Glacier fraud from "National Geographic" magazine

"When science is not on your side, photo fakery will do." - Nat. Geo's new motto?

The sort of persuasive pretty picture we have come to expect from NG below:



SOURCE

Some notes:

1). We read here that the observed retreat has been going on for 500 years! Since 1500 AD - when the highest technology was black gunpowder firearms: "The glacier has also receded 1.75 miles (2.82 km) since 1958, when Mendenhall Lake was created, and over 2.5 miles (4.0 km) since 1500."

2). Note that the 1894 photo was taken in winter (snow on cliffs) & the 2008 one in summer (lake not frozen)

3).
1937 photo

They conveniently covered up the fact that much of the visible glacier was gone by 1937 (lake not frozen in photo), when the demon CO2 levels were lower.

4).
Current winter photo

The color photo is actually what the glacier really looks like recently - IN WINTER with the lake frozen over - which looks more frozen that the 1894 winter photo....

5).
August 2003 photo

Finally a better 2003 photo showing the enormous mass of the glacier face





Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow sends note to Al Gore: You've jumped the shark



Dear Al,

Is that it? Is that all you've got?

You made the media rounds announcing 24 hours of “climate realism” (You even expropriated the term from those of us who challenge man-made global warming, and who have long preferred to be called “climate realists” rather than “skeptics” or some of the other less-flattering names you've been calling us).

We didn't expect you could persuade us, but we're CFACT, open minds are our business, so naturally we tuned in.

What we found exceeded our worst expectations. Speaker after speaker showed slide after slide of tragedy. Flooded houses, parched crops, starving kids. Shameless.

Don't you know that even if you swallow the whole IPCC report (hook, line and sinker), the tiny amount of warming we may have experienced in the last century cannot account for present weather events?

Could any open-minded observer have concluded that those precious children would have been better fed had mankind never invented fire, driven cars, worked in factories, or generated electricity?

Not only is human progress not responsible for severe weather, it is the best chance we have to meet these children's nutritional needs in the future. Developed societies, with plentiful, affordable energy, are able to aid the flooded homeowner, share their abundance with the victims of drought and nurture the needy child.

Want to create a bright future for the children in your slides? Eradicate energy poverty. Create a developing world of free markets, fair elections and the rule of law. Your sorry prescription Al, is a trap for these kids. We mean to free them.

We tuned into your broadcast, Al, looking for substance. Something to consider and debate. What we saw instead was nothing but propaganda.

Al, you have well and truly jumped the shark. It's time your show was canceled.

SOURCE




Gore’s 24 Hours of Fantasy

Gore is completely wrong when he tells us that the science of climate change is settled. If his “Climate Reality Project” actually did promote climate realism, he would tell us that the science is in a period of negative discovery — the more we learn, the more we realize we do not understand about this, arguably the most complex science ever tackled. Rather than “remove the doubt,” as Gore says, we need to recognize the doubt.

Many of the ideas expressed by climate campaigners such as Gore and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon are the consequence of a belief in what Canadian professors Chris Essex (University of Western Ontario) and Ross McKitrick (University of Guelph) call the “Doctrine of Certainty,” “a collection of now familiar assertions about climate that are to be accepted without question” (Taken by Storm, 2007).

Essex and McKitrick write: "But the Doctrine is not true. Each assertion is either manifestly false or the claim to know is false. Climate is one of the most challenging open problems in modern science. Some knowledgeable scientists believe that the climate problem can never be solved."

Yet, as long ago as 1989, Gore insisted there was “no dispute worthy of recognition” about the dangers of man-made greenhouse gas-driven climate change. Since then his certainty has solidified into dogma.

But that dogma is being contested by more and more reputable scientists who are finally speaking out in an organized fashion. For example, on August 29, a blockbuster science document was published that totally refutes Gore and Ban — the Interim Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). Coauthored by a team of scientists recruited and led by climate experts Dr. Craig Idso, Professor Robert Carter, and Professor Fred Singer, the NIPCC shows that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has ignored or misinterpreted much of the research that challenges the need for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas controls. In other words, the science being relied upon by governments worldwide to create multi-billion dollar climate policies is almost certainly wrong.

Consider extreme weather, the main topic of 24 Hours of Reality. Gore promotes the concept that greenhouse gas-induced global warming is leading to increasingly severe weather. But this defies logic. If the world warms due to increasing greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures at high latitudes are forecast to rise most, reducing the difference between arctic and tropical temperatures. Since this differential drives weather, we should see weaker midlatitude cyclones in a warmer world, and so less extremes in weather, not more.

It is also a mistake to blame human activities for current weather extremes. The NIPCC concluded that “the data reveal there have not been any significant warming-induced increases in extreme weather events.” The report’s authors showed that this was the case whether the phenomenon being studied was precipitation, floods, drought, storms, hurricanes, fire, or other weather-related events.

For example, the NIPCC includes a study published this year in Geophysical Research Letters about the causes of the 2010 Russian heat wave. Researchers deduced that it “was due to internal atmospheric dynamical processes” and “it is unlikely that the warming attributable to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations contributed significantly to the magnitude of the heat wave.”

We will probably find the same when most 2011 weather events are analyzed.

Besides increasing extreme weather that people always notice, it is also important to take note of decreasing trends. For example, we are now near a 30 year low in worldwide “accumulated cyclone energy” (hurricanes in the North Atlantic), something that was not supposed to be happening if the forecasts of climate models were correct. This graph shows the trend in worldwide accumulated cyclone energy.



Climate change and extreme weather have always happened and always will no matter what we do. Therefore, instead of futilely trying to stop them from occurring, we need to harden our societies to these inevitable events by burying electrical cables underground, reinforcing buildings and other infrastructure, and ensuring reliable energy sources so that we have the power to heat and cool our dwellings as needed.

Gore tells us that his program will “reveal the deniers.” If by “deniers” he means those of us who do not support his belief in an impending human-caused climate catastrophe, then we certainly hope he does reveal us. Gore and Ban alone have had many times the mainstream media coverage of all the skeptics combined. It is time to listen to reputable experts who understand that predicting, let alone controlling, climate decades from now will remain science fiction for the foreseeable future.

That may not be a comforting thought to climate crusaders, but that, Mr. Gore, is the true “climate reality.”

SOURCE





Warmist asks: Is Al Gore now a help or hindrance to the global warming cause?

Al Gore's Climate Reality Project is broadcasting its message to 24 time zones across 24 hours

Death by Powerpoint. I have suffered this torture too many times over the years. We all probably have. So I was a little nervous this morning logging into Climate Reality – Al Gore's 24-hour global-warming warning – as to what I might discover. And, I have to say, my heart immediately sank.

A no-doubt sincere presenter from the Solomon Islands was showing slide after slide of extreme weather events around the world that have occurred over the past year and linking everyone, it seemed, to the rise in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. As anyone who follows the climate debate closely knows, that is a very contentious peg on which to hang your hat. That kind of talk traditionally requires lots of caveats and careful explaining. Done with abandon and raw emotion – as this presenter seemed to be doing – and you are quickly labelled in some quarters as a climate "alarmist".

And, for me, this is one of the key challenges the Climate Reality project faces. Who exactly is it trying to convince with its urgent, sometimes breathless campaign? Is it preaching to the converted? If so, it is doing a good job.

Or is it trying to win over climate sceptics? I suspect not. I get the sense from Climate Reality's tone and focus that it believes sceptics are a lost cause who are beyond redemption or reason.

That leaves the middle ground – the unconverted. Al Gore did a tremendous job connecting with this constituency in his hugely successful, Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. No single person has ever done as much as Gore to raise global comprehension of both the causes and dangers of climate change.

But that was a long time ago now. The politics of climate change is much more polarised and fraught now than back then – even if the science is, it would seem, hardening – and, for right or wrong, Al Gore is a hugely polarising figure, particularly in his homeland. Whatever he does or says in this arena – no matter how cogent or sensible - will attract scorn and derision from those that just can't see past the man. And that is a huge problem for those who still want to see the world urgently address, as Gore says, the reality of climate change.

However, I still think there is an important, if difficult, question to be asked: despite all his efforts over the past three decades to raise awareness on this issue, is Gore now a help or a hindrance to the cause he cares so passionately about?

SOURCE





Warmist blogger openly misanthropic - world needs to rid itself of human virus‏

"Albedo increases when an area once covered by reflective snow or ice -- which bounces 80 percent of the Sun's radiative force back into space -- is replaced by deep blue sea, which absorbs the heat instead."

It goes from being an almost perfect reflector to being an almost perfect absorber.

Many have a hard time believing all this because they have not noticed it is hotter at the spot on the Earth where they live and work. And that might be. We are talking about global averages; adding up the highs and lows to determine whether the entire Earth's "fever" is steadily climbing or not.

And while it is getting hotter overall, in some places it is more than others. Where is it getting hotter faster? Way up there at the top of the world. "Temperatures in the Arctic region have risen more than twice as fast as the global average over the last half century." That is why the ice is melting so fast and furious.

It "has also become significantly thinner in recent decades, though it is not possible to measure the shrinkage in thickness as precisely as for surface area."

The Arctic sea ice extent "is dropping at about 11 percent per decade, which means the "summer ice cover could disappear entirely by 2030, leaving nothing but heat-trapping 'blue ocean.'"

Which is bad news. The world is dying. Or changing. Transforming. But the Earth will be fine as soon as she rids herself of this human virus. A little heat should take care of that, in a century or two. If we are foolish enough to let her.

More HERE




Australian Labor Party plants poison pills in carbon tax legislation

Henry Ergas

IT was Mark Dreyfus QC, Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change, who let the cat out of the bag.

Once the carbon change legislation is in place, he said, repeal would amount to an acquisition of property by the commonwealth, as holders of emissions permits would be deprived of a valuable asset. As a result, the commonwealth would be liable, under s.51(xxxi) of the Australian Constitution, to pay compensation, potentially in the billions of dollars. A future government would therefore find repeal prohibitively costly.

That consequence is anything but unintended. The clean energy legislation, released this week, specifically provides that "a carbon unit (its generic term for a right to emit) is personal property".

This, the government says, is needed to give certainty to long-term trades. But that claim makes little sense, for even without such protections there are flourishing markets for fishing quotas and other tradeable entitlements.

And internationally, governments have generally ensured pollution permits are not treated as conventional property rights, precisely so as to be able to revise environmental controls as circumstances change. Rather, this provision serves one purpose only: to guarantee any attempt at repeal triggers constitutional requirements to pay compensation, shackling future governments.

Nor is it the only poison pill built into the legislation. Also crucial is what happens if a new government rejects the emissions reductions recommendations made by the carbon regulator, the Climate Change Authority.

In that event, unless the government can secure a majority for an alternative target, permitted emissions are automatically cut by up to 10 per cent in a single year, crippling economic activity.

A Coalition government, or even a Labor government less wedded to the Greens, would therefore find itself trapped.

To describe such poison pills as unusual would be an understatement. Provisions that merely hinder future parliaments have long been viewed as abhorrent, as they undermine the democratic process. But they are especially harmful where uncertainties abound, as is surely the case for climate change. With the Kyoto protocol dead, and complete uncertainty as to any successor, a government focused on the public interest would seek flexibility, not a straitjacket.

That is all the more so as the costs of that straitjacket could be so great. Global warming is a global problem. Unless major emitters engage comprehensive abatement efforts, action by Australia would not only be futile but also extraordinarily expensive.

After all, unless it lowers the risk of global warming, the only benefit of a carbon tax is that it raises government revenues. But like all taxes, it distorts economic behaviour, reducing national income. Its economic cost can therefore be measured by how much income loss it causes per dollar of revenue raised. Going by Treasury's modelling, that ratio is 2: for each $1 of government revenue the carbon tax secures, incomes decline by about $2. By comparison, the Henry review estimated that for each dollar of revenue raised, mining royalties cause an income loss of about 50c.

A unilateral carbon tax is therefore four times more inefficient than the royalties the Henry review excoriated as the most distorting tax on our books.

And it may be even worse than that. Treasury's estimates assume international agreement on emissions reduction is reached relatively soon. Were agreement not reached, the cost could be two to three times greater.

That is because unilateral action would undermine our international competitiveness. But it is also because Treasury expects massive purchases of abatement from overseas. By 2018, it says, those purchases will account for 60 per cent of Australia's total abatement, and they remain above 50 per cent right through to 2045.

So if we are creating a "clean, green future", as the Prime Minister asserts, it is not in Australia. Where then do all those low-cost emissions reductions come from? According to Treasury, well over half will come from the former Soviet Union and from "Other Asia". But many of these countries lack any ability to monitor carbon abatement, with corruption so pervasive they are at the top of Transparency International's list of offenders. To assume they will provide a credible source of abatement is wildly optimistic; to think they will do so absent a comprehensive international framework is fanciful.

Abatement costs could therefore prove far higher than Treasury's numbers suggest. But a precise estimate would require access to Treasury's models. And here Treasury's performance has been disappointing. Appearing before the Senate Select Committee on Scrutiny of New Taxes, Treasury said its models were "publicly available" and that anyone willing to pay for those models could obtain them.

That evidence was misleading. For Treasury relied on a model developed by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics. And ABARE has now confirmed it will not make available the model Treasury used.

Moreover, Treasury blended the ABARE model with other models and data sets. Given that, only Treasury can provide users with the capacity to test its modelling: and the government clearly does not intend it to do so.

The Regulation Impact Statement released with the draft legislation does nothing to fill the gap that leaves. Indeed, it does not even meet the government's own guidelines for such RISs: it is strikingly superficial, given what is at stake; it is vague and qualitative; and it completely ignores the risks created by locking in future governments. That it was approved by the Department of Finance merely highlights how flawed the RIS process now is. Decisions about this legislation will therefore be based on assertions, not evidence tested in the light of day. And that is a disgrace. Not only because it makes a mockery of the government's claims about transparency. But also because the consequences of those decisions could be so great. And the poison pills built into the legislation would ensure those consequences were felt for decades to come.

Dreyfus is to be commended for stating that frankly. But whatever one may think of the carbon tax, those poison pills are public policy at its worst. If parliament had any decency, it would throw them out. That it won't says it all.

SOURCE

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