"Scientist" Michael Mann says there is no need for statistics: You can just SEE global warming

Unsurprising.  The statistics are pretty doleful for Warmism

The Democratic Platform Drafting Committee held a series of hearings to solicit input on what issues should be front-and-center during the general election.  Michael Mann spoke as follows:

“What is disconcerting to me and so many of my colleagues is that these tools that we’ve spent years developing increasingly are unnecessary because we can see climate change, the impacts of climate change, now, playing out in real time, on our television screens, in the 24-hour news cycle. Regardless of how you measure the impacts of climate change — be it food, water, health, national security, our economy — climate change is already taking a great toll… The stakes could not be greater in this next election — the future of our children and grandchildren literally hangs in the balance — nor could the contrast be any more stark. We have on the one hand a Republican Party whose standard bearer, Donald Trump, and a great majority of its congressional representatives deny that climate change even exists. We have on the other hand a Democratic Party that understands full well that while we can debate the policy specifics for dealing with this crisis, we cannot bury our heads in the sand and avoid dealing with the growing threat.”

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Grant-hungry scientists stage a tantrum about the Barrier Reef while on their holiday in Hawaii

Many causes of bleaching alleged but not a word about El Nino, the most probable cause.  These guys are just con-men.  Document probably written by a small but powerful clique only

As the largest international gathering of coral reef experts comes to a close, scientists have sent a letter to Australian officials calling for action to save the world's reefs, which are being rapidly damaged.

The letter was sent on Saturday to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull imploring the government to do more to conserve the nation's reefs and curb fossil fuel consumption.

The letter, signed by past and present presidents of the International Society for Reef Studies on behalf of the 2000 attendees of the International Coral Reef Symposium that was held in Honolulu this week, urged the Australian government to prioritise its Great Barrier Reef.

"This year has seen the worst mass bleaching in history, threatening many coral reefs around the world including the whole of the northern Great Barrier Reef, the biggest and best-known of all reefs," the letter said.

"The damage to this Australian icon has already been devastating. In addition to damage from greenhouse gases, port dredging and shipping of fossil fuels across the Great Barrier Reef contravene Australia's responsibilities for stewardship of the Reef under the World Heritage Convention."

Scientists are not known for their political activism, said James Cook University professor Terry Hughes, but they felt this crisis warranted such action.

A call to action from three Pacific island nations whose reefs are in the crosshairs of the largest and longest-lasting coral bleaching event in recorded history was presented on Friday at the conclusion of the symposium in Honolulu.

The heads of state from Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands attended the conference and will provide a plan to help save their ailing coral reefs.

The call to action, signed by the three presidents, asked for better collaboration between the scientific community and local governments, saying there needs to be more funding and a strengthened commitment to protecting the reefs.

In response to the letter, the scientific community at the conference said they would work with national leaders of Micronesia, the Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the world "to curb the continued loss of coral reefs."

Bleaching is a process where corals, stressed by hot ocean waters and other environmental changes, lose their colour as the symbiotic algae that lives within them is released. Severe or concurrent years of bleaching can kill coral reefs, as has been documented over the past two years in oceans around the world. Scientists expect a third year of bleaching to last through the end of 2016.

In the northern third of the Great Barrier Reef, close to half of the corals have died in the past three months, said Hughes, who focuses his research there.

But the panel of scientists emphasised the progress they have made over the past 30 years and stressed that good research and management programs for coral reefs are available. The scientists said they just need the proper funding and political will to enact them.

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“Unprecedented” Arctic-warming claims are false

The Arctic was warmer in the late 1930s

The media keeps shouting that the “global warming” that took place during the late 1990s was unprecedented, and therefore definitely man-made.But that is simply not true.

Take a took at this graph based on Hadcrut data. The graph is relative to all areas between 70 and 90° Latitude North. Temperatures are taken from the CRU (Climate Research Unit).



After a period of cold culminating around 1916, you can see that the Arctic underwent a period of heating leading to the historic peak in the late 1930s. The high in Arctic temperatures reached in 2010 was actually lower – lower! – than that of 1938.

This means that the warming between 1979 and today is not unprecedented. Indeed, the most rapid heating period seems to have occurred between 1916 and 1920, when Arctic temperatures went up as much as 4° C in just four years.

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Germans Rejecting Wind Power …Public Health Issues, Industrial Blight, Damage To Ecosystems

Once welcome as a clean alternative for producing energy, wind turbines in Germany are today faced with ever more hostile political and social environments.

As the turbines increase in size, so do their impacts on people and ecosystems that are near them. In the southern German town of Winterlingen hundreds of people recently packed into a sports facility to listen to a talk by sound expert, Dr. Johannes Mayer on the effects of low frequency sound, so-called infrasound, on humans. Ten years ago not even a handful would have shown up. But today as interest in the adverse effects of infrasound from wind turbines are surfacing and becoming a major public issue, citizens who face the possible invasion by a wind park are taking a keen interest in the topic.

According to the online Schwaebische.de here, Mayer issued strong warnings on the adverse health-effects wind turbines can have on people.

Using the available research results, he emphasizes that people do not hear the infrasound emitted by wind turbines, but that they can feel them. “For 20 to 30% of the exposed persons there are massive consequences: The body comes under a state of constant, uninterrupted stress ,” said the speaker. Difficulty sleeping, disturbed concentration and irritability and depressive mood are the consequences says Johannes Mayer.”

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Coming out

By former Canadian MLA, Ken Allred

“It is therefore correct, indeed verging on compulsory in the scientific tradition, to be skeptical of those who express certainty.” – Patrick Draper, PhD (Ecology)

I’m going to come out of the closet – no I’m not gay but even more controversial – I’m a climate change skeptic! Worse yet, I guess I’m almost a climate change denier even though I try my best to keep an open mind on the subject.

Admittedly, I’ve never been totally comfortable with the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, especially with all the controversy around the statistical methods used by Michael Mann to come to the conclusions that he did. In particular was the influential ‘hockey stick’ graph which was characteristically skewed to support his conclusions.

The original mandate of the IPCC from the United Nations spelled out that they were to focus on “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the atmosphere, and which is in addition to natural climate variability.”

Given such criteria it was obvious what their conclusions had to be or there would be no reason for them to exist. The United Nations obviously had an agenda and told the IPCC what they were to find – full stop!

Deniers have been ostracized from day one based on the endorsement of the IPCC report by 90 per cent (or some such number) of the scientific community. But let us bear in mind that even IPCC states that it is ‘extremely likely’ that human emissions have been the cause of global warming. Their claim is that it is 95 per cent certain.

Furthermore, the phrases, it is ‘likely’ and ’95 per cent certain’ don’t make it any more than a hypothesis. There is still room for question and it is the responsibility of the scientific community to debate the issue.

For the climate alarmists to condemn the deniers is as wrong as to condemn believers in an absolute being. And now, the lack of a rise in temperature since the turn of the century places their research in some doubt.

Unfortunately as Bob Dylan says “Money doesn’t talk, it swears.” Money is another source of my concern. As Vivian Crouse has determined through her research most of the money which funds Canadian anti-oil organizations comes from U.S. sources such as the Rockefeller Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, Tides U.S.A. and others.

CO2 is as essential to life on Earth as the oxygen we breathe. For without an ample supply of CO2 in the atmosphere plants could not exist. Over the millennia the proportion of CO2 has actually decreased as has the average global temperature. This entire climate change debate needs to be broadened to examine the issue in more detail rather than continually denying the deniers.

The carbon cycle and its central role in the creation of life should be promulgated rather than the demonization of CO2, that ‘carbon’ is a ‘pollutant’ that threatens the continuation of life.

In fact we need to change our focus and apply our resources to determine how we can comfortably survive as a species under warmer climatic conditions rather than how we can reduce greenhouse gases since the rise in CO2 is an inevitable swing in the millennia old climate change pendulum.

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Corruption In The Green Energy Sector Costs Ontarians

This autumn has not been kind to NextEra's Ontario operation.

Some of the turbines they own in Ontario were found to be throwing objects into farmers fields during harvest season, for reasons the Ministry of Environment apparently refuses to investigate. Their "success" in collecting feed-in tariff contracts from the Ontario Liberals is now subject to litigation filed by oil baron T. Boone Pickens. If he is successful in proving allegations of "abuse of power" and "undue political interference," the Liberals mismanagement of the energy file could cost Ontarians an extra $700 million dollars.

The New York Times sums the complaint by saying:

"A review of documents and emails between NextEra executives, lobbyists and government officials show that NextEra met and held calls with high-level officials at the Ontario Ministry of Energy, the premier's office and the power authority, even as Mesa Power executives were told they could not speak to officials until contracts were awarded. When NextEra lobbyists requested more information, officials sometimes responded within hours."

It is important to recall that this was in the era of gas plants being moved to protect under-performing Liberal MPPs from electoral defeat, but that said, NextEra's questionable behaviour isn't limited to Ontario.

As fate would have it, a NextEra lobbyist in the United States developed a romantic relationship with a U.S. government official overseeing a series of NextEra applications to construct renewable energy projects on public lands in the same month that her employment began at NextEra.

Emails detail NextEra leveraging their lobbyist's relationship with a key Department of Interior official that may have prevented a scientific review of derailing a project that began killing golden eagles within a month of operating.

The Department of Justice investigation into the relationship between NextEra and the U.S. Department of Interior highlights a number of examples of professional contact between the lobbyist and key official that was initiated by NextEra. The report is a fascinating read.

Considering what is known about the Ontario Liberal's gas plant scandal and all of the political interference that went on there, not to mention a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into NextEra's lobbying tactics in the United States, it will be fascinating to see what happens with T. Boone Pickens' claim.

Elsewhere in Ontario, NextEra has been negotiating "community vibrancy funds" with municipalities that are contingent on municipal councils passing favourable resolutions that will support NextEra in winning new business. They claim the whole thing is legal, but when is dangling benefits in front of decision-makers' faces while instructing them exactly how to use their official powers in a manner that benefits you legal or ethical?

Ben Greenhouse, NextEra's senior Canadian executive, has explicitly stated funds are conditional on municipal support in aiding new business developments, a message further reinforced by their Canadian staff in emails to municipal officials.

The only piece of good news for Ontarians related to the push for more wind turbines into our province is that the IESO has slowed down their approval process, delaying contract awards by another three months. Let's hope they take this time to clean up any "undo political interference" or "abuse of power" issues that may or may not exist within Ontario's green energy procurement process.

That said, with NextEra as a major player in Ontario's wind energy business along with Siemens (who has the distinction of paying the largest fine ever under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act over extensive bribery of foreign officials in 10 different countries) and Samsung (with it's own bribery scandals being well-known), one has to wonder whether the government knew who they were inviting into the province when they opened the flood gates under the Green Energy Act in 2009.

Whether Dalton McGuinty truly favoured NextEra will be decided in court, but Kathleen Wynne has the opportunity to turn the page and end any corruption within Ontario's green energy procurement process, and would be wise to do so.

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