Another appeal to authority

That's all Warmists have got. There are NO facts on their side, just speculation. Warmists must be the most authoritarian group on earth today -- excepting only the few surviving Communist countries. So they keep on trying to impress people with one pompous meeting after another

But they are not doing too well. Could they find only 17 Nobelists to put their names on the dotted line? Academics are mostly Leftist so that is a pretty poor turnout.

And here's the funny bit: There were originally 50 "experts" at the symposium -- mostly drawn from among the usual suspects. What happened to the other 33? Why were they not asked to sign? Is there a dawning realization that they no longer have much credibility? Are we at the last ditch where only Nobelists will do now? Forgive me while I laugh!

On Wednesday, 17 Nobel laureates who gathered in Stockholm have published a remarkable memorandum, asking for “fundamental transformation and innovation in all spheres and at all scales in order to stop and reverse global environmental change”. The Stockholm Memorandum concludes that we have entered a new geological era: the Anthropocene, where humanity has become the main driver of global change. The document states:

"Science makes clear that we are transgressing planetary boundaries that have kept civilization safe for the past 10,000 years. [...]

We can no longer exclude the possibility that our collective actions will trigger tipping points, risking abrupt and irreversible consequences for human communities and ecological systems.

We cannot continue on our current path. The time for procrastination is over. We cannot afford the luxury of denial"

The memorandum results from a 3-day symposium (attended also by the king of Sweden) on the intertwined problems of poverty, development, ecosystem deterioration and the climate crisis. In the memorandum, the Nobel laureates call for immediate emergency measures as well as long-term structural solutions, and they give specific recommendations in eight key priority areas. For example in climate policy, they recommend to:

"Keep global warming below 2ºC, implying a peak in global CO2 emissions no later than 2015 and recognise that even a warming of 2ºC carries a very high risk of serious impacts and the need for major adaptation efforts."

The memorandum was handed over to the members of the UN high-level panel on global sustainability, who traveled to Stockholm in order to discuss it with the Nobel laureates and experts at the symposium.

SOURCE






Hate speech, political violence and climate change

The Australian Greenie writing below unconvincingly tries to brand two prominent conservatives as hate speakers and then manages to find only two lone hate-speakers, the deranged Loughner and some other loner. And as for quoting the lightweight and self-contradictory David Neiwert, see here. And as for the sensationalist SPLC! Exaggerated scares are their fundraisers.

Our Greenie's lack of hard data leaves him entirely reliant on recycling judgments by others (including members of the Obama administration) that are as shallow as his own. So his fancied "culture of hate" turns out to be a mirage.

He makes no mention of the extremely hostile utterances by Greenies about skeptics. No mention at all of prominent Warmists like James Hansen who compared coal trains to Nazi death trains, thus helping to excite febrile rage among some gullible young Brits -- rage which they acted out by causing what little damage they could to Kingsnorth power station. When has a skeptic acted out any rage against Warmists?

And how about this little bit of hate-speech, also from the site which hosts the rant below?

"Precisely the same pseudo-scientific “institutes,” using the same pseudo-scientific jargon and the same pseudo-scientific “conferences” are now seeking to create the appearance of a “debate” about the fundamentals of climate science. Indeed, the very same people - yes, the same individuals - who were involved in manufacturing doubt about the link between smoking and cancer are now also involved in manufacturing doubt about climate science"

So skeptics are "pseudo-scientific" and "manufacturing doubt" like the hated tobacco industry. Identifying anybody with tobacco is hate speech coming from a Greenie.

And who were those "same individuals" who were doubters about both tobacco AND global warming? There are none. It is a lie. The only individual whom Warmists sometimes refer to is Fred Singer, who once pointed out some dubious EPA statistics about SIDESTREAM smoke -- criticisms which were subsequently resoundingly confirmed. See also here and here and here and here and here and here

I could go on -- mentioning for instance the hostile emails and comments that we skeptics constantly get from Warmists -- but I would end up writing an even longer article than the one below if I did. The comments attached to the original article cover both sides of the issue, however -- including some juicy hate-speech against skeptics. I have reproduced only part of the article below but I doubt that much has been lost in my doing so

"If politicians are intent on whipping up a lynch mob to divert attention from their own culpability, it is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies." -- Miranda Devine.

"This is not some nice little debate. This is war." -- Tom DeWeese, American Policy Center, think tank linked to Exxon-Mobil and Koch Industries.

Hate speech seems to pose three serious threats to the green movement. Firstly, it may lead to acts of political violence directed against politicians, leaders or activists. Secondly, hate speech undermines the constructive political discourse we need in order to deal with climate change. Thirdly, hate speech is the leading edge of a dangerous, new species of politics that is emerging in the USA.

We are dealing with hate speech when death threats are made towards a group (or an individual based on his or her membership of a group); for example, when directed against US President Barack Obama on the basis that he is an African-American. I propose that hate speech is present in Miranda Devine’s slippery quote above, in which she sneaks a proposal to lynch greenies behind a hypothetical IF-THEN clause.

Hate speech is shifting our culture, creating a social licence to commit political violence against people who belong to designated groups: Jews, greenies, Muslims, progressives of any stripe. It is part of the deliberate political programme of the extreme right in the USA, and is funded by various ‘philanthropists’, most notably the Koch brothers, who own America’s biggest private corporation, Koch Industries (a major polluter).

The issue of hate speech and violence crystallised early this year, after the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. On 8 January 2011 a rightwing assassin shot Congresswoman Giffords in the head, killed 6 people, and injured another 13. Giffords is hated for being Jewish, pro-choice and supporting community solar energy (and despite her relatively conservative positions on immigration and in support of gun rights).

The point is that the culture of hate erodes the social taboo against political violence and reinforces the ‘intuitive’ worldview of the mob. Professor Rod Tiffen of the University of Sydney says that the political parties and the Murdoch media work in tandem to drive populism. He writes, “Together they form an outrage industry that absents proportion, reason and reasonableness, and where it is difficult – soon, perhaps, near impossible – to have a measured debate of policy options.”

David Neiwert is a US journalist who specialises in investigations of extremists. His 2009 book The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right explains how the conservatives got as crazy as they are and where they are headed.

The Eliminationists cites the story of Jim Adkisson, who killed two people and wounded seven in an act of extremist political violence in July 2008. Adkisson wrote, "Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals... Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House...”.

Neiwert believes it is a logical step from the right-wing extremism of Fox News and sections of The Republican party to get to violence. If greenies and liberals are in a global conspiracy with climate scientists, Jews, bankers and the UN to enslave the West, then it makes ‘logical’ sense to eliminate them. Ever since the Exceptional Case Study Project, the Secret Service has implemented protective security using behavioural analysis of these ‘logical’ precursors to assassination.

SOURCE




New paper shows significant natural climate change from ocean oscillations

A paper published online today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds a strong influence of shifts in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) on changes in snow cover of the distant Tibetan Plateau over the past 200 years. Major shifts occurred in the 1840s, 1880s, 1920s, and 1960s with CO2 levels well below Hansen's fictitious "safe limit" of 350 ppm.

Ocean oscillations such as the AMO are not incorporated in climate models, but nonetheless have large effects upon climate change as demonstrated by this paper and others.

Meanwhile, the IPCC claims they can't explain climate change based on natural forces, allows no competing hypotheses, and thus proclaims man-made CO2 as the default climate control knob, while conveniently ignoring ocean oscillations and other natural influences.

Although ocean oscillations are poorly understood and scant research is being done to understand this large natural climate forcing, the IPCC and fellow alarmists cannot rightfully claim that only man-made CO2 explains climate change over the past century.

The paper also finds not surprisingly that cold phases are associated with more snow and warm phases with less snow, making a mockery of the claims of Jeff Masters, Mark "death spiral" Serreze, Al Gore and others that warming causes more snowfall.


The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) follows a quasi-60-year cycle

GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 38, L10703, 4 PP., 2011

Decadal variability in snow cover over the Tibetan Plateau during the last two centuries

By C. Shen et al.

Based on the coherency in decadal variability between the ice core data and the observed snow cover over the Tibetan Plateau during recent decades, we used three available ice core data to characterize the snow cover variability of the last 200 years. The analysis suggests that the snow cover exhibits significant decadal variability with major shifts around 1840s, 1880s, 1920s, and 1960s. Its variations are found to be closely correlated with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation: Cool/warm phases coincide with large/small snow cover. A plausible mechanism linking the North Atlantic climate to Asian monsoon is presented.

SOURCE




There's no global warming but there is some Arctic warming. Why?

Hansen doesn't know but ocean current oscillations explain it

NASA’s James Hansen (Hansen et al 2007 “Climate simulations for 1880–2003 with GISS modelE” Clim Dyn (2007) 29:661–696 observed that the climate model was not correctly simulating the 1930s-1940s warm period in the global average temperature:

“It may be fruitless to search for an external forcing to produce peak warmth around 1940.

It is shown below that the observed maximum is due almost entirely to temporary warmth in the Arctic. Such Arctic warmth could be a natural oscillation (Johannessen et al. 2004), possibly unforced.

Indeed, there are few forcings that would yield warmth largely confined to the Arctic. Candidates might be soot blown to the Arctic from industrial activity at the outset of World War II, or solar forcing of the Arctic Oscillation (Shindell et al. 1999; Tourpali et al. 2005) that is not captured by our present model. Perhaps a more likely scenario is an unforced ocean dynamical fluctuation with heat transport to the Arctic and positive feedbacks from reduced sea ice.”

So Hansen asserts that the previous warming cycle was natural (perhaps “solar forcing of the Arctic Oscillation”), but the current warming cycle is due to CO2. And yet the current “global” warming has also been “largely confined to the Arctic”.

The following figure shows the global temperature change from 1978 to 2006 for the lower troposphere from satellite data. Most of the warming has been in the Arctic.



The following figure is from the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) Figure 9.6 (2007). It shows the change in temperature (C per decade) by latitude. The black line shows the observed temperature, the blue band shows the output of the computer models including only natural factors, whereas the pink band shows the output of computer models including anthropogenic CO2. Notice that the models without CO2 (blue shaded area) can explain all of the warming for most of the world up to 30 degrees north latitude. This figure also shows that the warming is mainly in the Arctic.



So it is Hansen’s and other alarmists’ position that these two nearly identical Arctic warming cycles have two completely different causes – 1930s = natural; 1990s = CO2.

Much more HERE




LOL! "Green" Spain

On what might politely be called "non-economic reasoning", Spain's Leftist government spent huge amounts of their people's money on "renewable" energy and "Green jobs". The result was predictable and predicted

They call themselves "youth without a future" - young Spaniards frustrated by their inability to start a career, earn a steady wage and move out of their parents' homes.

And for the past week they have fuelled nightly demonstrations in Madrid and dozens of other towns and cities as part of a grass-roots protest movement organised on the Internet that has tapped into long-simmering grievances which have worsened with Spain's economic crisis.

The demonstrations ahead of local elections tomorrow have drawn tens of thousands, including unemployed of all ages and pensioners angry over the government's economic policies. But young people make up the vast majority.

Paula Mendez Sena, a 24-year-old architect by training, said she was taking part because she has been unemployed since graduating. Her 25-year-old partner who has an engineering degree is also out of work.

"At our ages our parents had jobs, a house and children. When are we going to have work and everything our parents had? If I think about it I feel like crying" she said at Madrid's central Puerta del Sol square as some of the dozens of demonstrators who camped out there overnight rested on sleeping bags nearby.

Handmade signs posted on the walls of stores in the square reflect the anger felt by many youths. "If you don't let us dream, we won't let you sleep," read one prominent cardboard sign.

Inspired partly by the youth uprisings in North Africa, the movement is organised on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter where it has tens of thousands of followers.

"The revolutions in Arab nations demonstrated that collective action can crystallize change," said Pablo Padilla, a 22-year-old anthropology student who is a leading activist with "Youth Without a Future", one of the groups convening the demonstrations. "What doesn't lead to change is sitting on the sofa," add Padilla, who began a three-month internship at a website in April that pays just 300 euros ($424) a month after spending a year and a half out of work.

Jose Feliz Tezanos, a sociologist at Madrid's UNED university, said the Internet has provided disgruntled youths with a "meeting place" where they can organise that did not exist before. "Social networking sites are the breeding ground for the movement. The environment is not explosive, but it is flammable. A spark would be all it takes to set off signficant conflicts," he said.

Police detained 19 people for disorderly conduct and damage to public property early on Tuesday when they cleared the roughly 150 youths who had camped out at Madrid's Puerta de Sol square.

The nightly protests have since grown in size and police have not moved to clear the square. The demonstrators say they plan to stay in the square until Sunday when Spain holds municipal and regional elections.

While Spain's youth unemployment rate has long been much higher than that for the general population, it has soared since the Spanish economy went into a tailspin following the collapse of a property bubble in 2008.

The jobless rate for those under 25 stood at 44.6 percent in February, more than twice the average for the country and the highest youth unemployment rate in the European Union.

Mr Tezano estimates that two-thirds of those with a job find themselves in a "precarious work situation" - on temporary contracts or low-paid internships.

Government spending cuts to slash the public deficit and reforms intended to revive the economy, such as changes to the labour code that makes it easier to fire workers and the decision to raise the retirement age to 67 from 65, have added to young people's anxiety about their future.

"They are cutting all the rights which cost our parents and grandparents blood and sweat to earn," said 32-year-old Claudia Ayala, who is working part-time at a shop while she looks for a job related to her degree. "Spain has been putting up with this situation but it reaches the point where you have to say 'enough'. And that moment has come."

SOURCE





Green taxes are killing the British steel industry -- and more

PRESSURE on Britain to cut its carbon emissions cost 1,500 jobs yesterday – and they will not be the last, the Government has been warned. Tata Steel announced the redundancies at its Scunthorpe and Teesside plants, blaming ­climate change legislation required by Brussels and the UK’s new Climate Change Act. The prospect of higher energy costs aimed at reducing carbon emissions by imposing limits would push the price of British steel to uncompetitive levels.

Karl-Ulrich Köhler, head of European operations for Tata, Britain’s largest steelmaker, said: “EU carbon legislation threatens to impose huge additional costs on the steel industry. “Besides, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about the level of further unilateral carbon cost rises the UK Government is planning. These measures risk undermining our competitiveness and we must make ourselves stronger in preparation for them.”

Godfrey Bloom, MEP for Scunthorpe and Ukip’s business spokesman, said: “The mad drive to Islington-friendly green enery is driving jobs out of the north. You cannot pile billions of pounds of extra costs on industry without a price being paid. “That price is the livelihoods of steel workers. The Government and the EU are dangerous, damaging and deluded if they think that throwing people on to the scrapheap of unemployment will effect the sea level in Fiji.”

He attacked Energy Secretary Chris Huhne and the EU over ­“misguided” legislation and “confusing targets” that made a bad commercial situation “far worse”. He said: “Extra costs and additional targets are clearly undermining business confidence. "It is clear that British manufacturing is put at high risk by the ideologically charged Climate Change Act and Mr Huhne’s latest environmentalist nonsense. “British jobs are at risk, British competitiveness is undermined. Why? So our Government can preen in a European spotlight.”

According to an independent report, the UK’s drive for green energy will send £60billion and 600,000 jobs “up in smoke” by ­creating the “highest energy costs in the world”. It says Mr Huhne’s blueprint, more wind farms, green levies and taxes aimed at making Britain a world leader in cutting greenhouse gases widely blamed for global warming, will “undermine” Britain’s ability to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by forcing out innovative companies.

The Civitas think-tank study accuses the Government of “sacrificing jobs for no green benefit”.

Britain is already committed to cutting emissions by 34 per cent from the 1990 level by 2020 – the highest target of any industrialised nation. But Mr Huhne is pressing for it to be 50 per cent by 2025 and potentially 60 per cent by 2030. The report calls it “too much, too soon”.

Report author David Merlin-Jones said: “There’s no economic benefit to pricing ourselves above competitors. At this rate when the present Government is long gone, its binding targets will still be decimating the UK economy.”

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: “It is vital that Government strikes the right balance between climate change and industrial polices.”

The Indian steel giant, which employs 20,000 Britons, is cutting 1,200 jobs in Scunthorpe and 300 in Teesside at its Long Products division, loss-making due to falling demand. That’s about eight per cent of its UK ­workforce.

The firm said demand for steel in the UK was only two thirds of that seen in 2007 and is not expected to recover before 2016. But Tata did announce a ­£400million investment in the division over the next five years to help turn it around.

Keith Hazlewood, national secretary of the GMB union, said: “This is a devastating blow to UK steelmaking, to the local communities and to the UK economy.”

SOURCE

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