How the Global Warming Scare Began

Heartland friend John Coleman is among the many courageous meteorologists who are speaking out against the fake science of man-caused global warming. He’s brave, influential, and has the backing of his TV station in San Diego, KUSI, to produce videos such as the one at left titled “How the Global Warming Scare Began.”

Coleman is the founder of The Weather Channel, was the first weatherman on “Good Morning America,” and was named “Broadcast Meteorologist of the Year” by the American Meteorological Society. (NOTE: Coleman quit the AMS when, he says, it was clear “the politics had gotten in the way of the science.”)

In the video in the player to the left, Coleman says something all global warming “skeptics” could agree upon: If the science actually backed up the notion that humans were endangering the earth’s climate, he’d be on the front lines to save the planet. “But it’s just not happening,” he said.

The little warming we have now is well within (and even below) natural variations over the centuries. But the fruitless “fight” against man-caused global warming is wasting enormous sums of money — seen in government outlays, and in the unduly rising energy bills of every American.

In his video, Coleman gives us many “Cold Hard Facts.” Here are some of them:

Arctic ice levels are well within the average measured by satellites since first recorded about 35 years ago.

Polar bear populations are up, not down.

The “global warming” superstorms the alarmists predicted have not materialized. No hurricanes hit the US in 2013. Superstorm Sandy was nothing compared to the Galveston Hurricane in 1900, before man supposedly had influence on the climate. Strong tornadoes have been diminishing, too.

We haven’t had a “killer heat wave” since the 1950s.

Al Gore got a “D” in the only science course he took at Harvard, taught by the godfather of climate alarmism, Roger Revelle … and the rest is history (including Revelle apologizing for his previous alarmism and Gore responding by calling him “senile.”)

There is so much more. The video in the player above is the primer you must show your alarmist friends.

For more information on what’s really happening to the earth’s climate, visit The Heartland Institute’s archive of its eight international conferences on climate change — featuring more than 300 presentations by 187 scientists, economists, and policy experts (including Coleman).

For the very latest observable climate science, as opposed to political climate science, visit the Climate Change Reconsidered site. Stay tuned to that site, and The Heartland Institute, for news about yet another report from the Nongovernmental Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) that will be released later this month.

SOURCE



China reconsiders carbon tax, citing Australia's planned repeal

China is reconsidering plans for a carbon tax as local air pollution trumps concerns over climate change and some rich nations back away from imposing a tax on greenhouse gas emissions, a top official said.

Premier Li Keqiang last week declared war on pollution, which is expected to speed up the process of turning China's limited environmental levy into a full-blown tax targeting the nation's major polluters.

But the all-out efforts to combat China's disastrous pollution levels might get in the way of plans to tax carbon dioxide emissions in a bid to stunt the rapid growth of greenhouse gas emissions, Zhu Guangyao, the vice environment minister, said.

"We have to reflect the requests of the majority through many consultation rounds," he told the Beijing Morning Post from the sidelines of China's annual parliamentary sessions.

A carbon tax is increasingly controversial among lawmakers, said Zhu, adding that an environment tax would be easier to push through without carbon in the mix.

The carbon and air pollution taxes would target mostly the same sources, and in difficult economic times China is wary of hitting companies with too many costly regulations.

Zhu also referred to the fact that Australia, under the Abbott government, is trying to abolish the country's carbon tax, while a price on carbon has been blocked in the United States.

China's Ministry of Environment currently collects a modest levy on air pollution, waste water and solid waste. As China's environmental problems have caused large-scale public anger the past year, the ruling Communist Party wants to ramp up taxation efforts.

The Ministry of Finance and the National Development and Reform Commission have both said a tax on carbon emissions might be implemented in addition to China's planned emissions trading scheme, its main policy to combat climate change, although studies are still being carried out on how it would work.

SOURCE




Another rubbishy "model" from NASA

They have no shame

LOVING life? Well, lap it up because the days of driving around in comfy cars, feasting on fancy food and enjoying an aircon-cooled civilised existence could be numbered.

With rising population, depleting natural resources and stretching social divide, civilisation could be facing collapse within the next few decades according to a scientific study funded by NASA. And if you think this is a load of scaremongering tosh, it’s happened before. Remember the Roman Empire?

In the report conducted by applied mathematician, Safa Motesharri, his ‘Human And Nature Dynamical’ (Handy) model claims “the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history”.

“The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilisations can be both fragile and impermanent.”

Our modern world might appear to be pretty sure of itself with advanced technologies helping people live longer and revolutionising everyday life but this might be to blame. Using his theoretical model Motesharri explored several factors and ran different scenarios that could lead to the collapse of industrial civilisation and found a break down of society could arise from global population growing rapidly and unsustainable resource exploitation.

And as resources deplete, they will become more expensive. This is where he further states that “economic stratification” — where society is further divided based on wealth — will create “Elites” (rich) and “Masses” (poor) with the Elites being responsible for over consuming leaving the Masses in famine and collapsing social structure.

But before you start hoarding resources, the study does conclude that this scenario is not inevitable and that in order to prevent such catastrophe it calls on action by the Elites to share the wealth and to do their bit in restoring balance.

“Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion”

It does serve as a wake up call that if we don’t want to face disaster we need to seriously consider how we manage resources, population growth and wealth. The end is not yet nigh...if we can help it.

SOURCE





Scared to death by Warmist howls

Driven demented by fear, a mother thinks of setting herself alight to draw attention to the (missing) global warming crisis



Here is a woman who looks young enough to have been exposed to climate alarm propaganda throughout her school and college years.  Children get frightened by that, and some may never grow out of it as they get older.  She may well be one of them:

In an article (hat-tip Climate Depot) on an Oregon news-site, she explains:

'A Tunisian man set himself on fire in 2010 and sparked an international movement. Don’t tell my family, but I’ve considered that route. I mean, wouldn’t any parent sacrifice a kidney, lung or life for her child? Imagine the headline: “Soccer mom desperate to save children’s future self-immolates.”'

On her own blog (linked to below the pic), she displays this banner:



This may represent a delayed success of sorts for the climate alarm campaigners.  Some of them, including for example UNESCO and also Pachauri of the IPCC, want children to be little political activists.  First they scare'em then they snare'em.  Well, this woman got so scared she thought of killing herself for the sake of her children.  I'd say she was snared as well.  Let us hope for her sake, and her children's, that she calms down a lot more and starts to develop a calmer perspective on climate variation and its various causes.

PS Another example, from 2013.  Here is a father from the other side of the States: 'When Ian Kim imagines the world his 7-year-old daughter will be living in 20 years from now, he says, it keeps him up at night. Images of ever more frequent super storms like Sandy, along with rising seas, or drought and heat waves wreaking havoc with crops haunt his waking hours.  “It’s a huge worry for me,” said Kim, a self-described environmental and social justice activist. “On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s a 10.” '  Once you are such an activist, you do need a good crisis to keep you going, even it is largely in his own mind.

SOURCE




Doom is a good shtick

Paul Ehrlich and Ann Ehrlich, two long-time prominent voices in the environmental community, often speculate about the future of humanity. They recently shared this anecdote:

    "A few years ago we had a disagreement with our friend Jim Brown, a leading ecologist.  We told him we thought there was about a 10 percent chance of avoiding a collapse of civilization but, because of concern for our grandchildren and great grandchildren, we were willing to struggle to make it 11 percent.  He said his estimate of the chance of avoiding collapse was only 1 percent, but he was working to make it 1.1 percent.  Sadly, recent trends and events make us think Jim might have been optimistic.  Perhaps now it’s time to talk about preparing for some form of collapse soon, hopefully to make a relatively soft “landing.”"

If you want to know why the Ehrlichs think it’s essentially game over for civilization, read their 2013 paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Their diagnosis:

    "The human predicament is driven by overpopulation, overconsumption of natural resources and the use of unnecessarily environmentally damaging technologies and socio-economic-political arrangements to service Homo sapiens’ aggregate consumption."

Translation: Too many damn people on the earth, driving cars, buying too much crap, all made possible by a globalized, industrialized, capitalistic system. Or something like that. Unsurprisingly, the Ehrlichs don’t agree with those who paint a sunnier view of humanity’s current trajectory. (What might a model sustainable society look like? Paul Ehrlich recently pointed to Australia’s Aboriginal culture.)

Now I’m not the only one to observe that the environmental community, as a whole, has a bleak view of the future.

But is the near-future collapse of civilization virtually guaranteed, as the Ehrlichs seem to think? Is there no reversing this collision course? Here’s what UK environmentalist Jonathan Porritt said last week in an interview:

    "A lot of people in my community of sustainability professionals have basically come to the conclusion it’s too late."

This strikes me as a self-defeating outlook, as I hinted the other day. It lends itself to the fatalism that has already infected environmental discourse, as I have previously discussed:

    "If you are a regular consumer of environmental news and commentary, you are familiar with the narrative of humanity’s downfall."

In the current issue of The New York Review Of Books, the novelist Zadie Smith is conflicted about this eco-doomsday narrative. On the one hand, she is bothered that most people aren’t taking seriously “the visions of apocalypse conjured by climate scientists and movie directors,” which she refers to as “the coming emergency.” But she also seems to get the futility of this storyline:

    "Sometimes the global, repetitive nature of this elegy is so exhaustively sad—and so divorced from any attempts at meaningful action—that you can’t fail to detect in the elegists a fatalist liberal consciousness that has, when you get right down to it, as much of a perverse desire for the apocalypse as the evangelicals we supposedly scorn."

Indeed, the merchants of eco-doom who peddle their vision of apocalypse to a secular choir are just as self-rightous and scornful of humanity as the fundamentalist preachers who hawk their hellfire and brimstone sermons. And like the most warped fundamentalists who exploit tragedy, the merchants of eco-doom also cynically seize on current events. On this score, nobody rivals Nafeez Ahmed (the UK Left’s faux-scholarly equivalent to Glenn Beck), who has an unquenchable appetite for peak-everything porn. (For commentary on his latest connect-the-collapse dots, see this post.)

Not all greens have a fetish for doomsday scenarios. Some are are trying to chart a more empowering vision for environmentalism. Porritt belongs to this group. He has a new book that appears hopeful about the future.

If only more environmentalists could snap out of their endless mourning for the planet and offer the rest of us something to look forward to other than imminent eco-collapse.

SOURCE





Ukraine Crisis Signals Shift In Global Energy Politics

The standoff between Russia and Ukraine that precipitated [yesterday’s] farcical referendum on Crimean secession evokes memories of past attempts to use energy as a geopolitical weapon.

Upon closer inspection, it also reveals the early stages of a historically significant shift in global energy politics that would have seemed improbable a generation ago.

During the similarly brutal winters of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the United States was heavily dependent on foreign supplies of energy. As the U.S. stared down the barrel of the oil weapon amid the 1979-'80 Iranian hostage crisis, energy expenditures as a percentage of U.S. gross domestic product reached 14%, triggering double-digit inflation and a double-dip recession.

Since then, energy's share of the domestic economy has fallen by about half as a combination of conservation measures, improved efficiency and increased production has begun to turn the tables on foreign suppliers like Russia and the OPEC cartel.

In 2013, U.S. oil production reached its highest level in 24 years.

Yet crude oil is so...20th century. In 1973, 46% of global energy supplies were derived from petroleum-based products. By 2011, that number had fallen to 36.1%.

These days, the story is natural gas, whose world market share over that same period rose from 18.9% to 25.7%, a number that is expected to increase sharply in coming years as more gas is extracted from shale rock formations through fracking, especially in the United States.

According to Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Prize" and an expert on all things energy, shale gas now accounts for more than a third of U.S. natural gas production, up from 2% in 2000, and could reach 50% or more within six years.

Unlike oil, natural gas is difficult to ship across oceans. Pipelines, like the ones Russia has used to sell its gas to Europe, can transmit energy through vast landmasses. That method, however, is vulnerable to one or more parties turning off the spigot for political reasons.

Russia's state-owned energy behemoth, Gazprom, did exactly that twice in the last 10 years, and recently rescinded the price discount it gave the Ukraine as a "reward" for allowing Russian gas to reach its major export markets in Western Europe.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the United States now produces more oil than it imports, the latter having fallen 30% since 2005. In fact, the U.S. is projected to surpass Saudi Arabia as the world's largest oil producer within a few years and already has passed Russia as the top gas producer.

The global economic impact of shale gas could be magnified when the first facilities to ship it from the U.S. in liquid form, known as liquefied natural gas, or LNG, become operational late next year. That will begin to put American policy-makers in the once-unfathomable position of having an energy weapon with which to apply geopolitical leverage.

SOURCE

***************************************

For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

*****************************************