Abrupt Climate Change

Climate alarmists are always talking about abrupt climate changes resulting from earth's rising temperature passing some ominous "tipping point" that triggers the occurrence of more numerous and severe storms, floods and droughts. One need only look to Al Gore's testimony of 21 March 2007 before the United States Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee for confirmation of this fact, wherein he states - without equivocation - that "droughts are becoming longer and more intense," but, of course, without offering any evidence in support of his contention.

To fill this gaping void with respect to drought, we here report the findings of Narisma et al. (2007), who analyzed "global historical rainfall observations to detect regions that have undergone large, sudden decreases in rainfall [that] are statistically significant at the 99% level, are persistent for at least ten years, and .. have magnitudes that are [mostly] 10% lower than the climatological normal (1901-2000 rainfall average)."

Working with the gridded high-resolution (0.5 x 0.5 degrees of latitude and longitude) global precipitation data set of Mitchell et al. (2004), which covers the period 1901-2000, the four researchers identified 30 drought episodes throughout the world that satisfied these stringent criteria during the 20th century. Among this major drought directory was the sudden and prolonged Sahel drought of Africa in the late 1960s, the United States Dust Bowl of the 1930s and Southwest drought of the 1950s (which also affected parts of Mexico), the strong and persistent droughts that occurred in northeast China in the 1920s, in Kazakhstan and regions of the former Soviet Union in the late 1930s, in southeast Australia in the late 1930s, and in southern Africa and eastern Europe in the 1980s, as well as the World War II droughts of 1937-1945 and the droughts that occurred over large regions of East India and Bangladesh in the 1950s.

With respect to the temporal distribution of the 30 severe and persistent droughts identified by Narisma et al., seven of them occurred during the first two decades of the 20th century (1901-1920), seven occurred during the next two decades (1921-1940), eight during the middle two decades of the century (1941-1960), but only five during the next two decades (1961-1980), and a mere three during the final two decades of the century (1981-2000), which is not at all what one would have expected if the climate-alarmist thesis that is propounded by Gore and his followers was correct.

So just what is the situation here? The scientists who performed the analysis note that the 30 major droughts they identified were "mostly located in semi-arid and arid regions" that "are naturally prone [our italics] to large fluctuations." And it's as simple as that. The 30 major droughts of the 20th century were likely natural in all respects; and, hence, they are "indicative of what could also happen in the future," as Narisma et al. state in their concluding paragraph. And happen they will. Consequently, the next time a serious drought takes hold of some part of the world and the likes of Al Gore blame it on the "carbon footprints" of you and your family, ask them why just the opposite of what their hypothesis suggests actually occurred over the course of the 20th century, i.e., why, when the earth warmed - and at a rate and to a degree that they claim was unprecedented over thousands of years - the rate-of-occurrence of severe regional droughts actually declined.

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The British floods

The wise heads were adamant that the recent British "drought" was caused by global warming. So the huge floods now happening must be caused by global cooling according to their logic! But it is of course hatred of their fellow citizens rather than logic which lies behind their views. The article below puts British weather into a factual perspective -- showing that it has always had ups and downs



What on earth is going on with our weather? Three months' worth of rain fell in a few places last week, Britain is drowning under floods of biblical proportions and nothing like it has been seen since Noah got his sea legs. In a wave of hysteria, the cry goes out for millions of sandbags, better drains and more flood defences. And fingers of blame are pointing at global warming.

But a simple fact has been overlooked: Britain is a wet country. Yes, it comes as a shock. Over the past few years we've become so used to years of scorching, Mediterranean-like summers, when hosepipe bans were the norm, vines were bursting with vintage grapes and water diviners were doing big business. But the truth is that our summers are supposed to be wet: it's our climate.

The accoutrements of the British summer holiday were thick pullovers and waterproofs. You expected to shiver on wet promenades, "Rain stopped play" was the national mantra and sunblock cream was something for film stars and models. That is why the August Bank Holiday was shunted to the end of the month, because the beginning of August was so awful.

Of course, British summers weren't always as wet as this year's, but some were certainly worse. 1912 was the wettest and dullest summer on record, far ahead of this summer's downpours. It pretty much rained all summer, reaching a peak in late August, when a seven-inch downpour in one day in Norfolk left Norwich completely marooned in a sea of mud and devastation. Even that deluge is overshadowed by the 11 inches of rain that fell in less than a day on Dorset in July 1955 - about half of London's yearly average rainfall. The longest nonstop rainfall record in the UK was more than 58 hours in London during June 1903, in a summer when there was an epidemic of lung disease in farmworkers caused by mouldy hay and grain.

Farther back still were the sodden summers of 1845 to 1850, when jungle-like humidity and relentless rains triggered the potato blight outbreak that led to the great Irish potato famine, in which a million people died and another million emigrated from Ireland.

Rain is only the half of it. The abysmal summer of 1956 was an assault course of monsoonal rains, big floods, giant hail, houses set ablaze by lightning, howling gales and miserable cold. Just to rub it in, August was one of the coldest and wettest on record across Britain.

It is a very human tendency to blame someone for the vagaries of the weather. A run of bad summers in the 1950s was blamed on nuclear bomb tests, the rains during the First World War were blamed on artillery going off on the Western Front and two centuries ago it was the battles of the Napoleonic Wars that were blamed for upsetting nature. And now it's global warming.

But climate change was supposed to be making our summers drier, not wetter. Leaving that aside, even if we accept that the recent downpours are a sign of global warming, then a single wet summer hardly adds up to any particular trend. No, it's far more plausible to explain this latest wet spell as a natural blip in the climate.

If so, then which politician or minister is going to have the courage to propose spending billions of pounds on building new river walls, embankments, ditches and other flood defences? How will we feel about spending large sums of money on such big projects when next year may bring another drought - and the inevitable demands for more reservoirs, leak-proof pipes and desalination plants?

And let's not forget that an even greater threat comes from the sea. A recent study reveals that London and the Thames Estuary is subsiding faster than anyone had estimated; and with sea levels rising relentlessly, the Thames Barrier is looking increasingly vulnerable. We need to fix that problem before London disappears under a storm surge like New Orleans.

The hysteria over this summer reveals more about our education. The daily forecasts and news reports are all facts and no explanation about why the weather is behaving the way it is. The explanation for the past few days of drama is that Britain lies in a part of the world that is finely balanced between wet and dry, warm and cold weather. The dividing line is the jet stream, a river of wind rushing overhead a few miles high. This summer the jet stream has been very sluggish and buckled into big loops, leaving Britain drenched on the wet side of one of those loops. However, on the other side of the jet stream large parts of Europe are roasting in a ferocious heatwave that has killed dozens of people and brought wildfires blazing across Greece.

This European split has happened before. In the summer of 2002, a large swath of Central Europe was battered by rains that set off huge floods along the Elbe and Danube, drowning more than 100 people.

But there is another story about this summer that has gone virtually unnoticed. Despite all the gloom and doom, temperatures are fairly normal for the time of year. In days gone by, a wet summer would invariably be cold, even with snow in July and frost in August.

The prize for the most diabolical summer of rain and cold should be awarded to that of 1816. Not for nothing was it called "the year without summer" - this time of great storms, massive rains and appalling cold led to the crops rotting, the price of bread soaring and food riots breaking out. Some 200,000 people died of famine across Europe, which was then followed by a typhus epidemic. So, let's look on the bright side. At least we haven't got any hosepipe bans - and the reservoirs are full.

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The warmists have hides like rhinoceroses

Here it is: The expected claim that the floods in Britain are a result of global warming -- quite unembarrassed by their previous claims that global warming caused the "drought" that affected Britain up until recently

Global warming is generating heavier rainfall over Britain of the sort that has triggered this week’s floods, scientists have confirmed for the first time. While it has long been suspected that climate change is contributing to increased precipitation over midlatitude countries such as Britain, research has now conclusively linked greenhouse gases to heavier downpours.

The findings, from an international team including several British scientists, do not prove that this week’s flooding is the direct result of global warming: it is linked to weather patterns that have been known before. It is consistent, however, with a much broader trend towards more rainfall, on which researchers have now found an unambiguously human fingerprint. “The paper is saying there is a significant human influence on global rainfall patterns and this includes an increase of precipitation north of 50 degrees northern latitude, an area that includes the UK,” said Peter Stott, a climate scientist at the University of Reading who took part in the study.

In the study, which is to be published in the journal Nature, the scientists compared recorded changes in rain and snowfall over land with changes that are predicted by climate models that account for global warming caused by greenhouse gases. The actual pattern of changes, with increased precipitation in latitudes north of 50 degrees, corresponds remarkably closely with the patterns that emerged from 14 different models. This suggests strongly that human-induced climate change has been responsible.

For the European region that includes Britain, the research team estimates that human activity has accounted for about two thirds of the observed trend. Other natural factors, such as volcanic activity, have also had an influence, but this is much smaller than that from people. Dr Stott said that the study did not examine seasonal trends, but that other predictions suggest Britain will in general suffer wetter winters and drier summers, rather than multiple repeats of this year’s summer downpours, though significant uncertainties remain.

It is currently impossible to say whether the current bad weather is a result of global warming, and more research is needed into the origins of such extreme events. “We looked at annual rainfall trends rather than any particular season,” Dr Stott said. “In the UK wetter winters are expected which will lead to more extreme rainfall, whereas summers are expected to get drier. However, it is possible under climate change that there could be an increase of extreme rainfall even under general drying.”

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Are Democrats the Peak-Oil Party?

"We have to understand how weak [Iran] is," explained Sen. Joe Biden last month at the Democratic presidential debate in Nashua, N.H. "They import almost all of their refined oil. By 2014, they are going to be importing their crude oil." If Biden really meant to say what he said, that places him firmly in the camp of those analysts who believe in "peak oil" and predict that global oil production will soon decline even as demand continues to rise, with the results being ever higher oil prices and shortages.

Peak oilers contend that the Middle East oil reserves are vastly overstated. Some, the minority to be sure, even think that global oil production will fall so far, so fast, that western civilization will have to return to some sort of pre-industrial way of life. Here are some choice predictions from one well-known proponent of the theory, James Howard Kunstler:

"One huge implication of the oil peak is that industrial societies will never again enjoy the 2 to 7 percent annual economic growth that has been considered healthy for over 100 years. This amounts to the industrialized nations of the world finding themselves in a permanent depression...The future is therefore telling us very loudly that we will have to change the way we live in this country. The implications are clear: We will have to downscale and rescale virtually everything we do...All indications are that American life will have to be reconstituted along the lines of traditional towns, villages, and cities much reduced in their current scale. These will be the most successful places once we are gripped by the profound challenge of a permanent reduced energy supply."

Clearly, the members of the National Petroleum Council, a federal advisory group representing the oil industry, are not believers in peak oil. "Fortunately, the world is not running out of energy resources," concludes a new report. "Coal, oil, and natural gas will remain indispensable to meeting total projected energy demand growth. "But the report does advocate that the United States do the following to meet a continuing rise in energy demand over the next quarter century:

1) Moderate the growing demand for energy by increasing efficiency of transportation, residential, commercial, and industrial uses.

2) Expand and diversify production from clean coal, nuclear, biomass, other renewables, and unconventional oil and gas; moderate the decline of conventional domestic oil and gas production; and increase access for development of new resources.

3) Integrate energy policy into trade, economic, environmental, security, and foreign policies; strengthen global energy trade and investment; and broaden dialogue with both producing and consuming nations to improve global energy security.

4) Enhance science and engineering capabilities and create long-term opportunities for research and development in all phases of the energy supply and demand system.

5) Develop the legal and regulatory framework to enable carbon capture and sequestration. In addition, as policymakers consider options to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, provide an effective global framework for carbon management, including establishment of a transparent, predictable, economy wide cost for carbon dioxide emissions.

My take: Between fears of global warming and higher energy prices, energy looks certain to be a major issue for the first time in a presidential election since 1980. Democrats already seem to have realized and are formulating specific plans, like Hillary Clinton's idea of a $50 billion energy research fund, or a similar $10 billion "New Energy Economy" fund that John Edwards is proposing.

The GOP isn't quite there yet as far as addressing this as an issue with specifics. Rudy Giuliani, as part of his website's "12 commitments," merely says, "I will lead America towards energy independence." Mitt Romney advocates spending "more research dollars in power generation, fuel technology, and materials science. It is in new technologies that we will find solutions to our environmental and energy needs."

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Global cooling kills fish

Well, it's Southern hemispheric cooling anyway. Barramundi are Australia's most sought-after fish for eating



IT'S enough to make any barramundi fanatic reach for a hanky. Thousands of dead tropical fish - some more than a metre long - floating to the surface of Lake Moondarra, Mount Isa's main water supply. Authorities are blaming Queensland's big chill on the mass fish deaths, which have local anglers fearing the worst.

George Fortune, president of the Mount Isa Fish Stocking Group, said about 2000 fish had died in July. "It's been unusually cold for unusually long, and they just can't tolerate the low temperatures for any length of time," Mr Fortune said. "The barramundi come into the shallow parts of the dam to try to get warm, but they get caught up in the shallows, dying of the cold weather."

The cold snap affecting the whole state has seen the mercury drop to as low as 3.2C in Mount Isa this month. And the fish deaths have forced authorities to grapple with another unwanted problem: disposing of the carcasses.

Big pits have been dug to bury the barramundi, along with large numbers of sleepy cod and catfish. Mr Fortune said barramundi stocks in Lake Moondarra were down by as much as 40 per cent.

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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film but it is in fact an absolute gift to climate atheists. What the paper says was of course all well-known already but the concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years really is invaluable. And the one fact that the paper documents so well -- that solar output is on the downturn -- is also hilarious, given its source. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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China reveals Greenie hypocrisy

China's booming economy has made it the world's biggest polluter. So why is it exempt from Kyoto, and why are the greenies so silent? Should we stop buying Chinese goods to fight global warming? But attacking Western civilization is the real Greenie agenda -- so China is ignored

Pollution and greenhouse gases are China's biggest export. But you won't see that in any balance-of-trade numbers or hear about it from the environmentalists who recommend draconian restrictions on the U.S. economy and insist we all drive battery-operated cars. Nor will you hear from the global warmongers, including Al Gore, that China has officially become the world's No. 1 polluter.

China's emissions of carbon dioxide have exceeded those of the United States at least two years ahead of most international estimates, according to a report issued last week by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. CO2 emissions, it says, rose an astounding 9% in 2006. China produces 12% of the world's CO2 and 25% of its mercury pollution. In contrast, the Energy Information Administration announced that the big, bad USA's carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels fell 1.3% in 2006, while our booming economy grew 3.3%. We are using energy more efficiently and reducing emissions without Kyoto. Energy use per unit of GDP fell 4.2 % last year, and carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP fell 4.5%.

While environmentalists and congressional Democrats have shut down our domestic development of fossil fuels like oil and even clean-burning natural gas, a new coal-fired plant big enough to supply every household in a city the size of San Diego comes on line every seven to 10 days in China, exporting more pollution to California and the western U.S. than even Gore's economic straightjacket could hope to eliminate.

As Peter Brookes of the Heritage Foundation reports, sulfur from China alone reaches 10% to 15% of the EPA's allowable levels in California, Oregon and Washington state alone. Estimates are that a third of California's air pollution and a fifth of Oregon's come from China. Sensors in the Sierra Nevada mountains have identified huge Chinese pollution clouds that traverse the Pacific.

As a "developing" nation, China is exempt from Kyoto - one of the reasons the U.S. Senate once voted 97-0 not to consider it for ratification. China would love to see the U.S. economy handcuffed as it races to make this century a Chinese one. As it is, our states and taxpayers struggle to clean up imported Chinese pollution.

Beijing has plans for 2,200 additional coal-fired plants by 2020. China relies on coal for some 75% of its energy and industrial needs. In 2006, China consumed more than 2.7 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity - almost double its 2002 rate. There's also vehicular pollution from 20 million cars on the road, a number expected to jump to a minimum of 150 million tailpipes by 2020.

According to the World Bank, the north-central Chinese coal town of Linfen is the world's most polluted city. China has 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities, and, according to the World Health Organization, 400,000 Chinese die prematurely each year from respiratory diseases.

Environmentalists are always suggesting ways we should change our lifestyles to reduce our "carbon footprint." Since a lot of what is produced in these pollution-belching Chinese factories is exported to the U.S., would they suggest we stop buying anything made in China until it cleans up its act? Greenies say it'll take a lot to save the earth. We have a place they could start and remind them that a journey of a thousand miles begins with an inconvenient truth.

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A REAL climate denier

Post lifted from Prof. Brignell. See the original for links

Over a quarter of a century ago, your bending author was immensely proud to be offered a chair at the University of Southampton. Like much else in modern Britain, the honour now seems somewhat tarnished. Here is an apologia for that paper as a Letter in the Sunday Telegraph, which tells you more about the state of peer review than it does about anything else, and has a second paragraph that is a collectors' item:

No spinning here

I am one of the authors of the Royal Society global warming paper that you say is simple and fundamentally flawed (Comment, July 15). Simple? The idea was to present a straightforward demonstration, without recourse to complex climate models. Flawed? None of the three academic referees the paper was subjected to found any flaws.

Climate change is by far the greatest threat to everyone's standard of living. Unlike political parties, companies, media stars, works of art, consumer products and even social trends and national economies, a scientific reality is immune to spin.

(Prof) Mike Lockwood, Southampton University

I think I now get where the Lockwood paper fits in to our understanding of climate and there is no doubt that it is an absolute gift to climate atheists. What it said was of course all well-known already but the concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years really is invaluable. And the one fact that the paper documents so well -- that solar output is on the downturn -- is also hilarious, given its source. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! This month's unprecedented cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards -- JR





Greenies war on fun: CO2 limits might kill Ferrari, Porsche

Greenies would certainly like nothing better



Are Ferraris and Porsches condemned to becoming track-day-only toys? Europe already appears well on its way to outlawing ultra-high performance vehicles. Can the US be far behind? That's the question Bloomberg is asking. The culprit in the attack on sports cars isn't necessarily their speed, but the fact that they produce too much carbon dioxide. But they do get criticized for their speed as well. One British member of the European Parliament, Chris Davies, is actually proposing a prohibition on any car with a top speed over 162 km/h (101 mph). That wouldn't leave much choice for buyers unless everybody started fitting governors.

The CO2 problem is the big one though. The European Union is planning to limit CO2 emissions in lieu of fuel-mileage standards. Carbon dioxide is considered one of the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming. While limiting CO2 emissions might be a laudable goal, the finger too often gets pointed at cars. Car & Driver's Csaba Csere is quoted in the article, talking about the fact that power plants and factories are where politicians should be focusing their efforts. "Automobiles always seem to be the focus, even though they only consume 15 percent or 20 percent of energy,'' he said.

While much of the article dwells on the anti-rich attitude that permeates these types of attacks, the writer brings up some interesting points. Some stuff seems purely intended to provoke reactions, and much of it feels like opinion over fact, but that's editorial content for you. Click over to read the whole thing.

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GM foods gain support in Australia

POLLUTION and climate change have raised public support for genetically modified food crops, according to Biotechnology Australia. A survey of more than 1100 people across the country found that acceptance rose dramatically from 46 to 73 per cent over the past two years. Asked whether GM crops should be grown in Queensland, 50 per cent of respondents said yes, while a further 30 per cent approved, provided there were strong regulations.

Queensland is the only state not to have a moratorium on GM crops: 97 per cent said its application could help develop environmentally friendly vehicle fuels, while 91 per cent thought it could help address the issues of climate change and water salinity. Federal Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane said the findings indicated a major change in public attitude towards biotechnology.

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The latest gift to Australia from the Greenies: A croc invasion



THE northeast coast of Australia is facing an explosion in its population of saltwater crocodiles, which are protected by law but are becoming a menace to swimmers, surfers and the inhabitants of some towns' outer suburbs. The problem is so serious that there are calls for the country's strict gun laws to be relaxed and hunters to be given open season on crocodiles.

Bob Katter, an independent MP, said that crocodile numbers had reached "plague proportions" and the huge reptiles were moving into places where they had never been seen before. "This is unprecedented in human history," he said. "People should be armed. What do they want us to do - knock the crocs on the head with a hammer?"

Locals have reported man-eating crocodiles basking near popular swimming spots and boat ramps. In Cairns and Townsville they have even been seen sunning themselves on surf beaches. "There are some 50,000 people living on river banks and shoreline between Townsville and Cairns. If you're going into these areas you really need to take some sort of firearm to protect yourselves," Katter said.

According to Peter Guivarra, an Aboriginal leader, officials conducting a night survey along a five-mile stretch of Tentpole Creek counted "more than 500 sets of eyes. That's a lot and absolute evidence that culling is now needed".

The Australian saltwater crocodile often grows to 15ft in length and can weigh a third of a ton. An endangered species in the 1960s, its numbers have reached levels not seen since the first British settlers arrived in 1788.

An 8ft crocodile was recently spotted at Forrest Beach, near Ingham, moments before a carnival was due to start. It was the sixth such sighting on the beach since December. Crocodiles have killed about a dozen people in Queensland in the past 10 years, half of them tourists from other countries. Rebecca Williams, director of the Environmental Protection Agency branch, said there had been 17 attacks since 1985 and of those five had proved fatal. In one famous case in October 2004, a 15ft crocodile attacked two families camped by a river 190 miles north of Cairns.

The rapid rise in crocodile numbers is attributed not only to a ban on hunting but also to the decline of predators such as dingoes which eat crocodile eggs.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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Greenie misanthropy on display again

Hatred of people is a major driving force among Greenies -- which is why they have been trying to stop people having babies from long before the global warming scare popped up. See e.g. here

The new head of the Science Museum has an uncompromising view about how global warming should be dealt with: get rid of a few billion people. Chris Rapley, who takes up his post on September 1, is not afraid of offending. 'I am not advocating genocide,' said Rapley. 'What I am saying is that if we invest in ways to reduce the birthrate - by improving contraception, education and healthcare - we will stop the world's population reaching its current estimated limit of between eight and 10 billion.

'That in turn will mean less carbon dioxide is being pumped into the atmosphere because there will be fewer people to drive cars and use electricity. The crucial point is that to achieve this goal you would only have to spend a fraction of the money that will be needed to bring about technological fixes, new nuclear power plants or renewable energy plants. However, everyone has decided, quietly, to ignore the issue.'

Such arguments give an indication of the priorities of the new Science Museum chief, an office that has been vacant since 2005 when Lindsay Sharp abruptly left the 150,000 pound post following rows about financial waste, cronyism and the 'Disneyfication' of exhibitions. Now Rapley, currently head of the British Antarctic Survey and a passionate believer [not a real scientist, in other words] in man's influence on climate, is set to take charge of the museum, one of Britain's most challenging institutions, where strict academic requirements must be met while competing with Legoland and Disneyland to attract visitors. Only by tackling the issues of the day can he succeed, Rapley said.

Hence his urging that we deal with overpopulation, a call of wide public interest and one that reflects the contents of the recent report by the Optimum Population Trust, which called for each couple in Britain to be limited to having two children each. 'A voluntary stop-at-two guideline should be adopted for couples in the UK who want to adopt greener lifestyles,' it stated.

The interest of Rapley, 60, in this subject stems directly from his climatic concerns. He sits near the extreme end of scientific views about global warming. He fears our planet faces a very hot and uncomfortable future. This belief puts him opposite climate-change deniers, about whom Rapley is generally vitriolic. He described the recent Channel 4 programme The Great Global Warming Swindle as 'a tissue of lies' while individual deniers, like Dominic Lawson, are dismissed in unexpectedly terse, Anglo-Saxon terms.

'As to my job at the Science Museum, my remit is very simple,' Rapley said. 'It is to make it the most advanced museum in the world. I will only be able to do that by addressing the key issues in science today and the most important of these is climate change and energy policy. However, there are topics like stem cell science and genomics that are set to have enormous impact and which will have to be tackled in detail.'

Rapley is passionate about making displays and instruments far more accessible. 'If you look at the Science Museum's great engine hall, there are wonderful machines on display but the accompanying explanations are quite often above most people's heads. Most children today probably don't realise these machines run on heat and water, but that is never mentioned. We need different explanations for different levels of understanding: the six-year-old, the 60-year-old, the PhD student. At the same time, there is no point having a few touch-screens about the place. People can only use them one at a time. One idea would be to send free texts to visitors' mobile phones, according to their needs, as they stand in front of displays. Just about everyone has a mobile phone, after all.'

The Oxford-educated physicist earned his spurs as a scientist who built instruments for space probes, such as X-ray detectors for the international Solar Maximum Mission launched in 1980. He went on to work at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory using satellite radar scanners to study the Earth and in particular Antarctica. 'All sorts of environmental issues lead to the Antarctic: sea-level rise, ozone depletion, atmospheric warming,' added Rapley, who is married with two daughters. In 1997, he was appointed head of the British Antarctic Survey and has worked there ever since.

As to key influences, Rapley points to an English teacher at his old school, King Edward's School, Bath, who introduced him to the works of Conan Doyle. 'I learned the joys of deduction from Sherlock Holmes and they stood me in good stead for the rest of my life. They got me to the Science Museum, in effect.'

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GREENIE STUNTS VIGOROUSLY DISCOURAGED IN RUSSIA

A Russian environmentalist was beaten to death and seven others wounded on Saturday when a group armed with iron bars and baseball bats attacked their camp near a nuclear waste processing plant in Siberia. Russian media reported up to 15 people shouting fascist slogans attacked the environmentalists, who were living in the camp to protest against nuclear processing in the city of Angarsk near Lake Baikal, 5000 kilometres east of Moscow.

"One of the injured died in intensive care as a result of the attack," Ekho Moskvy radio station quoted one of the environmental activists, Olga Kozlova, as saying. Another resident of the camp, Marina Popova, said the attackers shouted slogans against anti-fascists. "From that we can conclude they were Nazis or skinheads'', she told the Vesti-24 television channel, blood seeping through a bandage wrapped around her head.

Environmentalists have not previously been the target of violent attacks in Russia, where skinhead gangs have assaulted and killed people from ethnic and religious minority groups in the past.

Itar-Tass news agency said the man killed on Saturday was a 20-year-old from the far eastern port city of Nakhodka. Thirteen attackers had been identified and four had already been arrested, said Interior Ministry spokesman Valery Gribakin. "Those arrested denied any involvement with any extremist youth group,'' Gribakin was quoted by Ekho Moskvy as saying.

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Shallow breaths, save planet

By Tim Blair

IN A wonderful act of subversion, the Sydney Morning Herald's splendidly-named Stephanie Peatling this week managed to sneak a comic gem past her vigilant editors: "The greenhouse gas cuts Australia must achieve to prevent dangerous climate change may be substantially higher than thought, with modelling to be released today suggesting it should be as much as 95 per cent by 2020." That modelling was the work of a leftist panic hive called the Australia Institute, presided over by director Clive Hamilton.

I called Clive on Thursday to discuss how we might achieve this reduction, which essentially would require that Australians stop doing everything, including breathing. I also wanted to know how even a 100 per cent cut in Australia's carbon output could influence the global climate, given that we only generate about 1.5 per cent of all global emissions. And there's the matter of Chinese economic expansion, which easily counters any local reductions.

Let's say Labor's mighty Kevin Ruddernaut storms to power at the next election and adopts the Australia Institute's plans (not likely, but we're imagining a worst-case scenario here - after all, it's a tactic approved by the environmental Left). While Australia diligently spends the next 13 years closing down mines, factories, offices, hospitals, roads and anything else capable of killing the planet with carbon, the Chinese will have - if they continue at current rates - built about 670 new coal-fired power plants over the same time. (And lost about 78,000 workers in coal-mining accidents. The one-child policy isn't China's only means of population control.)

Alas, Hamilton wasn't at the institute's Canberra hut. He was on a break to do some writing, a helper told me, so had headed north to get away from Canberra's freezing weather. I hope he took his coat; it's barely any warmer in Sydney and Brisbane airport this week recorded its first sub-zero temperature. These sure are trying times for the warmenist crowd. (By the way, we know Hamilton owns a coat because last year he mentioned on the ABC that he felt tremendous guilt over buying one. It was too lavish, apparently, and Clive worried that his materialism set a poor example.)

Anyway, Australia's whole nationwide cold snap has been a beautifully-timed climatic accompaniment to the ABC's recent broadcast of The Great Global Warming Swindle. (Incidentally, Nine had first rights to the documentary, but instead handed it over to the ABC - where it became the broadcaster's second most-watched show of that week).

Radio National broadcaster Michael Duffy made one of the saner points in an otherwise weird post-show counselling session for traumatised viewers. Why, he asked, didn't the ABC put as much effort into challenging the claims made by the likes of Al Gore and Sir Nicholas Stern? Host Tony Snow's reaction was to dismiss the likelihood of having Gore appear but it really doesn't take much; the ABC could probably book him for $US100,000, Gore's asking price for his never-changing climate change speech.

Or they could just show his stupid movie. The good news is, for Tone and anyone else looking for flaws in Gore's Inconvenient Truth (and in arguments put forward by Stern, sometimes described as "the world's leading economist on climate change"), that you don't need any scientific training at all to realise these two aren't exactly expert researchers. For example, back in March Sir Nicholas told the SMH: "You can't export an American car to China: it does not satisfy the emissions standards." What a very odd claim. You'd think if China was so concerned about the health of its people, it would do something first about those 6000 coal miners it's offing every year rather than fuss over imported vehicle emissions. In fact, Stern was completely wrong. Cadillac, DaimlerChrysler, and Ford all sell US models in China. This has been going on for years.

However, a number of Chinese manufacturers are unable to sell their cars in the US. Reason? They do not satisfy US emissions standards. Stern believes the opposite is the case and actually repeated that line when addressing Australia's National Press Club earlier this year. Not a single journalist challenged him. Well, one tried but was unable to get a word in due to - and I quote the text message exactly - "left-wing wankers pandering to Stern". Which might explain why this Stern-like line from Gore's film has dodged any criticism: "We can't sell our cars in China today because we don't meet the Chinese emissions standards." Begs a question: If these guys can't get simple trade stories right, how can we trust them on complex scientific issues?

Speaking of getting things wrong, Tim Flannery wasn't amused by NSW Treasurer Michael Costa's recent labelling of him as an idiot. "My reaction is just lofty disdain," Flannery said at the time, although it wasn't really for him to rate the quality of his own reaction. This week Flannery revealed he may have been angered more than he let on by Costa's criticism (one of the few barbs ever publicly directed towards St Timothy the Bearded, who normally receives only loving praise - see above line re "pandering"). Speaking to AAP, Flannery upgraded those who question global warming theories from "sceptics" and "deniers" to . . . hey, let Flannery tell you himself:

"In 2005 the liars about climate change were winning. Today they've been vanquished . . . once and for all." So, liars are we? Flannery needs to take a holiday. Maybe Clive Hamilton has a spare bunk in his writing cave.

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Greenies sow food confusion

A Brit tries to take it all seriously

There's this organic carrot, and it's doing my head in. It's a nice carrot, as carrots go: fat, orange, with feathery green tufts on top. It has lived a blameless life in a field of joy, innocent of pesticides and artificial fertilisers. And now, here it is in the supermarket, rooting me on to take it home. Only, here's the thing: the carrot is from Israel. That's nearly 2,500 miles away. If I buy it, I will take on its carbon footprint, garnishing every mouthful with the greenhouse gas that it has splurged into the atmosphere to be here today. Can I live with that? Does the carrot's organic worthiness trump the fact that it is has amassed more air miles than an MP on an international fact-finding mission? Or should I let it rot for thoughtlessly contributing to the destruction of the planet?

You see my problem. I'm food confused. And not just about vegetables. Fruit, meat, dairy - these days, everything is fraught with ethical complications. If I tried to follow all of them, I'd end up an oxygenarian - one of those people who eat nothing but air. The "good" food choices have proliferated like salmonella in an Edwina Currie egg - organic, Fairtrade, locally grown, free range, boutique, the Leaf mark, Red Tractor, Freedom Food, farm assured - some important, others just marketing spin. How am I meant to know what comes first in the pecking order?

Some choices are straightforward. Processed food clearly puts you on the fast track to hell. As for animal welfare, I won't eat anything that hasn't had weekly spa treatments. But organic? I used to think it was a no-brainer: good for the planet (no energy wasted on fertilisers and pesticides); good for the soil (it works with nature, rather than against it); good for the creatures that inhabit furrow and field (livestock, wildlife, farmers). It is also, arguably, good for us.

But when food miles enter the equation, organic quickly loses its halo. Getting an organic New Zealand apple from the tree to your lunchbox releases 235 times as much carbon as it saves. How depressing is that? And that's before you even think about seasonality. We shouldn't be eating apples in June, but we have turned luxuries into necessities, demanding strawberries in midwinter and nectarines in spring.

Of course, there are some things (citrus fruit, pineapples, bananas) that don't grow in Britain, and I would be the last to suggest we could do without them. I'm also not sure I could survive without spices, olives, tea and coffee. But there have to be limits, such as not flying blueberries from Chile in December. And where do food miles and seasonality leave fair trade? Supporting Ethiopian coffee growers is one thing, but should we really be importing pears from South Africa, however benevolent our intentions?

Home-grown is no less problem-filled: your Isle of Wight tomatoes were probably grown in a greenhouse that burns more energy than a Chinese power station, and that supermarket potato has been taken by lorry to the other end of the country to be washed and packed. Sometimes it seems as if supermarkets set traps for unwary ecoshoppers. You know those fruit and veg packets with a picture of a happy supplier on the front - farmer Ted from Hampshire with his organic fruit? Turns out they aren't always from his farm at all. Sometimes they aren't even from his country.

Still, at least you know where you are with meat and dairy. Stick to organic and free range, and you can't go wrong. Except that farm animals happen to be huge contributors to global warming. A field of farting cows produces enough centrally heated methane to drown out the sound of the icecaps crumbling. Then there's all the packaging, the energy-hungry refrigeration, the distance between farm, slaughterhouse and supermarket depot.

A brilliant book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, by the American journalist Michael Pollan, poses this dilemma: "When you can eat everything, what do you choose to eat?" Pollan works his way along the different food chains in the States, from the longest (which stretches from the cornfields of the Midwest through intensive cattle farming and processing plants to the fast-food outlets that blight every town and city in the country) to the shortest - a modern hunter-gathering mission in northern California, on which he shoots his own wild boar, harvests morels in the hills, picks cherries from the streets of San Francisco and makes bread with wild yeast captured from the air. In between, there is "big" organic - operations such as the American organic supermarket Whole Foods Market - and small-scale organic, local growers supplying local people and local businesses. The hunter-gathering wins hands down, although Pollan admits it's not that practical on a daily basis. Local organic comes a close second.

Pollan has thought about what he eats; he has looked at the contradictions and worked out what matters. It's probably pretty similar to what most of us want - food that tastes good and makes us happy, without troubling either our conscience or our health. The difference is that he has done something about it. We can blame the supermarkets and producers, but ultimately the responsibility for what we eat lies with us. The choices are confusing, and there is no perfect solution. But the worst thing we can do is do nothing.

There is a movement in America called the Locavores - people who eat, wherever possible, a diet harvested within a 100-mile radius (in cities, we're talking farmers' markets, allotments, small shops that prioritise local producers). Locavores have a mantra: "If not locally produced, then organic. If not organic, then family farm. If not family farm, then local business. If not local business, then fair trade." I would add a line at the beginning: "If not local organic, then locally produced." But I've decided the Locavore code of priorities is going to be my way through the food confusion. That Israeli carrot will just have to go home with someone else.

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"Greenhouse" attack on China bad for Australia

There's a puzzle, a paradox and some amusing, and decidedly instructive, historical intersections in the rise and rise of the Aussie dollar, formerly known as the Little Aussie Bleeder or Pacific Peso. As it now grinds seemingly inexorably towards and past US90c -- and then on even to parity. Parity. Who could ever have imagined we'd see that again in our lifetime. Now, you'd be a brave punter to bet against it.

True, parity with the less-than-mighty greenback. That is of course a key part of the story. The rise of the Aussie is a combination of the falling greenback, against everyone. But also the Aussie's own, albeit more gentle, appreciation aga:nst the "thirds" - the euro, the pound and the yen. And why is the greenback sliding? Any number of factors can be cited, but in essence it comes down to one. The US's huge and entrenched current account deficits. There are only so many US treasury bills you can stuff away in the Great Wall.

But then - the puzzle - our current account deficit is just as large as the US's in relation to GDP. We've had more $50 billion deficits than Peter Costello's had hot - or indeed, cold - dinners at Kirribilli House. And we are going to have more (they stretch as far into the future as Treasury's statistical eye can see) than he now looks likely to have breakfasts at The Lodge.

So why isn't our dollar heading south? Simple answer: there has been more money wanting to come into the country each year than those $50 billion deficits. And in the currency free market the price of the Aussie rises until demand and supply are brought into balance and the market clears. Usually, with a little bit of help from the Reserve Bank, which is happy to sell some Aussies out of its - these days, virtual reality - stockpile.

The somewhat more complex question is why demand for the Aussie has been so strong. Every other time we've had big deficits we've had a weak currency. They were beginning to look endemic - hence those less than flattering terms in the opening paragraph. The answer is, of course, China, with again a little bit of help from the RBA. Not in the currency market but in setting official interest rates in Australia, and hence the bank borrowing rates which have been the principal means of bringing that foreign money into Australia. The combination of higher interest rates, the commodities boom, the strong dollar, rising asset values - property and shares - - has made buying the Aussie a no- brainer. To say nothing of buying, or attempting to buy, Aussie companies.

A $50 billion deficit might be big in our terms, but less than a day's trading in global currency markets. So the puzzle isn't really a puzzle. More of a question: how long does it last? How long can we sustain the unconventional combination of a huge deficit - stuck at 6 per cent of GDP - and a dollar that is rising in real terms against all major currencies?

The answer lies in a combination of what happens to the US economy and to US interest rates. Does it stay strong and rates stay where they are, or go higher? In the process staying the slide in the greenback, but leaving the US deficit destabilisingly high? Or does the US economy weaken, the Fed cuts rates, and the greenback's slide continues? With that wave taking our dollar higher. At least in company with everyone else; and indeed likely more of the recent past where the Aussie strengthens in its own right, on the back of our even more attractive interest rates?

Whatever the outcome by, say, mid- 2008, there is enough all-round momentum to carry our dollar well into the 90s at least. And that points to the single greatest lesson of exchange rate history, ours and everyone else's: you always overshoot.

Enter the paradox. The core driver of our rising dollar - and pretty much everything else in and around our economy - is the explosive growth in China's demand for, and consumption of, commodities. Principally, so far as we are concerned, iron ore to make steel and coal to generate power. Along with pretty much everything else - globally importantly, oil and copper.

In short, not to put too fine a point on it: our dollar is pivoting on a truly momentous eruption of greenhouse gases. Yet we and the world are - at least hypothetically - committed to not just capping that eruption, but reversing it. Let me spell that out a little more specifically. We have a dollar challenging conventional currency gravity; on the promise of pumping more and more commodities into the Chinese "greenhouse gas factory". Yet we want to in effect burn that factory down.

Add on the certainty that even on the assumption that the factory keeps on belching, our dollar will overshoot; what happens if we actually "succeed" in persuading China to please let us leave all the stuff in the ground? We have a rising dollar despite a $50 billion deficit because of the promise of China's exploding future demand.

What happens to the dollar if the deficit increases dramatically because export prices and/or volumes fall and the China promise evaporates? For some guidance, go to the history. If we do reach parity with the greenback, it will be the first time in the PK era. PK era? Post-Keating. The last time a dollar bought a dollar was when hardly anyone out there even knew Keating existed. In the wake of the week's events - rather amusingly when John Howard was treasurer - back in the early 1980s.

It did approach parity in the PK era, just after "his Howard", Bob Hawke, ended the drought, when in early 1984 it approached US97c. The last time it was flirting with today's levels was in early 1989 when it peaked just shy of that figure. Between those two peaks came "banana republic", when after Keating's famous exhortation in mid-1986 it dropped to US60c and below 50 on the TWI (trade weighed index). It's now, incidentally, at just over 70 on the TWI - the measure of its overall value against the currencies of our major trading partners.

Those dates and peaks and troughs are instructive on two counts. They indicate just exactly how the currency does overshoot - going too high and too low. And how quickly that can happen. In little more than two years the Aussie dropped 38 per cent against the greenback and 41 per cent in TWI terms. And then in less than three years jumped 49 per cent against the greenback and 34 per cent in TWI terms. This time it's supposed to be different.

What China is doing to commodities and the global economy is unprecedented. What really would be different is if we quite deliberately set out to destroy the foundation on which our contemporary prosperity is built. To say nothing of what it would do to a dollar that had, as always, overshot on the high side.

The above article by financial journalist Terry McCrann appeared in "The Australian" on July 21, 2007

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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Up against the warming zealots

Martin Durkin says his British documentary rejecting the idea of human-caused global warming has survived last week's roasting by Australia's public broadcaster

WHEN I agreed to make The Great Global Warming Swindle, I was warned a middle-class fatwa would be placed on my head. So I wasn't shocked that the film was attacked on the same night it was broadcast on ABC television last week, although I was impressed at the vehemence of the attack. I was more surprised, and delighted, by the response of the Australian public.

The ABC studio assault, led by Tony Jones, was so vitriolic it appears to have backfired. We have been inundated with messages of support, and the ABC, I am told, has been flooded with complaints. I have been trying to understand why.

First, the ferocity of the attack, I think, revealed the intolerance and defensiveness of the global warming camp. Why were Jones and co expending such energy and resources attacking one documentary? We are told the global warming theory is robust. They say you'd have to be off your chump to disagree. We have been assured for years, in countless news broadcasts and column inches, that it's definitely true. So why bother to stamp so aggressively on the one foolish documentary-maker - who clearly must be as mad as a snake - who steps out of line? I think viewers may also have wondered (reasonably) why the theory of global warming has not been subjected to this barrage of critical scrutiny by the media. After all, it's the theory of global warming, not my foolish little film, that is turning public and corporate policy on its head.

The apparent unwillingness of Jones and others at the ABC to give airtime to a counterargument, the tactics used to minimise the ostensible damage done by the film, the evident animosity towards those who questioned global warming: all of this served to give viewers a glimpse of what it was like for scientists who dared to disagree with the hallowed doctrine.

Why are the global warmers so zealous? After a year of arguing with people about this, I am convinced that it's because global warming is first and foremost a political theory. It is an expression of a whole middle-class political world view. This view is summed up in the oft-repeated phrase "we consume too much". I have also come to the conclusion that this is code for "they consume too much". People who believe it tend also to think that exotic foreign places are being ruined because vulgar oiks can afford to go there in significant numbers, they hate plastic toys from factories and prefer wooden ones from craftsmen, and so on.

All this backward-looking bigotry has found perfect expression in the idea of man-made climate disaster. It has cohered a bunch of disparate reactionary prejudices (anti-car, anti-supermarkets, anti-globalisation) into a single unquestionable truth and cause. So when you have a dig at global warming, you commit a grievous breach of social etiquette. Among the chattering classes you're a leper.

But why are the supporters of global warming so defensive? After all, the middle classes are usually confident, bordering on smug. As I found when I examined the basic data, they have plenty to be defensive about. Billions of dollars of public money have been thrown at global warming, yet the hypothesis is crumbling around their ears.

To the utter dismay of the global warming lobby, the world does not appear to be getting warmer. According to their own figures (from the UN-linked Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the temperature has been static or slightly declining since 1998. The satellite data confirms this. This is clearly awkward. The least one should expect of global warming is that the Earth should be getting warmer.

Then there's the ice-core data, the jewel in the crown of global warming theory. It shows there's a connection between carbon dioxide and temperature: see Al Gore's movie. But what Gore forgets to mention is that the connection is the wrong way around; temperature leads, CO2 follows.

Then there's the precious "hockey stick". This was the famous graph that purported to show global temperature flat-lining for 1000 years, then rising during the 19th and 20th centuries. It magicked away the Medieval warm period and made the recent warming look alarming, instead of just part of the general toing and froing of the Earth's climate. But then researchers took the computer program that produced the hockey stick graph and fed it random data. Bingo, out popped hockey stick shapes every time. (See the report by Edward Wegman of George Mason University in Virginia and others.) In a humiliating climb down, the IPCC has had to drop the hockey stick from its reports, though it can still be seen in Gore's movie.

And finally, there are those pesky satellites. If greenhouse gases were the cause of warming, then the rate of warming should have been greater, higher up in the Earth's atmosphere (the bit known as the troposphere). But all the satellite and balloon data says the exact opposite. In other words, the best observational data we have flatly contradicts the whole bally idea of man-made climate change.

They concede that CO2 cannot have caused the warming at the beginning of the 20th century, which was greater and steeper than the recent warming. They can't explain the cooling from 1940 to the mid-'70s. What are they left with? Some mild warming in the '80s and '90s that does not appear to have been caused by greenhouse gases. The whole damned theory is in tatters. No wonder they're defensive.

The man-made global warming parade, on one level, has been a phenomenal success. There isn't a political party or important public body or large corporation that doesn't feel compelled to pay lip service. There are scientists and journalists (a surprising number) who have built careers championing the cause. There's more money going into global warming research than there is chasing a cure for cancer. Many important people and institutions have staked their reputations on it. There's a lot riding on this theory. And it has bugger-all to do with sea levels. That is why the warmers greeted my film with red glowing eyes.

Last week on the ABC they closed ranks. They were not interested in a genuine debate. They wanted to shut it down. And thousands of wonderful, sane, bolshie Australian viewers saw right through it. God bless Australia. The DVD will be out soon.

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Carbon Offsets - Buyer Beware

A strong smell of fraud

Congress began investigating the carbon offset industry this week. The inquiry could produce some "inconvenient truths" for Al Gore and the nascent offset industry.

Carbon offsets ostensibly allow buyers to expunge their consciences of the new eco-sin of using energy derived from fossil fuels. Worried about the 8 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted each year by your SUV? Similar to the indulgences offered by Pope Leo X in the 16th century, you can absolve yourself of sin by purchasing $96 worth of CO2 offsets - typically offered at $12 per ton of CO2 emitted - from offset brokers who, in turn, supposedly use your cash to pay someone else to produce electricity with low or no CO2 emissions.

Last year, offsets representing 23.7 million tons of CO2 were sold to businesses and consumers. Sounds like a lot of CO2 emissions were avoided, except when you consider that annual natural emissions of CO2 amount to hundreds of billions of tons.

The physical world aside, the CO2 offset marketplace itself is questionable - hence this week's congressional hearing entitled, "Voluntary Carbon Offsets: Getting What You Pay For." The hearing is particularly notable since it was called by a Democrat-run Congress, concerned that global warming alarmism is being jeopardized by dubious marketing and consumer rip-offs involving offsets.

A prime example of dubious offset marketing involves Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." The movie's producers, Paramount Classics and Participant Productions, announced that they purchased offsets from broker NativeEnergy to compensate for 100 percent of the CO2 emissions from the air and ground transportation, hotel use, and production and promotional activities associated with the movie. So how many offsets supposedly compensated for the CO2 sins of Al Gore and the dozens of individuals credited with producing a movie shot in Nashville, Los Angeles, and Beijing? According to a Web site release from NativeEnergy - which has since been removed - it only cost 40 tons of offsets (worth about $480) to make "An Inconvenient Truth" carbon neutral.

It's an absurdly low figure given that the making of a 30-second television commercial can easily produce 50 tons and the movie "Syriana" - another NativeEnergy project - was supposedly offset with 2,040 tons worth of offsets. When I called NativeEnergy to inquire about the 40-ton figure and the Web page that mysteriously disappeared, I was rebuffed and told that the company "does not share information about its clients without their consent." This immediately made me wonder why the producers of "An Inconvenient Truth" either withheld or revoked their consent since so many of NativeEnergy's other clients' offset purchases are so prominently touted on the company's web site.

NativeEnergy told me I would have to go through Paramount's legal department to obtain the necessary consent. Despite repeated attempts, Paramount never returned my calls - quite odd given the Oscar-winning producers' mission and audacious self-acclaim of pioneer status as the world's first carbon-neutral documentary. NativeEnergy still boasts on its web site about offsetting "100 percent of the carbon dioxide pollution" associated with "An Inconvenient Truth" - but there's still no mention - let alone any "carbon accounting" - of what that "100 percent" actually represents.

There is reason to explore this issue further than just the spotlighting of more Al Gore-related hypocrisy - the climate alarmist community is even concerned about the offset racket. As recently reported on the left-wing web site Grist.org (http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/6/19/123649/857), it's worthwhile asking whether carbon offsets are offsetting anything at all. According to the Grist article, NativeEnergy is selling offsets that are supposed to be helping to pay for wind-generated electricity supplied by the Alaska Village Electric Cooperative (AVEC) to 52 Alaskan villages.

When the Grist reporter first interviewed an AVEC official, the money received from NativeEnergy was described as a "bonus" - a potential problem given that the agreement between AVEC and NativeEnergy requires that the offsets are "a significant contributor to economic viability and the seller's efforts to build additional wind capacity." AVEC and NativeEnergy have since backed off the "bonus" characterization, according to the Grist article.

While acknowledging the possibility of a slip of the tongue on the part of the AVEC official, the Grist reporter raised the salient point - presumably because of the black box-nature of CO2 offsets - that we will never actually know whether the offsets purchased through NativeEnergy were used to produce any wind power or reduce any CO2 emissions.

NativeEnergy sells offsets to the public at a cost of $12/ton. But how much of that price goes to reduce CO2 emissions versus NativeEnergy's pockets? A recent CNNMoney article reported that NativeEnergy raised $250,000 to pay for 50,000 tons of CO2 reductions on South Dakota's Rosebud Sioux tribe reservation - that is, as little as $5/ton may go toward emissions reduction. A gross profit margin of $7/ton for NativeEnergy is not bad, especially since there appears to be little follow-up and verification as to whether the consumer's goal of reducing CO2 emissions are actually accomplished.

Finally, taxpayers provide additional support for projects in which NativeEnergy is involved - the Department of Energy contributed more than $448,000 to the Rosebud Sioux project. The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave AVEC $2.5 million for wind turbines. A Capitol Hill staffer told me that the congressional inquiry would look into the possibility of "double-dipping" in the offset industry.

There's an awful lot of consumer and taxpayer money flying around offset-related projects with little, if any, accountability. On one hand, it's good that Congress, in the name of consumer protection, has commenced an investigation of "the efficacy and accounting of these unregulated commodities." On the other hand, only time will tell if a Congress controlled by the global warming lobby will conduct a bona fide investigation that risks discrediting one of its major themes.

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INHOFE RIPS EPA OZONE PROPOSAL

U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe increased his own alert Wednesday on an ozone proposal, warning "virtually the entire state" of Oklahoma would fail to meet new air quality standards suggested by the Environmental Protection Agency. Last month, the Oklahoma Republican's initial warning covered only Tulsa and a dozen other Oklahoma counties. Inhofe announced his broader assessment at a subcommittee hearing on the proposed smog regulations whose witnesses included EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson.

In his opening remarks, he directed Johnson's attention to a map showing the "tremendous progress" Oklahoma has made in cleaning up its air. "Not a single county in Oklahoma is in violation of the ozone standards. Not a single one, Mr. Administrator," Inhofe said. "Yet your proposal will put virtually the entire state into non-attainment. How is it that EPA last year considered states like Oklahoma to have clean air that was healthy to breathe, yet next year it will consider the air unhealthy, even as their pollution levels continue to plummet?"

In an interview following the hearing, the senator explained why he upped the ante on EPA's proposal to include the entire state. He said the original list covered only counties where monitors are located, adding those counties would be considered out of attainment immediately under the proposed regulations. "The monitors are scattered out. They are not all in one area," Inhofe said. "In almost every case, the surrounding counties (of those monitored) would be included."

He said with the possible exception of Cimarron and Texas counties, located in the state's Panhandle, the entire state would be in nonattainment. "It would happen pretty quick," the senator said. As the top Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Inhofe routinely takes the lead on such issues for his party. "I am embarrassed," he conceded. "You would think as the ranking member I could do something about this."

Inhofe expressed regret that he was no longer chairman of that key committee. "Quite frankly, if the Democrats had not taken control and I were still chairman of the committee I would seriously doubt we would have that problem," he said. Inhofe also accused EPA of not enforcing current regulations uniformly and pointed to the area of southern California as proof.

When asked, EPA did not respond directly to Inhofe's specific concerns. The agency provided maps that apparently indicated the number of counties with monitors that would be out of compliance if the new standards were in place today and those that would be in 2020. Tulsa County seemed to be only one that EPA could say for certain would continue to be out of compliance.

During his testimony at Wednesday's hearing, EPA chief Johnson said the current standard does not protect the public health with an adequate margin of safety and should be strengthened to provide additional protection, specifically for those with asthma and other lung diseases. If the proposed changes are put in place following public comments, Johnson said his agency would work with states on meeting the new standards.

Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del., the subcommittee chairman, commended Johnson for proposing the new standard. A former governor, he spoke of the costs dirty air presents for the entire nation. Inhofe and Carper have each introduced clean air legislation

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DEMOCRATS' BILL DOESN'T ADDRESS ENERGY NEEDS

SENATE Democrats' first swing at national energy policy might be boiled down to a couple of broad statements: Alternative fuels are good, big business is bad and Americans stung by higher energy costs shouldn't expect help any time soon.

With the legislation's direct cost to government (read: taxpayers) at $140 billion to $205 billion over 15 years, you'd think there'd be something in it for average folk. Hardly. Democrats are putting their stock in subsidies, tax preferences and other incentives for futuristic fuels -- mandating increased use of ethanol, for example, and requiring utilities to use more wind, solar and other renewable sources in the future.

Don't get us started on ethanol, a fuel that has yet to demonstrate any real-market viability without heavy government subsidies. Renewables are fine as they go, too. Yet Democrats' lack of balance with respect to production and supply should concern every American who fills a gas tank.

Sen. Jim Inhofe's amendment to give states the option of streamlining the permitting process for building greater refining capacity was defeated on a party-line vote after Democrats complained it was a giveaway to the oil companies. Sen. Barbara Boxer of California suggested Big Oil isn't building new refineries because it makes it easier to manipulate fuel prices. Another production-side amendment, to let Virginia lift a 25-year freeze on offshore drilling, was defeated by Democrats talking of environmental concerns as if it were 1977, not 2007.

The bill would make price gouging a federal crime -- a solution in search of a real-world problem. Meanwhile, Democrats are split on increasing car fuel efficiency standards, with Michigan's senators trying to stave off standards that would damage the auto industry. Stay tuned as the legislation proceeds. But unless you're into windmills, solar panels or corn there's not much most Americans can look forward to.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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Big threat! Melting glaciers may add around 7 inches to the sea-level this century!

We had roughly that in the 20th century and nobody noticed. This is in any case a typical example of looking at one thing in isolation. That ocean warming should lead to increased evaporation and hence increased precipitation and that increased precipitation should lead to ice buildup in central Antarctica is not mentioned. Why? Because ice buildup in Antartica should take water OUT of the oceans! You would think that these scientists were simpletons unless you knew that what they are really doing is making a sacrifice to their AGW god

CONTRARY to common belief, melting glaciers due to global warming contribute more to the rising sea level than melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets [That would not be hard since the Antarctic is not melting at all and Greenland probably is not either, depending on what estimates you use], researchers have said. Scientists found that the ebb and flow of glaciers where they meet the water causes them to speed up and deliver more ice into the world's oceans than previously estimated, said the study published in Science's latest issue.

Glaciers and ice caps account for 60 percent of the meltwater that flows into the oceans, which has been speeding up over the past 10 years from global warming, said the study's chief author, emeritus professor Mark Meier of University of Colorado's Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. Together, glaciers and ice caps drop into the oceans 417 cubic kilometres of ice each year, equal to the volume of Lake Erie, one of the five Great Lakes of the United States. And the volume of ice grows by 12.5 cubic kilometres each year.

By comparison, the study said, ice breaking off and melting from Greenland's ice sheet contributes 28 per cent of the world's ice to the oceans, and the Antarctic ice sheet another 12 per cent. The accelerating contribution of glaciers and ice caps is due in part to rapid changes in the flow of tidewater glaciers that discharge icebergs directly into the ocean, the researchers said. When the glacier with its "toe in the water'' thins, they said, a larger fraction of its weight is supported by water and it slides faster and sends more ice into the ocean.

Alaska's Columbia Glacier which drops three cubic kilometres into Prince William sound is a good example, said geologist and co-author of the study Robert Anderson. The glacier has thinned up to 400 metres in a few places, has shrunk about 14.5 kilometres since 1980 and is expected to shrink the same amount in the next two decades, he said. The melting of the ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic is not expected to catch up with that of glaciers and ice caps until the end of the century, the scientists said.

They estimated the accelerated melting of glaciers and ice caps will add from 10.2 to 24.1 centimetres [4" to 10"] to the sea level rise globally by 2100. The figures do not include the expansion of the oceans as they get warmer which could potentially double the levels, the researchers said. A 30-centimetre rise in the sea level causes a shoreline retreat of 30 metres or more, they said, adding that currently some 100 million people live within about one metre of sea level.

Source




Beef is bad for the planet!

PETA will love this nonsense!

A kilogram of beef causes more greenhouse gas and other pollution than driving for three hours while leaving all the lights on at home, a Japanese study has found. New Scientist reports that a team led by Akifumi Ogino, of the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Tsukuba, calculated the environmental cost of raising cattle through conventional farming, slaughtering the animal and distributing the meat.

The team discovered that producing a kilo of beef causes the equivalent of 36.4kg in carbon dioxide (CO2), the principal greenhouse gas, the study found. Most of these greenhouse gas emissions are methane, released from the cow's digestive system. That 1kg of beef also requires energy equivalent to lighting a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days to produce and transport the animals' feed.

The calculations, which are based on standard industrial methods of meat production in Japan, did not include the impact of managing farm infrastructure and transporting the meat, so the total environmental load is higher than the study suggests. The study appears in full in thespecialist publication Animal Science Journal.

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Greenies show their real colours -- Fascist black

HUMVEES are bricks on wheels -- huge military vehicles made famous during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Civilian versions, called the Hummer, were sold a year later and they've been selling well ever since. But a new enemy has emerged on the streets of the US. Environmental activists, it seems, have it in for the Hummer.

Gareth Groves, a 32-year resident of northwest Washington DC, woke the other day to find his new $US45,000 ($51,000) Hummer wrecked. Witnesses reported two masked men attacking the car with a baseball bat, smashing every window before scratching on the side "For The Environ".

Mr Groves knew when he bought the car that his eco-friendly neighbours weren't too happy about it, but this? "The thought of somebody vandalising it never crossed my mind," he told The Washington Post. "I've kind of been in shock." Since Monday, he says, he's been getting stares that indicate smug satisfaction. "I'd say one in five people who come by have that 'you-got-what-you-deserve' look," says friend Andy Sexton, 27. "I'm worried about what I do now," Mr Groves said. "If I get it fixed, do I put it back in the same spot three weeks from now?"

Neighbours admit they don't care much for the car -- this is hybrid-car territory where people boast about getting 4.9 litres per 100km not the paltry 16.7 the guzzling Hummer gets. "The neighbourhood in general is very concerned with the environment," Lucille Liem said. "It's more liberal-leaning. It's ridiculous to be driving a Hummer." But, she added, she did not condone violence. Local police said vandalism to advertise a political message was new to the area and likely to be an isolated event. Well, maybe. Mr Groves, meanwhile, is looking for a lock-up shed.

Source




Global cooling spreading in Queensland

QUEENSLAND'S tourist strips have woken to record subzero temperatures on another cold morning in the state's south-east. The Bureau of Meteorology said temperatures fell below zero for the first time since records began at Coolangatta, on the Gold Coast, and at Maroochydore on the Sunshine Coast. While Coolangatta dipped just below zero, Maroochydore plunged to -1 degree celsius, a bureau spokesman said. ``It's so unusual getting temperatures near zero with the ocean being so close,'' he said.

Many Brisbane residents woke to ice on the windscreen this morning after another near freezing night in the south east. Although the overnight minimum was a touch higher than the previous night, at 4.7 degrees compared with 3.8, the apparent temperature was a teeth chattering 1C. Senior Forecaster Gordon Banks said Amberley shivered on -3.8C within a degree of its all time record low of -4.5C. The cold temperatures did not just grip the south-east corner though, with below zero temps recorded as far north as Samuel Hill, in Central Queensland where the mercury dipped to -1C. And Gympie posted a new record, plunging to -3.4C, almost half a degree colder than ever before.

Source




ANOTHER BAD GUESS BY CLIMATE SCIENTISTS

Their models are full of guesses and now we hear that one such lot of guesses was quite wrong. Journal abstract follows:

Boundary Layer Halogens in Coastal Antarctica

By Alfonso Saiz-Lopez et al.

Halogens influence the oxidizing capacity of Earth's troposphere, and iodine oxides form ultrafine aerosols, which may have an impact on climate. We report year-round measurements of boundary layer iodine oxide and bromine oxide at the near-coastal site of Halley Station, Antarctica. Surprisingly, both species are present throughout the sunlit period and exhibit similar seasonal cycles and concentrations. The springtime peak of iodine oxide (20 parts per trillion) is the highest concentration recorded anywhere in the atmosphere. These levels of halogens cause substantial ozone depletion, as well as the rapid oxidation of dimethyl sulfide and mercury in the Antarctic boundary layer.

Science 20 July 2007: Vol. 317. no. 5836, pp. 348 - 351

Another summary of the above paper:

Tropospheric halogens affect the concentration of ozone, the oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere, and aerosol formation, all of which are linked to climate. The halogen chemistry of the frozen high latitudes has proven to be particularly interesting, not least because of the role of these regions as harbingers of global climate change, but a better understanding of that chemistry has been hampered by lack of data. Saiz-Lopez et al. (p. 348) present measurements of BrO and IO in the Antarctic boundary layer from January 2004 to February 2005. They observed high concentrations and persistence of these halogens throughout the sunlit period, contrary to expectations and unlike the situation in the Arctic, where IO has not been detected. The springtime IO levels they found are the highest reported anywhere in the atmosphere, and an apparent synergy between IO and BrO suggests an unknown halogen-activation mechanism. These levels of halogens also cause the rapid oxidation of dimethyl sulfide and mercury in the Antarctic boundary layer.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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Economic climate changes

Congress is considering global warming legislation to require substantial cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the inescapable byproduct of the fossil fuels -- coal, oil, and natural gas -- that supply 85 percent of the world's energy. China, India, and every other developing country refuse to limit their emissions because they fear CO2 controls more than global warming. What do they know that our lawmakers don't?

National Review's Jonah Goldberg notes that that Earth warmed about 0.7 degrees Celsius in the 20th century while global GDP increased by some 1,800 percent. For the sake of argument, he says, let's agree that all of the warming was anthropogenic -- the result of economic activity. And let's further stipulate that the warming produced no benefits, only harms. "That's still an amazing bargain," Goldberg remarks.

Average life expectancies doubled during the 20th century. The world's population nearly quadrupled, yet per capita food supply substantially increased. Literacy, medicine, leisure, and "even in many respects the environment hugely improved, at least in the prosperous West."

This suggests a thought experiment that I recently posed to Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and her colleagues on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee:

Suppose you had the power to travel back in time and impose carbon caps on previous generations. How much growth would we be willing to sacrifice to avoid how many tenths of a degree of warming? Would humanity be better off today if the 20th century had half as much warming -- but also a half or a third or even a quarter less growth? I doubt anyone on this committee would say "yes." A poorer planet would also be a hungrier, sicker planet. Many of us might not even be alive.

So, how much future growth are Boxer and company willing to sacrifice to mitigate future warming? That is not an idle question. Some people believe we're now smart enough to measurably cool the planet without chilling the economy. But Europe is having a tough time (PDF) meeting its Kyoto commitments, and Kyoto would have no detectable impact on global temperature.

Three of the main climate bills introduced in the Senate this year would require CO2 emission cuts of about 60 percent (PDF) by 2050. Yet the Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that in 2030 U.S. emissions will be about 33 percent above (PDF) year 2000 levels. Nobody knows how to meet the targets in those bills without severe cuts in either economic growth or population growth.

But won't the bills' carbon penalties make deep emission reductions achievable by spurring technological change? Don't bet on it.

European countries have been taxing gasoline for decades at rates that translate into carbon penalties of $200 to $300 per ton of CO2. (A $1.00 a gallon gasoline tax roughly translates into a $100 per ton CO2 penalty, and Europe taxes gasoline at rates of $2.00 to $3.00 (PDF) a gallon or more.) Where in Europe is the miracle fuel to replace petroleum? Where are all the zero emission vehicles? Europe is not one mile closer than we are to achieving a "beyond petroleum" transport system. On the contrary, European Union transport sector CO2 emissions in 2004 were 26 percent higher than in 1990.

The EIA analyzed the market impacts of the relatively modest -- $7 per ton -- CO2 emission cap in "discussion draft" legislation sponsored by Sens. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and Arlen Specter (R-PA). The bill's proposed cap would cut projected investment in coal generation by more than half (PDF). However, it does not make carbon capture and storage (CCS) economical. Would a bigger regulatory hammer do the trick? No, it would just drive more investment out of coal generation.

An MIT study (PDF) finds that it will take billions of dollars over a decade to find out whether CCS is economical under a $30-per-ton CO2 penalty. Note that even if CCS is determined to be "economical," the MIT study estimates that coal generation over the next five decades grows by less than 20 percent of what it would in the absence of a carbon penalty.

Regulatory climate strategies put the policy cart before the technology horse. Not until markets are capable of producing vast quantities of affordable energy without emissions would it be reasonable for Congress to consider mandatory emission cuts.

Policy makers concerned about global warming should do three things. First, as Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg recommends (PDF), encourage worldwide R&D investment in non-carbon-emitting energy technologies. This -- not tougher CO2 controls -- should be the focus of post-Kyoto diplomacy.

Second, eliminate tax and other political barriers to innovation and capital stock. A recent study (PDF) by the American Council for Capital Formation shows that the United States lags behind many of our trading partners in capital cost recovery for investment in electric power generation, transmission lines, pollution control equipment, and petroleum refining capacity.

Third, as economist Indur Goklany recommends (PDF), for a fraction of Kyoto's cost, target international assistance on those threats to human health and welfare where we know how to do a lot of good for each dollar invested. This would not only save millions of lives today, it would also help developing countries become wealthier and less vulnerable to climate-related risk.

Source






Peer Review

Post lifted from Prof. Brignell. See the original for links. Before the most recent IPCC report, Warmists often used "peer review" as alleged proof that the journal articles they relied on were correct. As anybody who has been involved in the process knows, however, it is no such thing. I personally often got the impression that reviewers did not even read what they purported to review -- and with over 200 papers published in the academic journals I am an unusually successful academic author so speak from some experience and am clearly not speaking from sour grapes. Since peer opinion as expressed in the body of the most recent IPCC report (as distinct from the non-scientific summary) has turned against alarmism, however, we hear rather less about peer review these days.

It is perhaps rather curmudgeonly to add a few "yes buts" when someone has paid you a bit of a compliment, but more needs to be said on the subject of peer review and editors, as raised by Charles Warren Hunt in Greenie Watch. There is certainly no question that the system is corruptible and has been corrupted, as ancient memories related in these pages have testified. Those were the days when science was free from the pressures of the new religious elite, and the situation is far, far worse now.

It is, however, difficult to see how modern scientific publication can exist without some form of specialist review system. Time was when one person could have a working knowledge of the whole of a subject area and would therefore make a competent journal editor. Scientific activity has expanded so much in the last half century that such a function is beyond one person. The danger before about 1980 was that journals could be effectively cornered by coteries who were promoting one particular theory. Now, of course, that small danger has become a universal threat, and even common practice.

It all comes down to the integrity of the editor. Under Sir John Maddox, for example, Nature maintained its reputation as the world's leading science journal. It was an honour to have results published therein. The present day Nature is just a bad joke among those who still value the integrity of science. You only have to look at the extraordinary shenanigans its editors indulged in to avoid publishing valid criticism of the bogus "hockey stick" to see an example of corruption at the top.

When you have refereed thousands of papers for various journals and conferences, sat on editorial boards and adjudicated in refereeing disputes, you develop a pretty good overview of the problems of the system. There are too many papers offered for a start. Many of them are trivial, unoriginal or provably wrong. Some of the would-be authors are even clearly insane. A journal will quickly lose its reputation and readership if it fills its pages with self-evident trash. Just coping with the significant new results in most fields is a demanding onus on those working in them and they do not welcome the wasting of their precious time. There will always be referees who abuse that position, but most of them do an honest job for no pay. The bonus is that they have a more up-to-date knowledge of their field than others. If you become known for doing a good, conscientious job, the demands on your time grow and grow until eventually you have to call a halt. Finding suitable referees is a nightmare for editors and their boards.

But, of course, all of that has changed. People driven by quasi-religious belief go to great lengths to gain positions of power, such as editorships, and to recruit their kind. There are very few journals left that you could trust to take a balanced view on a subject such as climate without resorting to dogma-based censorship. Though the refereeing system had major intrinsic problems, like democracy it was the least bad system we have.

The big change we are now faced with is that "Peer Review" has now become one of the religious mantras used to impose censorship. Although the internet has removed the exclusivity of control that existed in scientific and other publication, the opposite has happened in the so-called main-stream media. Peer Review now often means that a paper has been subjected to censorship by a close-knit community of like-minded believers. As Wegman so powerfully demonstrated, we have a situation in which a relatively small circle of intimates are reviewing and quoting each other's work and, worse, excluding others who do not conform to their dogma. There is nothing new in this, except perhaps the sheer scale of it and the potent social and economic consequences.

"Peer Review" is now a phrase bandied about by people who quite clearly have no idea how science in general and refereeing in particular are supposed to work. It is used to condemn ideas purely on the basis of whether they conform to the prescribed dogma. Although the content of the internet is almost all rubbish, it is also where you can find the best of scientific thinking. Let us hope that that small element can be preserved should humanity eventually return to sanity.




The truth is, we can't ignore the sun

By Dr David Whitehouse -- an astronomer, former BBC science correspondent, and the author of "The Sun: A Biography". Dr Whitehouse makes a similar point about recent solar activity to the points made by myself and Prof. Brignell but since Dr. Whitehouse got his comments into the mass-circulation "Daily Telegraph", they will undoubtedly be much more influential

According to the headlines last week, the sun is not to blame for recent global warming: mankind and fossil fuels are. So Al Gore is correct when he said, "the scientific data is in. There is no more debate." Of that the evangelical BBC had no doubt. There was an air of triumphalism in its coverage of the report by the Royal Society. It was perhaps a reaction to the BBC Trust's recent criticism of the Corporation's bias when reporting climate change: but sadly, it only proved the point made by the Trust.

The BBC was enthusiastically one-sided, sloppy and confused on its website, using concepts such as the sun's power, output and magnetic field incorrectly and interchangeably, as well as not including any criticism of the research.

But there is a deeper and more worrying issue. Last week's research is a simple piece of science and fundamentally flawed. Nobody looked beyond the hype; if they had, they would have reached a different conclusion. The report argues that while the sun had a significant effect on climate during most of the 20th century, its influence is currently dwarfed by human effects. It says that all known solar influences since about 1990 are downward and because global temperature has increased since then, the sun is not responsible.

No. The research could prove the contrary. Using the global temperature data endorsed by the Inter-national Panel on Climate Change, one can reach a completely different conclusion. Recently the United States' National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration said that 2006 was statistically indistinguishable from previous years. Looking at annual global temperatures, it is apparent that the last decade shows no warming trend and recent successive annual global temperatures are well within each year's measurement errors. Statistically the world's temperature is flat. The world certainly warmed between 1975 and 1998, but in the past 10 years it has not been increasing at the rate it did. No scientist could honestly look at global temperatures over the past decade and see a rising curve.

It is undisputed that the sun of the later part of the 20th century was behaving differently from that of the beginning. Its sunspot cycle is stronger and shorter and, technically speaking, its magnetic field leakage is weaker and its cosmic ray shielding effect stronger. So we see that when the sun's activity was rising, the world warmed. When it peaked in activity in the late 1980s, within a few years global warming stalled. A coincidence, certainly: a connection, possibly.

My own view on the theory that greenhouse gases are driving climate change is that it is a good working hypothesis - but, because I have studied the sun, I am not completely convinced. The sun is by far the single most powerful driving force on our climate, and the fact is we do not understand how it affects us as much as some think we do. So look on the BBC and Al Gore with scepticism. A scientist's first allegiance should not be to computer models or political spin but to the data: that shows the science is not settled.

Source





Australia: Global cooling now hits Queensland too

Queensland breaks all-time cold weather record

SOUTH-EAST Queenslanders have woken to a record-breaking cold morning. The Bureau of Meteorology said temperatures fell to a record low at Brisbane Airport shortly after sunrise today, with a temperature of -0.1 degrees celsius recorded at 6.39am (AEST). The previous record for the airport was 0.6 degrees, recorded in 1971 and 1994. Elsewhere in the region, Ipswich, south-west of Brisbane, recorded a low of -4.8 degrees overnight, just 0.1 degree short of the lowest temperature recorded there, in 1995.

There have also been reports of -7 degrees in Stanthorpe, in Queensland's south, while nearby Warwick recorded a temperature of -6.4 degrees. Kingaroy, north-west of Brisbane, plunged to -3.2 degrees, while Amberley, in Brisbane's south-west, fell to -1.9 degrees. Brisbane itself was slightly warmer at 3.9 degrees, while the Gold Coast got to a low of 3.1 degrees about 7am (AEST) and the Sunshine Coast recorded 1.4 degrees.

The cold weather is a result of a combination of dry air and clear night skies as well cold air being pushed up from the south by a strong low pressure system in the Tasman Sea, a bureau spokesman said. Cold temperatures are expected to continue tomorrow but should return to average by the weekend, the spokesman said.

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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