Weather Records Keep Falling: Cold, Snow and Ice

Record setting cold and snow, not global warming, became the norm in November 2014. According to Ice Age Now: Four Thousand eight hundred fifty six locations in the U.S. set daily record low-high temperatures in November and another 4,121 saw record lows at least one day in November. For the month as a whole, 94 locations set a new monthly record low and 1435 locations set an average record low-high temperature for the month as a whole. Indeed, for the year-to-date, nearly 28,000 locations saw record lows during 2014, and another 19,500, locations set record low-daily-highs.

The Weather Channel reported cities across the U.S. experiencing record daily low temperatures for November, including: Casper, Wyoming: -27 (Nov. 12) and -26 (Nov. 13); Redmond, Oregon: 17 (Nov. 15) and -19 (Nov. 16) each was colder than previous record of -14 (Nov. 15, 1955); Joplin, Missouri: 6 (Nov. 18) bested

previous record of 7 (Nov. 29, 1976) Chicago great lakes frozen

And some cities had record low November streaks: Dallas/Ft. Worth: Six straight days of highs of 45 degrees or colder (Nov. 12-17); and Chicago: 180 straight hours below freezing (late on Nov. 11 until late morning Nov. 19)

The record cold brought with it record breaking ice and snow for many locations in the U.S. For instance, ice brought the earliest end to navigation on the Upper Mississippi River near the Twin Cities according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Blairsville, Georgia received its earliest snow on record on Nov. 1; 0.5 to 2 inches. The previous earliest snow was Nov. 10, 1968 and St. Cloud, Minnesota, received its record heaviest November calendar day snow (13.2 inches on Nov. 10). Gile, Wisconsin got hit with 50.1 inches of snow over a four-day period from Nov. 10-14. This awaits certification as a Wisconsin state snowstorm record.

Areas along the great lakes were especially hard hit by snow with Buffalo Niagara International Airport reporting 88 inches of snow (over 7 feet) from Nov. 17-21. Cities chalking up their snowiest Novembers on record in 2014 include: Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan: 65.4 inches (old record was 46.8 inches in 1989); Rhinelander, Wisconsin: 32.4 inches (old record was 21.5 inches in 1957) and Bangor, Maine: 25.9 inches (old record was 24.6 inches in 1962)

For the U.S. as a whole, Rutgers University Global Snow Lab reports, North America snow cover reached a record extent for mid-November (15.35 million square kilometers), crushing the old record from 1985 by over 2 million square kilometers.

SOURCE





How Obama and his environmental base are planning to eradicate the oil and gas industry

By Ron Arnold

Why does the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory war against hydraulic fracturing look like the Natural Resources Defense Council’s 2007 agenda for eliminating domestic oil and natural gas development?

Because it is.

The NRDC’s unjustifiable access to such anti-fracking regulatory power—and the diversion of $8.4 million in taxpayer dollars to its coffers—is highlighted in an October report from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee minority staff titled, “Setting the Record Straight: Hydraulic Fracturing and America’s Energy Revolution.”

The 111-page committee report opens by citing the enormously positive impacts of America’s oil and natural gas renaissance, which has:

Created and sustained millions of jobs and revitalized our manufacturing sector;

Provided greater energy security and geopolitical strength while reducing our trade deficit;

Lowered domestic energy prices both in our homes and at the gasoline pump.

But the emphasis is on those who would obliterate that renaissance. The message to the public is a warning: President Obama is coordinating with far-left environmental activists such as the aggressive NRDC and the Sierra Club, along with their millionaire board members, their Hollywood celebrity boosters and their “philanthropic” funders, such as the rabidly anti-fracking Park Foundation, to wage an all-out assault to shut down domestic production of American oil and natural gas.

The report notes that “the price of energy is no object to them; they can afford to pay their energy bills at virtually any price.” They can dump hundreds of millions of dollars into a coordinated campaign against affordable energy, decrease the standard of living for middle-class America and devastate the poor without a qualm.

Specifically, NRDC and other groups are “initiating legal challenges to force regulatory action with sue-and-settle arrangements”—the Sierra Club has received more than $19 million and the NRDC $252,004 in EPA-friendly settlements.

An anti-fracking agenda

The most insidious attack is “blurring the scientific literature with spurious studies.”

The foremost example is a 2011 Cornell University report by two biologists and an engineer who “falsely concluded that the life-cycle emissions from natural gas development emit more greenhouse gases than coal,” which was touted by The New York Times as “settled science” useful to silence defenders of fracking. But it was, in fact, science made for hire.

Lead author Robert W. Howarth “was approached by the Park Foundation in 2010 and asked to write an academic article that would make a case that shale gas was a dangerous, polluting fuel. That same year, the Park Foundation gave Cornell University $135,000 for Howarth’s study,” the report said.

Howarth’s “outdated and manipulated data” were so wrong that his study was refuted by his own Cornell colleagues, state regulators, some environmental groups, and even Obama’s White House.

The Park Foundation’s IRS Form 990PF reports from recent years reveal anti-fracking grants totaling more than $3 million to media outlets, including the American Prospect, Earth Talk, Grist, Mother Jones, The Nation, and Yes! Magazine, along with activist groups including Earthworks, Food and Water Watch, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Media Matters for America, and a network of about 50 others.

“This strategically organized alliance,” says the report, “has gone to great lengths to misconstrue facts, falsify science, and manufacture risks in order to vilify hydraulic fracturing” while ignoring the numerous failed “green” stimulus projects, including Solyndra.

Government regulation

The committee report was particularly concerned about Obama’s rhetoric that masks his intent, citing remarks that he gave to Northwestern University in October. According to the report, Obama bragged that “our 100-year supply of natural gas is a big factor in drawing jobs back to our shores. Many are in manufacturing, which produce the quintessential middle-class job.”

But at the same time, the report said, “over one dozen federal agencies [are] attempting to justify the federal usurpation of states’ rights to regulate hydraulic fracturing.”

Since 1997, EPA regulation of oil and natural gas extraction grew by more than 145%, and 13 federal agencies are trying to regulate fracking out of existence.

The overall picture of the President’s allies is one of heirs, investorsm, and entrepreneurs who became vastly rich in the capitalist system and thus envision themselves as the best directors of everybody else’s life. They became a new ruling class, crony capitalists out to mold the public destiny by destroying all competing visions, using power purchased from politicians, activists, and media shills.

The committee report connects some crony capitalist dots: John Bryson was a co-founder of NRDC in 1970 and later became the chairman and CEO of Edison International, “which obtained exclusive power purchase agreements for four solar projects that received [Department of Energy loans].”

In May 2011, Bryson was appointed to be Obama’s Secretary of Commerce and resigned in 2012 for health reasons. NRDC has numerous doorways to the corridors of power.

Conservatives puzzle over the socialist direction of Big Green’s crony capitalists. Anti-fracking activist Bill McKibben’s 350.org bluntly positioned itself as socialist when director Naomi Klein published her 2014 book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, which sets the anti-fracking, anti-fossil fuel task as, “shredding free market capitalism.” Does her gang mean to shred America’s private enterprise by nationalization?

Crony capitalism

Why bother? If your crony capitalist money can buy the government regulations you want and reroute the federal treasury into your anti-fossil fuel agenda, you get to keep your taxpayer-fed crony capitalism and anybody who survives gets the socialist shreds.

We all owe a debt of thanks to Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, top Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, for having the courage and diligence to spearhead such investigations as this fracking report documents.

Looking beyond the waning days of the lame-duck session, he told The Daily Signal, “With a Republican majority in the Senate, committee reports—which are based on honest research—will have a more significant presence in terms of creating awareness and setting policy.

“These reports are crucial to understanding how aggressive the EPA and the Obama Administration are in broadening the scope of their authority to issue regulations that affect small businesses and individual families across the country. Plus, they could lead to oversight hearings and perhaps legislative reforms.”

SOURCE





Harmful Consequences of EU Climate Policy

The European Union’s (EU) unilateral efforts to tackle climate change have been a disaster for the economy and the region’s people.

In 2002, the EU approved the Kyoto Protocol and committed to cutting its collective greenhouse gas emissions to 8 percent below 1990 levels by 2008–12. As a result of the restrictive and prescriptive energy policies imposed to meet the target, today the economies of most EU member states are stagnating or in decline. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned in late November the crisis-ridden EU poses a major threat to the world’s economy.

Europe’s climate strategy was based on two key assumptions: first, global warming was an urgent threat needing to be addressed immediately regardless of the costs; second, the world was running out of fossil fuels, so as oil and gas became ever more expensive, renewable energy would become competitive. Neither assumption proved correct.

Europe’s assumption about the urgency of the global warming problem has run up against the now-18-year-long pause in global temperature rises. That pause was not predicted by climate models and at the very least indicates either a misunderstanding of the factors affecting temperature or a consistent overestimation of climate sensitivity.

In addition, while Europe adopted legally binding emission reductions and domestic policies to meet them, the world did not follow suit.

EU countries have substantially reduced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions domestically, but only at the expense of the region’s economic viability. Europe’s energy-intensive and heavy industries moved abroad to locations with no CO2 emission limits and less expensive energy and labor costs. Those countries are now growing much faster than the EU.

EU member states spent about $882 billion on renewable energy projects between 2005 and 2013. In Germany alone, the green energy transition could cost more than $1 trillion by 2030 if the country’s climate targets and renewable energy goals are not modified.

Energy prices have risen sharply in Europe, where electricity price are now more than double those of the United States. In 2012 alone, lower gas and electricity prices in the United States relative to Europe meant estimated savings of close to $130 billion for U.S. manufacturing.

Last year, Antonio Tajani, the EU’s outgoing industry commissioner, warned Europe’s unilateral climate policies were pushing electricity costs to uncompetitive levels: “We face a systemic industrial massacre. We need a new energy policy. We have to stop pretending, because we can’t sacrifice Europe’s industry for climate goals that are not realistic, and are not being enforced worldwide.”

The costs of Europe’s climate policies have sparked the editors of The Washington Post to acknowledge Europe “has become a green-energy basket case. Instead of a model for the world to emulate, Europe has become a model of what not to do.”

Recognizing the seriousness of this problem, the EU has responded in its latest climate policy agreement by making its terms conditional on a binding international climate treaty. On October 23, EU leaders agreed to a conditional CO2 reduction target of 40 percent by 2030 ‒ provided there is a legally binding UN climate treaty. A special “flexibility clause” was added to the final text, allowing the council to reassess its conditional target after the UN summit.

There is no more “go-at-it-alone” or “Europe-leads” European plan. If the U.S., China, and others don’t adopt binding limits, Europe, learning from its previous climate policies, is prepared to look towards its best industrial interest first for a change.

SOURCE






Still more politicized pseudo-science?

The neonics and honeybees saga takes interesting, potentially fraudulent turn

Paul Driessen

Widening efforts to blame neonicotinoid pesticides for honeybee “colony collapse disorder” and other “beepocalypse” problems have taken a fascinating turn.

Insisting that scientific evidence shows a clear link between neonics and honeybee population declines, EU anti-insecticide campaigners persuaded the European Union to impose a two-year ban on using the chemicals. Farm organizations and the Union’s Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Department unsuccessfully opposed the ban, arguing that evidence for a link is not persuasive, and actual field studies in Canada and elsewhere have found little risk to bees from the pesticides.

Then this year’s canola (rapeseed) crop suffered serious losses of 30-50 percent, due to rampaging flea beetles. Over 44,000 acres (18,000 hectares) were declared a total loss. Euro farmers blamed the ban.

Now it appears that the campaign against these newer, safer pesticides – and the scientific papers that supposedly justify the ban – were all part of a rigged, carefully orchestrated environmentalist strategy.

A recently leaked memorandum, dated June 14, 2010, summarizes a discussion earlier that month among four European scientists who wanted to block neonic use. The memo says the four agreed to find prominent authors who could write scientific papers and coordinate their publication in respected journals, so as to “obtain the necessary policy change to have these pesticides banned.”

“If we are successful in getting these two papers published,” the memo continues, “there will be enormous impact, and a campaign led by WWF etc could be launched right away. It will be much harder for politicians to ignore a research paper and a policy forum paper” in a major scientific journal. Initial papers would demonstrate that neonics adversely affect bees, other insects, birds and other species; they would be written by a carefully selected primary author and a team of scientists from around the world. Additional papers would be posted online to support these documents – and a separate paper would simultaneously call for a ban on the sale and use of neonicotinoids.

(The WWF is the activist group World Wildlife Fund or World Wide Fund for Nature.)

One meeting attendee was Piet Wit, chairman of the ecosystems management commission of the environmentalist organization International Union for Conservation of Nature. Another was Maarten Bijleveld van Lexmond, who became chairman of the IUCN’s Task Force on Systemic Pesticides, which was inaugurated in March 2011, just after the European Union agreed to finance the Task Force to the tune of €431,337 ($540,000). Vouching for the Task Force as an “independent and unbiased” scientific “advisory” group was the same Dr. Maarten Bijleveld, who is also a founding member of the WWF’s Netherlands branch and an executive officer of the IUCN’s environmental committee.

Further underscoring the “independent” nature of these organizations, the EU awarded the IUCN €24,014,125 ($30,000,000) between 2007 and 2013. Moreover, IUCN task force membership is by invitation only – making it easier to implement the Systemic Pesticides Task Force’s stated purpose: to “bring together the scientific evidence needed to underpin action on neonicotinoid pesticides.”

The entire operation is odorously reminiscent of ClimateGate orchestration of alarmist research and banning of studies questioning “dangerous manmade climate change” assertions, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s 1972 DDT ban, regarding which then-EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus later admitted that he had not attended a single minute of his own task force’s lengthy hearings or read a single page of its findings, which concluded that the insecticide was not dangerous to humans or most wildlife.

The IUCN/WWF campaign also recalls the equally well coordinated effort by Fenton Communications, CBS “60 Minutes” and the Natural Resources Defense Council to ban Alar (a chemical used to keep apples ripening longer on trees), in a way that would channel millions of dollars to the NRDC. It reminds me of former Environmental Defense Fund senior scientist Charles Wurster’s assertion that, “If the environmentalists win on DDT, they will achieve a level of authority they never had before.”

Never mind that the Alar scam sent many family apple orchards into bankruptcy – or that millions of African and Asian parents and children have died from malaria because radical greens have made DDT largely unavailable even for disease control. For them, humanitarian concerns rarely enter the discussion.

As science writer Hank Campbell observes, all these campaigns reflect proven strategies “to manipulate science to achieve a political goal.” They follow the Saul Alinsky/Big Green script summarized by Madeleine Cosman: Select and vilify a target. Devise a “scientific study” that predicts a public health disaster. Release it to the media, before legitimate scientists can analyze and criticize it. Generate emotional headlines and public reactions. Develop a government “solution,” and intimidate legislatures or government regulators to impose it. Coerce manufacturers to stop making and selling the product.

Environmental pressure groups have repeatedly and successfully employed these steps.

In a recent speech, Harvard School of Public Health Professor Chensheng Lu claimed that his “Harvard Study” clearly demonstrated that neonics “are highly likely to be responsible for triggering Colony Collapse Disorder.” However, pesticide expert and professional pest exterminator Rich Kozlovich says the vast majority of scientists who study bees for a living vigorously disagree. They cite multiple problems, including the fact that small bee populations were fed “astronomical” levels of insecticide-laced corn syrup, and the colonies examined for Lu’s paper did not even exhibit CCD symptoms.

President Obama has nevertheless relied heavily on all this pseudo-science, to support his June 2014 memorandum instructing relevant U.S. agencies “to develop a plan for protecting pollinators such as honey bees …in response to mounting concerns about [their] dwindling populations on American crops.” The “serious” problem, Mr. Obama insists, “requires immediate attention.”

He is playing his role in the Big Green script but, as my previous articles have noted (here, here and here), nothing in honest, actual science supports his call for yet another Executive Branch end-run around the Legislative Branch and a proper vetting of what we do know about neonics and honeybee problems.

Neonics are vital for numerous crops: canola, soybeans, wheat, winter squash, citrus groves and others.

Derived from a synthetic form of nicotine and often applied to seeds, “neonicotinoids” are incorporated into plants to defend them against pests. This allows growers to be much more targeted in killing crop-threatening insects: only those that actually feed on the plants are affected. This approach (or spraying) also means growers can successfully grow crops with far fewer large-scale insecticide applications, and dramatically reduce reliance on more toxic pesticides that do harm wildlife, including bees. Real-world field studies have shown that bees collecting pollen from plants treated with neonics are not harmed.

Other research has identified serious problems that truly are afflicting bees in Canada, the United States, Europe and elsewhere. Varroa mites carry at least 19 bee viruses and diseases – and parasitic phorid flies, Nosema intestinal fungi and the tobacco ringspot virus also cause significant colony losses. Beekeepers have accidentally killed entire hives, while trying to address such problems.

Colony Collapse Disorder has shown up from time to time for centuries. A hundred years ago it was called the “disappearing disease.” It now seems to be ebbing, and bee and beehive numbers are climbing.

We need to let real science do its job, and stop jumping to conclusions or short-circuiting the process with politicized papers, anti-neonic campaigns and presidential memorandums. We need answers, not scapegoats. Otherwise, bee mortality problems are likely to spread, go untreated and get even worse, while neonic bans cause widespread crop failures and huge financial losses for farmers.

Via email





Australia: Greenies harassing banks over carbon

ANZ Bank's lending to big carbon emitters is set to come into focus at this week's annual meeting of shareholders, after other banks have boosted their disclosure of climate-change risks.

Investors will on Thursday vote on a proposal to change the constitution to force ANZ to publish the amount of greenhouse gas emissions the company is financing via loans and investments.

It comes as banks globally face growing pressure to consider the financial risks they may face from lending to companies with large carbon footprints.

Proxy advisers are recommending shareholders vote against the resolution, which was also put to CBA investors and rejected by a large margin.

Nonetheless, ANZ's rivals have also taken steps to disclose more information about their carbon exposure.

NAB, which also has its annual general meeting on Thursday, was facing the same resolution, from the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility, but it was withdrawn after the bank agreed to publish more detail on its exposure to climate-change risks in 2015.

CBA also agreed to provide more detail on how much of its loan book is exposed to fossil fuels. At its annual general meeting last month, 3.2 per cent of shareholders voted in favour of the resolution.

In a note to investors, CGI Glass Lewis says ANZ could face some risk through its financed emissions but it may not be practical or even possible to collect all the information required by the resolution. It is advising shareholders to vote against the proposal.

"Given the trend in increased regulation and a heightened sense of awareness among some regulators concerning ensuring the mitigation of the effects of climate change, it is likely that part of the company's loan book could be affected," the note said.

"However, we are not convinced that adoption of this proposal is in the company or its shareholders' best interests at this time."

The lobby group behind the proposal argues that of the big four banks, ANZ is the most exposed to climate-change risks  because of its role as a big lender to the resources sector.

The debate is occurring amid a growing focus on banks' exposure to borrowers who would be affected by climate change policies.

The Bank of England this month reportedly commenced an inquiry into the risk of a "carbon bubble" – a financial shock caused by efforts to mitigate climate change.

Westpac did not face the resolution because ACCR research has found it was the least carbon-exposed to climate risks of the big four. All the same, a significant share of the questions put to chairman Lindsay Maxsted at the bank's AGM on Friday focused on how the bank was responding to climate change in its lending decisions.

Aside from carbon, ANZ investors will also have a non-binding vote on chief executive Mike Smith's remuneration, which rose 3.7 per cent to $10.7 million.

NAB cut the pay of its its former boss Cameron Clyne by more than $1 million to $6 million after disappointing financial results for the bank.

SOURCE





100 reasons why climate change is natural

HERE are the 100 reasons, released in a dossier issued by the European Foundation, why climate change is natural and not man-made:

1) There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.

2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.

3) Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.

4) After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.

5) Throughout the Earth’s history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher – more than ten times as high.

6) Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time.

7) The 0.7C increase in the average global temperature over the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends.

8) The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favourable reviewers not the 4,000 usually cited.

9) Leaked e-mails from British climate scientists – in a scandal known as “Climate-gate” - suggest that that has been manipulated to exaggerate global warming

10) A large body of scientific research suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years.

11) Politicians and activiists claim rising sea levels are a direct cause of global warming but sea levels rates have been increasing steadily since the last ice age 10,000 ago

12) Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London says climate change is too complicated to be caused by just one factor, whether CO2 or clouds

13) Peter Lilley MP said last month that “fewer people in Britain than in any other country believe in the importance of global warming. That is despite the fact that our Government and our political class—predominantly—are more committed to it than their counterparts in any other country in the world”.

14) In pursuit of the global warming rhetoric, wind farms will do very little to nothing to reduce CO2 emissions

15) Professor Plimer, Professor of Geology and Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide, stated that the idea of taking a single trace gas in the atmosphere, accusing it and finding it guilty of total responsibility for climate change, is an “absurdity”

16) A Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist, Willie Soon, said he is “embarrassed and puzzled” by the shallow science in papers that support the proposition that the earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming.

17) The science of what determines the earth’s temperature is in fact far from settled or understood.

18) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, unlike water vapour which is tied to climate concerns, and which we can’t even pretend to control

19) A petition by scientists trying to tell the world that the political and media portrayal of global warming is false was put forward in the Heidelberg Appeal in 1992. Today, more than 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, from 106 countries have signed it.

20) It is claimed the average global temperature increased at a dangerously fast rate in the 20th century but the recent rate of average global temperature rise has been between 1 and 2 degrees C per century - within natural rates

21) Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, Poland says the earth’s temperature has more to do with cloud cover and water vapor than CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

22) There is strong evidence from solar studies which suggests that the Earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades

23) It is myth that receding glaciers are proof of global warming as glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for many centuries

24) It is a falsehood that the earth’s poles are warming because that is natural variation and while the western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer we also see that the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder

25) The IPCC claims climate driven “impacts on biodiversity are significant and of key relevance” but those claims are simply not supported by scientific research

26) The IPCC threat of climate change to the world’s species does not make sense as wild species are at least one million years old, which means they have all been through hundreds of climate cycles

27) Research goes strongly against claims that CO2-induced global warming would cause catastrophic disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets.

28) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels are our best hope of raising crop yields to feed an ever-growing population

29) The biggest climate change ever experienced on earth took place around 700 million years ago

30) The slight increase in temperature which has been observed since 1900 is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term natural climate cycles

31) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels of some so-called “greenhouse gases” may be contributing to higher oxygen levels and global cooling, not warming

32) Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures

33) Today’s CO2 concentration of around 385 ppm is very low compared to most of the earth’s history – we actually live in a carbon-deficient atmosphere

34) It is a myth that CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas because greenhouse gases form about 3% of the atmosphere by volume, and CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere

35) It is a myth that computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming because computer models can be made to “verify” anything

36) There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes

37) One statement deleted from a UN report in 1996 stated that “none of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases”

38) The world “warmed” by 0.07 +/- 0.07 degrees C from 1999 to 2008, not the 0.20 degrees C expected by the IPCC

39) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says “it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense” but there has been no increase in the intensity or frequency of tropical cyclones globally

40) Rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be shown not only to have a negligible effect on the Earth’s many ecosystems, but in some cases to be a positive help to many organisms

41) Researchers who compare and contrast climate change impact on civilizations found warm periods are beneficial to mankind and cold periods harmful

42) The Met Office asserts we are in the hottest decade since records began but this is precisely what the world should expect if the climate is cyclical

43) Rising CO2 levels increase plant growth and make plants more resistant to drought and pests

44) The historical increase in the air’s CO2 content has improved human nutrition by raising crop yields during the past 150 years

45) The increase of the air’s CO2 content has probably helped lengthen human lifespans since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution

46) The IPCC alleges that “climate change currently contributes to the global burden of disease and premature deaths” but the evidence shows that higher temperatures and rising CO2 levels has helped global populations

47) In May of 2004, the Russian Academy of Sciences published a report concluding that the Kyoto Protocol has no scientific grounding at all.

48) The “Climate-gate” scandal pointed to a expensive public campaign of disinformation and the denigration of scientists who opposed the belief that CO2 emissions were causing climate change

49) The head of Britain’s climate change watchdog has predicted households will need to spend up to £15,000 on a full energy efficiency makeover if the Government is to meet its ambitious targets for cutting carbon emissions.

50) Wind power is unlikely to be the answer to our energy needs. The wind power industry argues that there are “no direct subsidies” but it involves a total subsidy of as much as £60 per MWh which falls directly on electricity consumers. This burden will grow in line with attempts to achieve Wind power targets, according to a recent OFGEM report.

51) Wind farms are not an efficient way to produce energy. The British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) accepts a figure of 75 per cent back-up power is required.

52) Global temperatures are below the low end of IPCC predictions not at “at the top end of IPCC estimates”

53) Climate alarmists have raised the concern over acidification of the oceans but Tom Segalstad from Oslo University in Norway , and others, have noted that the composition of ocean water – including CO2, calcium, and water – can act as a buffering agent in the acidification of the oceans.

54) The UN’s IPCC computer models of human-caused global warming predict the emergence of a “hotspot” in the upper troposphere over the tropics.  Former researcher in the Australian Department of Climate Change, David Evans, said there is no evidence of such a hotspot

55) The argument that climate change is a of result of global warming caused by human activity is the argument of flat Earthers.

56) The manner in which US President Barack Obama sidestepped Congress to order emission cuts shows how undemocratic and irrational the entire international decision-making process has become with regards to emission-target setting.

57) William Kininmonth, a former head of the National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation, wrote “the likely extent of global temperature rise from a doubling of CO2 is less than 1C. Such warming is well within the envelope of variation experienced during the past 10,000 years and insignificant in the context of glacial cycles during the past million years, when Earth has been predominantly very cold and covered by extensive ice sheets.”

58) Canada has shown the world targets derived from the existing Kyoto commitments were always unrealistic and did not work for the country.

59) In the lead up to the Copenhagen summit, David Davis MP said of previous climate summits, at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and Kyoto in 1997 that many had promised greater cuts, but “neither happened”, but we are continuing along the same lines

60) The UK ’s environmental policy has a long-term price tag of about £55 billion, before taking into account the impact on its economic growth.

61) The UN’s panel on climate change warned that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035. J. Graham Cogley a professor at Ontario Trent University, claims this inaccurate stating the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.

62) Under existing Kyoto obligations the EU has attempted to claim success, while actually increasing emissions by 13 per cent, according to Lord Lawson. In addition the EU has pursued this scheme by purchasing “offsets” from countries such as China paying them billions of dollars to destroy atmospheric pollutants, such as CFC-23, which were manufactured purely in order to be destroyed.

63) It is claimed that the average global temperature was relatively unchanging in pre-industrial times but sky-rocketed since 1900, and will increase by several degrees more over the next 100 years according to Penn State University researcher Michael Mann. There is no convincing empirical evidence that past climate was unchanging, nor that 20th century changes in average global temperature were unusual or unnatural.

64) Michael Mann of Penn State University has actually shown that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age did in fact exist, which contrasts with his earlier work which produced the “hockey stick graph” which showed a constant temperature over the past thousand years or so followed by a recent dramatic upturn.

65) The globe’s current approach to climate change in which major industrialised countries agree to nonsensical targets for their CO2 emissions by a given date, as it has been under the Kyoto system, is very expensive.

66) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures when looking at the history of the Earth’s temperature.

67) Global temperatures have not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years and have actually been falling for nine years. The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed a scientific team had expressed dismay at the fact global warming was contrary to their predictions and admitted their inability to explain it was “a travesty”.

68) The IPCC predicts that a warmer planet will lead to more extreme weather, including drought, flooding, storms, snow, and wildfires. But over the last century, during which the IPCC claims the world experienced more rapid warming than any time in the past two millennia, the world did not experience significantly greater trends in any of these extreme weather events.

69) In explaining the average temperature standstill we are currently experiencing, the Met Office Hadley Centre ran a series of computer climate predictions and found in many of the computer runs there were decade-long standstills but none for 15 years – so it expects global warming to resume swiftly.

70) Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote: “The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the Earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope.  Such hysteria (over global warming) simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth.”

71) Despite the 1997 Kyoto Protocol’s status as the flagship of the fight against climate change it has been a failure.

72) The first phase of the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which ran from 2005 to 2007 was a failure. Huge over-allocation of permits to pollute led to a collapse in the price of carbon from €33 to just €0.20 per tonne meaning the system did not reduce emissions at all.

73) The EU trading scheme, to manage carbon emissions has completely failed and actually allows European businesses to duck out of making their emissions reductions at home by offsetting, which means paying for cuts to be made overseas instead.

74) To date “cap and trade” carbon markets have done almost nothing to reduce emissions.

75) In the United States , the cap-and-trade is an approach designed to control carbon emissions and will impose huge costs upon American citizens via a carbon tax on all goods and services produced in the United States. The average family of four can expect to pay an additional $1700, or £1,043, more each year. It is predicted that the United States will lose more than 2 million jobs as the result of cap-and-trade schemes.

76) Dr Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has indicated that out of the 21 climate models tracked by the IPCC the differences in warming exhibited by those models is mostly the result of different strengths of positive cloud feedback – and that increasing CO2 is insufficient to explain global-average warming in the last 50 to 100 years.

77) Why should politicians devote our scarce resources in a globally competitive world to a false and ill-defined problem, while ignoring the real problems the entire planet faces, such as: poverty, hunger, disease or terrorism.

78) A proper analysis of ice core records from the past 650,000 years demonstrates that temperature increases have come before, and not resulted from, increases in CO2 by hundreds of years.

79) Since the cause of global warming is mostly natural, then there is in actual fact very little we can do about it. (We are still not able to control the sun).

80) A substantial number of the panel of 2,500 climate scientists on the United Nation’s International Panel on Climate Change, which created a statement on scientific unanimity on climate change and man-made global warming, were found to have serious concerns.

81) The UK’s Met Office has been forced this year to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by revelations about the data.

82)  Politicians and activists push for renewable energy sources such as wind turbines under the rhetoric of climate change, but it is essentially about money – under the system of Renewable Obligations. Much of the money is paid for by consumers in electricity bills. It amounts to £1 billion a year.

83) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.

84) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal’s editor, solely because he did not share their willingness to debase science for political purposes.

85) Ice-core data clearly show that temperatures change centuries before concentrations of atmospheric CO2 change. Thus, there appears to be little evidence for insisting that changes in concentrations of CO2 are the cause of past temperature and climate change.

86) There are no experimentally verified processes explaining how CO2 concentrations can fall in a few centuries without falling temperatures – in fact it is changing temperatures which cause changes in CO2 concentrations, which is consistent with experiments that show CO2 is the atmospheric gas most readily absorbed by water.

87) The Government’s Renewable Energy Strategy contains a massive increase in electricity generation by wind power costing around £4 billion a year over the next twenty years. The benefits will be only £4 to £5 billion overall (not per annum). So costs will outnumber benefits by a range of between eleven and seventeen times.

88) Whilst CO2 levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout history, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and the growth rate has now been constant for the past 25 years.

89) It is a myth that CO2 is a pollutant, because nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere and human beings could not live in 100% nitrogen either: CO2 is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is and CO2 is essential to life.

90) Politicians and climate activists make claims to rising sea levels but certain members in the IPCC chose an area to measure in Hong Kong that is subsiding. They used the record reading of 2.3 mm per year rise of sea level.

91) The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998.

92) If one factors in non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements show little, if any, global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).

93) US President Barack Obama pledged to cut emissions by 2050 to equal those of 1910 when there were 92 million Americans. In 2050, there will be 420 million Americans, so Obama’s promise means that emissions per head will be approximately what they were in 1875. It simply will not happen.

94) The European Union has already agreed to cut emissions by 20 percent to 2020, compared with 1990 levels, and is willing to increase the target to 30 percent. However, these are unachievable and the EU has already massively failed with its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), as EU emissions actually rose by 0.8 percent from 2005 to 2006 and are known to be well above the Kyoto goal.

95) Australia has stated it wants to slash greenhouse emissions by up to 25 percent below 2000 levels by 2020, but the pledges were so unpopular that the country’s Senate has voted against the carbon trading Bill, and the Opposition’s Party leader has now been ousted by a climate change sceptic.

96) Canada plans to reduce emissions by 20 percent compared with 2006 levels by 2020, representing approximately a 3 percent cut from 1990 levels but it simultaneously defends its Alberta tar sands emissions and its record as one of the world’s highest per-capita emissions setters.

97) India plans to reduce the ratio of emissions to production by 20-25 percent compared with 2005 levels by 2020, but all Government officials insist that since India has to grow for its development and poverty alleviation, it has to emit, because the economy is driven by carbon.

98) The Leipzig Declaration in 1996, was signed by 110 scientists who said: “We – along with many of our fellow citizens – are apprehensive about the climate treaty conference scheduled for Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997” and “based on all the evidence available to us, we cannot subscribe to the politically inspired world view that envisages climate catastrophes and calls for hasty actions.”

99) A US Oregon Petition Project stated “We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of CO2, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”

100) A report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change concluded “We find no support for the IPCC’s claim that climate observations during the twentieth century are either unprecedented or provide evidence of an anthropogenic effect on climate.”

SOURCE

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