Researcher hits media & admits West Antarctica ice sheet melt not traceable to humans!

And we've got 200 years before anything much happens anyway

"I have a problem with the widespread implication (in the popular press) that the West Antarctic collapse can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change," said Mike Wolovik, a graduate researcher at Lamont-Doherty who studies ice sheet dynamics. "The marine ice sheet instability is an inherent part of ice sheet dynamics that doesn't require any human forcing to operate. When the papers say that collapse is underway, and likely to last for several hundred years, that's a reasonable and plausible conclusion."

 But, he said, the link between CO2 levels and the loss of ice in West Antarctica "is pretty tenuous." The upwelling of warmer waters that melt the ice has been tied to stronger westerly winds around Antarctica, which have been linked to a stronger air pressure difference between the polar latitudes and the mid-latitudes, which have in turn been linked to global warming.

"I'm not an atmospheric scientist, so I can't evaluate the strength of all of those linkages," Wolovik said. "However, it's a lot of linkages." And that leaves a lot of room for uncertainty about what's actually causing the collapse of the glaciers, he said.

Researchers have been discussing the theory of how marine ice sheets become unstable for many years, said Stan Jacobs, an oceanographer at Lamont-Doherty who has studied ocean currents and their impact on ice shelves for several decades.

"Some of us are a bit wary of indications that substantial new ground has been broken" by the two new papers, Jacobs said. While ocean temperatures seem to be the main cause of the West Antarctic ice retreat, there's a lot of variability in how heat is transported around the ocean in the region, and it's unclear what's driving that, he said. And, he's skeptical that modeling the system at this point can accurately predict the timing of the ice's retreat.

But, he added, "this is one more message indicating that a substantial sea level rise from continued melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could occur in the foreseeable future.

Cochran agreed: The papers' message is "that … over the next couple hundred years, there's going to be a significant rise in sea level, and at this point we can't stop it."

SOURCE




We Can Easily Adapt To Sea Level Changes, New Report Says

Attempts to stem sea level rises by reducing CO2 levels in order to "combat" global warming are a complete waste of time says a new report by two of the world's leading oceanographic scientists.

Over the last 150 years, average global sea levels have risen by around 1.8 mm per annum - a continuation of the melting of the ice sheets which began 17,000 years ago. Satellite measurements (which began in 1992) put the rate higher - at 3mm per year. But there is no evidence whatsoever to support the doomsday claims made by Al Gore in 2006 that sea levels will rise by 20 feet by the end of the century, nor even the more modest prediction by James Hansen that they will rise by 5 metres.

Such modest rises, argue oceanographer Willem P de Lange and marine geologist Bob Carter in their report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, are far better dealt with by adaptation than by costly, ineffectual schemes to decarbonise the global economy.
They say:

"No justification exists for continuing to base sea-level policy and coastal management regulation upon the outcomes of deterministic or semi-empirical sea-level modelling. Such modelling remains speculative rather than predictive. The practice of using a global rate of sea-level change to manage specific coastal locations worldwide is irrational and should be abandoned."

It is irrational not least because it is based on a complete misunderstanding of the causes and nature of sea-level rises. There are parts of the world where the sea level is rising, others where it is falling - and this is dependent as much on what the land is doing (tectonic change) as on what the sea is doing.
In other words - a point once made very effectively by Canute - it is absurdly egotistical of man to imagine that he has the power to control something as vast as the sea. The best he can hope to do is to adapt, as previous generations have done, either by deciding to shore up eroding coastal areas or abandon them and move further inland.

And for those still in doubt, here is what Vincent Courtillot, Emeritus professor of geophysics at Paris Diderot University has to say in his introduction to the report:

"Sea level change is a naturally occurring process. Since the last glacial maximum, some 18,000 years ago, de-glaciation has taken place and this natural global warming has led to sea-level rise of on average 120 m or so. At some times, pulses of melt water coming from large peri-glacial lakes led to rates of sea level rise as high as 3 m per century. The rate slowed down some 7000 years ago and since then has been naturally fluctuating by only a few metres. The remaining global sea-level rise has been about 20 cm in the 20th century. Has this led to global disasters? The answer is no. If the projected rise over the 21st century is double what was seen in the 20th, is it likely that it will result in global disasters? Again, the answer is most likely no; human ingenuity, innovation and engineering, and the proper material and financial resources should solve local problems if and when they arrive, as they have in the 20th century."

SOURCE





Well, I Guess Obama Hasn't Healed the Planet

When Barack Obama won his party’s presidential nomination in 2008, he proclaimed that “generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that… this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Six years later, the president is threatening to go around Congress and upend the American economy in a misguided attempt to secure his legacy on climate change.  He’s gone from the candidate who said, “I face this challenge with profound humility and knowledge of my own limitations” to the president who says if Congress won’t act on this issue, “I will.”

Despite Americans’ keen interest in just about any issue except climate change, the White House is encouraging climate hysteria to push the Environmental Protection Agency’s coming regulations.

President Obama wants to use the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. The two main problems with this: It would devastate the economy and it would NOT heal the planet, so to speak.

“Even if we were to stop emitting greenhouse gas emissions entirely, we would not moderate the Earth’s temperature more than a few tenths of a degree Celsius by the end of the century,” said Heritage’s Nicolas Loris, the Herbert and Joyce Morgan Fellow.

Read that again: A few tenths of a degree—from taking extreme measures.

And how well do these dire climate projections do in reality? In fact, the climate models the administration relied on for its proposals projected the earth would warm 0.3 degree Celsius over the past 17 years—which did not happen, Loris reports. During that time, carbon dioxide emissions did increase—yet the projected warming did not happen.

That doesn’t bother the White House, which continues hyping the latest climate report with “with bogus claims of past, current and predicted climate impacts,” says David Kreutzer, Heritage’s research fellow in energy economics and climate change.

You may not be able to count on the White House’s climate projections, but there are several things you can count on from Obama’s action plan:

higher energy prices
lower incomes for Americans
slower economic growth

White House adviser John Podesta said this week that congressional attempts to block the administration have “zero percent chance” of working. Will members of Congress take that as a challenge and step up to protect Americans from this wrongheaded plan that would bring only economic harm for no environmental benefit?

SOURCE




The Slow, Sure Death of "Climate Change" Lies

By Alan Caruba

Even though President Obama continues to lie about “climate change” and employs the many elements of the federal government to repeat those lies, this huge hoax is dying.

Obama is on record saying that climate change “once considered an issue for the distant future, has moved firmly into the present” and is “affecting Americans right now.” Climate change as studied by climatologists is measured in terms of centuries whereas the weather is what is happening today. It has been happening before and since the rise of civilization. Obama’s claim that “climate-related changes are outside of recent experience” and “have become more frequent and/or intense” is a lie from start to finish.

The White House recently released its latest “National Climate Assessment.” It is 841 pages of outlandish claims that reflect the lies generated by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. When you consider that the federal government spends an estimated $2.6 billion annually in grants for climate research, about the only beneficiaries are those “scientists” employed to further the hoax.

The UN’s IPCC was created in 1983 and has issued a series of reports whose sole intention has been to frighten people around the world with claims of global warming that are scientifically baseless.

The Heartland Institute, a non-profit market-based think tank, responded by creating the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) and by sponsoring a series of international conferences. The 9th conference will be July 7-9 in Las Vegas. That effort began in 2003 in cooperation with the Science & Environmental Project led by Dr. S. Fred Singer and was joined by the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.

I am an advisor to the Institute, having written about environmental and energy issues for several decades at this point.

Calling on thousands of scientists around the world, in 2013 the NIPCC published the first of a three-volume response to the IPCC’s fifth assessment. This year, it has published a volume of Climate Change Reconsidered devoted to biological impacts, a 1,062 page opus. The NIPCC is an international panel of scientists and scholars with no government affiliation or sponsorship, and it receives no corporate funding.

Writing in the Financial Post in October 2013, Lawrence Solomon, the executive director of Energy Probe, a Toronto-based environmental group, noted that “solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years.” The Earth’s climate is primarily a reflection of solar radiation or the lack of it. From 1300 to 1850, the Earth was subject to a mini-ice age. While the global warming hoax began in the late 1980s, Solomon noted that, in the 1960s and 1970s, the scientific consensus was that the Earth “was entering a period of global cooling. The media in those years was filled with stories about a pending new ice age.

It was only the intervention of the UN’s IPCC that changed the “consensus” to one of global warming. A cooling cycle that began around fourteen years ago could lead to another mini-ice age or the planet could be on the cusp of a full-fledged one. On average, the interglacial periods of the Earth have lasted about 11,500 years and we are at the end of such a period.

Climate Change Reconsidered II devoted to biological impact features scientific studies that conclude:

# “Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant.” Considering that all vegetation on Earth depends on it, it is not surprising that another conclusion was that the ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content is causing a great greening of the Earth.

# As a result, “there is little or no risk of increasing food insecurity due to global warming or rising atmospheric CO2 levels and that terrestrial ecosystems have thrived throughout the world as a result of warming temperatures and rising levels of atmospheric CO2. Multiple lines of evidence indicate animal species are adapting, and in some cases, evolving, to cope with climate change of the modern era.”

# In addition, “rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels to no pose a significant threat to aquatic life and that a modest warming of the planet will result in a net reduction of human mortality from temperate-related events.”

The irony of the latest NIPCC report, of course, is that it responds to the claims of global warming and carbon dioxide’s role at a time when the Earth is cooling. It makes one wish that all the talk about “greenhouse gases” is true enough to help us escape from the present cooling.

One thing we do know for sure is that the Greens talk of climate change has lost its grip on the public imagination and attention. As the cooling cycle continues, people around the world will be far more focused on increased evidence of massive ice sheets at both poles, on frozen lakes and rivers, on shortened growing seasons, and on the desperate need for more fossil fuels to warm our homes and workplaces.

SOURCE




Obama and EPA Use “National Security” to Block Independent Investigations!

The executive branch has an enormous amount of power and thanks to President Obama’s time in office, that power has expanded over the past 6 years.

The result of this extended power is that an overbearing executive branch comes into conflict with individual rights and liberties as it continues its expansion. The IRS scandal is an excellent example of how executive bureaucracy will go to any length to protect and perpetuate its own existence.

While the President does have extraordinary power over the executive branch, there are safeguards in place to prevent fraud and abuse. Inspectors general serve as a watchdog element to stop these bloated bureaucracies from devolving into tyranny and lawlessness. But what happens when these Inspectors General are shut out? What happens when members of the President’s inner circle deliberately try to thwart investigations into the Executive branch bureaucracies?

That is exactly what is happening at the Environmental Protection Agency! EPA Assistant Inspector General Patrick Sullivan testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that the EPA’s Office of Homeland Security, run by EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, is currently acting as a “rogue law enforcement organization.” A unit run by Barack Obama’s political staff has been blocking independent investigations for years and preventing the Inspector General from doing his job.

Time and time again, when the Obama administration is forced to choose between transparency and opacity, it chooses the latter. This is corruption at its absolute worst!

This isn’t just a story about the EPA. Yes, that part of the story is important and should serve as a smoking gun, showing just how corrupt the Obama administration has become. But the story is much larger than just this one agency. Across the board, government agencies’ corrupt elements are being revealed. Not through legitimate investigation, but through the Obama administration’s resistance to oversight efforts.

The greatest comedy over the past six years is that as lawless as the Obama administration may be, many of the checks and balances designed to curtail White House abuses happen to have a serious conflict of interest.

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals is charged with determining whether executive orders and bureaucratic regulations are constitutional. Last year, Harry Reid abolished the filibuster to allow Democrats to pack this court with Obama supporters. That check has been all but eliminated.

The Attorney General is supposed to enforce the law of the land. Unfortunately, Eric Holder has no intention of upholding anything. He refuses to enforce our immigration laws and has refused to defend laws passed by Congress when they come up before the Supreme Court. When Congress held Eric Holder in contempt, they turned the case over to… Eric Holder! As if this corrupt Obama appointee would ever police himself…

Now we have a branch within the Environmental Protection Agency that refuses to cooperate with independent investigators. The EPA already has a number of excuses that it uses to avoid oversight. The agency uses “public health” and “environmental protection” as excuses to explain away its actions. These latest discoveries show that the White House actually staffed the EPA’s Office of Homeland Security with Obama supporters for the sole purpose of blocking oversight investigations.

First of all, why on earth does the EPA need an Office of Homeland Security? The actual Department of Homeland Security is redundant enough as it is… why does the EPA need its own miniature, in-house version? The answer is simple. Now, whenever the Obama administration wants something to go away or for an investigation to stop, this small unit of Obama staffers can claim that a program or regulation is in the name of “national security.”

A lot of this is the Republicans’ fault. Both parties have contributed to the rise of national security justifications for illegal actions. We have been conditioned to just accept that whenever the goal is national security, the ends always justify the means. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

The Obama administration’s politicization of this EPA unit shows just how corrupt our government has become. When confronted over environmental regulations and the EPA’s inner workings, the White House has actually tried to claim immunity and confidentiality by arguing the agency protects national security. The only things that the EPA protects are the wallets and bank accounts of the environmental lobby.

The Obama administration is out of control. But quite frankly, party affiliation has nothing to do with it. The Executive branch has grown to be so corrupt that it will stop at nothing to protect itself and shield itself from investigations. Even if it means claiming “national security” to stop investigations into the Environmental Protection Agency, the modern Presidency knows no shame.

This is completely absurd, but it is unfortunately our fault. We have allowed the Executive branch to become so bloated and corrupt. We have been conditioned by both political parties to accept “national security” as an excuse for practically anything

SOURCE






Australia:  Green anti-coal seam gas activists at work

Anti-gas activist’s camp relies on gas cylinders, six drums of diesel and electric generator. Go figure.



Less than a week after a council vowed to shut down a large anti-coal seam gas protest camp in the state's north and promised police would be called in to send it packing, the activists have been told they can stay.

The Bentley camp, near Lismore, is a temporary home to between hundreds and thousands of people, depending on the day.

It was established in February on private land adjacent to the site where Metgasco plans to begin exploratory drilling for gas.

Richmond Valley Council announced last Wednesday the camp's approval would expire at the end of that week and not be renewed due to its burgeoning numbers, the length of time it had been there, and the "ongoing breach of many of the approval conditions".

The mayor, Ernie Bennett, said police would be required "for sure" to move the campers on.

But on Thursday morning, Mr Bennett said the protesters would not be moved, despite their occupation of the land being "illegal".

"I don't think it would be appropriate to remove them at this point," he said.

"Council is working with them to put an appropriate DA [development application] before council."

The Greens have said the police should not be used to break the protest.

“The NSW Police Force should not be used as private security to allow a coal seam gas company to force its way into a community that has overwhelmingly rejected the presence of gas fields in the Northern Rivers,” Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham said this week.

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

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