Tuesday, May 26, 2015



British Commo paper loves global warming

They want a revolution to fix it, unsurprisingly.  Communists will always be Communists.  See article from the British "People's Daily" below

EARLIER this month the International Energy Agency released its annual flagship energy technology report, explaining that “clean energy progress is falling well short of the levels needed to limit the global increase in temperature to no more than 2°C.”

The inadequacy of the world’s response to climate change was further confirmed by a study led by Lord Nicholas Stern, which also noted the commitments made by nations to cut carbon emissions by 2030 fall about half short of the reductions needed to restrict warming to a 2°C increase on pre-industrial levels.

As many readers will know, 2°C is the global temperature increase world leaders in the West agree we cannot exceed if we wish to stop dangerous climate change.

Contrast this with statements recently made by the top climate scientist Professor James Hansen. “It’s crazy to think that 2°C is a safe limit,” Hansen told ABC Radio in Australia, noting it was a “prescription for disaster” which would lock in several metres of sea level rise by 2050. “The consequences are almost unthinkable,” Hansen explained. “It would mean that all coastal cities would become dysfunctional.”

The inescapable, terrifying conclusion is this — the climate target that Western governments have agreed on is not even close to being achieved. And even worse — the agreed target that we are failing to reach is not in itself strong enough to stop dangerous climate change.

Other recent dispatches from the environmental front line are equally disturbing. “A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them,” the New York Times noted in January. Similarly, last year the generally conservative UN intergovernmental panel on climate change reported: “Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.”

So what has been the British media’s response to the growing climate crisis that threatens humanity and the planet?

Research conducted by Vicky Dando from the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies has found there was a five-fold decrease in press reporting of climate change between 2007 and 2012. Richard Thomas, from Cardiff Business School, has completed (soon to be published) research that shows a similar reduction. Comparing the 10pm weekday flagship news bulletins on ITV and BBC in 2007 and 2014, Thomas has found environmental issues had almost disappeared from our screens by 2014. In 2007 the percentage of news time devoted to environmental issues was 2.5 per cent on ITV and 1.6 per cent on the BBC. By 2014 this had dropped to just 0.3 per cent on the BBC and 0.2 per cent on ITV.

“In 2007, the Madeleine McCann story, on its own, commanded as much attention as the total number of environmental stories broadcast that year,” notes Professor Justin Lewis from the Cardiff School of Journalism, summarising Thomas’s research. “Remarkably, seven years on — well after the McCann story has faded from the news agenda — this comparison holds up. “By 2014 there were still as many broadcast news stories about Madeleine McCann as there were on the range of environmental issues.”

Has there ever been a more shocking example of how the media has failed the British public and their future children? When will our supposedly stroppy and independent fourth estate wake up and realise it’s not just Rome burning but the whole planet?

Depressingly, the media blackout was mirrored in the general election campaign. “The future of all nations is irrevocably and immediately threatened,” explained Peter Wadhams, a professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge, in a letter to the Independent in April 2015. “Yet we see little or no discussion of this by any of the main political parties during this general election campaign.” Other than a brief mention by Green Party leader Natalie Bennett, climate change was completely absent from the televised leader debates.

In 2013 Professor Kevin Anderson, the deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said that to avoid an increased in temperature above 2°C the world would require a “revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony.”

A good place to start this revolutionary change would be our corporate-owned, advertising-dependent, growth-obsessed, power-friendly media.

SOURCE





Target practice: Atmospheric Scientist John Christy exposes inaccuracy of climate models



Speaking before Congress, Professor of Atmospheric Science John Christy illustrates the gross inaccuracy of the 102 climate model simulations relied upon by the United Nation's in the latest IPCC AR5 climate change report. Professor Christy describes his chart: 'That is the trend in the atmospheric temperature that has happened since 1979. That's the target that you want to hit with your climate model. So, it's like we give someone 102 bullets to shoot at that target... Not a single one of these climate model projections was able to hit the target. That is the basis though on which the policy is being made, is on those climate models, not on the evidence before us.'

US House Committee on Natural Resources, May 13, 2015





Professor Singer Finds CO2 Has Little Affect on Global Temperature

Written by Dr Pierre R Latour


Singer (L).  Latour (R)

I write to concur with conclusions in Dr S Fred Singer’s recent essay: “The Climate Sensitivity Controversy”, by S. Fred Singer, American Thinker, October 15, 2014. And to solve the puzzles he posed. Singer and Latour

In particular he concludes “climate sensitivity, CS, is close to zero”. This means any effect of CO2 on Earth’s temperature and climate is vanishingly small, hence unimportant. Singer leaves his warmist camp and joins the denier camp of skeptics.

I met Singer at his University of Houston lecture hosted by Prof Larry Bell on February 6, 2012 and his several talks at the latest Heartland Institute ICCC, Las Vegas, July 7-9, 2014. He has played an important role in disputing alarmist global warming claims for decades. He has received many awards.

Singer reveals he assumes CO2 warms Earth because it is called a greenhouse gas, which does not make it so. It is also green plant food, which does chemically make it a coolant.  Great confusion arises when a radiating gas, which cools the atmosphere, is incorrectly labeled a greenhouse gas and then warming is arbitrarily assigned to it, by virtue of the nomenclature change.

I discovered in 2012 introducing radiating gases like H2O and CO2 to the atmosphere actually cools the Earth slightly and had useful direct email exchanges with Singer on the matter. Naturally I am pleased he has reached a similar conclusion, perhaps by another way.

The proper way to calculate CS is from the laws of physics, chemistry, biology and chemical engineering with correct physical properties. Relying on empiricism and data regression for large complex engineering systems is well known to be incorrect and flawed. They never represent the nonlinear world outside their domain of fit; cannot extrapolate, only interpolate. Same for stock market charting. The whole data fitting exercise to support GHGT (greenhouse gas theories) is worthless from its inception. (Except it conveniently proved CO2 lags temperature by 800 years from Al Gore’s 420,000 year trend, proving CO2 could not cause these temperature changes; the sun did it.)

My way is physics, the Stefan-Boltzmann Law of radiation intensity from all matter proportional to its temperature and emissivity. This Law works for entire planets, even when there are clouds, thermal feedbacks and hurricanes.

I parted company with Singer with his current “Of course, the proper way to determine Climate Sensitivity (CS) is empirically -- by using the climate data.” two years ago. That is wrong. He expresses misgivings himself.

GHGT promoters are wedded to the idea of correlating temperature and CO2 data, which alone can only prove correlation, never causation. A corollary error is to account for other known causes driving temperature, like solar, and ascribe all response discrepancy actually due to unknown causes, to CO2.

Another error is to statistically fit data to empirical equations and attempt to extrapolate outside the validity domain of the data. Interpolation is allowed, extrapolation of nonlinear natural world outside the domain is not.

A fourth error is to deviate from the scientific method practice which uses experimental data to falsify proposed theories that don’t predict nature’s behavior well, rather than claim validity of when predictions are confirmed by luck.

A fifth error is to keep data analysis methods used to support validity of hunches confidential, particularly when publically financed. (Newton’s Principia Mathematica made him famous by full disclosure.)

Worst of all is filing defamation lawsuits against skeptics questioning secret GHGT methods, assumptions and scientific basis. Even smearing them and attacking their character is unacceptable.

Five strikes and you are way out. These principles are well known to control systems engineers, but not UN IPCC GHGT promoters that lack credentials.

Singer correctly notes there are several different temperatures involved; a source of confusion I discovered years ago. The GHGT literature is intellectually incoherent, a mess. He is correct to point out atmospheric global warming ceased since 1997 until now, 2014. The globe warms about half the time, 4.6 billion/2 = 2.3 billion years. It cools half the time also.

He has been wandering around in the swamp of atmospheric feedbacks, positive or negative, proclaiming it is all too complicated and controversial. Like esteemed MIT Professor Richard Lindzen and other meteorologists, he is trapped in his feedback swamp and can’t get out.

Feedbacks are the province of control systems engineering. (I know what feedback control is and how to build it. In 1997 I proved any thermostat for Earth adjusting fossil fuel combustion is unmeasurable, unobservable and uncontrollable; it will never work. Even Lord Monckton is beginning to consider control systems engineering; I encountered him personally in Las Vegas.)

Singer calls for more research, while promoters at UN IPCC and global climate change organizations are already wasting $1 billion/day in hopeless controversy and useless assessment reports.

Inventing a new mechanism of radiant heat transfer, back-radiation, from cold atmospheric CO2 molecules back down to Earth’s surface, with intensity 333 w/m2 (compared to solar intensity reaching surface which averages 161 w/m2 of surface) warming it further, causing it to radiate up even more intensely at 396 w/m2, violates FLoT and SLoT, constituting a perpetual motion machine creating energy to drive global warming, an impossibility of nature. Heat does not flow from cold matter to hot matter, heating hot further; only from hot to cold. This is engineering fraud of the first order. GHGT has been falsified by eminent physicists.

Singer closes with two puzzles, both of which I have solved.

More HERE





Green Energy Policy? - “Nothing that Works”



Viv Forbes

Modern industrial society commenced with the use of coal and oil to power factories, trains, ships and agriculture and to generate electricity. With abundant energy, prosperity increased, and people could save enough to support leisure, education, culture and environmental concerns.

But the dark greens have a dream to dismantle all this, and return society to the hunter/gatherer era.

In an unguarded moment Maurice Strong, a leader of the international green movement, said:  “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

Greens have thus gleefully spread the global warming scare to justify a massive political war on hydro-carbon fuels. Timothy Wirth, ex-President of the UN Foundation, spilt the beans:

“We've got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”

To mask their real aim of de-energising modern industry, they continually promote “alternative energy”.

The only alternatives to coal, oil and gas for stable, reliable and economical grid power are nuclear energy, and in favourable locations, hydro or geothermal.

Nuclear power could be one of our cheapest and safest energy sources. However greens have opposed and denigrated it for decades, and erected such bureaucratic and financial hurdles that it is seldom considered in most pampered western societies.

They are in favour of hydro, providing it does not disturb one fish or frog on their favourite river.

But they continually spruik the benefits of wind and solar power.

Wind/solar can be useful in some mobile or remote locations, and for some people with deep pockets who wish to become independent of the grid. But being totally unable to supply 24/7 grid power, they need reliable backup (or massive batteries) for about 75% of their rated capacity. Once we subtract the energy and resources needed to build and maintain the towers/panels, plus the roads and transmission lines, plus backup/batteries and then run it all intermittently, the whole-of-life net-contribution of wind/solar to energy supply or emission reduction is negligible or negative.

Another dark green leader, Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountains Institute, said:  “It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.”

Green energy policy promotes this dictum by supporting “Nothing that Works”.

SOURCE





Media Ignores Conflicts of Interest and False Claims

In a brazen display of hypocrisy, the media recently fawned all over a new report in Nature Climate Change claiming the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) clean power plant rules will save thousands of lives per year.

The hypocrisy?

Just two months ago, dredging up 10-year-old accusations, the media savagely attacked noted astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon because his employer, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, took $1.2 million from the fossil fuel industry to support his work. Though no impropriety by Soon or Harvard-Smithsonian was ever demonstrated, and the substance of Soon’s work was not challenged, Soon endured weeks of criticism implying he was a paid shill.

Almost every story on the Nature Climate Change report went out of its way to stress the research team involved in the study had no personal interest in the results of their research; their research could be trusted because it was untainted by the influence of special interests.

How do we know the authors had no financial interests in the findings? Because, like Soon, they declared it at the end of the article. And the press swallowed this claim hook, line, and sinker.

There’s just one problem: Collectively, the authors of the study have received more than $45 million from EPA for their research.

It’s a safe bet each of the co-authors will seek more funding from EPA in the future (if they don’t already have grant and research funding requests currently pending at EPA). Since EPA had already determined it was going to restrict carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, does anyone really believe the study would find the proposed restrictions are unjustified? Does anyone believe if it had, EPA would continue to reward the authors with continued generous research funding?

As Steve Milloy, founder of JunkScience.com, wrote (sarcastically) discussing funding given to just three of the co-authors, Joel Schwartz, Jonathan Levy and Charles Driscoll, “Now how could Schwartz’s $31,176,575 or Levy’s $9,514,361 or Driscoll’s $3,654,608 from EPA possibly be considered as a ‘competing financial interest’ in an article they wrote in support of EPA’s flagship regulatory effort?”

With tens of millions of dollars in research funding at stake, one might think the press would question the researchers’ claims of no undue influence. Instead, the Buffalo News quoted one author as saying “I’m an academic, not a politician, I don’t have a dog in this fight,” referring to the ongoing, very public battle over EPA’s clean power plant rule.

US News and World Report dutifully reported, “the EPA, which did not participate in the study, or interact with its authors …, roundly welcomed the findings.” And the Harvard School of Public Health story on the report described the researchers as “independent.”

And this despite that one of the authors seemed to reveal to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette the findings had been predetermined, saying, “People are focused on climate control and mitigation, but in doing this study we wanted to bring attention to the additional benefits of carbon control.” (Emphasis mine) So the benefits were already evident and they wanted to put the icing on EPA’s carbon-control cake.

We at The Heartland Institute reject the idea a researcher’s sources of funding determine the soundness of his or her results. Rather, as J. Scott Armstrong recently argued, the methodologies and results stand or fall based upon their ability to be replicated and prove what they claim to prove. Still, the double standard the press displays with regard to the research of climate skeptics as opposed to climate alarmists, when questions of conflict of interest are raised (or not raised as is the case with the alarmists camp), rankles me.

An enterprising investigative journalist might find it interesting to see how many researchers who’ve received EPA funding have produced reports undermining EPA’s regulatory efforts. Further, it would be interesting to know if those same researchers continued to receive EPA grants afterwards.

SOURCE





Climate stupidity and human survival

By Denis G. Rancourt (Rancourt is a Leftist who has regard for the facts -- a rare soul)

The human animal has an instinct to identify potential dangers and to warn others. It is a built-in survival mechanism of any animal that lives in a group. And it is a strong and constant activity, re-enforced by environmental stressors.

This plays out on several time scales, from the immediate in the case of a potential physical assault, to the weekly in checking the weather forecast, to seasonal in preparing for winter, to life-long in planning for inevitable aging, to leaving good things for our grandchildren...

It is in our fiber to look ahead and to plan ahead, especially in the face of foreseeable or detected dangers.

The whole process can spin out of control when the danger is difficult to perceive yet could be lethal. Think of baboons who are on the lookout for a stalking lion. The slightest shadow movement can make them scream and run for the trees. It's a tense and highly volatile situation.

At this stage in our evolution we are faced with a pathological extension of our collective survival reflex, which is entirely fabricated by our high priests (government funded scientists and talking heads).

If these high priests were not here to tell us that the atmospheric concentration of the minor constituent CO2 is increasing, and that "global mean surface temperature" has increased by some 0.5 C in the last 100 years, then we would never know about these imperceptible causes of our certain eventual collective death as a species.

The priests explain that our certain extinction will occur from a rising sea level and changing regional climates. That these changes will cause mass migrations, ecosystem collapses, agricultural failures, famines, and disease. They also inform us that those who will suffer most are the most vulnerable inhabitants of the planet, as though this were a new feature of the effects of natural disasters.

Therefore, they urge, we must tax carbon emissions, apply cap and trade, and create a global carbon economy to limit CO2 in the atmosphere. And who better to coordinate it all than the World Bank, IMF, and such, given their stellar records in managing equitable development on this little rock. (Or is that economic enforcement of US regime supremacy?)

Forgive me for saying, but this all sounds rather nutso to me.

Nothing could be more like a religion than this crazy movement. We are expected to accept that an essential and growth-limiting plant nutrient (CO2: [1]) is a toxic pollutant, that the world will be destroyed because of our collective and intrinsic wickedness of emitting CO2, via floods no less.  

Take a deep breath (exhale if you dare) and allow me to state a few facts that might help put things into perspective.

The planet has been teeming with life for billions of years.

During that time, the global mean temperature has almost always been some 10 C higher than in the present geologic anomaly [2], in a manner uncorrelated with CO2 concentration [3]. That is the history of this same planet that we live on. During that time, the CO2 concentration has typically been 10 times higher than today's value, and it has rarely been as low as modern values, nor has it ever been lower than modern values.

There is no reason to believe that humans would not fare well on an Earth that is 10 C warmer, never mind 1 or 2 C. Land value would increase in the polar regions, and there would be intense reforestation and forest densification of the equatorial regions, with little possibility for controlling growth where it is hot and humid.

From what we know of our planet and the history of its biosphere, warming is not going to kill us off any time soon. None of the known mass extinctions (a relative term) in Earth's history can be reliably attributed to "sustained warming", whereas ice ages that have occurred recently (during human presence on the planet, in the last 1 M years) are expected to correspond to periods of decreased planetary life density, but saw mammals and human populations completely adapt. Basically, neither warming or cooling can kill us by any know mechanism ever observed. If anything, the opposite of "killer warmth" is observed on today's Earth, where both human populations and living biomass are concentrated near equatorial latitudes:

Therefore, we still have much time left to achieve human extinction by much more direct means than warming (or cooling) of any kind. We also have a lot of time and occasions to practice accommodating mass migrations caused by our wars and economic violence, in order to prepare for the "climate migrations".

Somehow there seems to be more public-opinion, political, and lobbying effort in implementing and developing the instruments of a global carbon economy than in developing the instruments to prevent wars of aggression, to cope with the consequences of natural disasters, to stop displacing and dispossessing local inhabitants, to enforce the Geneva Conventions, to stop the wholesale destruction of entire nations (Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran...?), to respect international law, ... not to mention reparations to the survivors of recent slavery, genocide, dispossession, and crass exploitation.

Rather than widespread vehement and actuated insistence on democratic control of local resources and institutions, based on individual realities on the ground, instead we have a sizable yet ineffective population of vocal do-gooders enthralled in spasmodic incantations against atmospheric CO2 emissions, as part of a Gaia-inspired religion perverted by the Christian concept of original sin; all of which de facto supports the carbon globalization schemes engineered by the US regime to attempt to constrain their emerging competitors and extort a development tax.

When has "globalization" even been about justice, or about anything other than economic predation? When have good-will global efforts ever had any significant positive impact? [4]

Why pollute local struggles and liberation of the individual with tenuous claims about imperceptible dangers? And why put so much energy into insisting that the danger from CO2 is real? This seems like a classic example of seeking an overarching religious belief "solution" to real local problems that one cannot or will not confront.

"Climate justice" needs to be "justice". The comfortable-middle-class fetish for carbon co-opts the analysis, defuses the thrust for defending identity-tied interests, and sends legitimate demands straight into the atmosphere. Or, at best, it is simply irrelevant to real struggles.

In the main population, if all the fanatics that are screaming that the sky is falling would scream to stop the war machine that occupies every corner of the globe, then we could start moving away from the real manufactured disasters that wash over the planet continuously, which don't require satellite spectrometers to detect.

Instead of asking whether we can detect warming, whether intense weather events are actually more frequent, whether species extinction rates can reliably be measured, and so on, why not address the obvious: Humans are exploiting and terrorizing other humans, human conditions are constantly being attacked, and natural habitat is being destroyed

Why turn to sanitized and intractable up-in-the-air questions when injustice and actual destruction is all around us? And why oh why pretend that humans can manage global carbon fluxes, manage the radiation balance of the planet, and control climate?

It's a planet!

If we are going to have a global religion, why not believe that justice leads to both short-term and long-term safety? Not justice that is planned and given to us, but justice that we acquire through struggle and liberation.

On the other hand if you must be irrelevant and must have your carbon fetish, then at least put it into a planetary perspective [5]:

The present (2010) rate of fossil fuel burning (0.8 x 10^13 kg-C/y) is 8% of global primary production (GPP)

The latter plant growth (GPP) uses only 0.07% of solar light striking the planet

Thus, fossil fuel burning represents 8% of 0.07% = 0.006% of solar energy rate of input (the sun is a sun and the Earth is a planet...)

The CO2 production from the burning of fossil fuel is approximately equal to that from human and domestic animal breathing

The combined biomass of humans and domestic animals is 0.04% of Earth's living biomass

Ants have transformed the planet's surface and its ecology far more than have humans

The total amount of fossil fuel burned to date (historically to 2010) by humans is 3.7 x 10^14 kg-C, less than half of the carbon contained in the atmosphere as a minor constituent gas

Dissolved CO2 in the oceans is 50 times more than the total amount in the atmosphere

Living and dead biomass-carbon (in soils, sediments, plant-cover, etc.) is probably much greater than carbon as CO2 in air and water

Thus, the total post-industrial fossil fuel burned to date represents less than 1% of the planet's global bio-available and exchangeable carbon, not to mention geological sources

As such, atmospheric CO2 is readily exchanged with and buffered by compartments of labile carbon that are much larger than the atmosphere, via flux mechanisms that science is barely beginning to understand.

More HERE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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