each other.

Bild asked if there is any data to support this. Overland says: "We still don’t have any absolute evidence, but we have clearly measured that there is 30% less ice cover in the Arctic.”

Therein lies the beauty of tabloid science. Proof? Evidence? Data? That’s for scientific journals. Tabloids don’t need that sort of stuff. Bild then asks Overland about what to expect in the future:

"In 30 years 80% of the Arctic ice may be gone. The extreme weather will intensify further. And the dramatic changes of the atmospheric system are obvious.”

And adds:

"All our climate models show that the unpredictability of the weather is increasing dramatically as our planet heats up.”

He claims the models show it. They all but confirm the science. But then he adds the models are not able to detect surprises. For example, he was surprised by the 2007 Arctic ice shrinkage. And now they have just found the latest surprise – unforeseen by their models: "And now we are experiencing the next surprise, the collapse of the Arctic current and the flow of cold air to the south. It is alarming. We are entering new meteorological territory: The extreme weather is going to get a lot worse.“

Everyone in Germany knows who is behind this Bild snowjob – Stefan Rahmstorf of the alarmist, science front-group Potsdam Institute For Climate Impact Research (PIK).

That’s the institute that came out with a similar bogus theory to explain the cold winters, read here. But later even Rahmstorf backpedalled on this dubious Arctic sea ice – cold winter connection, read here. Yet Overland thinks even science rejected by Rahmstorf is good enough.

If you can’t make the case in the professional journals, then you take it to the tabloids and the masses and hope that mass popularity will win the day for your alarmist views.

It really is sad to see a scientist fall to that level of scientific destitution. Postulating is one thing, but calling postulates fact without evidence is quackery. Period.

In case there are any remaining questions as to the seriousness of Bild, here’s what they wrote in 2007: "But the heating of the earth is accelerating! If it gets 2 degrees warmer than today, then hundreds of millions of people will thirst and starve to death. Or they’ll drown in flood waves from swelling oceans.”

Like I say, made for each other.

SOURCE (See the original for links)





Topical Storm Alert: 'Climate Week' has formed, and may be intensifying ahead of its expected UK landfall in March

Climate Week, 21 - 27 March 2011 in Britain

The National Association of Head Teachers is said to be supporting it, and so is Tesco, Kellogs, Aviva, EDF, and the Royal Bank of Scotland. And a great many others - a veritable roll call of the establishment.

This cyclone's energy is being raised and organised by a committee of a few seasoned organisers and a lot of fresh young ones. They remind me just a bit of my own good self way back in the 70s, when Ehrlich and the Club of Rome were persuading us that we were doomed, would be lucky to see the year 2000, and even if we did, we'd not be having much fun, what with the starving, fighting, freezing, and choking and all. Except, I don't think I looked nearly as good nor as cheerful as they do. But then I was an angry young man attacking the establishment's views, while they are supporting them.

The CEO is Kevin, who obviously is quick and light on his feet to complete this sort of manoeuvre - the leap across a change of government:

"From 2007 to 2009 Kevin sat on the Council on Social Action chaired by the Prime Minister, and on the government’s Talent and Enterprise Task Force. He chaired the Enterprise Campaign Coalition and was on the selection committee of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion. He currently sits on the steering group of the Big Society Network launched by the Prime Minister, David Cameron in July 2010."

Phil is Head of Communications, and is clearly into green and good causes:

"Phil has worked on numerous award-winning campaigns for social and environmental causes, including Friends of the Earth’s Big Ask , WWF’s Earth Hour, and Orange RockCorps, an initiative uniting young people with their community through music. He helped launch eco blockbuster Age of Stupid with the greenest ever world premiere and organised the UK’s first prison gig at HM Pentonville to highlight the problem of young male suicide. He is a trustee of Dramatic Need, a groundbreaking arts charity supported by Oscar-winning director (and fellow trustee) Danny Boyle, which works with severely underprivileged children in South Africa and Rwanda."

There are 16 more, several of whom seem to have held down more ordinary jobs, and several are just setting out on their journeys to help us all out, and get paid for it at the same time. Not that money is important when you have a planet to save.

Actually, let me rephrase that: 'the hundreds of billions of dollars, pounds, and euros diverted into climate change good works of one kind or another, are as nothing compared to the losses they tell us we would see if we hadn't spent all that money on them'.

In particular, we might not have learned how to adjust the thermostat on our global warming system, to return climate to the idyllic past of, say the 19th century? Or perhaps we'd choose the Little Ice Age which spanned the 18th century, or the Medieval Warm Period that preceded it. Or perhaps even a return to the golden days of the Climatic Optimum, a few thousand years earlier in our beloved Holocene, when mean temperatures were several degrees higher than in industrial times and humanity thrived like never before.

Anyway, this is to daydream...let's get back to the Topical Storm now heading our way:

"Climate Week is a supercharged national occasion that offers an annual renewal of our ambition and confidence to combat climate change. It is for everyone wanting to do their bit to protect our planet and create a secure future.

Climate Week will shine a spotlight on the many positive steps already being taken in workplaces and communities across Britain. The power of these real, practical examples – the small improvements and the big innovations – will then inspire millions more people.

Thousands of businesses, charities, schools, councils and others will run events during Climate Week on 21-27 March 2011. They will show what can be achieved, share ideas and encourage thousands more to act during the rest of the year.

You can help create a massive movement for change by making Climate Week happen where you are. Ask an organisation or group you know, such as your workplace or local school, to run an event."

Well, I wonder how many will? Climategate was a bit of a bummer in late 2009, and the ice and snow and sundry political farces in and around Copenhagen that December can't have helped much. The Met Office has given climate prediction for just a few weeks ahead a bit of a bad name in 2010, issuing secret forecasts of impressive vagueness at huge expense to poor old HMG, which ran out of cash in the cold weather funds before January 2011 got underway. The public has been up to its ears in global warming of late, and hasn't liked it one little bit.

There may even be some who have been convinced that CO2 controls climate, and that we'd all be a nice bit warmer if only we could only get more of the stuff to stay up in the air. Somehow I foresee that their projects and events and suggestions will not see the light of day as 'Climate Week' strikes, and we are deluged with the establishment's perspective instead. But wait! Have the Met Office predicted such a deluge for late March? If they have, perhaps there is yet still hope ...

SOURCE




Fury builds over blackouts caused by de-industrialization of America

That's the headline at News-Worthy Information, which leads to the same headline from the original article at Prison Planet. I'm not particularly enthused about citing PP as a source, considering all their conspiracy theories and Trutherism, yet, they happen to have a point

Fury is building over rolling nationwide blackouts triggered by the Obama administration’s deliberate agenda to block the construction of new coal-fired plants, as local energy companies struggle to meet Americans’ power demands amidst some of the coldest weather seen in decades.

- As we reported yesterday, four hospitals in Texas reacted furiously after they were hit with planned outages despite being promised they would be spared even as power to Super Bowl venues remains uninterrupted.

And they provide many more examples, leading to

Cold weather is not the primary culprit behind the power outages that have hit many areas of the country this week. The real blame lies with the Obama administration’s deliberate war against the efforts of local power companies to meet America’s energy needs by building new plants, the vast majority of which have been blocked by judges, governors and the EPA over the last four years at the behest of the Obama administration in the name of preventing global warming.

Remember when Obama said this?

"Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket," Obama told the Chronicle . "Coal-powered plants, you know, natural gas, you name it, whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers."

Well, his administration, along with Democrats in Congress and in State governments, have worked hard to destroy our energy infrastructure. In fact, a major source of energy, coal fired plants, have been abandoned in large numbers since 2001. No new plants have been started in the last two years. Good thing we have solar, wind, and hydrothermal, with the panels covered with snow, turbines frozen solid, and waterways frozen. On the bright side, more people will freeze to death, meaning less people on the planet, something the extreme envirowackos/climate alarmists should be pleased over.

SOURCE





Fish Wrap: Damned You Evil Republicans Who Want Dirty Air!

And by dirty air, they mean carbon dioxide, a trace gas that is necessary for life on Earth: Clean Air Under Siege

Shortly after he entered the Senate in 2007, John Barrasso told his Wyoming constituents that the country’s biggest need was an energy policy to deal with carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.

That was then. In lockstep with other Senate Republicans, he helped kill last year’s energy and climate bill. Now he has introduced a bill that would bar the Environmental Protection Agency and any other part of the federal government from regulating carbon pollution.

Oooh, scary! "Pollution." You know, the type that plant life loves. The stuff most other life on Earth expels during respiration.

Congress’s failure to enact a climate bill means that the E.P.A.’s authority to regulate these gases — an authority conferred by a landmark Supreme Court decision in 2007 — is, for now, the only tool available to the federal government to combat global warming.

An authority not conferred by the Legislative branch.

The modest regulations the agency has already proposed, plus stronger ones it will issue later this year, should lead to the retirement of many of the nation’s older, dirtier coal-fired power plants and a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions.

Which would do what, exactly? Other than cause rolling brownouts and blackouts, since it is difficult to get power from solar panels covered with snow and wind turbines whose hydraulic fluids are frozen. I guess the Fish Wrap editorial board missed that globull warming has made it so cold that manholes are exploding in NY City. But, they are worried about all sorts of bills in Congress that would weaken the EPA's non-existent authority to regulate greenhouse gases, which have caused 92 roofs to collapse in Mass., snow in West Palm Beach, and farmers worried about crop survival. Oh, and Warmists spinning like tops, with their "AGW causes cold and snow" meme, which, oops, is bat guano.

That is just obstruction by another name. It would delay modernization and ensure that more carbon is dumped into the atmosphere. History shows that regulatory delays have a way of becoming permanent.

Modernization, eh? To.....what? Enviro-weenies block the building of alternative energy plants or their transmission lines. You liberals won't actually allow the building of new nuclear plants. France beats us on the use of nuclear. France! I'm not a big fan of coal, but, America needs power, not stupid pronouncements from climate hypocrites sitting comfortably in their Manhattan offices. Say, what happened to all that Stimulus money that was supposed to be used to modernize the energy infrastructure? Perhaps the Times should investigate that.

SOURCE




At last: Unrest in Egypt due to global warming!

We knew it was coming



Paul Krugman joins the crowd who think that they can see the signal of greenhouse emissions in noisy, short-term data on food prices, and then construct a chain of causality to the ongoing unrest in the Middle East. Such tenuous claims of attribution have about as much scientific standing as Pat Robertson saying that Hurricane Katrina was the result of the vengeful wrath of God.

Here is what Krugman writes today: "The evidence does, in fact, suggest that what we’re getting now is a first taste of the disruption, economic and political, that we’ll face in a warming world. And given our failure to act on greenhouse gases, there will be much more, and much worse, to come."

The figure at the top of this post is from a paper by Daniel Sumner, of the University of California-Davis (here in PDF), in which he seeks to place the 2006-2008 increase in grain prices into historical context. Current grain prices are at a similar level to the peak in 2007. Sumner's paper also has a figure going back to the mid-1800s. Good luck disentangling a long-term climate signal in the long-term data, which shows a significant decline in grain prices, much less attributing such a signal to a particular cause. Efforts to link short-term wiggles to the effects of greenhouse gas emissions go well beyond the canons of empirical science, to use a polite euphemism from The Climate Fix.

Sumner concludes: "The percentage price increases for grains from 2006 through 2008 were among the largest in the 140-year history for which U.S. data are readily available (figure 2). That said, at the end of 2008, real prices of grain remained near those of just two decades earlier (figure 3). Government policymakers often fail to appreciate the strength of forces driving commodity prices, and policies often exacerbate market imbalances or use commodity market flux as a rationalization for income transfers to favored groups. Looking forward, relatively minor demand-side adjustments to biofuels policy may allow grain prices to moderate significantly. However, assured renewal of longterm productivity growth requires renewed commitments to investments in agriculture science."

Like Pat Roberson's attribution of Katrina to the wrath of God in punishment for our sins, Krugman's attribution of unrest in the Middle East to the wrath of Climate in punishment for our sins is in one sense just emotive commentary from an uninformed pundit. On the other hand, to the extent that Krugman's views shape policy, they are simply misguided and misleading.

SOURCE (See the original for links)

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