"SETTLED SCIENCE"

"Global Warming" had a precursor in capturing the hearts and minds of the world. Michael Crichton, in his novel "State of Fear," brilliantly juxtaposes the world's current political embrace of "global warming" with the popular embrace of the "science" of eugenics a century ago. For nearly 50 years, from the late 1800s through the first half of the 20th century, there grew a common political acceptance by the world's thinkers, political leaders and media elite that the "science" of eugenics was settled science. There were a few lonely voices trying to be heard in the wilderness in opposition to this bogus science, but they were ridiculed or ignored.

Believers in eugenics argued that we could improve the human race by controlling reproduction. The most respected scientists from Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other bastions of intellectual rigor retreated to a complex on Long Island named Cold Spring Harbor. Their support came from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman fortune working with the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, State and other agencies.

The "science" was not lacking important public supporters. Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson were enthusiastic believers. The theory won approval of Supreme Court justices, leaders in higher education and Nobel Prize winners. The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was one of the most vocal adherents. She established the first "birth control" clinic in 1916.

They believed that "the best" human beings were not having as many children as inferior ones -- the foreigners, immigrants, Jews, Blacks, degenerates, the unfit and the "feeble minded." Sanger said "fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty." She spoke of the burden of caring for "this dead weight of human waste." H.G. Wells spoke against "ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens." Roosevelt said, "Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind." George Bernard Shaw said that only eugenics could save mankind.

Twenty-nine states passed laws allowing sterilization. Ultimately, 60,000 Americans were sterilized -- some legally. The Germans were the most progressive. They had help. The Rockefeller Foundation funded the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the work of its central racial scientists, one of whom was Josef Mengele.

Ultimately the "mental defectives" in Germany were brought to newly built houses where they were interviewed. They were then shown to a back room where they were gassed. Eventually the German program was expanded into a vast network that killed 10 million undesirables. After World War II many of the public adherents to the pseudoscience of eugenics went silent. Colleges removed the textbooks and stopped teaching it.

But not everyone went away. As recently as July 24, 2003 Tony Platt testified before the California Senate Judiciary Committee on S.R. 20 relative to eugenics. He agreed that the state should apologize for its actions.

One must ask, "How in the world did university researchers come to conclusions that defended this outrageous affront to society?" A look back at the research concluded that the researchers adjusted their outcomes to support the theory of those paying for the research. This is not unusual. It is very easy to believe that the settled science regarding climate change is just as suspicious, and indeed may be another example of pseudo-science capturing the imagination of politicians, actors and the media elite who have a desperate need to embrace some "science" which may force us to change the way we live our lives. H. L. Mencken once wrote, "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it." We see pictures of huge blocks of ice crashing into the sea from the Antarctic Peninsula, which comprises about 2 percent of the continent. The fact that the remaining 98 percent of Antarctica is growing by 26.8 gigatons of ice per year is ignored.

We are told today that human activity is causing a dramatic increase in carbon dioxide levels that is responsible for "global warming." While a congressional delegation was visiting the Antarctic expedition in January of 2003 we were shown the results of the Vostok ice-sheet cores where temperatures and CO2 levels were measured as far as 400,000 years ago. At that time, the level of CO2 was 280 parts per million parts of atmosphere (ppm), about what it was 20 years ago. The levels of CO2 and temperature rode up and down in consonance over 400,00 years. "Who," I asked, "was burning the fossil fuels 400,000 years ago?" I was treated as though I was rude.

It has been known for years that most CO2 is dissolved in the oceans. It is called "carbon sinking." The oceans typically contain 60 times as much CO2 as the atmosphere. It is also known that colder waters dissolve more CO2 than warm waters. Which do you think is cause and which is effect? We currently have CO2 levels of about 380 ppm. A recent study completed at UC Davis concluded that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere 300 million years ago was on the order of 2,000 ppm. Then this, "the same increase that experts expect by the end of this century as remaining reserves of fossil fuels are burned." If it is a given that human burning of fossil fuels is what will cause an increase of CO2 levels up to 2,000 ppm in the next 93 years, don't they owe us an explanation as to who burned those fossil fuels 300 million years ago? In fact we are being treated to a modern scientific shell game. The most prevalent and efficient greenhouse gas is not CO2; it is water vapor, which accounts for about 60 percent of the heat-trapping gases while CO2 accounts for about 26 percent. So, why are we being served a daily diet of our destroying the environment with our behavior as it relates to CO2? Because our behavior has little to do with the amount of water vapor, so it is a non-starter when it comes to those whose principal goal is ruling our lives.

In order to focus on you and what you are doing to increase the CO2 in the atmosphere, which, as everyone knows will destroy the globe, we do not discuss the activities of termites. Fifteen years ago it was estimated that the digestive tracts of termites produce about 50 billion tons of CO2 and methane annually. That was more than the world's production from burning fossil fuel. Additionally, cattle, horses and other ruminant animals are huge producers of both CO2 and methane, but, being unable to respond to our demands on this issue, their activity is ignored.

When it comes to methane, another greenhouse gas, termites are responsible for 11 percent of the world's production from natural sources. Seventy-six percent comes from wetlands, which provide habitat conducive to bacteria, which produce 145 million metric tons of methane per year during the decomposition of organic material. It is curious that the very alarmists on climate change are alarmists on saving and increasing wetlands.

It becomes clear from the literature -- not to mention documentary films -- produced by the alarmists, that if human beings do not change the way we live the planet is doomed. This is not the first charge against human behavior. Many of you will remember the "scientific" studies 30 years ago about the destruction of the ozone layer, particularly at the poles, that would reduce the atmosphere's ability to stop infrared rays from the sun. We would see increasing incidence of skin cancer and increasing temperatures. It was theorized that this was caused by the increased production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that were used -- as Freon -- in refrigeration units. When Freon was invented it was considered a miracle gas. It replaced, in refrigeration units, a combination of toxic gases that, if released, actually killed people. But the settled science concluded that human activity was a threat to the planet. We outlawed the production of CFCs and thousands of people across the world died from eating rancid food due to the loss of refrigeration.

The world's production of CFCs peaked at 1.1 million tons per year. If 100 percent of that was released it would have added 750,000 tons of chlorine into the atmosphere. That is insignificant compared to the 300 million tons the oceans yield annually by the evaporation of seawater alone. But that couldn't be controlled so the alarmists went after us. Indeed, the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in June of 1991 produced some of the highest levels of chlorine and bromines in history and led to some of the lowest ozone levels ever recorded. You would not know that today. The earth survived.

Today, if there is a settled science, it is adduced by climatologists who have been observing and studying the world for decades. Many are retired and not seeking government grants for research and thus not inclined to reach outcomes that are politically popular. Most have been through more than one alarmist cycle of doom. The predictions by scientists in Time magazine's "Another Ice Age?" in 1974 and Newsweek's "The Cooling World" in 1975 come to mind. The latter article stated that scientists "are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climactic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic."

But wise old heads believe that we are going through normal cycles of heating and cooling that we have seen over hundreds of millions of years as the earth heats and cools when the activity of the sun changes. The earth is heated by the sun. The sun is impacted by magnetic forces creating outbursts called sunspots, which increase the heat it imparts. During the coldest period in the Little Ice Age, which ended near the end of the 19th century, sunspots almost completely disappeared for 70 years. The earth cooled. Sunspot activity has been declining for a number of years and is expected decline by 40 percent over the next decade. The world is about to enter a cooling period. Be prepared to change your lifestyle.

Source






INTERSTELLAR DUST: A SIGNIFICANT DRIVER OF CLIMATE CHANGE?

E. Kasatkina et al.

Abstract

Tree-ring series collected from different parts of Arctic (Fennoscandia, Kola Peninsula and Northern Siberia) are investigated by means of the multi-taped method (MTM) of spectral analysis. Results of spectral analysis allow us to select the main periods of solar variability (22-, 30--33- and 80--90-year solar cycles) in Kola and Fennoscandia tree-ring chronologies. Besides it was found that only periodicities of around 20 years are present in Siberian and Stockholm series, respectively.

With respect to 11-year periodicity, which is the most prominent one in sunspot number spectrum (Schwabe cycle) it may be said that it hardly appeared in Arctic tree-ring series. Although the 22-year cycles in climatic records are perceivable (it is also evident from our and other results), any physical mechanisms by which a reversal in the solar magnetic field could influence climate are still missing.

To our mind, a potential cause of this phenomenon seems to be a variation of stardust flux inside the solar system. The most recent observations in frame of the DUST experiment on board the Ulysses spacecraft have shown that stardust level inside of the solar system was trebled during the recent solar maximum (Landgraf et al., 2003. Penetration of the heliosphere by the interstellar dust stream during solar maximum. Journal Geophysical Research 108, 8030).

It is possible that the periodic increase of stardust in the solar system will influence the amount of extraterrestrial material that rains down to the Earth and consequently down to the Earth's atmosphere and may affect climate through alteration of atmospheric transparency and albedo.

(The Doi (permanent) address for the full academic article above is here)





The Earth was warming before global warming was cool.

BY PETE DU PONT

Mr. du Pont is a former governor of Delaware. It is encouraging that the following summary of some simple facts was published in the widely-read Wall St. Journal

When Eric the Red led the Norwegian Vikings to Greenland in the late 900s, it was an ice-free farm country--grass for sheep and cattle, open water for fishing, a livable climate--so good a colony that by 1100 there were 3,000 people living there. Then came the Ice Age. By 1400, average temperatures had declined by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, the glaciers had crushed southward across the farmlands and harbors, and the Vikings did not survive.

Such global temperature fluctuations are not surprising, for looking back in history we see a regular pattern of warming and cooling. From 200 B.C. to A.D. 600 saw the Roman Warming period; from 600 to 900, the cold period of the Dark Ages; from 900 to 1300 was the Medieval warming period; and 1300 to 1850, the Little Ice Age.

During the 20th century the earth did indeed warm--by 1 degree Fahrenheit. But a look at the data shows that within the century temperatures varied with time: from 1900 to 1910 the world cooled; from 1910 to 1940 it warmed; from 1940 to the late 1970s it cooled again, and since then it has been warming. Today our climate is 1/20th of a degree Fahrenheit warmer than it was in 2001.

Many things are contributing to such global temperature changes. Solar radiation is one. Sunspot activity has reached a thousand-year high, according to European astronomy institutions. Solar radiation is reducing Mars's southern icecap, which has been shrinking for three summers despite the absence of SUVS and coal-fired electrical plants anywhere on the Red Planet. Back on Earth, a NASA study reports that solar radiation has increased in each of the past two decades, and environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg, citing a 1997 atmosphere-ocean general circulation model, observes that "the increase in direct solar irradiation over the past 30 years is responsible for about 40 percent of the observed global warming."

Statistics suggest that while there has indeed been a slight warming in the past century, much of it was neither human-induced nor geographically uniform. Half of the past century's warming occurred before 1940, when the human population and its industrial base were far smaller than now. And while global temperatures are now slightly up, in some areas they are dramatically down. According to "Climate Change and Its Impacts," a study published last spring by the National Center for Policy Analysis, the ice mass in Greenland has grown, and "average summer temperatures at the summit of the Greenland ice sheet have decreased 4 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the late 1980s." British environmental analyst Lord Christopher Monckton says that from 1993 through 2003 the Greenland ice sheet "grew an average extra thickness of 2 inches a year," and that in the past 30 years the mass of the Antarctic ice sheet has grown as well.

Earlier this month the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a summary of its fourth five-year report. Although the full report won't be out until May, the summary has reinvigorated the global warming discussion.

While global warming alarmism has become a daily American press feature, the IPCC, in its new report, is backtracking on its warming predictions. While Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" warns of up to 20 feet of sea-level increase, the IPCC has halved its estimate of the rise in sea level by the end of this century, to 17 inches from 36. It has reduced its estimate of the impact of global greenhouse-gas emissions on global climate by more than one-third, because, it says, pollutant particles reflect sunlight back into space and this has a cooling effect.

The IPCC confirms its 2001 conclusion that global warming will have little effect on the number of typhoons or hurricanes the world will experience, but it does not note that there has been a steady decrease in the number of global hurricane days since 1970--from 600 to 400 days, according to Georgia Tech atmospheric scientist Peter Webster.

The IPCC does not explain why from 1940 to 1975, while carbon dioxide emissions were rising, global temperatures were falling, nor does it admit that its 2001 "hockey stick" graph showing a dramatic temperature increase beginning in 1970s had omitted the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming temperature changes, apparently in order to make the new global warming increases appear more dramatic.

Sometimes the consequences of bad science can be serious. In a 2000 issue of Nature Medicine magazine, four international scientists observed that "in less than two decades, spraying of houses with DDT reduced Sri Lanka's malaria burden from 2.8 million cases and 7,000 deaths [in 1948] to 17 cases and no deaths" in 1963. Then came Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring," invigorating environmentalism and leading to outright bans of DDT in some countries. When Sri Lanka ended the use of DDT in 1968, instead of 17 malaria cases it had 480,000.

Yet the Sierra Club in 1971 demanded "a ban, not just a curb," on the use of DDT "even in the tropical countries where DDT has kept malaria under control." International environmental controls were more important than the lives of human beings. For more than three decades this view prevailed, until the restrictions were finally lifted last September.

As we have seen since the beginning of time, and from the Vikings' experience in Greenland, our world experiences cyclical climate changes. America needs to understand clearly what is happening and why before we sign onto U.N. environmental agreements, shut down our industries and power plants, and limit our economic growth.

A survival instinct gone awry?

Post lifted from Dinocrat

Many bright people have written that Global Warming functions in much the same way as a religion. Michael Crichton has an entertaining piece to that effect that we’ve written about before in this space. Richard Lindzen, professor at MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, has said the same thing. So have many others. Standing as its own kind of proof of this thesis is the Wahhabi-like intensity that some believers (Ellen Goodman for example) have toward the crime of apostasy. Al Gore’s statement — really, a command — that “the debate…is over” conjures up an image of Torquemada, not of Galileo or Newton.

We are not here today to debate the merits of Global Warming. Frankly, we don’t care about the issue all that much. And to the extent there may actually be some global warming — manmade or otherwise — we’re all for it. As we have said, we plan to cash in big by buying muskeg in western Canada and hoping it becomes the New California someday.

Our question today is this: is there an survival purpose to the religious madness that grips the most fervent Global Warming adherents, turning them into harpies and hysterics? We think the answer is probably yes. The ancient story of Pharaoh’s dream tells us that the affluent and powerful have always had a little internal alarm bell warning them about the saven years of lean following the seven years of fat. Preparing for the lean times, and, as importantly, trying to ward them off, has been important for human survival — then and now.

Most people in America today have absolutely no idea how we became so rich over the last 130 years. They have no idea about the nexus of laws, an enterprising spirit of the people, available capital, good accounting, an expanding market, low cost resources, technology and engineering, and an adequate monetary policy that created the relative paradise that is capitalist America — a point we have made over and over again.

Moreover, the harpies and hysterics from the entertainment and political worlds are not only ignorant about how this prosperity came to be, they have themselves done almost nothing to create it — hence, in our opinion, they do not feel within themselves that they have earned the riches with which they have been showered. Thus, they seek, through magical incantations, to expiate their guilt at living, undeserved, in the seven years of fat, and hoping, through their professions of unworthiness and promises of self-abnegation, to ward off the anger of the gods. This kind of magical thinking should have become attenuated in the age of science and engineering, but these are people who haven’t the slightest clue about how an electric motor works, or why bad monetary policy causes inflation or depression. They are as kids in a candy store.

We comprehend the survival usefulness of an internal warning system for those who live lives of excess, but it is less clear why this has resulted in such hysteria, when a more appropriate response would simply be to consider better planning measures for the seven years of lean, in the event they arrive. Perhaps that comes from our ancient human history, when man had no technology to do any meaningful planning beyond a season or two into the future. Perhaps also the emotional agitation was a warning in the ancient days to be on the lookout for usurpers.

We note a final, amusing, parallelism from the time of Pharaoh to the modern potentates of our political and entertainment world. In both ages men worried and felt guilty about their privileged status, and wanted to ward off the seven years of lean by ritual incantations and professions of sorrow, penance, and self-abnegation. But when it came time for the actual ritual of human sacrifice, it was the little guy, not they, who paid the price to appease the gods.

***************************************

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

Comments? Email me here. My Home Pages are here or here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************

REID A BRYSON SAYS: RELAX: THE SKY ISN'T FALLING

I am pleased that Professor Reid A. Bryson of the University of Wisconsin has agreed to post the guest weblog below on Climate Science. He is a Global 500 Laureate Senior Scientist, and Center for Climatic Research and Emeritus Professor of Meteorology, of Geography, and of Environmental Studies. His vita (see also here) documents his many invaluable contributions to climate science, as well as to other sciences. His expertise is summarized on his vita as "Much of Bryson's work has dealt with climate in relation to human ecology, and this has led him into extensive travel, especially to Asia where he worked primarily on anthropogenic changes of climate and landscape in general. His best-known laboratory works are in the development of new approaches to climatology, such as airstream analysis and quantitative, objective methods of reconstructing past climates. Dr. Bryson is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Meteorological Society, and a charter member of the World Council for the Biosphere." He is eminently well qualified to present a weblog on Climate Science. The weblog post follows below.

GUEST WEBLOG: HISTORY!! (Getting Back To What It Sort Of Used To Be)

by Professor Reid A. Bryson

Remember Otzi, the Ice Man? The fellow that was found in the mountains between Austria and Italy a few years ago? He had been shot a little over 5000 years ago, and then covered with snow, and more snow, until a few years ago the snow melted back enough for Otzi to be found. Between his burial under snow and his exhumation by nature there was more snow and ice than before, or now. Are we just getting back to what the snow climate used to be?

When the Vikings settled part of Greenland circa 900 CE, they established a settlement that lasted longer than the United States has been around. There was a considerable amount of traffic between Greenland and Europe, by the standards of the time, so some skippers were making their first trip. The directions were, at first, to sail two and a half days west from Iceland to the shore of Greenland where there stood the landmark Blasark (black shirt) Mountain. Then sail down the coast to Eriksfjord, a beautiful broad straight passage across southern Greenland. Reaching the west coast they should turn right up the coast to the navigation marker on Herjolf's Ness. (About "Bluie West 3"in WW II.) Turning in to Tunugdliarfik Fjord Erik's homestead Brattahlid was only 75 miles at the end of the fjord (across from Bluie West 1, for you old timers).

After 1200 CE the directions changed. Sail one and a half days west from Iceland to the edge of the ice pack. If it is clear you might see the mountain Hvitsark to the west (snow covered now?), then go all the way down around hazardous Cap Farvel and up the other coast to Herjolf's Ness. Eriksfjord was no longer open, nor is it now. As of a decade or so ago there were two valley glaciers blocking it from the sides. Yes, I saw them. If Greenland ice diminishes some, will we be getting back to conditions like it used to be?

One of the well known climatic episodes (to well-educated climatologists) is the Little Ice Age. The hemispheric cooling started in the 1400s, really got going about 1570 (see Frobisher's journal) and was full-blown by mid-1600s. The Pilgrims picked a lousy time to come to America. After a little amelioration, things got worse culminating in the "Year Without a Summer".

Since then the hemispheric temperature has risen, and we even have thermometers to attest to it. Gee, getting back to what it used to be sure doesn't sound like the sky is falling and catastrophe looms. Besides, warmer weather reduces the Climatic Overhead and we get more income per unit of energy used.

Incidentally, this sequence can be modeled without even referring to anthropogenic carbon dioxide. The Northern Hemisphere temperature history as modeled using Milankovitch variations in solar radiation modulated by volcanic aerosols, using oceans and carbon dioxide only as minor dependent variables. (BP means before 1955 CE).

This figure captures very well, the "little ice age", the Medieval Warm Period, and other known variations of late BCE and early CE times. The drivers of this model are Milankovitch calculations (average for the entire Hemisphere) and the observed volcanic record described above. Carbon dioxide is treated as a very minor dependent variable. It is unlikely that a general circulation model which assumes a major role of carbon dioxide can duplicate this known climatic sequence.

Source





IPCC's Artful Bias

Every trial lawyer will tell you that the key to presenting a strong case lies in carefully omitting the evidence against you. This is not lying, it is artful bias. Advocacy is the heart of our adversarial judicial system. Each side presents its case in the strongest possible terms, as though the other side's case did not exist. The jury hears both sides, puts the whole story together, then decides.

Anyone who doubts that the new IPCC Summary for Policy Makers is an advocacy document is ineligible for duty on the jury of reason. So what ain't they saying? Unfortunately the other side does not seem to be represented. We have looked in vain for the minority report. You would think that for $18 million they could afford one, but that just measures the advocationality of the thing. One side fits all.

Here is just a graphic peek at the missing side to give you the flavor of the game. Figure 2 shows a bunch of bars. Each represents one of the factors that is thought to have influenced global temperature. We see at once that all but one of these bars is human. Most are pretty big, especially the really big red one labeled CO2. There is one tiny natural bar labeled Solar.

There it is. Case closed. The jury can go home, no need to hear from the other side, it will only confuse them. We did it. The prosecution rests, let the persecution begin. Well not really, as always in these proceedings. A big pile of contrary science is missing here. Good science, interesting science, being carried on by a whole lot of real scientists.

For simplicity let's divide this mountain of contrary science into three high heaps. The first heap has to do with this little bitty solar bar. This bar is based on the relatively small amount of variable, direct radiant energy coming from the sun. What is omitted is a huge amount of research going on into indirect and amplified solar mechanisms. The reason for this research is the close correlation between solar variation and global temperature, seen over a lot of time scales. Something is going on but we don't know what and there are a lot of theories. Google Scholar lists over 500,000 scientific papers on solar variability. The IPCC omits this research because it does not help their case.

The second heap includes little things like the ocean, earth wobbles, etc., that are also thought to heavily influence climate. They get no bar at all, because we can't measure their influence either, even though we know it is there.

The third heap is ugly but very real. It is research into natural climate variability per se, something that has received a lot of attention. We now know that climate varies all the time, for reasons we do not understand. It has varied quite naturally a lot more than the little bit we are fussing with today. So today's warming may well be simply the emergence of mother earth from the famous Little Ice Age. But you can't put a bar on the LIA because we don't know what causes it. Looking at the IPCC bar chart you would never know there was a LIA, just a lot of human stuff and a bitty bit of sun. That is the truly artful part of their bias, simply ignore what we don't understand, like it did not exist.

In short, it is easy to argue that humans control climate, if you omit nature. That is just what the IPCC does, and it is very good advocacy. It's just not good science.

Source





Gore's Bad Science



Al Gore's grasp of Earth science was dreadful in college and has gotten steadily worse, according to the embarrassing facts exposed in the "Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming," a book that declares: "Catastrophic Manmade global warming is not catastrophic, manmade, or global." It reveals that Gore's college grades were not anything to write home about:

NATURAL SCIENCES 6 (MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE): D
NATURAL SCIENCES 118: C+

Gore's favorite crusade of recent months, that global warming caused Katrina, is summarily dismissed in the book by the nation's top hurricane expert. "The degree to which you believe global warming is causing major hurricanes is inversely proportional to your knowledge about these storms," said Dr. William Gray, the leading Hurricane expert in the U.S.

"The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming" dismantles Gore's faulty science with hard facts ignored by the mainstream media:

* Gore's favorite animal, the polar bear, is thriving. Ten out of 12 polar bear populations are thriving, although the White House has recently said they are going extinct.

* Man is responsible for only 3% of all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

* Methane is a naturally occurring greenhouse gas that comes from decaying plants, seeps from swamps, bogs, rice paddies, and leaks out the front and back ends of masticating animals.

* The Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker and the South Pole is getting colder. The Southern hemisphere on the whole shows no appreciable rise in temperatures.

* Gore points out that the "snows of Kilimanjaro" are melting, but leaves out the fact that the temperature there is dropping.

Source






GREENIES SHAFT BRITISH DRIVERS

We no longer build new roads in the UK. But we are world-leaders in constructing endless debates about roads - arguments that seem to go round and round in circles getting nowhere, like a long afternoon on the M25. The fewer miles we actually add to the road network, it seems, the more mileage there is in engineering big political controversies out of mundane roads-related matters. We could surely do with a u-turn in priorities here.

After years of pootling around the political backstreets, for example, road pricing - a system of charging motorists for the mileage they do - has been driven to the top of the agenda. Last year the government-initiated Eddington Report declared the need for a national system of road-charging to be an unarguable necessity - or an `economic no brainer' as former British Airways chief Rod Eddington put it.

Since then, no fewer than one-and-a-quarter million people - all of them presumably lacking a brain in the Treasury's view - have signed an online protest against the plans for road-pricing on the government's own petitions website. The idea that road-users are rising up against the authorities, over not only road-pricing but also congestion charges, speed cameras and the many other minor discomforts of driving, has reached the point where an unknown `disgruntled motorist' was made the prime suspect for the recent spate of little letter-bomb attacks, with some even implying that the government was to blame for `driving him to it'.

These rows are a sign that politics is currently on the road to nowhere. There is a crying need for investment in major new roads in the UK, an advanced economy with a sub-European road network that, in the past 10 years, has built barely 150 miles of new motorway to support traffic growth of more than 30 per cent. Yet the demand for substantial new roads is not even on the table in the `great congestion debate'. Instead we are left with an argument over how motorists should be made to make do and mend with what exists, which is about as productive as two motorists yelling at one another through a fug of exhaust fumes.

The Eddington Report was the latest example of how the authorities now routinely deploy green politics as the language of eco-austerity. In the spirit of other New Labour reports, it effectively sought to redefine the aim of government transport policy as making Britain less mobile, by using financial penalties to drive people off the roads (at least the busy ones they want to use, at the times they most want to use them) rather than expanding capacity to meet demand. It is another testament to the triumph of the miserly politics of lowering people's expectations.

Eddington suggests it is a no-brainer that we must have a national system of road-pricing, since the shock-horror alternative would be actually to invest in big new roads. He argues that smaller projects which fiddle with the existing system are best, and warns the government not to be seduced by `grand projects' (he is preaching to the converted there), before driving his point home by concluding that `ambitions and dreams of extensive new networks.should be put aside.. Some of the best projects are small-scale, such as walking and cycling.' That should get Britain moving!

As Austin Williams of the Future Cities Project has noted, what Eddington did was to reduce the planning of our future transport infrastructure to simple fiscal considerations, a crude cost-benefit analysis assuming the need for demand management (1). The wider needs of a modern, mobile society are discounted, any vision of a more free-travelling future dismissed as `dreams'. So at the same time as something as everyday as roads can be blown up into the stuff of political controversy, the issue can simultaneously be reduced to another of Gordon Brown's mean-spirited bean-counting exercises. And in another sign of the miserabilist times, Eddington makes clear that motorists must be punished if they insist on driving about doing their business - or in New Labour-speak, they must be made to `feel the consequences of their decisions'.

A few months on from the publication of the Eddington Report, however, it would appear that the government's attempt to start the road-pricing bandwagon has backfired. New Labour no doubt hoped that farming it out to `independent' experts (even if they were handpicked by the Treasury) would allow it to remain aloof. But fuelled by scaremongering headlines about how much it might cost mothers to take their kids to school or do the shopping etc, public opposition to the government has quickly blown up around the online petition.

Comparisons with the anti-poll tax protests that helped to bring down Margaret Thatcher have been overstated. But as they are popularly understood, the road-pricing proposals would appear to have one similar effect to the hated poll tax - making people pay more for less. You do not have to be an economist to grasp that the government already takes around œ45billion a year in taxes from road-users, and spends no more than œ7billion of it on the roads. The apparent prospect of paying more tax, with no promise of new investment, could hardly have been better designed to disgruntle middle-class motorists as well as white van man.

It looks like a classic New Labour cock-up. Deeply worried about its isolation from the electorate, the government sets up this website for public petitions, presumably on the basis that for a self-proclaimed `listening government', even having your policies complained about is better than being entirely ignored. Inevitably, however, given the breadth of cynicism about politics and government today, a big two-fingered protest soon emerges on the site - and perhaps equally inevitably, it is about the mundane stuff that seems to touch people's lives rather than Iraq.

And if the anti-road pricing petition confirms the isolation of the political class from the public, the government's response to it has made clear the deepening insecurity in Whitehall. No sooner had the million-signature petition started making headlines than ministers started suggesting there had been a misunderstanding and they wouldn't be bringing in any system of road-pricing that the public does not support.

Remember, the Tory poll tax had been in force for some time before the protests and a major riot in central London caused a government crisis in 1990. Nowadays all it takes to unnerve the authorities is a `virtual barricade' of an ephemeral online petition, at least five years before road-pricing could actually take effect. It appears that, in the last days of Tony Blair, New Labour has become even more shaky and bereft of a political sat-nav to guide it than when Mrs Thatcher's Conservative regime was in its final throes in the Downing Street bunker.

Yet at root this is another phoney war that New Labour and its opponents are fighting. One thing that is very unlikely to result is any fundamental change of policy as regards those seductive `grand projects' that Old Mother Eddington warned ministers about. The no-more-roads prejudice draws its authority from the green consensus that now extends pretty much across the mainstream political spectrum.

Although the likes of Tory leader David Cameron are now a prominent part of that consensus, it owes much of its strength to the old left. It was the rump of the left that helped to organise and support the anti-roads protests of the past 20 years, depicting motoring as an unnecessary evil and roads as a blot on the landscape. This attitude laid the foundations for today's narrow `debate' about how to restrict car travel; see for example the origins of London mayor Ken Livingstone's ever-expanding congestion charge in his statement, almost 20 years ago, that he hated cars and would like to `ban the lot'.

The left's enthusiastic embrace of the small-minded anti-road building lobby symbolised its political degeneration, its abandonment of the social - the progressive attempt to transform society through human action - in favour of the natural: the reactionary attempt to defend the environment against humanity.

In The Communist Manifesto, more than a century-and-a-half ago, Marx and Engels talked about the `wonders' of industrial capitalism. Now those wonders are condemned as evils. An understanding that capitalism had both a dynamic and a destructive aspect was always fundamental to a radical left view. More recently, however, what remains of the left has come to see them as the same thing, and to attack such modern achievements as flying or mass mobility as crimes against the environment. Throw in an unhealthy dose of antagonism towards the `greedy' cheap-flying, car-driving masses, and it becomes clear that while the left itself might have largely disappeared from the political roadmap, its misanthropic prejudices have done much to help consolidate the consensus against new road-building.

The fact remains, however, that our motorway-malnourished society needs bigger and better road networks, alongside a properly funded public transport system. We need far less effort to be put into constructing fuming rows about roads, and rather more into quietly building them. In the current phoney war over road-pricing, New Labour might think itself well-advised to follow the old advice: when in a hole, stop digging. But the authorities would do us all a favour if they also took heed of some alternative advice. When in a jam, start digging - more motorways.

Source

***************************************

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

Comments? Email me here. My Home Pages are here or here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************

SIMPLE TRUTH ABOUT WARMING



"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." -- Leo Tolstoy (1826-1910)

Clearly, Tolstoy -- the great Russian novelist -- wasn't writing about man-made global warming, since he predated this relatively recent hysteria. Nevertheless, the quote certainly applies to the global warming debate -- or should I say the climate change consensus? The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summary released last Friday inflates the language of doom even as it deflates its predictions of temperature and sea level increases from previous reports.

The IPCC Climate Change 2007 report predicts world temperatures will possibly rise 1.8C to 4C (3.25 to 7.2F) from 1990 levels to the year 2100 and that sea levels might rise 28 to 43 cm (11 to 17 inches). Just six years ago, however, the picture looked much bleaker.

The 2001 IPCC report predicted that from 1990 to 2100 temperatures would rise 1.4C to 5.8C causing sea levels to rise by .09 to .88 metres (3.5 to 34.6 inches or 9 to 88 cm). In other words, in just six years, predictions about temperature increases have plummeted by one-third and predictions about sea-level increases at the high end have been cut in half! At that rate, by my calculations, we'll just have to wait for two more reports and the IPCC will be predicting no measurable increases at all!

Incidentally, many climate scientists have been saying just that -- wait until 2025, when it's expected the sun's output may wane, leading to global cooling. Another measurement has had to be slashed by one-third as well. In 2001, the UN body said the global net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming with radiative forcing of 2.43 watts per square metre. Oops. Now they're saying it's 1.6 watts per square metre. Shouldn't someone at least be blushing? Shouldn't they apologize for getting all of this so wrong? If a large automobile executive got his predictions wrong by up to 50%, he'd be fired.

The IPCC, however, continues to fly around at great cost to the UN and the environment and they stay on board this great gig as long as they continue to tout the party line -- that Earth is going to hell, only it's going to be even hotter. What's most troubling about all of this is the 21-page, much-hyped summary is not referenced at all. The science that supposedly backs all of these predictions is nowhere to be found and won't be released until April and May.

This is problematic on many fronts, but as past IPCC reports have shown, the summary is not written by the scientists whose names appear on the cover, it's written by politicians and bureaucrats. Indeed, some of those scientists after the fact have complained their work has been grossly misrepresented.

In 2001, two scientists complained publicly their work was misrepresented by those who wrote the summary, including MIT physicist Richard Lindzen.

In June 1996, Dr. Frederick Seitz, past-president of the National Academy of Sciences and president emeritus of Rockefeller University, wrote with regard to the 1995 IPCC report: "I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report." He continued: "This report is not what it appears to be -- it is not the version approved by the contributing scientists listed on the title page."

In other words, past IPCC reports have proven to be fraudulent and yet, to paraphrase Tolstoy, they have been woven into the public policy fabric of our lives.

Source





GLOBAL WARMING AND HOT AIR

You could be excused for thinking that we'll soon do something serious about global warming. Last Friday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- an international group of scientists -- concluded that, to a 90 percent probability, human activity is warming the Earth. Earlier, Democratic congressional leaders made global warming legislation a top priority; and 10 big U.S. companies (including General Electric and DuPont) endorsed federal regulation. Strong action seems at hand.

Don't be fooled. The dirty secret about global warming is this: We have no solution. About 80 percent of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas), the main sources of man-made greenhouse gases. Energy use sustains economic growth, which -- in all modern societies -- buttresses political and social stability. Until we can replace fossil fuels or find practical ways to capture their emissions, governments will not sanction the deep energy cuts that would truly affect global warming. Considering this reality, you should treat the pious exhortations to "do something" with skepticism, disbelief or contempt. These pronouncements are (take your pick) naive, self-interested, misinformed, stupid or dishonest. Politicians mainly want to be seen as reducing global warming. Companies want to polish their images and exploit markets created by new environmental regulations. As for editorialists and pundits, there's no explanation except superficiality or herd behavior.

Anyone who honestly examines global energy trends must reach these harsh conclusions. In 2004, world emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2, the main greenhouse gas) totaled 26 billion metric tons. Under plausible economic and population assumptions, CO2emissions will grow to 40 billion tons by 2030, projects the International Energy Agency. About three-quarters of the increase is forecast to come from developing countries, two-fifths from China alone. The IEA expects China to pass the United States as the largest source of carbon dioxide by 2009. Poor countries won't sacrifice economic growth -- lowering poverty, fostering political stability -- to placate the rich world's global warming fears. Why should they? On a per-person basis, their carbon dioxide emissions are only about one-fifth the level of rich countries. In Africa, less than 40 percent of the population even has electricity.

Nor will existing technologies, aggressively deployed, rescue us. The IEA studied an "alternative scenario" that simulated the effect of 1,400 policies to reduce fossil fuel use. Fuel economy for new U.S. vehicles was assumed to increase 30 percent by 2030; the global share of energy from "renewables" (solar, wind, hydropower, biomass) would quadruple, to 8 percent. The result: by 2030, annual carbon dioxide emissions would rise 31 percent instead of 55 percent. The concentration levels of emissions in the atmosphere (which presumably cause warming) would rise.

Since 1850, global temperatures have increased almost 1 degree Celsius. Sea level has risen about seven inches, though the connection is unclear. So far, global warming has been a change, not a calamity. The IPCC projects wide ranges for the next century: temperature increases from 1.1 degrees Celsius to 6.4 degrees; sea level rises from seven inches to almost two feet. People might easily adapt; or there might be costly disruptions (say, frequent flooding of coastal cities resulting from melting polar ice caps).

I do not say we should do nothing, but we should not delude ourselves. In the United States, the favored remedy is "cap and trade." It's environmental grandstanding -- politicians pretending they're doing something. Companies would receive or buy quotas ("caps") to emit carbon dioxide. To exceed the limits, they'd acquire some other company's unused quotas ("trade"). How simple. Just order companies to cut emissions. Businesses absorb all the costs. But in practice, no plausible "cap and trade" program would significantly curb global warming. To do that, quotas would have to be set so low as to shut down the economy. Or the cost of scarce quotas would skyrocket and be passed along to consumers through much higher energy prices. Neither outcome seems likely. Quotas would be lax. The program would be a regulatory burden with little benefit. It would also be a bonanza for lobbyists, lawyers and consultants, as industries and localities besieged Washington for exceptions and special treatment. Hello, influence-peddling and sleaze.

What we really need is a more urgent program of research and development, focusing on nuclear power, electric batteries, alternative fuels and the capture of carbon dioxide. Naturally, there's no guarantee that socially acceptable and cost-competitive technologies will result. But without them, global warming is more or less on automatic pilot. Only new technologies would enable countries -- rich and poor -- to reconcile the immediate imperative of economic growth with the potential hazards of climate change.

Meanwhile, we could temper our energy appetite. I've argued before for a high oil tax to prod Americans to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles. The main aim would be to limit insecure oil imports, but it would also check CO2emissions. Similarly, we might be better off shifting some of the tax burden from wages and profits to a broader tax on energy or carbon. That would favor more fuel-efficient light bulbs, appliances and industrial processes. It's a debate we ought to have -- but probably won't. Any realistic response would be costly, uncertain and no doubt unpopular. That's one truth too inconvenient for almost anyone to admit.

Source





FINNISH NUKES GOING FULL SPEED AHEAD

It is 25 degrees below freezing and work is going at full pace on a huge construction site on the west coast of Finland. Ice and snow crunch underfoot and the workers have a grim, focused look on their faces as they move between huge cranes and concrete slabs in their bright orange jackets and safety helmets.

This particular morning is not cold enough for work to be called off - that would take minus 30C - but it is cold enough to send Finland's national electricity consumption to its highest recorded level. That record surge was set last Wednesday as millions of homes and workplaces struggled to warm up, highlighting the importance to Finland of the construction project at Olkiluoto, a small island that used to be covered in coastal pines.

The orange-clad workers are building a nuclear power plant that is crucial to Finland - which has no oil, gas or coal of its own - and is seen by many experts as the future of the country's power industry. Of the 450 commercial reactors around the world, this is the one being most closely watched as Australia and other countries contemplate nuclear power as at least part of the solution to reducing carbon emissions and slowing climate change.

The first nuclear power station built in Western Europe since the Chernobyl disaster 20 years ago, the Olkiluoto III plant will be one of the largest in the world and the first "third generation" pressurised water reactor. With a price tag of well over E3 billion ($5billion), it will produce 1600 megawatts, close to the combined output of the two nuclear stations already operating at Olkiluoto. The new plant will alone account for about 15 per cent of Finland's electricity needs.

The sheer ambition and cutting-edge technology of the plant have already drawn Prime Minister John Howard's nuclear energy adviser Ziggy Switkowski and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer to the island, with Switkowski using his visit to help conclude that Australia should go nuclear.

When Inquirer visited the site last week, its most striking feature was its remoteness. While Switkowski recommended the construction of up to 25 Australian plants "only tens of kilometres" from major centres - prompting Labor to warn of plants on the edges of capital cities - the Finnish plants are about as remote as southern Finland gets. Only 33 people live within 5km of the site.

A thin metal shelter has been built to keep the weather off the main reactor site, where workers have just finished laying the main base slab of concrete (3m deep and 60m in diameter) and have started on outer walls that will eventually rise 20 storeys. There will actually be two enormous outer walls, designed to withstand severe earthquakes or a direct hit by a commercial airliner fully loaded with fuel.

Most of the 1100-plus workers keep busy indoors, and the surprising quiet of the construction site is matched inside the nearby Olkiluoto I station, where even the main reactor hall is monitored electronically. The nearest town, Eurajoki (population 5800), is 15km away. The smokestacks of Rauma (pop 37,000), an industrial port about 20km away, can just be seen from the top of the power plants, and Pori (pop 76,000) is 30km to the north. With no big cities and with electricity-hungry timber mills spread through its north, Finland has a large grid and a far-flung network of power stations that do not need to sit near their consumers.

Those timber mills and the harsh climate make Finland one of the world's largest electricity consumers on a per capita basis. Its 5.3 million people use more than twice the electricity of nearby Denmark, which has 5.4 million. The Finnish people's awareness of their energy problems has helped to build support for the nuclear industry, and Howard's team might take heart from the fact that even the nearest neighbours of the Olkiluoto plants seem more interested in the economic benefits of the industry than the potential dangers.

The present construction workforce of 1180 will rise to 3000, and as many jobs again are believed to have been created in the local area. In the long term there will be about 150 people employed to operate the plant. Where the Finnish experience is less encouraging for Howard is in Switkowski's conclusion that Australia could have commercial plants up and running in as little as 10 to 15 years. Finland's politicians and voters have been through years of consultations, studies and debates but nuclear power is still a tough political and regulatory issue, and that is without the obstacles presented by ALP premiers determined to block the industry.

Environmental studies for Olkiluoto III began in 1998 and preparation of the site got under way in 2003, but civil construction did not begin until 2005 and it is not expected to be operating until 2011. That is a timeline of 13 years despite the fact that there were already nuclear plants at the site and that Finland has nuclear expertise dating back to 1977, when the first of its four plants came on line. Construction has fallen 18 months behind schedule due to delays that have left the owners and builders pointing fingers and fighting over money.

TVO, the Finnish energy company that owns the plant, has blamed the French-German builders Areva-Siemens, accusing them of design mistakes, poor supervision of sub-contractors, shoddy training and construction mishaps such as the use of the wrong concrete. The builders claim the schedule they were given was unrealistic, but TVO points out that the builders approved that schedule before starting work. Jorma Aurela, senior engineer in the Ministry of Trade and Industry's nuclear energy division, says both sides are to blame for the delays. "They did not estimate the length of the project properly. TVO, the main contractor Areva and all the sub-contractors made the same mistake," says Aurela, who writes Finland's nuclear power plant licences. "But every power plant in Finland has been built late, that's why the public is not that surprised or upset about it. What is important is that safety is OK."

In 1982, with four plants up and running, a Gallup poll found that just 24 per cent of Finns approved of nuclear power and 38 per cent were opposed. By 1985, approval had climbed to overtake opposition (35-32) - but then Chernobyl sent support plummeting and in 1993, parliament rejected a proposal for a fifth plant. It was not until 2002 that a fifth licence squeaked through on a vote of 107-92. Support has since climbed steadily so that 50 per cent now approve and only 20 per cent do not. Aurela says the key is that Finns believe they must diversify their sources of energy. "Australia is like Norway, you are lucky enough to be able to choose between various types of energy but we have to get it where we can," he says. "Right now our energy mix is very good as we have a variety of sources, but each source has its own problems."

Wind power, for instance, provided just 0.1 per cent of electricity generation in 2004 and offers little hope of growth as Finland has weak winds, especially in winter. Hydro provided 17 per cent of the country's electricity but it, too, has little potential for growth. Timber made up 12 per cent and peat another 7 per cent. Imported coal provided another 18 per cent, gas 12 per cent and oil 2 per cent but Finland's Kyoto commitments mean its coal usage must fall. Nuclear plants were the largest single source of electricity with 25 per cent, and the new plant will provide the equivalent of 15 per cent of current consumption.

Finnish President Tarja Halonen told The Australian last week climate change had been the big driver of public acceptance of nuclear fuel because global warming was no longer a debate, "it is a fact". But Halonen, who was in Australia this week, also said nuclear power risked distracting funds from renewable energies, a concern echoed by the Greens. "The greatest environmental hazard posed by nuclear power is that nuclear energy is being marketed as a magical solution to climate change, so that we would not really have to change anything," says Tapio Laakso, chairman of the Greens' youth organisation.

Aurela briefed Switkowski last year and warned that public acceptance can never be taken for granted by the industry. "An accident in any of the 450 plants in the world would jeopardise public support and could have the same effect on your industry that Chernobyl did on ours," he says. Aurela also said that if there is to be a nuclear power industry in Australia it must be driven by the private sector. "The industry should have no future in Australia if it is dependent on government money. Nuclear energy has to survive on its own commercial merits or it has no future," he says.

Another innovation that some in Australia would like to copy is unfolding just over a kilometre from the new plant. A plain two-lane road dips into a tunnel entrance running under a pine forest and disappears into the bedrock. The tunnel already reaches a depth of 180m and will eventually grow into a 42km maze. With a price tag of E2.5 billion, this will be the world's first permanent dump for the most dangerous of nuclear wastes, spent fuel rods.

All nuclear plants now use interim dumps but the Finns are working to bury their spent fuel under 520m of bedrock. The Swedes and Americans are planning to do the same thing and there have been determined calls in Australia to set up a dump as a money-making venture. Aurela says Finland sees the dump as one of the costs of nuclear fuel, not as a way of generating profits, and only Finnish waste will be stored there. While Britain and many other countries are facing taxpayer bills of billions of dollars to clean up power stations, the Finns decided back in 1983 to set a levy on nuclear fuel to fund a permanent dump. Some 5500 tonnes of spent fuel will be packed into 2800 airtight steel containers about 4m long and then encased in copper. They will then be placed in holes drilled a few metres apart in the floor of the new tunnels and surrounded with bentonite clay to protect the copper from salty groundwater. The tunnels will finally be filled in with a mixture of clay, sand and rock.

Aurela says the dump would be easier to build in Australia. "We have very old and stable bedrock but we do have groundwater. For Australia this waste question would not be that difficult. You have a huge country with plenty of desert and dry bedrock." However politically radioactive the idea of such a dump might be in Australia, it has been calmly accepted in Finland. And yet there is one part of the nuclear cycle that much of the Finnish public is balking at - uranium mining.

Recent proposals for mining leases have been opposed by environmentalists and local communities, with Antti Kokkonen, political editor of the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper, explaining that Finns are much more relaxed about nuclear dumps and power plants than they are about uranium mining. "Some of the uranium deposits are near populated areas and people seem to think that digging it up would be dangerous."

Source




EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT ELECT CLIMATE SCEPTIC AS HEAD OF ENVIRO COMMITTEE

Czech MEP Miroslav Ouzky (Civic Democrats, ODS) is the first Czech to head the EP's environmental committee as he was elected its chairman in Brussels today. Ouzky replaced Christian Democrat Karl-Heinz Florenz, according to agreements within the conservative EP's group European People's Party-European Democrats (EPP-ED) of which ODS MEPs are members. Some MEPs, however expressed fears about Ouzky's qualification for the new post... Asked about global warming, Ouzky admitted the problem of greenhouse gases, but he said he cannot say to what extent they affect global warming. He, however added that the world must fight with this problem.

Source





Global warming goes to court in Australia too

THERE are some decisions that are too important to be left to the judiciary. And a carbon tax is one of them. But while governments debate the issue and agonise about the details, green activists are working through the courts to bypass the democratic process and force such a tax on the coal industry. Unlike governments, judges and tribunal members cannot equip themselves with sufficient information to make an informed decision about how to deal with climate change. For this reason, they must be stripped of the power to intervene in this area before the environmental lobby persuades activist judges that they alone can save the world.

There is another reason why judges should bow out of this area. And it was spelt out as recently as last week by High Court Chief Justice Murray Gleeson. Judicial officers risk a loss of public confidence if their rulings are considered to be no more than the imposition of their personal social goals. The green campaign, which started in NSW, received a welcome setback in Queensland this week. A tribunal headed by Greg Koppenol exposed the flawed logic of those who wanted to use Mr Koppenol's tribunal to force a coalmine to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Had they succeeded, it would have had the same effect as a carbon tax: the cost of the mine's coal would have risen and consumers would have bought their coal elsewhere. And it would have been a tax that would have been passed without a single vote by a representative body. Mr Koppenol made the right call. But that's not the point. Unless the states prevent judges and tribunals from venturing into this area, the nation is at risk of being lumbered with an inconsistent network of court-imposed carbon taxes.

For proof, just look at last year's loopy decision by NSW Land and Environment Court judge Nicola Pain. She ruled that an environmental impact statement for the Anvil Hill coalmine in the Hunter Valley was invalid because it failed to consider the emission of greenhouse gases. Ms Pain was an environmental activist before she was appointed to the bench by NSW Attorney-General and Environment Minister Bob Debus.

On this issue, the NSW Labor Government has betrayed the coal industry. Coalmining jobs are now at risk because of the actions of the state Labor Government. Instead of legislating to overturn Ms Pain's ruling and seeking a consistent national approach, the NSW Government has embraced her mad plan. It has asked the mine to respond to a Greens suggestion that factor into its costbase $109 a tonne for carbon dioxide emissions. Such a tax, which was calculated according to data in the much-criticised Stern review of climate change, would render the mine economically unviable. The issue of climate change demands a national approach, not an ad hoc network of inconsistent state taxes. Despite what some governments might think, taxes are not the solution to all the world's problems.

Source

***************************************

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

Comments? Email me here. My Home Pages are here or here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************

THE NON-EXISTENT CORRELATION THAT THE GREENIES RELY ON

The excerpt below is yet more documentation for a continuing rise in CO2. But where is the warming that is supposed to go with that? Earth's average annual temperature has not risen since 1998

Yesterday, scientists produced the first evidence that the rampant growth of emerging economies like China is contributing to global warming.

The Norwegian Polar Institute which monitors the air in the Arctic circle, said that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is at a new record and still rising fast. Airborne concentrations of have now reached 390 parts per million, up from 388 a year ago. Before Europe's industrial revolution in the 18th Century, concentrations are believed to have been largely stable at around 270 ppm for several thousand years.

But most scientists now believe that human activity, and especially the burning of fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal, has released ever more carbon into the atmosphere. Kim Holmen, research director at the institute, said that levels have risen particularly sharply since 2000, and those rises have coincided with the emergence of Asian economies like China and India. "The large increases in release rates are definitely in the Asian economies," Dr Holmen said.

Source





WHAT THE U.N. WON'T TELL YOU

By Ross McKitrick (McKitrick is associate professor of economics at the University of Guelph)

Last Friday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group charged with assessing the state of the world's climate, unveiled the summary of its latest report. The IPCC Web site claims an impressive number of participants: 450 lead authors, 800 contributors and 2,500 expert reviewers (of which I was one). But it would be a mistake to assume all these experts endorse everything in summary, including its bottom-line assessment: "Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations."

Many disagree with the conclusion itself or the claimed level of certainty, but the fact is, we were never asked. Most participants worked only on small portions of the report, handed in final materials last summer and never ventured an opinion on claims made in the summary. Nor can readers check how well the summary reflects the underlying science. The report itself will not be distributed until May. Although it was officially "released" on Feb. 2, the IPCC is going over the wording to make sure it is consistent with the summary.

This is a curious and disconcerting aspect of IPCC procedures: it needs a couple of months to revise a detailed report prepared by hundreds of scientists, to ensure it agrees with a brief summary drafted by a few dozen scientists and edited by hundreds of bureaucrats and politicians. To be sure, the IPCC does an impressive job of mobilizing experts to produce a report it hopes will be of service to the world. No one should trivialize this achievement.

But let's not make the error of allowing a glossy summary to trivialize the complexities and uncertainties in climate change. After all, if the issues were so simple, you wouldn't need 3,700 experts to write the report. It is a paradox that some of the strongest claims of unanimity in science are made on a subject involving some of the deepest intellectual disagreements and uncertainties.

For instance, the study of climate begins with the movements of fluids: the oceans and atmosphere. The mathematics describing fluids in motion were derived by Claude-Louis Navier and George Gabriel Stokes more than a century ago, but no one has been able to put the equations in a form that would be useful for predicting many key climatic processes. The Clay Institute of Mathematics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, offers a $1 million prize for anyone who can solve the "Navier-Stokes problem," or even just prove that a solution is possible.

In lieu of a solution, scientists use computer models to approximate how the countless processes affecting the climate might behave over time. The IPCC report explains many important limitations of these models: the summary ignores them.

The report fails to achieve balance in other places. For instance, in its 2001 report, the IPCC effectively denied the view that the Earth's climate had cycled through warming and cooling for 10 centuries prior to today's warming. The famous "hockey stick" graph implied warming began with industrialization. I am skeptical of this claim, based on a lot of research-including some high-level expert reviews last year-that showed the data did not support the IPCC claim.

The 2007 report admits problems in this earlier view, but goes on to claim that climate is likely the warmest in 1300 years-precisely what the data don't support. The IPCC also denies that its estimate of rising temperatures, based on weather data collected in ground-level stations around the world, is affected by warming biases due to land-use change, urbanization and the sudden closure of half the world's monitoring stations in the early 1990s.

I am skeptical of their position, based on work I and others have done showing correlations between these influences and temperature trends. There are other examples. Numerous analyses of solar data suggest the sun's output has intensified since the 17th century, and its indirect effect on cloud formation may further amplify its influence on the climate, implying much of 20th-century climate change is natural.

One recent study, by contrast, suggests almost no solar intensification has occurred since the 17th century. That's the study you will read about most in the IPCC report summary. The IPCC leaders have a point of view. Think of their report as the case for the prosecution. Maybe this time the district attorney is right. Maybe not: that is why we need to hear from the defense as well.

Source





AN ECONOMETRIC VIEW OF GLOBAL WARMING

By Arnold Kling

"Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future." -- Ellen Goodman

"Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It's neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment. Also, it's an undignified slapstick that people don't wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the summary for policymakers where all the "but's" are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses. This is clearly such an incredible failure of so many people, from journalists to politicians." -- Czech President Vaclav Klaus

Pundits, politicians, and the public have a hard time coming to grips with uncertainty. This makes the atmosphere for debating global warming policy especially foul, because the key issues with global warming are the uncertainties involved. Those who would try to reduce the issue of global warming to a yes-or-no question ("do you believe or do you deny?") are not scientists. Real scientists understand uncertainty. Real science deals with uncertainty through relentless, skeptical inquiry. Real science resolves arguments not with consensus, but with data.

My understanding of global warming is influenced by my background in applied statistics and economics. There certainly are scientists who have spent more time than I have analyzing the meteorological data. However, before you call me a "hack," make sure that you are capable of understanding, say, Martin Weitzman's critique of the Stern report. [Excerpt immediately following below]

Two facts are known. One is that the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide has been climbing exponentially. In fact, the overall level of human activity, as measured by total Gross Domestic Product, is perhaps 50 times higher than it was one hundred years ago. Another fact is that over the past 30 years, the average global temperature has increased in total by between 0.5 degrees and one degree centigrade. That means that the average annual rate of increase has been less than one-tenth of one degree per year.

The global warming that has taken place so far is minor. The improvement in living standards that has taken place in the past one hundred years is enormous. The global warming issue has nothing to do with the global warming that has taken place to date. It has everything to do with the global warming that will take place in the future.

This is a matter that depends on climate forecasting. The climate forecasting challenge is to predict the rate of change of global temperature, based on the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide. From a purely statistical standpoint, we do not have the data to do this. The current level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is quite high, even relative to a quarter century ago. We probably have not had enough experience to know the rate of change in global temperature that will result from this high level.

The attempts to cope with this ignorance are known as climate models. Given the sheer complexity of global climate, it is impossible to have much confidence in these models. Perhaps they are better than nothing -- that is, better than a simple statistical extrapolation. However, my guess would be otherwise. For a decade, beginning in about 1978, the economics profession witnessed the utter discrediting of a similar exercise in complex modeling -- so-called macroeconometrics.

Macroeconometrics was supposed to enable you to do something like predict nominal GDP (GDP not adjusted for inflation) based on the money supply. Looking at historical data, this almost seems too easy -- the level of GDP and the level of the money supply both rise over time. Economists thought that they might remove this spurious correlation by "de-trending" the data and then looking at the correlation adjusted for this trend. Unfortunately -- and this is what began to hit home in the late 1970's -- "de-trending" did not remove the spurious correlation.

There was a lot of highly technical analysis undertaken, including work by Nobel Laureate Clive Granger. My take-away from this work is that the amount of meaningful information in macroeconomic data is much less than is necessary for macroeconometric models to be successful. Simple statistical extrapolations work just about as well, and often better. Climate data looks to me suspiciously like macroeconomic data. The true information content probably is not sufficient to produce a reliable model for forecasting.

"Just in Case"

If I thought that climate models were highly accurate, then I would be opposed to any major near-term policy to address global warming. The reason is that the climate models predict gradual, modest global warming over the next century. What that means is that, relative to future GDP, the costs are tolerable. As Weitzman points out, the mainstream economic approach to trading off tolerable future costs against current costs would argue against making significant sacrifices today.

However, Weitzman implicitly shares my concern with climate models. Obviously, we have nothing to worry about if the models are too pessimistic. If it turns out that over the next decade global temperatures edge down, or rise more slowly than the models predict, then we will be relieved. The troublesome possibility is that the models are not pessimistic enough. In fact, Weitzman would argue, and I concur, that the case for doing something today about global warming rests on the fear of the scenario of accelerated near-term climate change -- increases in temperature at a rate that is on the high end of the range being forecast by climate models.

The ideal approach would be a "just-in-case" climate-change mitigation plan. If global warming stays at or under current baseline projections, we probably would do best to simply just adapt. However, if global warming accelerates, we would want to take strong steps to counteract it. In that sense, climate engineering, in which we attempt to use technological means to manipulate global temperatures, would be a good fit. If we had such mechanisms, we could use them on an as-needed basis.

Martin Weitzman also discusses the issue of "just-in-case" policies. "...many hard questions need to be asked. What are early-warning signs of impending environmental disasters like melting ice sheets or thermohaline inversions? How much would it cost to put sensors in place that might detect early-warning signals of impending climatic catastrophes? How early might the warning be before the full effects are felt? What could we do as an emergency response if we received such an early-warning signal? Would last-ditch emergency measures help to ward off disaster by reversing the worst consequences of global warming in time?"

Weitzman concedes that the "just-in-case" approach may not be feasible. "It may well turn out that the option value of waiting for better information about catastrophic tail events is negligible (because early detection is impossible, or it is too expensive, or it comes too late, or because nothing practical can be done about undoing greenhouse warming anyway), but these are conclusions we need to reach empirically, rather than postulating them initially."

Stripped of jargon, what Weitzman is saying is that we should try to study whether a just-in-case approach can work, rather than limit ourselves to the choices of either making huge economic sacrifices or running the risk of climate catastrophe. If we lack "just-in-case" mechanisms, then any approach that we take toward climate change risks making significant errors. We might sacrifice a lot of the world's standard of living in order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, only to discover that it was unnecessary, because global warming was not going to accelerate, regardless.

Conversely, the reductions that we carry out might turn out to be insufficient. If we do opt for sacrifice, then most economists would agree with Weitzman that the best approach would be to tax carbon emissions. "One can only wish that U.S. political leaders might have the insight to understand and the courage to act upon the breathtakingly-simple market-friendly idea that the right carbon tax could do way more to unleash the decentralized power of greedy, self-seeking American inventive genius on the problem of developing economically-feasible non-carbon-intensive alternative technologies than all of the command-and-control schemes and patchwork subsidies making the rounds in Washington these days." It is possible to have a civilized, sensible discussion about the issue of global climate change. However, doing so requires speaking in the language of uncertainty, rather than moral righteousness.

Source






THE STERN REVIEW OF THE ECONOMICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE

Martin L. Weitzman

Introduction

The issue of global climate change and what to do about it has put economics to a severe test in which economists have been challenged to think anew about how to model (or at least how to envision) such fundamental concepts as risk, uncertainty, prediction, and discounting. There is nothing like being asked for a specific policy recommendation on a vivid actuality to put a little life into otherwise arcane matters of economic analysis. Beyond the issue of whether it is right or wrong in its conclusions, The Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change is an opportunity for economists to take stock of what we know about this subject, how we know it, what we don't know, and why we don't know it.

The Stern Review is a full-fledged economic analysis of climate change that was officially commissioned by the British government, and for both economic and political reasons is an unusual, and unusually important, document. Sir Nicholas Stern is a professional economist of high standing and a distinguished public servant. Weighing in at 600+ pages, the Stern Review is comprehensive in its scope and ambitious in its aims. A non-specialist economist wanting to get a feel for the basic issues of global climate change could do much worse than browse through this report, as it summarizes well the essentials.

A detailed Review of the Review is out of place here it would be too long, and besides the Stern Review reads well and is available on line. Instead I concentrate on trying to distil the Review down to its analytical essence as a piece of applied cost-benefit analysis, because it can be a bit difficult to see the forest for the trees.

[...]

On the political side of the Stern Review, my most-charitable interpretation of its urgent tone is that the report is an essay in persuasion that is more about gut instincts regarding the horrors of uncertain rare disasters whose probabilities we do not know than it is about economic analysis as that term is conventionally understood.

Although it is difficult enough to analyze people's motives, much less the motives of a 600-page document, I can't help but think after reading it that the strong tone of morality and alarm is mostly reflecting a fear of (in my ponderously esoteric Bayesian jargon) what is potentially out there in the thick left tail of the reduced-form posterior-predictive probability distribution of g under greenhouse warming. I have argued here that this thick left tail of g is an important aspect of the economics of climate change that every analyst - Stern and the critics of Stern - might do well to try to address more directly.

History will judge whether the economic analysis of the Stern Review was more wrong or more right, and, if it was more right, whether as pure economic analysis it was right for the right reasons or it was right for the wrong reasons.

FULL ANALYSIS here





POLITICIZED SCIENCE

By Philip Stott

I confess I was afflicted by a profound world-weariness following the release yesterday of the latest gloomy machinations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The U.N.'s global-warming caravanserai, founded in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, had this time pitched camp in Paris, in order to issue the "Summary for Policy Makers" relating to Working Group One of its "Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007."

This is the group that focuses on "The Physical Science Basis" of climate change, and its summary was greeted with the usual razzmatazz, the Eiffel Tower's 20,000 flashing bulbs being symbolically blacked out on the evening before. Further IPCC reports are due this year, one in April from Working Group Two, on the impacts of, and adaptation to, climate change, and another in May, from Working Group Three on climate-change mitigation.

But it is the science summary that always gives rise to the jamboree -- with journalists, politicians and eager environmentalists desperate to claim that this particular report is the last word on climate change, that it represents a true consensus, that the world is doomed, and that we must recant our fossil-fuel ways. Moreover, as in 2001 with the Third Assessment Report, Friday's release was preceded by speculative leaks, the political shenanigans and spinning beginning even before the final text had been haggled over and agreed upon.

Unfortunately, the IPCC represents science by supercommittee, as rule 10 of its procedures states: "In taking decisions, and approving, adopting and accepting reports, the Panel, its Working Groups and any Task Forces shall use all best endeavors to reach consensus." I bet Galileo would have had a rough time with that.

In this context, it is vital to remember that science progresses by skepticism and by paradigm shifts: A consensus early last century would have given us eugenics. Moreover, the IPCC does no original research, nor does it monitor climate-related data; its evidence is instead from selected secondary sources. But, above all, this supercommittee is more political than is often recognized, rule three firmly reminding delegates that: "documents should involve both peer review by experts and review by governments."

Friday's summary and "best estimates" of temperature-rise by 2100 (as compared to preindustrial times) are thus little more than a committee compromise chewed over by governments with different agendas: an average potential rise of three degrees Celsius (up from 2.5 degrees in 2001); a probable rise of between 1.8 to 4 degrees; a possible rise of between 1.1 to 6.4 degrees. So you can take your pick, also bearing in mind that there are groups outside the IPCC predicting cooling by one or two degrees Celsius.

Moreover, the conclusion that climate changes seen around the world are "very likely" to have a human cause is wonderful Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass talk. Unsurprisingly, the report will please neither a Humeian skeptic nor a rabid apocalyptic. Indeed, even before it appeared, environmentalists were incensed that predictions for the rise in sea levels this century have been lowered to between 28 and 43 cm (11 to 17 inches). They want the polar bears to be drowning now!

FULL COMMENT here

***************************************

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

Comments? Email me here. My Home Pages are here or here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************

Panel of Broadcast Meteorologists Reject Man-Made Global Warming Fears- Claim 95% of Weathermen Skeptical

Climate alarmism is proving more unsustainable everyday. Increasing numbers of scientists and climate experts are growing more skeptical of predictions of a man-made catastrophe. For proof of the growing momentum, see previous EPW release: Climate Skeptics Vindicated as Growing Number of Scientists & Politicians Oppose Alarmism

Today's climate roundup includes articles about scientists standing up for climate realism.

1) Panel of Broadcast Meteorologists Reject Man-Made Global Warming Fears - Claim 95% of Weathermen Skeptical

From Crain's Cleveland publication on February 13, 2007:

The Ohio TV meteorologists, Dan Webster, Dick Goddard, Mark Johnson, Mark Nolan and John Loufman, mocked the UN's global warming alarmism. "You tell me you’re going to predict climate change based on 100 years of data for a rock that’s 6 billion years old?" Johnson said. "I’m not sure which is more arrogant — to say we caused (global warming) or that we can fix it," Nolan said. "Mr. Webster observed that in his dealings with meteorologists nationwide, ‘about 95%’ share his skepticism about global warming," the paper reported. 

 Also See: From The Cleveland Plain Dealer on February 16, 2007 : TV Weathermen Downplay Global Warming Fears

2) Meteorologist Dismisses UN IPCC Report

From Kentucky meteorologist Chris Allen blog on the 2007 UN IPCC global warming report:

"But, just because major environmental groups, big media and some politicians are buying this hook, line and sinker doesn't mean as a TV weatherperson I am supposed to act as a puppy on a leash and follow along," Allen said in his blog titled "Still Not Convinced" on February 7, 2007. Allen has the Seal of Approval of the National Weather Association and is the chairman of the Kentucky Weather Preparedness Committee.

As I have stated before, not only do I believe global climate change exists - it has always existed. There have been times of global warming and cooling," Allen, who is with WBKO in Bowling Green, added.

Source





Antarctic monitoring gives pesky results

Actual Antarctic temperatures disagree with climate model predictions. Lots of excuses but it's just NOT warming down there -- exactly where the Green loons most want it to warm

A new report on climate over the world's southernmost continent shows that temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as had been predicted by many global climate models. This comes soon after the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that strongly supports the conclusion that the Earth's climate as a whole is warming, largely due to human activity. It also follows a similar finding from last summer by the same research group that showed no increase in precipitation over Antarctica in the last 50 years. Most models predict that both precipitation and temperature will increase over Antarctica with a warming of the planet.

David Bromwich, professor of professor of atmospheric sciences in the Department of Geography, and researcher with the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, reported on this work at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at San Francisco. "It's hard to see a global warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now," he said. "Part of the reason is that there is a lot of variability there. It's very hard in these polar latitudes to demonstrate a global warming signal. This is in marked contrast to the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula that is one of the most rapidly warming parts of the Earth."

Bromwich says that the problem rises from several complications. The continent is vast, as large as the United States and Mexico combined. Only a small amount of detailed data is available - there are perhaps only 100 weather stations on that continent compared to the thousands spread across the U.S. and Europe . And the records that we have only date back a half-century. "The best we can say right now is that the climate models are somewhat inconsistent with the evidence that we have for the last 50 years from continental Antarctica . "We're looking for a small signal that represents the impact of human activity and it is hard to find it at the moment," he said.

Last year, Bromwich's research group reported in the journal Science that Antarctic snowfall hadn't increased in the last 50 years. "What we see now is that the temperature regime is broadly similar to what we saw before with snowfall. In the last decade or so, both have gone down," he said.

In addition to the new temperature records and earlier precipitation records, Bromwich's team also looked at the behavior of the circumpolar westerlies, the broad system of winds that surround the Antarctic continent. "The westerlies have intensified over the last four decades of so, increasing in strength by as much as perhaps 10 to 20 percent," he said. "This is a huge amount of ocean north of Antarctica and we're only now understanding just how important the winds are for things like mixing in the Southern Ocean." The ocean mixing both dissipates heat and absorbs carbon dioxide, one of the key greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

Some researchers are suggesting that the strengthening of the westerlies may be playing a role in the collapse of ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula. "The peninsula is the most northern point of Antarctica and it sticks out into the westerlies," Bromwich says. "If there is an increase in the westerly winds, it will have a warming impact on that part of the continent, thus helping to break up the ice shelves, he said. "Farther south, the impact would be modest, or even non-existent."

Bromwich said that the increase in the ozone hole [Increase? What increase? Isn't it supposed to be shrinking after all the wise Greenie bans on "harmful" chemicals like freon?] above the central Antarctic continent may also be affecting temperatures on the mainland. "If you have less ozone, there's less absorption of the ultraviolet light and the stratosphere doesn't warm as much." That would mean that winter-like conditions would remain later in the spring than normal, lowering temperatures. "In some sense, we might have competing effects going on in Antarctica where there is low-level CO2 warming but that may be swamped by the effects of ozone depletion," he said. "The year 2006 was the all-time maximum for ozone depletion over the Antarctic."

Bromwich said the disagreement between climate model predictions and the snowfall and temperature records doesn't necessarily mean that the models are wrong. [Theory trumps facts??] "It isn't surprising that these models are not doing as well in these remote parts of the world. These are global models and shouldn't be expected to be equally exact for all locations," [Even the most crucial ones?] he said.

Source




Weapons of Global Warming Destruction


Since 9/11, there has been an international debate concerning a battle of civilizations. In the few short weeks since the Democrats officially took over Congress, a different war has taken shape within our own borders, and has morphed into a potentially more important conflagration, at least for the time being.

At the heart of the debate is anthropogenic global warming, and what America should do about it if anything. On the fringes is: the battle to unionize Wal-Mart; another push for universal healthcare; the perennial goal of raising taxes; the jealous desire to limit the pay of CEOs, and; a Hugo Chavez-like call to strip the oil companies of their profits.

As Americans, we should be almost as fearful of this ideological war as the one we are waging against Islamic extremists. After all, the first time capitalist principles lost out to socialist ones in the depths of the Great Depression, decades of budget deficits and exploding federal debt ensued that still threaten our financial solvency today, and our children's futures tomorrow.

In fact, two and a half decades since the start of the Reagan Revolution, the free market is once again under attack. If capitalists on both sides of the aisle don't take a stand to squelch this call for government to solve all of our problems, our children will be destined to live much more austerely than us, and become the first generation of Americans to be less successful than their parents.

Global Warming Deniers are now on a Par With Holocaust Deniers

The center of the battle between socialism and capitalism right now is clearly global warming, and it is fascinating to see what lengths the left will go to advance their forces on this issue. Such actions now include threats to people's jobs if they don't conform to the views expressed by liberals concerning man's "undeniable" role in causing the earth's temperatures to rise.

In late December, The Weather Channel's foremost climate expert Heidi Cullen called for meteorologists to be stripped of their certifications by the American Meteorological Society if they disagreed with the tenets of anthropogenic global warming.

Just last week, the Democrat governor of Oregon threatened to remove the mostly-ceremonial title of State Climatologist from a man that has held the position since 1991 all because the gentleman questions man's role in climate change.

On February 7, former Vice President Al Gore, the left's true champion on this issue, told a group he was speaking in front of in Madrid, Spain, that China is correct to blame America for global warming. Maybe more important, Gore stated to the crowd that this Asian country - which happens to possess the fastest growing economy on the planet with the largest population base - shouldn't be required to participate in climate solutions until the United States does its share.

Those familiar with the strategies employed by socialists must recognize the common tactic of blaming the world's problems on America while absolving all other nation's of any responsibility. Gore is indeed a master at this.

Of course, an interesting hypocrisy exists in this strategy as Gore travels the world stoking irrational fear to win over the simple-minded. After all, isn't he now doing exactly that which he accused President Bush of in 2004?

For those that have forgotten, this is what Gore said about President Bush and the war in Iraq on February 9, 2004, just prior to the Tennessee Democrat primary:

He betrayed this country! He played on our fears! He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops, an adventure preordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place!

Remember this? How different is Gore's claim about the President three years ago from his current rant about civilization's imminent doom all based on a slide presentation that he created well before he was elected Vice President in 1992?

In reality, by exaggerating the dangers of global warming, as well as man's real or imagined role, Gore and his ilk are using exactly the same fear tactics they claim the Bush administration was guilty of in the lead up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Somehow, the media have all missed this extraordinarily delicious hypocrisy as they themselves fall hook, line, and sinker for the conclusions they so desire to hear from those they hold in highest esteem. A fine example was published in the February 9 Boston Globe, as liberal writer Ellen Goodman offensively proclaimed:

I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future [emphasis added].

Goodman was employing a common liberal tactic of eliminating debate on an issue by self-ordaining dissenters as vile vermin. This was especially offensive given a recent ACNielsen Internet poll which concluded that more than 50 percent of Americans don't believe humans are responsible for global warming.

Don't you love it when these sanctimonious socialists claim to be smarter than everyone else as they advocate taking away our money for our own good? If they'd only learn how to insult us in a fashion that wasn't so obvious, we'd gladly turn over all our worldly possessions for the causes they hold so dear.

Calling a Charade a Charade

In the end, that indeed is what this is all about: Global warming represents the Democrats' weapons of mass destruction. With it, they hope to scare enough Americans into sacrificing their own financial well-being all for the noble goal of saving the planet.

This is why the sudden urgency for action. After all, the Democrats and their media minions learned from their successful defeat of Social Security reform in 2005 that Americans aren't concerned about what they perceive as problems in the distant future.

As the left and the press were able to convince folks that Social Security insolvency wouldn't occur for at least another thirty years or more, the problem was easily swept far enough under the rug to be ignored. In this way, the largest and most obvious example of socialism in America was miraculously kept intact, for the time being of course, without the slightest capitalist tinkering.

However, by cleverly claiming that seas are going to rise and begin killing innocent people in ten years if nothing is done to stop it, the liberals have created an urgency about global warming that the Bush administration failed to with Social Security. As a result, the population is now ripe for listening to solutions for a problem that is significantly more a figment of the imagination than the mathematical certainty that America's largest entitlement program will go bankrupt if changes aren't enacted.

Put another way, two years ago, the left and the media were able to convince the American people that there was no consensus about when Social Security would run out of money, and though they agreed it will certainly happen at some point, Americans were more than happy to defer concern for this seemingly distant problem. Yet, two years later, these same politicians and press representatives have created an hysteria over an unproven theory, professing a consensus that they advertise as incontrovertible even though none exists, all over a calamity that might never actually occur.

Isn't that extraordinary?

But this is only part of the charade. As America has moved away from organized labor in the past two and a half decades, the stock market has exploded, as have real estate prices, wages, and the number of people on non-farm payrolls. During this period, the average net worth of the citizenry has dramatically outpaced inflation while the standard of living improved across all social strata.

Of course, this makes socialists despondent, for the better off people are, the less they need to rely on government.....

More here




Global warming: Just another liberal orthodoxy

An astounding range of absurd ideas have been incorporated into the "mainstream" of modern America, based not on any inherent merit, but rather on the benefits to liberalism that can be derived from them. So much of today's "conventional wisdom" represents neither convention nor wisdom, but instead results from a fundamentally leftist worldview, combined with a truly juvenile dosage of wishful thinking.

Consider, a few such pillars of the liberal faith, and more specifically how fragile they quickly become when placed under the hot lights of honest scrutiny.

As the American culture continues to crumble, we are incessantly reminded that "our diversity is our strength." Tell that to the people of the Balkans where, prior to U.S. intervention, centuries old feuds and tribalism had rendered the region little more than a wasteland of unending bloodshed between bickering "warlords."

Hardly any better is the current plight of those hapless Europeans, who pride themselves on that most virtuous of liberal precepts, their "tolerance" of other cultures. Yet on a daily basis they witness ever more of their heritage being eradicated by militant Muslims who are neither diverse nor tolerant. Barring a miraculous resurgence of fortitude and conviction of its former heritage, Europe's fate is sealed.

On this side of the ocean, American liberals claim a virtual monopoly of "tolerance." Yet the facts indicate otherwise. Under the preposterous auspices of "tolerance," liberals have over the past several decades sought to squash any stance, any opinion, or any logical question that threatens their agenda.

As it was with Cold War "compromise," whereby American negotiators were expected to abandon their positions in order to embrace those of the Soviet Union, the steadily emerging definition of "tolerance," from the liberal perspective, amounts to a demand that traditional America unquestioningly blesses their ideology, with no promise whatsoever of reciprocity.

Thus, in the name of "tolerance," liberals expunged any mention of God, the Bible, or America's Christian roots from the school system, and ultimately all other areas of public life. Concurrently, in the name of "diversity," they relentlessly work to replace those standards with the canons and icons of other, often pagan, cultures. And ultimately, in the place of traditional morality and faith, they seek to establish an orthodoxy of the secularist liberal state.

So it is no surprise that the latest catechism of their "true believers," is conversion, by force if necessary, to an acceptance of "global warming" and all of the necessary precepts of the liberal agenda needed to "fix" it. This mandatory conversion is being pursued with a fervor rarely witnessed outside of the most oppressive cults.

Humanity has been dealing with the extremes of climate since time immemorial. Admittedly during that entire period, eras of heightened temperatures, followed by cooler periods have been visited on the human race. Thus it is natural to react to such shifts with feelings of helplessness, and at times, foreboding.

To many, the dire implications of last summer's blistering high temperatures seemed irrefutable, at least until the record setting lows of this winter. So far, the inarguably "conclusive" proof offered by those who claim the planet is getting steadily warmer has borne little or no repeatable evidence of a scientifically established pattern.

We were likewise forewarned that the 2006 hurricane season would surely eclipse the devastation of Katrina, Rita, and the horrendous toll of 2005. Yet this proclamation of doom turned out to be a bust. Apparently the prophets of the left need a bit of honing on their skills. Nevertheless, to even question the legitimacy of their utterances is no less than "blasphemy," spawning instant calls for excommunication of the offending parties.

So, rather than dwelling for too long on such an unknown quantity as the weather, it is more relevant to consider the wholly anticipated patterns of liberalism. Among their ranks, far more than in the weekend forecast, can be found the underlying motives and workings of the current global warming hysteria.

In no other way can the sanctimonious rantings of Dr. Heidi Cullen of the now thoroughly politicized Weather Channel be explained. Cullen recently pushed for the professional disqualification of any meteorologist who refuses to profess the doctrine of man made global warming. And what, other than similarly mindless fanaticism can explain the behavior of the Grand Green Inquisitor himself, former vice-president Al Gore?

Elsewhere, the "hot earth society" seeks to denigrate skeptics as a class of politically incorrect social "pariahs," labeling them as "global warming deniers," a clear allusion to those anti-Semitic deniers of the Nazi holocaust.

Yet among few if any of these people is the primary goal to "save the planet," but rather to promote the liberal agenda, as their own unbridled usage of energy, and selective attacks against the "Great Polluters" clearly proves. Perhaps the most glaring evidence is that the Russians and Chinese, who pollute to a horrendous degree, get a "pass" on account of being good socialists. Meanwhile the United States is roundly condemned.

The '08 campaign season is already gearing up, and Democrats are desperate to frame the debate around anything other than traditional values or the terror war. So of course, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-CA) has been quick to jump onto this bandwagon. Expect Hillary to follow soon.

The randomness of sunspots and other factors quite beyond the understanding of humanity ultimately render it impossible for meteorologists to forecast the weekend weather with absolute certainty. In contrast, the actions and motives of the American left, committed always and only in pursuit of their own interests, are among the most predictable phenomena of the modern world.

Source




How to coax climate science out of the cave of religion

Mark Bahner writes:

The U.S. government should set up a prize fund totaling $400 million, payable in 2031. The prize fund would be open to any U.S. university with accredited science or engineering programs. The fund would be awarded as $200 million for first place, $100 million for second, $50 million for third, $25 million for fourth, $12 million for fifth, $6 million for sixth, $3 million for seventh.and $1 million until we run out of money.

Prizes would be awarded for most closely predicting the following parameters:

1) globally averaged surface temperature anomaly for 2029-2031, relative to 1990;
2) globally averaged lower tropospheric temperature anomaly for 2029-2031, relative to 1990;
3) Atlantic hurricane basin sea surface temperature anomaly for 2029-2031, relative to 1990;
4) average insured U.S. hurricane losses for 2029-2031 ....

I see lots of problems with this approach. But I do think that the problem of coaxing climate science out of the cave of religion is worth thinking about. One idea would be a methodological audit conducted by statisticians, economists, and others who are outside the climate science field. Another idea would be a prediction market.

Source

***************************************

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

Comments? Email me here. My Home Pages are here or here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************