Bare-faced lie from Warmist "scientist"

On the threat of trace amounts of CO2: "The end-point of that path looks something like Venus". But that is nonsense. The huge surface temperature of Venus is adiabatic -- the product of the weight of Venus's huge atmosphere. And adiabtics is basic physics so he had to know about that

The keynote speaker was Mark Jaccard, who teaches in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Jaccard -- with former vice president Al Gore and colleagues on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for helping to raise awareness of global warming.

...Still, at the end of his address, Jaccard faced questions from audience members who clearly were dubious.

One person asked what made Jaccard so sure that global warming was man-made and not a result of natural warming and cooling cycles.

"One hundred and fifty years ago, people were predicting that if we continued to dump these gases into the atmosphere, temperatures would rise, and the increase would be dramatically different from the natural 10,000-year cycles that you're talking about," Jaccard replied. "And that's exactly what's happening.".

...It's not that the earth will warm up, then flatten out and everyone will adapt to that new reality, Jaccard insisted. "The end-point of that path looks something like Venus. It's really hot. At some point, we're going to panic and say we need to do something about that."

Temperature of Venus

Where the Earth has an average surface temperature of 14 degrees Celsius, the average temperature of Venus is 460 degrees Celsius. That is 410 degrees hotter than the hottest deserts on our planet.

...The temperature of Venus is not the only extreme on the planet. The atmosphere is constantly churned by hurricane force winds reaching 360 kph.

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A reply to a featherhead

In response to Naomi Klein's article "Capitalism vs. the Climate" in "The Nation", Dr. Martin Hertzberg wrote a succinct reply for publication in the magazine. As the likelihood of it being published there is negligible, I reproduce it below. A very detailed critique of the Klein article can also be found in Joanne Nova's website

What Naomi Klein fails to understand in her "Capitalism vs. the Climate" article is that weather and climate are controlled by the laws of Physics and Chemistry on a macroscopic scale. They engender forces and motions that are beyond human control, and the scrawny human constructs of Capitalism, or Communism, or Fascism, or Socialism have absolutely no role in weather or climate.

Weather and Climate existed long before humans appeared on Earth and they will exist in the same way long after we disappear either individually or collectively as the human race. What should have been an objective evaluation of climatological data, and a respectful scientific dialogue on whether or not CO2 and other "greenhouse gases" are causing global warming or climate change, has unfortunately degenerated into a partisan political harangue.

While right wing reactionaries like Limbaugh and the Koch brother's "think tanks" are partly responsible for that degeneration, some of the blame is shared by the Gore-Hansen-IPCC clique of fear-mongers, environmental lobbyists, and progressive Democrats. Klein's article is only the latest example of that degeneration.

She simply swallows the dogma that the "consensus" of the self proclaimed "climate scientists" who are motivated by the noblest of motives, is correct. Thus, the thousands of knowledgeable meteorologists and climatologists throughout the world who disagree with that phony consensus are wrong and motivated by money given to them by the fossil fuel industry.

Thus, she claims that the "scientific theories presented here (the latest Heartland Conference) are old and long discredited" even though she knows absolutely nothing about those theories. She claims that we have just experienced "the end of the hottest decade in recorded history": a statement that reveals her ignorance of the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, the Holocene, and the five Interglacial Warming that preceded them during the last 450,000 years. Those periods were all considerably warmer than today in the absence of any significant human CO2 emission.

The underdeveloped world will have to depend on the use of fossil fuels to improve their standard of living just as the developed nations have. Draconian measures of "carbon control" to address the non-existent problem of "global warming / climate change" will significantly impede their development just as the fiscal draconian measures imposed on them by the IMF and the World Bank did.

The overwhelming weight of scientific and cultural evidence shows clearly that the theory that human emission of CO2 and greenhouse gases is causing "global warming/climate change" is one of the greatest frauds in the history of science. Klein's fact-deficient political harangue is thus totally out of touch with reality.

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The Global Warming Guessing Game

Less than a week after UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged developing nations to commit billions of dollars to fight the effects of climate change, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a well-timed preliminary report that basically said its climate models were fairly useless at the moment. In the process, they also threw out basic scientific principles by stating that extreme weather events would become more common, and that its climate models didn't have practical predictability.

If it sounds like the IPCC wants its cake without it melting first, you'd be correct. Keep in mind that the next official release from the IPCC (and its myriad working groups) isn't until 2014, but that hasn't stopped the bureaucrats who run the IPCC from issuing a report that backs up the claims made by the UN Secretary General.
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So how did the IPCC come to these conclusions? The following admission by Chris Fields, a co-author of this recent report, comes from a Reuters news article:

Sceptics have questioned the models the IPCC uses to make its climate predictions, but Fields defended the science: “There are many cases in which just from observations, we’ve seen a change,” he said.

“Climate models are only some of the tools used to make future projections. Some … are based on projecting historical data forward or what we know about the physics of the system. Lots of observations are built in for us to test how they work.”

Keep in mind that the theory of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming is just that: still a theory. Fields does not elaborate on what these other "tools" are, only that observational testing is built into proving the IPCC's theory correct. Dr. Roger Pielke provides insight into the failure of Global Multi-Decadal Climate Models.

I completely agree that we should rely on observational data as a tool. Compare what the computer models predicted 10 years ago to what has actually been observed in the global temperature records, and something remarkable occurs. They aren't very accurate.

Carbon Dioxide levels have risen, likely caused by human activity, geographical occurrences, solar output, and China's ever-growing dependence on coal for energy production, but temperatures haven't.

With that in mind, let's see how well the computer models predict the next ten years based on what we observe (which requires patience and waiting), and we'll have twenty years of projected data by computer models versus real-world data.

Alarmists have already stated that it's too late anyways, so before we throw money, resources, and unproven technologies at a problem that's still, from a scientific standpoint, still theoretical, 10 years of gathering data coupled with the previous ten years seems reasonable, at least to me, to both sides of the debate.

What we do know is that we are still in a natural warming trend that started in 1850 after emerging from a cold spell known as the "Little Ice Age." This four-hundred-year-long atmospheric drop in temperatures is recognized as having occurred by the IPCC, NASA, and climatologists.

Whether the post-1850 warming is due to man-made, cyclical, or natural incidents is simply unknown. Global temperatures considered remotely reliable, uniform, and accurate have only 'come of age' in the last thirty years. Some say only 10. Others say we still have a long way to go. I tend to agree with the latter.

For those who remember last year's New England winter, the brutal cold, the almost-weekly snowstorms, it came as a surprise when climate alarmists said it was a result of global warming. More CO2 in the air means more water in the air means more snow [As an aside, I remember my high school science teacher teaching us that the colder the air, the less moisture it can hold].

From the same Reuters article we learn that, "There is medium confidence that droughts will intensify in the 21st century ... due to reduced precipitation and/or increased evapotranspiration…" Evapotranspiration is simply the process by which water is transferred from the land to the atmosphere by evaporation…

The report also states, "It is likely the frequency of heavy precipitation ... will increase in the 21st century over many areas…" Confused? Don't be. It simply means, at least according to the IPCC, that you can now blame any extreme weather event on global warming.

These conclusions are guesses, probabilities, computer model predictions, and it urges that countries make disaster-management plans and risk assessments - just as Ban Ki-moon urged less than a week before. In marketing parlance, this is known as a promotional tie-in.

My opinions about the future of the climate are no more accurate than the IPCC's. The hysterical alarmism promoted by environmental groups, the media (we read and watch and glorify death and destruction; it's human nature), politicians, governments, and litigators do more harm to the planet than any amount of CO2 could ever do.

You would never take a medication unless it was put through unbiased double-blind clinical trials, the results duplicated by a disinterested party, and then gone through the FDA's rigorous testing and screening process. And even then, it may get revoked by the FDA because it wasn't living up to it's intended purpose.

Why should we believe in the future, predicted severity of the climate and how it will affect us twenty, thirty, even a hundred years from now when the "accepted" climate research has been so muddled, biased, non-reproducible, and worse, disproved repeatedly by disinterested climatologists?

I'm afraid we may never know the answer until enough time has passed where we can look back in hindsight at our collective folly so as not to repeat the same mistakes. But in the meantime, we can all take our best guesses. Just like the IPCC.

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Green Fiascoes and Boondoggles

A barrage of news headlines on the Solyndra scandal continue to remind us that President Obama made green jobs one of his administration’s priorities. Those headlines also reveal this initiative to have been a costly mistake.

The bankruptcy of Solyndra, the solar-panel manufacturer that has collapsed despite receiving half a billion dollars from the federal government, is only the tip of the iceberg. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that several other green companies that received generous federal aid are teetering on the brink.

Ener1, whose subsidiary EnerDel received a $118 million federal grant, lost $165 million in fiscal 2010 and has dim prospects. According to the Journal, Ener1 had “lost its bid to supply batteries to Fisker Automotive, a battery-powered car maker which received a $529 million U.S. taxpayer-backed federal loan guarantee in 2010,” when “Fisker chose to buy its batteries from a company called A123 Systems, itself the recipient of a $249 million U.S. Department of Energy grant.”

Great! First Team Obama extends taxpayer dollars to green companies, then it torpedoes them by giving larger grants to their competitors. Meanwhile, Fisker, itself a recipient of over a half-billion dollar handout from Uncle Sam, is making its cars in Finland.

Team Obama’s record on creating green jobs is no more confidence-inspiring than its record in midwifing a viable electric car industry.

A recent study by the Labor Department’s Inspector General examined what became of $162.8 million of Obama stimulus money funneled to the Employment and Training Administration. Set up to “train and prepare individuals for careers in ‘green jobs,’” the score is this: 53,000 individuals were trained, 8,035 got jobs, and only 1,033 trainees still held those jobs after six months.

There are at least four important reasons why we should stop funding “green” government programs:

First lesson: government-appointed experts are incompetent economic planners—a fact of life that any intelligent adult should know after the spectacular failure of central economic planning in the socialist experiments of the 20th century. No matter how brilliant and how well-intentioned government planners may be, they do not and cannot know what consumers want and how much they are willing to pay for it. Only free markets can solve this challenge. If electric cars are to be a viable industry, private companies will make them so.

Second lesson: The government's involvement in Solyndra raises troubling questions about possible corruption. While I think the Solyndra deal stinks to high heaven, I wonder whether any laws have been broken. Where is the dividing line between influence peddling, legitimate lobbying, political deal-making, and actual crime? Many farm-state Republicans have supported the uneconomical ethanol boondoggle for decades in exchange for generous support of their electoral campaigns, so the practice is bipartisan.

Third lesson: Government job programs are a blatant failure. They have never been economically beneficial. In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had the department of agriculture hire 100,000 Americans to monitor how much acreage American farmers were cultivating. These federal jobs produced no wealth. Their jobs made no more economic sense than paying people to dig holes and then fill them up.

Today's green workers are economically nonsensical, too. True, they sometimes produce something, but the economic value is invariably less than the amount of tax dollars needed to subsidize their job. In other words, federal jobs make us poorer.

Fourth lesson: Finally, we simply can't afford these green boondoggles. Uncle Sam’s official debt is now $15 trillion, and when you include off-budget items and unfunded liabilities, the situation is far worse. Given this fiscal reality, it is the height of irresponsibility to throw taxpayer dollars at any special interests, and it is particularly egregious to subsidize enterprises that are plainly uneconomical.

I am not opposed to green industries. What we need is for the government to get out of the way and let green technologies prove themselves in the competitive marketplace. It's time for change and an end to economic foolishness. Let’s get the burden of green boondoggles off the taxpayers’ back.

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Dutch Fall Out Of Love With Windmills

For centuries, the Netherlands has harnessed wind power, using windmills to drain water from low-lying marsh and turn it into arable land. Now however, Holland is falling out of love with its iconic technology.

When the Netherlands built its first sea-based wind turbines in 2006, they were seen as symbols of a greener future. Towering over the waves of the North Sea like an army of giants, blades whipping through the wind, the turbines were the country's best hope to curb carbon emissions and meet growing demand for electricity.

The 36 turbines -- each one the height of a 30-storey building -- produce enough electricity to meet the needs of more than 100,000 households each year.

But five years later the green future looks a long way off. Faced with the need to cut its budget deficit, the Dutch government says offshore wind power is too expensive and that it cannot afford to subsidize the entire cost of 18 cents per kilowatt hour -- some 4.5 billion euros last year.

The government now plans to transfer the financial burden to households and industrial consumers in order to secure the funds for wind power and try to attract private sector investment. It will start billing consumers and companies in January 2013 and simultaneously launch a system under which investors will be able to apply to participate in renewable energy projects.

But the new billing system will reap only a third of what was previously available to the industry in subsidies -- the government forecasts 1.5 billion euros every year -- while the pricing scale of the investment plan makes it more likely that interested parties will choose less expensive technologies than wind. The outlook for Dutch wind projects seems bleak.

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The truth will out on the Australian Labor Party's carbon scam

Censorship won't help them

THE whitewash begins. Now that the carbon tax has passed through federal parliament, the government's clean-up brigade is getting into the swing by trying to erase any dissent against the jobs-destroying legislation.

On cue comes the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which this week issued warnings to businesses that they will face whopping fines of up to $1.1m if they blame the carbon tax for price rises.

It says it has been "directed by the Australian government to undertake a compliance and enforcement role in relation to claims made about the impact of a carbon price."

Businesses are not even allowed to throw special carbon tax sales promotions before the tax arrives on July 1. "Beat the Carbon Tax - Buy Now" or "Buy now before the carbon tax bites" are sales pitches that are verboten. Or at least, as the ACCC puts it, "you should be very cautious about making these types of claims".

There will be 23 carbon cops roaming the streets doing snap audits of businesses that "choose to link your price increases to a carbon price".

Instead, the ACCC suggests you tell customers you've raised prices because "the overall cost of running (your) business has increased".

It's all very Orwellian: the tax whose name cannot be spoken. We are already paying for the climate-change hysteria that has gripped Australia for a decade. Replacing even a portion of our cheap, coal-fired power with renewable energy is hellishly expensive. It also requires costly adaptation of existing infrastructure.

That's a big reason why electricity prices have hit the roof already. So when we accelerate the process with the carbon tax, the pain will escalate. That's the whole point of carbon pricing. A record number of households have had their electricity disconnected because they can't pay their power bills.

Household energy costs are estimated to have risen 17 per cent since July, with the result that the ranks of the energy poor are swelling.

In NSW, the Energy and Water Ombudsman has reported an 18 per cent increase in complaints from people whose electricity has been disconnected.

Then there are all the little immeasurables. For instance, last winter the price of Lebanese cucumbers in NSW skyrocketed because soaring energy costs forced the biggest grower to shut off heat lamps in some of his growing sheds. Result: fewer cucumbers - so prices rose to meet demand.

But no matter how Orwellian the tactics, no matter how many carbon cops are sent into hairdressing salons to interrogate barbers on the precise nature of their price rises, the truth remains: Australia has gone out on a limb, imposing a carbon tax that will send businesses to the wall, cause undue hardship to families, and tether Australians more tightly to government handouts.

And soon, we will send billions of dollars overseas to buy useless pieces of paper called carbon credits. Invest-ment bankers, lawyers and carbon traders will get rich, as will all the usual spivs and scam artists ready to stick a bucket under the government spigot raining taxpayer cash.

It doesn't matter how many fairy stories the Greens tell about how the carbon tax will "save" the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu. Or how many gullible people believe hurricanes, floods and earthquakes are the result of man-made global warming. Eventually, the truth will out.

Even the International Panel on Climate Change, whose bureaucrat-written summaries cherrypick the most alarming scientific forecasts, is holding back in the face of runaway alarmist rhetoric from politicians.

In fact, leaked draft copies of the IPCC's latest special report into "Extreme Events and Disasters" reveal declining scientific certainty about the threat of human-produced greenhouse gases.

"There are a lot more unknowns than knowns," says BBC environment correspondent Richard Black.

The rising toll of extreme weather events cannot be blamed on greenhouse gas emissions, according to Black, who has seen the draft.

"Uncertainty in the sign of projected changes in climate extremes over the coming two to three decades is relatively large because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability," says the IPCC report. In other words, the effect of human-produced greenhouse gas on the climate is insignificant when compared to natural climate change.

Since he's dropped in for 26 hours, US President Barack Obama could explain to his new best friend Julia Gillard why he decided not to impose a carbon tax on his ailing economy. Or why Canada has prudently ruled out a carbon scheme, and New Zealand is scaling its back and China and India continue to sit on their hands. Durban will be fun.

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