The crooked Mike Lockwood (Professor of Space Environment Physics at Reading University, England
In Christopher Booker’s book, The Real Global Warming Disaster, (page 186/7), he writes about the Channel Four programme, “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, produced by Martin Durkin:
What enraged the upholders of the ‘consensus’ more than anything else, however, was the publicity Durkin’s film gave to those scientists who believed that the real cause of global warming (and cooling) lay in the activity of the sun, particularly the theories of Friis-Christensen and Svensmark. Friis-Christensen’s work, it was pointed out on various blogs, had been wholly discredited. One graph shown in the film, it was claimed, had deliberately omitted the last few years of solar activity, because to have included these would have shown that it had been declining just when global temperatures were rising, thus exposing the theory as false (Durkin amended this for the DVD version of his film by adding the missing years).
So concerned were the advocates of the ‘consensus’ by the interest now being shown in the view that global warming might be related to the activity of the sun that some more formal riposte was inevitable. On July 11 2007 it came. Bearing all the signs of a carefully planned operation, the media, led by the BBC and Nature, suddenly came out with a rash of news items trailing a new study which, it was claimed, had completely demolished the ‘solar warming’ thesis.
The paper, published online by the Royal Society, was by Professor Mike Lockwood, a physicist at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory, and Claus Frőhlich of the World Radiation Center in Davos, Switzerland.They claimed that a fresh look at the data for the previous 100 years showed that Svensmark’s solar data were seriously wrong. They conceded that the sun’s magnetic activity had been higher in the 20th century than in previous centuries, and also, perhaps surprisingly, admitted that in earlier years this had significantly influenced global temperatures. But in 1985 it had peaked and started to decline, and it was at just this time that global surface temperatures had continued to rise, higher than ever. This was the proof, they claimed, that solar activity could not be the cause of recent warming.
Supporters of the ‘consensus’ were exultant at their coup. ‘This paper is the final nail in the coffin for people who would like to make the Sun responsible for present global warming’, one German climate scientist told Nature‘This should settle the debate’, said Lockwood himself, expressing particular anger at the Channel Four programme, which he described as ‘so bad it was almost fraudulent’
Yet the Royal Society’s paper had a number of odd features. One was that its seven pages of text were written so opaquely, citing so many sources, that it looked as though the authors’ chief purpose was just to put across their central headline message.
They were at pains, for instance, not to argue with the mass of research showing that, up to recent times, solar effects had played a significant part in influencing global temperatures (‘it is becoming feasible’, they conceded, ‘to detect genuine solar forcing in climate records’). The focus of their concern was the period since 1985, in assessing whether ‘solar variations could have played any role in observed present-day global warming’. Here, having established that solar activity had weakened, they could put across their central message: that, because surface temperatures had continued to rise, there could be no connection between current warming and the Sun.
But herein lay several disconcerting features of their argument. One was that a graph allegedly showing the cosmic ray count (gleefully reproduced by the BBC) in fact showed something quite unrelated to cosmic rays. A graph of the actual cosmic ray count (from the Climax neutron monitor) showed, for instance, that in the early 1990s it was very low, indicating the likely onset of a strong warming phase over the following years. Why had this evidence been misrepresented and omitted?
Then why had they only included a graph of recent surface temperatures and not one showing satellite data? The latest satellite record of lower air temperatures since 1979 showed that, following the El Nino year 1998, levels had fallen markedly, even, in 2000, by as much as a full degree, Although it had risen again, with a spike in 2006, a further sharp fall in 2007 had already taken it down to a level 0.6 of a degree lower than it was in 1998, Indeed it was slightly lower than a level it had reached in 1983.
Not to include this was suspect enough. But even more so was the way in which the record of surface temperatures on which Lockwood and Frőlich hung their case, instead of giving year-by-year figures, was smoothed out to show a continuous warming. Looked at on a year-by-year basis, the latest data from the Hadley Centre gave a very different picture. These showed that, in the six years between 2000 and 2006, even the trend line of surface temperatures had not continued to rise, flattening out around an average level more than 0.2 degrees lower than in 1998. Now in 2007, as was already apparent, it was falling further still.
Why did the authors prefer such long-term averages to the simpler message of year-by-year data? The latter would have exposed a crucial flaw in their argument. If rising CO2 levels were the main driver of global warming, then temperatures should also have continued to rise. If temperatures were flattening out at a time when CO2 levels were still increasing, this questioned the entire case for CO2-driven global warming.
Despite such determined efforts being made to discredit the findings of Svensmark’s SKY experiment, not all the world’s more established scientists were so easily satisfied. It had already been announced that in 2010 an international team at CERN, the world’s largest sub-atomic particle laboratory based in Geneva, would be carrying out a very much larger-scale test of Svensmark’s theory, in a project named CLOUD.
A quick glance at the HADCRUT trends from 2001 to 2007 show that, far from continuing to rise as Lockwood claimed, temperatures were if anything dropping.
As we know, the pause in satellite temperatures can be traced back even earlier to 1998, blowing a huge hole in Lockwood’s argument. Given the time lags and state of the ocean cycles, the rise in temperatures between 1985 and 1998 would not have been incompatible with the Svensmark theory.
It appears then that the Lockwood paper of 2007, rather than being an objective piece of science, was simply an attempt to discredit Svensmark's theory and the Channel Four programme.
FOOTNOTE
In September 2007, two months after the Lockwood paper had been released, Svensmark & Friis-Christensen issued a trenchant rebuttal to Lockwood’s conclusions, finding many flaws in his work.
The green energy mirage – and con job
Musk, Schmidt, Simons and billionaire buddies build empire based on climate and energy BS
Paul Driessen and Tom Tamarkin
Elon Musk and his fellow barons of Climate Crisis, Inc. recently got a huge boost from Pope Francis. Musk et al. say fossil fuels are causing unprecedented warming and weather disasters. The Pope agrees and says Catholics must “ask God for a positive outcome” to negotiations over another UN climate treaty.
It matters not that the predicted calamities are not happening. There has been no warming in 19 years, no category 3-5 hurricanes making US landfall for a record 9-1/2 years, indeed none of the over-hyped climate disasters occurring in the real world outside the alarmists’ windows. In fact, poor nations support the treaty mostly because it promises some $100 billion per year in adaptation, mitigation and compensation money from FRCs: Formerly Rich Countries that have shackled their own job creation, economic growth and living standards in the name of stabilizing Earth’s perpetually fluctuating climate.
Any money that is transferred will end up in the pockets of governing elites. Poor families will get little or no cash – and will be told their dreams of better lives must be limited to jobs and living standards that can be supported by solar panels on their huts and a few wind turbines near their villages.
Simply put, the Musk-Obama-Pope-Climate Crisis schemes will save humanity from exaggerated and fabricated climate disasters decades from now – by impoverishing billions and killing millions tomorrow.
For the catechism of climate cataclysm coalition, the essential thing is that we believe the hysterical assertions and computer models – and support endless renewable energy mandates and subsidies.
Musk and his Tesla and SolarCity companies have already pocketed $4.9 billion in taxpayer-financed subsidies, and even long-elusive profitability has not ended the handouts. Now he claims a small “blue square” on a map represents the “very little” land required to “get rid of all fossil fuel electricity generation” in the USA and prevent a non-existent climate cataclysm. We just need rooftop solar panels linked to wall-mounted battery packs – a mere 160 million Tesla Powerwalls – to eliminate the need for all coal and natural gas electricity generation in the United States, he insists.
Hogwash (from pork barrel political pig farms). As a careful and extensive analysis demonstrates, even without considering the monumental electricity demand required to convert America’s vehicles to electric-battery versions, providing today’s baseload and peak demand electricity would require 29.3 billion one-square-meter solar panels. Assuming adequate yearlong daily sunlight, that’s 29,333 square kilometers of active solar panel surface area: 7.2 million acres – or nearly all of Maryland and Delaware!
The analysis is technical, beyond the ability of most voters, journalists, politicians and regulators to comprehend fully. Read it anyway, if only to understand the enormity of financing, raw materials, mining, manufacturing and electricity required to make and ship the panels (some 40 million per year), battery packs and inverters (to convert low-voltage solar electricity to 120 or 240 Volt alternating current).
We are clearly dealing with an unprecedented green mirage and con job. It will drive average retail electricity prices from the 8-9 cents per kilowatt-hour in coal and gas-reliant states, to the 15-17 cents per kWh in California, Connecticut and New York – or even the 36-40 cents in Germany and Denmark, where unsubsidized rates are 70-80 cents per kWh! The impact of such prices on people’s jobs, living standards, health and welfare would be devastating. But Musk and his “clean” energy friends ignore this.
Musk has a BS in physics – and obviously holds advanced BS degrees in lobbying and con-artistry about climate disasters and renewable energy solutions, mandated by government decrees and financed by endless billions in subsidies. He has made numerous personal visits to legislative offices in Sacramento and Washington, to promote more such schemes, and aligns his efforts with those of Eric Schmidt, Nat Simons, Tom Steyer, Al Gore and members of the Clean Tech Syndicate: eleven secretive families with total wealth of over $60 billion, who want to get even richer off taxpayers and consumers.
They assume (demand) that bogus climate cataclysms will continue to bring them billions in climate cash payouts from Washington and state capitals, along with more exemptions from endangered species and environmental cleanup laws and regulations that are applied with a vengeance to fossil fuel projects.
Google scientists finally admitted that existing and near-term renewable energy technologies simply do not work as advertised and cannot meet their political or climate promises. The technologies are all hat, no cattle. However, the Climate Crisis and Clean Tech industries are determined to push ahead – using our money, risking little of their own, and getting reimbursed by us when their investments turn sour.
Google and NRG now want a $539-million federal grant to bail them out of $1.6 billion in taxpayer loans for the bird-roasting Ivanpah concentrated solar power project in California, because it does not work and needs so much natural gas to keep its water hot that it doesn’t meet state renewable energy standards. Other Obama “greenbacks” energy “investments” have also drowned in red ink, leaving taxpayers to pay the tab: Solyndra, Abound Solar, Solar Trust, Ener1, Beacon Power, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Musk is nevertheless lobbying for SB-350, which would require that 50% of California’s electricity be produced via “renewable” sources, such as wind, solar, biofuels and politicians’ hot air. Meanwhile, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s family and corporate foundations give millions to alarmist climate scientists, the ultra-green Energy Foundation, and rabid anti-fracking groups like the World Wildlife Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council. NRDC also gets millions from EPA, to promote the agency’s anti-fossil fuel agenda and place 33 of its employees on 21 EPA “advisory” committees.
Schmidt and Warren Buffett also support the secretive far-left Tides Foundation, which has given millions to groups opposed to coal and hydraulic fracturing, the Keystone XL and Sandpiper pipeline projects, and countless other job-creating hydrocarbon programs. Canadian researcher Cory Morningstar accurately describes Tides as a “magical, money-funneling machine of epic proportions.”
Billionaire Nat Simons and his Sea Change Foundation spend tens of millions annually promoting and lobbying for “renewable” energy policies, mandates and subsidies; investing in wind, solar and biofuel companies; supporting environmentalist pressure groups; and contributing to Democrat politicians who perpetuate the crony corporatist arrangements. Simons, his wife and various Vladimir Putin cronies (via Klein, Ltd. and the shadowy Bermuda Wakefield Quin law firm) are the only contributors to Sea Change.
We often rail against Third World corruption. Our American (and European) environmental corruption is simply more subtle and sophisticated. It is legalized deception and theft – a massive wealth transfer from poor and middle class consumers and taxpayers to billionaires who are raking in still more billions, thanks to brilliantly crafted alarmist campaigns. And let’s not forget Al Gore, Mike Mann, Tom Steyer, James Hansen and all the others who likewise profit immensely from these arrangements – and the constant vilification of scientists who question climate catastrophe mantras.
Pressure groups and governing elites used to argue that we are running out of oil and natural gas. That ploy no longer works. While fossil fuels may eventually prove finite, fracking has given us vast new supplies of petroleum – and huge coal, oil and gas deposits have been placed off limits by government decree. We have at least a century to develop alternative energy sources that actually work – that create real jobs, actual revenues, lower energy prices and true prosperity – without the mandates, subsidies, deception, fraud and corruption that are the hallmark of “green” energy schemes.
No wonder the “clean tech” crowd is financing anti-hydrocarbon and climate chaos campaigns. But despite the Pope’s belated rescue attempt, the pseudo-science of “dangerous manmade global warming” is slowly succumbing to climate reality. And any new UN climate treaty will founder once poor nations realize the promised hundreds of billions a year will not materialize.
Those still impoverished nations should not do what rich countries are doing now that they are rich. They should do what rich countries did to become rich.
Via email
Pentagon Ships Military Off to Battle 'Climate Change'
In January 2012, Barack Obama said, “As we look beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan … we’ll be able to ensure our security with smaller conventional ground forces.” In other words, even though America’s military is being downsized, our military prowess will remain untarnished. “[Y]es, our military will be leaner, but the world must know the United States is going to maintain our military superiority with armed forces that are agile, flexible and ready for the full range of contingencies and threats,” he explained.
Who knew that meant documenting the effects of climate change — even as terrorism-fueled crises in the Middle East rage on? According to The Washington Times, “Though stretched thin by the aftermath of two wars and the current fight against the Islamic State, the Obama administration has enlisted the Pentagon to measure the shrinking ice in the Arctic in the latest example of the president’s climate agenda being extended to the military.
A recent Government Accountability Office report examined the Defense Department’s role in the Arctic, which increasingly will include ‘monitoring the changing Arctic conditions,’ such as ice levels.” America’s retreat — not climate change, as this administration posits — facilitated the Islamic State’s rise. And pulling even more resources away from the real fight to wage war on a straw man isn’t going to make them go away.
Rep. Smith (R-TX) Rips Secret Science, Unconstitutional Regulations
Stuart Varney, host of FOX Business’ Varney & Co., complained about President Barack Obama’s unconstitutional executive orders during the June 10 broadcast of the show, focusing specifically on the administration’s climate change regulations.
Varney said to his final guest, Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, Chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, “My point is that there’s nothing you can do about this, is there?”
Smith responded with a long list of actions his committee was undertaking to rein in the administration.
In his luncheon keynote address at the Tenth International Conference on Climate Change, Smith detailed his efforts to counteract the Obama administration’s executive actions and graciously opened his remarks with “appreciation of the Heartland Institute’s fact-checking of the administration’s claims about climate change.”
Reining in the EPA
The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee has jurisdiction over federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Smith said, “As chairman, it is my responsibility to ensure that the federal government is efficient, effective, and accountable to the American people. Regulations should be based on sound science, not science fiction.”
EPA behaves otherwise, hiding regulatory data and silencing its taxpayer-funded scientists.
Smith told the conference, “Earlier this year, the House passed the Secret Science Reform Act of 2015, which will greatly improve transparency and accountability at EPA. The bill simply requires EPA to base its regulations on publicly available data, not secret science.”
Smith says EPA has gone rogue.
“When EPA refused to release the data it uses to justify its Clean Air Act regulations, the Science Committee issued its first subpoena in 21 years to retrieve the information,” said Smith.
Reports then surfaced EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy deleted almost 6,000 text messages sent and received by her on her official agency mobile device.
In response, Smith delivered the laugh line: “Yet she claimed—unbelievably—that only one was official. That was when we realized that she and Hillary Clinton must share the same private e-mail server.”
EPA ignores the Law
Despite issuing a second subpoena in March 2015 to obtain McCarthy’s documents, the committee is still awaiting for delivery. Smith says McCarthy is not the first EPA official to disdain Americans’ right to know.
“In 2014, a federal judge held EPA in contempt for disregarding a court order not to destroy records,” said Smith.
“Last March, a federal judge called the EPA’s handling of a 2012 Freedom of Information Act request ‘suspicious,’” said Smith.
The court found, according to Smith, “‘The agency either intentionally sought to evade the [Freedom of Information Act] request in order to destroy documents or demonstrated extreme apathy and carelessness.’
“This same discredited EPA now seeks to pursue the most aggressive regulatory agenda in its 44-year history,” said Smith. “One regulation on the horizon is the Obama Administration’s sweeping new electricity regulation, the so-called Clean Power Plan. The president’s power plan is nothing more than a power grab to give the government more control over Americans’ daily lives. These regulations stifle economic growth, destroy jobs, and increase energy prices. That means everything will cost more—from electricity to gasoline to food.”
Control Water, Control People
In May, Smith said, “The EPA submitted its final rule to define the ‘Waters of the United States.’ This is the EPA’s latest attempt to expand its jurisdiction and increase its power to regulate American waterways, claiming unprecedented jurisdiction over many different bodies of water, including those that temporarily result from a ‘drizzle.’ The EPA actually uses the word, ‘drizzle.’
“The [Obama] administration’s regulations appear to be designed to achieve more government control of the lives of the American people, with little environmental benefit. This is the definition of all pain and no gain.”
Americans are noticing.
“Despite the intense media coverage given to climate change, the American people, for good reason, still are skeptical,” said Smith. “A recent Gallup survey revealed a 43 percent plurality of Americans feel climate change is ‘generally exaggerated,’ and only 31 percent think it is ‘generally underestimated.’”
The public has the power to change things.
Smith closed by saying, “That is why we need The Heartland Institute to continue to provide a fact-filled perspective that benefits the public and informs scientific debate. Thank you again for trying to prevent Americans from being burdened by many costly and unnecessary regulations that are often justified by spurious science and a liberal political agenda.”
True to his word, four days after the conference, Smith demanded EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy provide long-withheld documents by June 22, 2015, or face a court order to compel their production.
Poll Shows the Public Supports Fracking
A new poll from Robert Morris University (RMU) shows the public overwhelmingly supports fracking for natural gas and oil production. Even before the EPA released its long awaited report largely exonerating fracking from charges it was causing water pollution, the poll showed more than 57% of Pennsylvanians support fracking. Nationally, 56 percent of those survey supported fracking.
Among those surveyed in Pennsylvania, 74 percent said fracking would have a positive economic impact on the country, compared to 73 percent nationwide.
When asked whether fracking can “move the US to energy independence“, nationally 69 percent of those polled agreed, compared to 70 percent of Pennsylvanians.
The poll indicated a number of those surveyed were concerned fracking could cause or was causing air and water pollution and earthquakes. This fear evidently reduced support for fracking from the more than 70 percent who agreed it was good for the economy and national security, to the 56 percent nationally who supported fracking overall.
Shale Energy Insider quoted Tony Kerzmann, professor of engineering at RMU, saying “I think probably the biggest thing you can make of these findings is people want cheap energy and are willing to accept environmental impacts.”
Awareness Breeds Comfort not Contempt
In a positive sign for the oil and gas industry, which is spending millions of dollars to raise awareness of the fracking’s economic benefits and the fact it is environmentally benign, it seems the more the public knows about fracking, the more comfortable and supportive they are of the activity. Support for fracking grew nationwide from 42 percent in 2013, to 56 percent today, coinciding with an 25 percent increase in the awareness of fracking. Seventy percent of those surveyed in this year’s poll were aware of fracking, up from 45 percent in 2013.
“One of the things we have to realize is that the awareness is mostly industry driven. I think the fracking awareness and the increase in support go hand-in-hand,” Kerzmann suggested.
The poll was conducted by the Robert Morris University Polling Institute and sponsored by Trib Total Media, sampling the opinions of 1,003 adults nationwide resulting in a +/- 3.0-percentage point margin of error. RMU also polled 529 Pennsylvania residents separately during the same time period.
Climate skeptics vocal within Australia's main conservative party
Prime Minister Tony Abbott is facing a push from inside the Liberal Party to prevent Australia signing up to any binding emissions reduction targets at the upcoming Paris climate talks.
A cabal of regional and rural Liberal members, centred in Western Australia and supported by a number of conservative MPs, will force a vote at Saturday's federal council meeting in Melbourne on whether Parliament should "examine the evidence" around climate change before agreeing to any post-2020 emissions cuts.
Liberal sources told Fairfax Media that Environment Minister Greg Hunt is likely to be forced to step in and fight off the motion on Saturday by asserting the Abbott government accepts climate change is real and is willing to work with other nations to combat its effects.
The timing of the intervention will be a headache for Mr Hunt who has over recent months moved the government towards accepting tougher emissions targets, as revealed by Fairfax Media on Tuesday.
A Liberal moderate who will attend the federal council meeting said the group of elected Liberals and members behind the motion should be given an audience with the Pope so they can be "brought up to speed by a new age person living in this century".
The party's regional and rural committee, chaired by WA farmer Brian Mayfield, has submitted the motion, which will call for a House of Representatives committee to "examine the scientific evidence that underpins the man-made global warming theory".
It also calls for investigation into "the reasons for the failure of computer models, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and prominent individuals to predict, among other things, the pause in global warming this century".
"In light of the uncertainty around this issue, Australia does not sign any binding agreement at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris later this year," it says.
Mr Mayfield declined to comment but Liberal Senator Chris Back and Western Australian colleague Dennis Jensen both told Fairfax Media that an examination of whether the science supported climate change was worthy of party debate.
Mr Jensen said the push was coming out of WA because the state has a "reputation for independent thinking". In 2009, a similar campaign was aimed at then opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull who was urged by WA members not to negotiate with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd ahead of the Copenhagen summit. "The science is absolutely not settled. This argument that it's all done and dusted is rubbish," he said.
Farmers see more climate variability in their working lives than most people and the view that everything is in stasis except for the human influence on the climate was nonsense, he said.
A senior Liberal source said the motion would have to be "derailed" by Mr Hunt. "It's something that will appeal to some conservatives but he will have to head it off. There is more and more a view that Hunt has got the government to a point of being ready to act and accept the climate science, so the timing could not be worse."
"This sort of talk takes us back to the Neanderthal age. It's flat earth stuff."
But Senator Back said: "I think it is certainly worthy of debate but the question is can you get all the information between now and Paris [in December]."
Climate sceptic Tasmanian Liberal Senator Richard Colbeck said he expected the motion would "dead batted" on Saturday. "It's not a can of worms I would want to open up," he said.
Mr Hunt said: "We firmly and absolutely accept that climate change is real and taking action to combat it as imperative. We are already taking strong action and achieving significant reductions through the Emissions Reduction Fund.
"We will shortly announce our post-2020 target. There should be no doubt that our target will be significant and Australia will play a constructive role in global talks in Paris."
***************************************
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
*****************************************
Jim Hansen and his twin
No comments:
Post a Comment