Ya gotta laugh!  The NYT could teach Dr Goebbels a thing or two

The NYT has up at the moment a big article by a dear little lady named Coral Davenport (and friends) under the heading: "Greenland Is Melting Away". It's a long article decorated with huge and beautiful pictures so one might expect a lot of it.


Coral is a twit

But Coral presents zero proof that Greenland Is Melting Away.  Instead she salivates over a group of "scientists" travelling to Greenland to take "measurements".  The only actual statement she  makes about Greenland overall is "The full melting of Greenland’s ice sheet could increase sea levels by about 20 feet".

Maybe it could, though she gives no calculations or proof, but the interesting thing about the claim is that she doesn't say when or how long that will take.  In fact she goes on to say that nobody knows that and that the scientists she adulates are there to take measurements that might answer the question.  The answer could be "1,000 years" for all we know -- and for all that the NYT tells us

So the whole thing is just a glossy bit of unusually brainless propaganda. But it's the sort of  propaganda that Leftists need to prop up their sagging hypothesis about global warming.





Steve Goddard takes on little Coral with some facts and figures

The facts and figures are deadly to Warmism so it's no wonder little Coral doesn't mention any

Even the most ridiculous estimates of ice loss in Greenland are less than 200 km³ per year. The volume of the ice sheet is 3,000,000 km³. Using the most aggressive claims, it would take 15,000 years for the ice sheet to melt. That accounts for a sea level rise of about one hundredth of an inch per year. Does Coral Davenport think that one inch of sea level rise over the next century is going to drown her?

But the reality is that the surface of Greenland gains about 300 billion tons of ice every year. Greenland is not melting.



Ninety percent of the ice sheet gained mass from September 1, 2014 to August 30, 2015.



Claims that the ice sheet is losing 200 km³ / year are based on unreliable gravity calculations made by people with an agenda.

Glacial flow to the ocean is controlled by the amount of excess ice building up in the interior. If for some reason the amount of ice building up in the interior decreased, flow would also decrease.

Climate is cyclical. There is no rational reason to believe that the Greenland ice sheet is going to disappear. More than half of it never gets above freezing most years.

More HERE





It’s deep in the ocean, and it could stop Global Warming

Something else not accounted for in those wonderful "models"

A groundbreaking new study finds that a bacteria living far below the surface of the waters cold be a key to reversing climate change

A stunning new finding out of the University of Florida has revealed the existence of bacteria deep down on the ocean floor that could have a huge impact on climate change.

Carbon dioxide is the greenhouse gas that is most responsible for global warming, and it is emitted largely by human activity, meaning that figuring out a way to eliminate these vast quantities of carbon dioxide is key to fighting climate change. Now, a research team has found a bacteria called Thiomicrospira crunogena that gobbles up carbon dioxide by producing an enzyme that converts it into a compound that is totally benign, and can even strip carbon dioxide from organisms, according to a Christian Science Monitor report.

The bacteria is found deep down in the ocean, living near hydrothermal vents in temperatures too extreme for most creatures to survive.

Robert McKenna, who is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the UF College of Medicine, said according to the report: “This little critter has evolved to deal with those extreme temperature and pressure problems. It has already adapted to some of the conditions it would face in an industrial setting.”

There’s just one problem: in order for this process to be feasible, a lot of carbonic anhydrase will be needed — the good news is that McKenna’s team has found a way to get this enzyme without diving deep down to the ocean floor to collect this bacteria.

And we can thank the deadly E. coli bacteria for that. By genetically engineering E. coli scientists can produce the enzyme in a lab setting, although so far they have been able to produce only very small quantities. Considering the massive problem we have on our hands when it comes to global warming and just how much carbon dioxide is out there that needs to be absorbed, we’re going to need a lot more than a few milligrams at a time.

Also, the enzyme can’t be produced all that quickly, and that presents another obstacle for researchers.

A news release on the finding was published on the University of Florida’s website, which can be found here.

SOURCE




War Between the States: Clean Power Plan Edition

The latest legal filing against the United States government, specifically the Environmental “Protection” Agency, is the case of 24 states fighting the astronomical emissions standards of the Clean Power Plan. That plan should serve as even more hard evidence that Barack Obama and his statist fellow travelers truly believe in the maxim, “rex non potest peccare” or “the king can do no wrong.”

Obama is simply making sure to fulfill his 2008 campaign promise that, “Under my plan, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” But he and his ecofascist militants have triggered another response from the real world — the states where energy production, especially coal, is key for families pursuing the American Dream and the greater economy.

Why are nearly half of the states united in their opposition against an overreaching leftist administration?

Via its Clean Power Plan, the EPA has declared war on coal and any other fossil fuel. They claim to be fighting a danger as great as terrorism — climate change — at least as declared by Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. In February 2014, Kerry bloviated, “Climate change can now be considered another weapon of mass destruction, perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.”

Obama’s plan to reduce carbon emissions 32% by 2030 is more a plan to bankrupt the coal industry, with petroleum next on the list. Since 2010, according to Politico’s “War on Coal,” the equivalent of a coal-burning power plant has been forced to close by the Obama administration’s extreme regulations every 10 days.

Incredibly, Janet McCabe, EPA acting assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation, proclaimed last week, “The power plan is based on a sound legal and technical foundation” that “really puts states in the driver’s seat.

Ms. McCabe, why don’t you tell that to the newly unemployed in Erwin, Tennessee?

On Oct. 15 in Erwin, a city of just of 6,000 residents, the CSX rail terminal completely closed suddenly and without advanced notice, eliminating 300 jobs. Why would 5% of a small Appalachian town find itself unemployed in such a dramatic act?

CSX spokeswoman Melanie Cost cited "changing business environment” and, specifically, “significantly reduced coal traffic through the region.”

The Obama-led Left rails against so-called “trickle-down” economics — the Reagan Era economic expansion that included an increase of wages and prosperity. But leftists guarantees trickle-down misery and unemployment. You see, the Erwin CSX terminal was on the mainline through Unicoi County that feeds coal traffic out of western Virginia and eastern Kentucky to the ports of Charleston, Savannah and Wilmington. More misery is sure to trickle down.

The radical Left can’t handle the fact that our economy is built on energy.

Despite King Obama’s promise to bankrupt coal companies and close plants while, therefore, increasing the cost of electricity, the EPA vigorously denies that its edicts will have a negative economic impact to states. The illogic of the militant environmentalists is that, by a stroke of a wand, all energy should be supplied by wind or solar — “renewable” energy sources.

Never mind that the actual technology and infrastructure doesn’t exist on a scale to make this fantasy a reality, the political will and commitment to an ideology is the priority. Hence, the vast divide between the actions of the “Red” versus “Blue” states.

The 24 states suing to protect their workforce and citizens' budgets are predominantly center-right politically: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wyoming and Wisconsin.

There are 15 states and the District of Columbia, led by leftists, who oppose the lawsuit and applaud government-run economies. These states generally have little dependency on jobs related to manufacturing. In essence, the states where the ivory-towered elites reside who frown upon manufacturing and blue-collar labor are assisting Obama and the Left with their de facto tax on the Red states where hard-working Americans produce rather than merely pontificate.

The most idiotic of all the facts produced in this lunacy of the Left was exposed last September in a hearing before the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology by Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX). Through testimony and data, the unnecessary and unbelievable price that Americans are being asked to pay to reduce carbon emissions was laid bare. After 14 years of impact to the American economy, by 2030 the reduction in carbon emissions demanded of our companies would equate to “just over 13 DAYS of Chinese emissions.”

Remember China — one of our main competitors for manufacturing jobs?

Comedian George Carlin pretty much summed up the danger of the Left these days: “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”

SOURCE




Global warming despotism

Science works through status quo challenges, through checking and rechecking, through producing evidence to counter other evidence and constantly arriving at reconsidered conclusions. Societies, in similar fashion, work best by being open and free, getting it that, in a contest between discourse and dictate, it’s time and again discourse that provides the needed wisdom.

All of this and more is why it is so astonishing and dismaying — but also revealing — to see a group of 20 alarmed climatologists wanting to curtail debate on global warming by shutting up the opposition, and hardly by gentle means. They want to employ tactics fashioned to go after gangsters.

The tool would be the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, allowing trials of those only indirectly involved in crimes. It was meant to heap massive damage on such groups as the Mafia, and it did. The climatologists want to use it against those connected to fossil fuel corporations who are arguing that global warming is not the terror it is often portrayed as being.

These climatologists say there’s self-serving deception going on here and that the consequences could be inadequate action curtailing a wide variety of horrors. They have sent a letter asking President Barack Obama and others in his administration for an investigation, and what we will get if it comes is massive damage to free speech and something you would think an alarmist would fear: less discernment in coping with climate change.

Free speech, after all, has beneficial consequences. As the great English philosopher John Stuart Mill said in his 1859 book, “On Liberty,” silencing an opinion robs everybody. It just may be true or at least partially true, and, if we do not hear it, we may never profit from the multiple dividends this truth provides.

If it is false, he said, its collision with truth can lead to a “clearer perception” of what the true statement has going for it as defenders more closely examine their reasoning. “Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field,” Mill explains.

To argue that authority can squash opinion without fear of squashing truth is to assume human infallibility of a kind that Mill has never noticed, he says. He tells us, too, that discounting an argument because it’s intemperate can be risky, seeing as how all sides in a dispute may be intemperate.

Twenty years before the birth of Albert Einstein, who dramatically redid the theories of Isaac Newton, Mill said even Newton should be questioned. So should the views of warming alarmists. Throughout the history of science, consensus theories have evolved only to be sent to the shed, and the alarmist consensus is nowhere near what it is made out to be, as careful critics have shown. Most climatologists do believe in warming and human activity as a cause without always believing in certain catastrophe down the road or embracing political solutions that could do more harm than the warming itself.

Scientists and public officials will be holding a conference in Paris this December to fashion a global climate policy agreement, and the last thing we need is a quieting of those with important questions before it begins, while it’s going on or after it’s done. The more back-and-forth discussion there is on a topic, the better answers can get, as Mill also said, in contradiction to confused despotic urgings inspired by apocalyptic imaginings.

We’ve had as much from members of Congress instigating investi gations of the funding of supposed warming skeptics, from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D.-R.I., who also called for the RICO action, and from these 20 scientists. Their proposals would make Mill blush and ought to make the American citizenry outraged.

SOURCE





The latest scare: Global warming could threaten survival of European lizards

Just a laboratory experiment.  Not considered is that in a real-life environment, the lizards would move polewards, to a temperature that suited vthem

Global warming may threaten the survival of European lizards by forcing the reptiles to live fast and die young, new research has shown.

Scientists set up an experiment in which 18 populations of common lizards lived in semi-natural enclosures, one of which simulated an end-of-the-century climate 2C warmer than it is today.

After a year, lizards in the warmer conditions were found to be coping very badly and dying at a rate that would lead to rapid population extinctions in around 20 years.

Dr Elvire Bestion, from the University of Exeter - who co-led the study, said: "While a two-degrees warmer climate might seem beneficial at first, as it leads to faster growth of juvenile lizards and earlier access to reproduction, it also leads to lower survival in adult individuals, which should endanger population survival."

The common, or viviparous lizard, Zootoca vivipara, is widespread across Europe and one of only two indigenous lizards in the UK, not including the legless slow worm.

Co-author Dr Julien Cote, from the Laboratoire Evolution et Diversite Biologique in France, said the team did not predict the total extinction of the common lizard. But he added that some populations could be hit hard by climate change.

"We suggest that populations at the southern edge of their range of distribution might particularly suffer from warmer climates," he said. Across Europe as a whole, between 14% and 30% of lizard populations could be threatened.

Dr Bestion said: "Anecdotally, we .. showed that warmer climates led some adult females to engage into a second reproduction event during the summer, while these lizards normally reproduce only once a year during the spring.

"Combined with the earlier juvenile reproduction and the higher adult survival, these results suggest a shift of demographic strategy from a relatively long life and low reproductive output to a faster life, higher reproductive investment. We can wonder whether this strategy shift may help adaptation of populations to warmer climates over time."

The research is published in the journal Public Library of Science Biology.

SOURCE

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