Russia knows how to prevent global warming

Russia knows how to prevent global warming - academic

30/05/2007 20:47

MOSCOW, May 30 (RIA Novosti) - Russian scientists have found a way to prevent global warming of the Earth, the director of the Global Climate and Ecology Institute said Wednesday.
Russian Academy of Sciences Academic Yury Izrael told a news conference that the method envisions air spraying of a sulfur-containing aerosol in lower stratosphere layers at a height of 10-14 kilometers (six to 10 miles). Sulfur drops would then reflect solar radiation.

According to scientists, one million tons of aerosol sprayed above the planet would make possible a reduction of solar radiation by 0.5-1%, and a reduction of air temperature by 1-1.5 degrees Celsius.

Unseasonably hot May weather with temperatures at 32.1 degrees Celsius (89.7 degrees Fahrenheit) beating a 116-year-old maximum has already seen last year's energy consumption for this time of year surpassed by about 8% in Moscow and 12% in St. Petersburg, a spokeswoman for the UES electricity monopoly said earlier.

Izrael said the method demands more detailed development, and that a relevant decision on the international level should be made for it to come into force.

However, the academic said the method is not an alternative to measures to fight climate change envisioned by the Kyoto Protocol, which contains commitments by some countries on specific volumes of greenhouse gas emission reductions.

"I don't want any contradiction of the Kyoto Protocol, but in parallel with existing methods, cheaper ones should be developed. I am advocating that work be conducted simultaneously on several methods," Izrael said.

He also said the Russian scientists' method will make the fight against warming faster and cheaper. "It is also good that it can be stopped at any moment," Izrael said.
The Russian academic said global temperature in the coming 100 years could rise by 1.4-4 degrees Celsius, which, he said, will cause droughts, floods and cyclones. He said Russia could face the extinction of 20-30% of its animals and plants if temperatures rise by 2 degrees Celsius.
However, Izrael said the current high temperatures in Moscow are not connected with a global climate change.

"Any fact, even the most acute should not be directly linked to climate change, but should be considered as part of temperature fluctuations," he said.

NASA's Top Official Questions Global Warming

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin Questions Need to Combat Warming

By CLAYTON SANDELL and BILL BLAKEMORE
May 31, 2007 —

NASA administrator Michael Griffin is drawing the ire of his agency's preeminent climate scientists after apparently downplaying the need to combat global warming.

In an interview broadcast this morning on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" program, Griffin was asked by NPR's Steve Inskeep whether he is concerned about global warming.

"I have no doubt that a trend of global warming exists," Griffin told Inskeep. "I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with."

"To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change," Griffin said. "I guess I would ask which human beings are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take."

Griffin's comments immediately drew stunned reaction from James Hansen, NASA's top climate scientist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

"It's an incredibly arrogant and ignorant statement," Hansen told ABC News. "It indicates a complete ignorance of understanding the implications of climate change."

Hansen believes Griffin's comments fly in the face of well-established scientific knowledge that hundreds of NASA scientists have contributed to.

"It's unbelievable," said Hansen. "I thought he had been misquoted. It's so unbelievable."

News media inquiries to NASA headquarters about Griffin's comments prompted the space agency to make the unusual move of issuing a news release late Wednesday night.

"NASA is the world's preeminent organization in the study of Earth and the conditions that contribute to climate change and global warming," Griffin said in a statement. "The agency is responsible for collecting data that is used by the science community and policy makers as part of an ongoing discussion regarding our planet's evolving systems. It is NASA's responsibility to collect, analyze and release information. It is not NASA's mission to make policy regarding possible climate change mitigation strategies. As I stated in the NPR interview, we are proud of our role and I believe we do it well."

Hansen, featured prominently in Al Gore's global warming documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," has been warning of the potential dangers of climate change since the 1980s.

In late 2005, he accused NASA of trying to improperly censor him after he warned that Earth's climate might be approaching a dangerous "tipping point."

The agency later fired a public affairs employee, a political appointee of the Bush administration, over the incident.

Last year, many NASA scientists were upset when reports surfaced that the agency had quietly deleted the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet" from the NASA mission statement. The scientists believe research on issues like climate change will suffer as NASA shifts priorities toward exploration missions to the moon and Mars.

"Earth has always been central to NASA's science," Hansen said.

Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures

Eco-Freak Quotes

THE SUSSMAN FILES

Frightening Eco-Freak Quotes from the Sussman Files

"We already have too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure."

Paul Elrich,
Stanford University biologist and Advisor to Albert Gore

"I think if we don't overthrow capitalism, we don't have a chance of saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecological society under socialism. I don't think it's possible under capitalism."

Judi Barri of Earth First!

"Capitalism is a cancer in the biosphere."

Dave Foreman, Founder, Earth First!

"The northern spotted owl is the wildlife species of choice to act as a surrogate for old-growth forest protection," explained Andy Stahl, staff forester for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, at a 1988 law clinic for other environmentalists.

"Thank goodness the spotted owl evolved in the Pacific Northwest," he joked, "for if it hadn't, we'd have to genetically engineer it." Andy Stahl at a 1988 law clinic for environmentalists, staff forester, Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund


"Now, in a widening sphere of decisions, the costs of error are so exorbitant that we need to act on theory alone, which is to say on prediction alone. It follows that the reputation of scientific prediction needs to be enhanced. But that can happen, paradoxically, only if scientists disavow the certainty and precision that they normally insist on. Above all, we need to learn to act decisively to forestall predicted perils, even while knowing that they may never materialize. We must take action, in a manner of speaking, to preserve our ignorance. There are perils that we can be certain of avoiding only at the cost of never knowing with certainty that they were real."

Jonathan Shell,
author of Our Fragile Earth

"A global climate treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the greenhouse effect."

Richard Benedict, an employee for the State Department
working on assignment for the Conservation Foundation

"[W]e have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."

Stephen Schneider,
Stanford University Professor and author
Quoted by Dixey Lee Ray in Trashing the Planet (1990)

"I honor Earth First for having the guts to do the things they do. It's not for me, but I understand why they do what they do. And, ultimately, we all help each other."

Brock Adams,
VP, Audubon Society,
quoted in the Los Angeles Times.

"If we seek only personal redemption we could become solitary ecological saints among the masses of those we might classify as 'sinners' who continue to pollute."

Bill Devall & George Sessions,
Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered Layton

"More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecological crises until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one."

Lynn White, Jr.
"The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," Science, (Mar. 10 1967), p 1206

"Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license.... All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing."

David Brower,
Friends of the Earth

"The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state."

Keith Boulding,
originator of the "Spaceship Earth" concept

"If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS. It [AIDS] has the potential to end industrialism, which is the main force behind the environmental crises."

Earth First! newsletter

Global warming debunked

Sunday, 20 May 2007

Global warming debunked

Climate change will be considered a joke in five years time, meteorologist Augie Auer told the annual meeting of Mid Canterbury Federated Farmers in Ashburton this week. Man's contribution to the greenhouse gases was so small we couldn't change the climate if we tried, he maintained.

"We're all going to survive this. It's all going to be a joke in five years," he said.

A combination of misinterpreted and misguided science, media hype, and political spin had created the current hysteria and it was time to put a stop to it.

"It is time to attack the myth of global warming," he said.

Water vapour was responsible for 95 per cent of the greenhouse effect, an effect which was vital to keep the world warm, he explained.

"If we didn't have the greenhouse effect the planet would be at minus 18 deg C but because we do have the greenhouse effect it is plus 15 deg C, all the time."

The other greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen dioxide, and various others including CFCs, contributed only five per cent of the effect, carbon dioxide being by far the greatest contributor at 3.6 per cent.

However, carbon dioxide as a result of man's activities was only 3.2 per cent of that, hence only 0.12 per cent of the greenhouse gases in total. Human-related methane, nitrogen dioxide and CFCs etc made similarly minuscule contributions to the effect: 0.066, 0.047 and 0.046 per cent respectively.

"That ought to be the end of the argument, there and then," he said.

"We couldn't do it (change the climate) even if we wanted to because water vapour dominates."

Yet the Greens continued to use phrases such as "The planet is groaning under the weight of CO2" and Government policies were about to hit industries such as farming, he warned.

"The Greens are really going to go after you because you put out 49 per cent of the countries emissions. Does anybody ask 49 per cent of what? Does anybody know how small that number is?

"It's become a witch-hunt; a Salem witch-hunt," he said.

Nine Lies About Global Warming

Nine Lies About Global Warming

The Lavoisier Group

February 2006

Ray Evans

1. Carbon dioxide is a pollutant.

2. The twentieth century has been the hottest in recorded history and the decade 1990–2000 the hottest ever.

3. The evidence linking anthropogenic (man-made) carbon dioxide emissions and current warming is decisive.

4. The scientific consensus is that anthropogenic CO2 emissions have already caused significant global warming and must be severely curtailed to prevent future climate catastrophe.

5. Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 and the global warming caused thereby are responsible not only for higher temperatures and more droughts than in the past, but also for moreblizzards, unseasonal snow, and freezing weather. They are also responsible for increasing numbers of cyclones.

6. Because of anthropogenic emissions, the polar ice caps are melting and sea levels are rising. The rising sea levels threaten low lying island states in the Pacific and Indian Oceans with
complete inundation.

7. Unless anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are reduced by 50–60 per cent of current levels by the year 2050, by 2100 our descendants will have to endure global temperatures of between 1.4 to 5.8°C warmer than the present.

8. Tropical diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will spread from the tropics to the temperate regions.

9. Shutting down coal-fired power stations and replacing them with renewable energy sources such as windmills and solar panels (or even nuclear power plants) will not cause unemployment
or economic deprivation.

The Nine Lies Nine Lies About Global Warming

Ray Evans

Introduction

People who know that they are morally superior to the rest of mankind are often tempted to ignore the moral norms on which Western civilisation depends. One of the most important of these rules is telling the truth. The Ninth Commandment states ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness….’ Environmentalism, however, is a form of religious belief which fosters a sense of moral superiority in the believer, but which places no importance on telling the truth. As the former Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart put it:

No matter if the science is all phony [sic], there are collateral environmental benefits…. Climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring aboutjustice and equality in the world.1

Ever since the hot American summers of 1987 and 1988, the international environmentalist
movement has campaigned to establish a global regime of decarbonisation. Their argument has been that increases in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), brought about by mankind’s use of coal, oil and gas will, through a process of greenhouse gas-induced warming, bring about global climate catastrophe. Although this argument is inherently implausible, they have had the most extraordinary success with their campaign. The Rio Earth Summit of
1992 led to the 1994 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which in turn led, in December 1997, to the Kyoto Protocol. The essential element of the Kyoto Protocol was that those industrialised nations which ratified the Protocol committed themselves to specified reductions in CO2 emissions by 2012. The base year of 1990 was chosen and each industrialised country was given a specified target to reach. Australia’s target was 108 per cent of 1990 emissions. Only Iceland, 110 per cent, was given a more generous target. Countries which did not achieve their targets were to be penalised in the years following 2012, and a supra-national inspectorate was to be established to police the global decarbonisation programme.
Australia and the US, however, refused to ratify the Protocol.

Following the 11th Conference of Parties meeting in Montreal in December 2005, the Kyoto Protocol is now almost dead. It was born in 1997 and has been sustained, to this point, through a web of mendacity, fraud and lies. The nine most important lies are listed on the facing page, and a brief examination of them follows.

1. Carbon dioxide is a pollutant

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a colourless, odourless, tasteless, non-toxic gas which is essential to all life on earth. (Carbon monoxide, however, is extremely toxic and, if inhaled, will cause death very quickly.) All green vegetation requires carbon dioxide as plant food, and the process of photosynthesis, in which plants take in carbon dioxide, absorb solar radiation, store the carbon and emit oxygen, is basic to life. As concentrations of carbon dioxide increase, the rates of growth of plants also increase.

Flowers and vegetables grown in hothouses are frequently fed with extra carbon dioxide for faster growth and higher yields. As atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased from approximately 325 ppmv (parts per million by volume) in 1970 to 375 ppmv today, wheat yields in Australia have increased in the last 30 years, in part because of CO2 enrichment.
Every time a story on global warming is featured on TV, either a background image of the cooling tower of a power station, with its plume of minute water droplets above, or a smoke stack belching forth dark plumes of soot, fly ash, and other particulates, is shown. In this mendacious way, carbon dioxide is identified as a serious pollutant, and the US is always labelled as the world’s greatest polluter. (Australia is frequently labelled as second to the US.)
Coal-fired power stations which have modern flue-gas scrubbing equipment built into their exhaust systems, will have smoke stack emissions which are barely visible.

Mark Steyn commented:

In the past third of a century, the American economy has swollen by 150 per cent, automobile traffic has increased by 143 per cent, and energy consumption has grown 45 per cent. During this same period, air pollutants have declined by 29 per cent, toxic emissions by 48.5 per cent, sulphur dioxide levels by 65.3 per cent, and airborne lead by 97.3 per cent.2 Carbon dioxide cycles naturally through the atmosphere, the earth’s land mass, and the oceans. Huge volumes of carbon dioxide are injected into the oceans and atmosphere during earthquakes and volcanoes. The amount of carbon contained in atmospheric carbon dioxide is about 730,000 million tonnes (730 Gigatonnes of carbon (GtC)). The annual transport of carbon to and from the land surface and the atmosphere, is estimated at 120 GtC; between the oceans and the atmosphere the estimate is 90 GtC. The annual emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere
resulting from human activities is about 7 GtC, less than 1 per cent of the total atmospheric carbon mass, and less than 4 per cent of the natural annual emissions from the biosphere and the oceans. Changes in the natural transport of carbon, as well as human activities, have led to recent increases in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.3

2. The twentieth century has been the hottest in recorded historyand the decade 1990–2000 the hottest ever.

This particular lie has done much to damage the credibility of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. The IPCC was established under the auspices of the UNEP (United Nations Environment Panel), and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). Its brief was to provide an authoritative international statement of scientific opinion on climate change. It has issued three such reports. The most recent, the Third Assessment Report (TAR), was released in Shanghai in January 2001. The authority of the IPCC has been used by many governments (including the Australian Government) as justification for various perceived decarbonisation policies, such as the subsidies now given to the owner-operators of wind farms, proposed carbon taxes of one kind or another, and various
carbon trading schemes which are merely add-ons to carbon taxes.

At the press conference at which this Third Assessment Report was launched, a backdrop showing a graph of northern hemisphere temperatures from 1000 to 2000 AD was prominently displayed. This graph, known as Mann’s Hockey Stick, was so widely used by the IPCC that it became a corporate logo. From 1000 to 1900 AD the northern hemisphere temperature was depicted as slowly cooling by 0.2°C. From 1900 to 2000 AD the temperature took off in a straight line showing a century of warming of 0.6°C. The graph looked like an ice hockey stick with the handle running from 1000 to 1900 AD and the blade shooting upwards from 1900 to 2000 AD. The lead author of the research which led to this graph was Michael E. Mann
of the University of Virginia.
4
The purpose of the graph was to legitimise the claim that twentieth-century warming
is unprecedented; that it is due to anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide;
and that the increase in twentieth-century temperatures has been so precipitate
that drastic policies of decarbonisation have to be implemented. In particular, the
well-known history of the Mediaeval Warm Period, 800 AD to 1300 AD, an era
which was warm enough for Vikings to establish a colony in Greenland and which
lasted for 300 years, was to be airbrushed out of the historical record.3 Also deleted
from the record was the Little Ice Age which ran from 1560 to 1850 AD.
It is now established beyond argument that this hockey stick is a fraud. The algorithm
which the authors used to process tree ring data not only produced the hockey
stick published and promoted by the IPCC, but was able to produce a hockey stick
from a series of random numbers. The IPCC has not confessed to fraud. It carries on
as if nothing is wrong with its conduct or its conclusions. If the IPCC were a commercial
corporation operating in Australia, its directors would now be facing criminal
charges and the prospect of going to jail.
There is now a great deal of evidence to show that the Mediaeval Warm Period was
a global phenomenon. It was during this period that Europeans enjoyed agricultural
prosperity with an abundance of food and population growth. They made huge
progress in technology, inventing, for example, mechanical clocks and windmills,
building the great cathedrals, and establishing great trading cities such as Venice,
Amsterdam, and London. It is ironic that the global warmers should seek to erase
from the record this remarkable era of human progress as part of their campaign to
return Western society to a state of extreme energy deprivation.
As far as Australia is concerned, the highest recorded maximum temperatures for
Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney were recorded during heatwave conditions over
south-eastern Australia that persisted from 6th to 14th January, 1939. The table
gives some maximum temperatures for this period.
Maximum Temperatures °C for days in January 1939
8th 9th 10th 11th 12th 13th 14th
Adelaide 44.0 45.9 46.1 44.2
Melbourne 43.1 44.7 45.6
Sydney 45.3
There were extensive bushfires throughout Victoria, culminating in Black Friday,
the 13th January, when 70 lives were lost. The claim that 2005 was the hottest
Australian year on record is false.4
5


3. The evidence linking anthropogenic (man-made) carbon dioxide emissions and current warming is decisive.

If we plot global temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations for the period
1970–2000, we will obtain a reasonably good correlation, and it appears plausible
to argue that anthropogenic emissions are causing global warming. A good correlation,
however, does not prove causality between the two variables, and even more
importantly, if we extend our time scale and plot fossil fuel consumption (a good
proxy for anthropogenic emissions) against temperature change, from 1860 to 2000,
we see no correlation at all.
Here we see that global temperatures rose from 1860 to 1875, then cooled until
1890, rose until 1903, fell until 1918 and then rose dramatically until 1941–42. We
then experienced the long cooling until 1976, the year of the Pacific Climate Shift,
and since then temperatures have risen by about 0.4°C. There is zero correlation
between the temperature curve and the anthropogenic CO2 curve over this 140-
year period. This fact alone should have brought the carbon dioxide-induced global
warming debate to an end.

4. The scientific consensus is that anthropogenic CO2 emissions have already caused significant global warming and must be severely curtailed to prevent future climate catastrophe.

Since the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change came into force in 1994,
those nations which have ratified the UNFCCC (which include Australia and the
US) send official delegates to annual meetings which are called Conferences of the
Temperature graph
Global Fossil-Fuel Use vs Temperature Change
Source: Klyashtorin and Lyubushin 2003, Energy and Environment, vol. 14, no. 6, Figure 1
6
Parties (COP). They are usually held in December, and attract an influx of about
10,000 lobbyists, activists and media personnel as well as government officials and
ministers. The NGO activists are there to generate press coverage and to stage
media events.
There is a symbiotic relationship between the NGOs, the UN bureaucrats who
comprise the Secretariat, and the delegations from the member governments, most
of whom are well paid senior officials of Departments of the Environment. For many
of these officials, global warming is not only a cause they believe in, but also the
best gravy train they can imagine.
A few days prior to COP 10, held in Buenos Aires in December 2004, the journal
Science published a paper by Dr Naomi Oreskes, a professor in history at the University
of California at San Diego. She claimed to have analysed the abstracts—using
the key words ‘climate change’—of all the scientific papers listed on the ISI database
for the decade 1993–2003. Seventy-five per cent of the 928 abstracts she
analysed (that is, 695) fell into the category, ‘either explicitly or implicitly accepting
the consensus view’. For the first time, empirical evidence was presented that
appeared to show a near unanimous scientific consensus on the anthropogenic causes
of recent global warming.
Dr Benny Peiser from John Moores University at Liverpool decided to replicate the
study. He found that a search on the ISI database using the keywords ‘climate change’
for the years 1993–2003 reveals that almost 12,000 papers were published during
the decade in question. Oreskes then admitted that she had used the keywords
‘global climate change’. This reduced the number of papers under review to 1,247,
of which 1,117 had been abstracted.
Of all 1,117 abstracts, only 13 (one per cent) explicitly endorsed the ‘consensus
view’. However, 34 abstracts rejected or questioned the view that human activities
are the main driving force of ‘the observed warming over the last 50 years’.
Oreskes claimed that ‘none of these papers argued [that current climate change is
natural]’. However, 44 papers emphasised that natural factors play a major if not the
key role in recent climate change.
Dr Peiser sent a letter to Science setting out the results of his investigation. Science
refused to publish the letter.
The Oreskes study is still quoted as evidence supporting the ‘consensus’ argument.
A statement by the Royal Society in March 2005, for instance, used Oreskes’ flawed
study as a key argument in the climate change debate.
Statistical analysis apart, a number of the most eminent scientists in the field of
physics and climate science generally have made scathing criticisms of the IPCC
and of the ‘consensus’ view. One such criticism is from Hendrik Tennekes, the world’s
7
leading authority on the physics of turbulent flow, and recently retired Director of
Research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute:
The climate orthodoxy perpetrates the misconceptions involved by speaking,
as IPCC does, about the Scientific Basis of Climate Change. Since
then, I have responded to that ideology by stating that there is no chance
at all that the physical sciences can produce a universally accepted scientific
basis for policy measures concerning climate change.
Australia’s Garth Paltridge, a distinguished scientist who retired recently from his
post as Director of the Antarctic CRC and IASOS at the University of Tasmania,
commented on the way in which the IPCC and its supporters operate:
Each of the successive summaries [to the IPCC’s Assessment Reports] has
been phrased in such a way as to appear a little more certain than the last
that greenhouse warming is a potential disaster for mankind. The increasing
verbal certainty does not derive from any particular advance of the
science. Rather, it is a function of how strongly a statement about global
warming can be put without inviting a significant backlash from the general
scientific community. Over the years, the opinion of that community
has been manipulated into more-or-less passive support by a deliberate campaign
to isolate—and indeed to denigrate—the scientific sceptics outside
the central activity of the IPCC. The audience has been actively conditioned
into being receptive. It has thereby become gradually easier to sell
the proposition of greenhouse disaster.
After making sceptical comments in the press about the global warming ‘consensus’,
Professor Paltridge was threatened by the CSIRO with major funding cuts to
the Antarctic Research programme for which he was responsible.

5. Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 and the global warming caused thereby are responsible not only for higher temperatures and more droughts than in the past, but also for more blizzards,
unseasonal snow, and freezing weather. They are also responsible for increasing numbers of cyclones.

As the years passed and North America, the UK and Northern Europe experienced
some rather severe winters (but not as severe as the winter of 1946–47), the global
warming story began to look a bit threadbare. So the words ‘climate change’ superseded
‘global warming’, and explanations were put forward as to why increasing
anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide could lead to severe winters as well as
hot summers. The high point of this campaign was the movie The Day After Tomorrow
which showed New York inundated with snow and ice as global warming triggered
the onset of the next ice age.
One of the most frequent arguments in this genre is the shutting down of the Gulf
Stream by global warming with horrendous consequences for all of Europe. Carl
8
Wunsch, Professor of Physical Oceanography at MIT and the world’s leading authority
on ocean currents commented:
The only way to produce an ocean circulation without the Gulf Stream is
either to turn off the wind system, or stop the earth’s rotation, or both.
The Greenpeace protesters at the Montreal COP, held in December 2005, had to
endure blizzard conditions. Mark Steyn, writing in the London Daily Telegraph about
this event, suggested that Montreal had been relocated to
planet Goofy, a strange lost world where it’s perfectly normal for apparently
sane people to walk around protesting about global warming in subzero
temperatures. Or, as the Canadian Press reported: ‘Montreal—tens of
thousands of people ignored frigid temperatures Saturday to lead a worldwide
day of protest against global warming’.
Unfortunately, no one had supplied an updated weather forecast to the
fellow who writes the protesters’ chants. So, to the accompaniment of the
obligatory pseudo-ethnic drummers, the shivering eco-warriors sang: ‘It’s
hot in here! There’s too much carbon in the atmosphere!’ Is this the first
sign of the ‘New Ice Age’ the media warned us about last week?….
But the point is, as Steven Guilbeault of Greenpeace puts it: ‘Global warming
can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter, that’s what
we’re dealing with.’ Got that? If it’s hot, that’s a sign of global warming,
and, if it’s cold, that’s a sign of global warming.
And if it’s just kind of average—say, 9°C, and partially cloudy, as it will be
in Llandudno today—that’s a sign that global warming is accelerating out
of control and you need to flee immediately because time is running out!
‘Time is running out to deal with climate change, says Mr Guilbeault. Ten
years ago, we thought we had a lot of time, five years ago we thought we
had a lot of time, but now science is telling us that we don’t have a lot of
time.’
In recent months Florida, Louisiana and Texas have born the brunt of some severe
cyclones. Katrina, in particular, caused enormous damage in New Orleans. Once
again the global warmers were quick to blame it all on global warming and anthropogenic
emissions. Swiss Re and Munich Re are two very large re-insurance companies
which have been doing all they can to support the argument that anthropogenic
carbon dioxide is the culprit.
There is no evidence at all to support this. There is zero correlation between the
incidence and severity of cyclones with atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Insurance
payouts, of course, have increased greatly. This is because Americans have
been migrating to the warmer south-eastern states. Florida now has a population of
20 million and the value of real estate in that State has increased accordingly.
9


6. Because of anthropogenic emissions, the polar ice caps are melting and sea levels are rising. The rising sea levels threaten low lying island states in the Pacific and Indian Oceans with complete inundation.

Prior to the AP6 meeting in Sydney on 11–12 January 2006 (the Asia Pacific Partnership
on Clean Development and Climate, APPCDC), a serious public relations
exercise was conducted by representatives of the low lying Pacific Island States.
The claim made by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) is that, because of
global warming, sea levels are rising, their islands are being submerged, and in this
particular instance the demand made of the Australian Government was that the
citizens of these states should be given permanent residency visas in Australia.
The problem here again is that there is no evidence to support their claims. The
South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project, funded by AusAID and
managed by the National Tidal Facility (NTF), has found no evidence of rising sea
levels.
Professor Nils Axel-Morner, head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics Department
at Stockholm University, and past president of the INQUA Commission
on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, has debunked rising sea level claims.
His arguments are supported by satellite measurements which show no change in
sea level over the past decade.
Morner and his team did an exhaustive investigation of the claim made by the
IPCC that the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean are at risk from sea level rise
accelerated by global warming. He found considerable evidence that the sea level
in the Maldives has fallen over the past 30 years, and that the islands and their
people survived much higher sea levels in the past. What is rarely mentioned is that
many of these islands are near the boundaries of the earth’s crustal plates, whose
movement is responsible for their uplift or sinking relative to global mean sea level.
The global warmers’ argument for rising sea levels is that the polar ice caps are
melting and therefore sea levels are rising. It is revealing that many global warmers
do not understand that the Arctic Ice Cap, floating as it does in the Arctic Sea,
makes only a small difference whether it is in solid or in liquid form. The solid
form—ice—has a density 90 per cent of the liquid form, which is why it floats—
just—in water.
Whenever rising sea level stories are given a run on TV, we have shots of Antarctic
icebergs calving from the ice shelf. We do not, however, see snow falling onto the
Antarctic Ice Sheets some thousands of metres above sea level where temperatures
are rarely above freezing point. Satellite observations tell us that the Greenland Ice
Sheets are thickening, not diminishing, and that the Antarctic Ice Sheet is close to
balance.
10

7. Unless anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide are reduced by 50–60 per cent of current levels by the year 2050, by 2100 our descendants will have to endure global temperatures
of between 1.4 to 5.8°C warmer than the present.

This claim is at the heart of the global warming scam. It is based on projections
coming out of models run on the most powerful computers which purport to simulate
the behaviour of the atmosphere as it responds to changes in carbon dioxide
concentrations. The claim that computer models can do this and produce meaningful
results is regarded as nonsense by leading scientists in the fields of fluid mechanics,
numerical modelling of complex systems, and climate science.
For example, Hendrik Tennekes, cited above, wrote recently:
the task of finding all nonlinear feedback mechanisms in the microstructure
of the radiation balance probably is at least as daunting as the task of
finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. The blind adherence to the
harebrained idea that climate models can generate ‘realistic’ simulations of
climate is the principal reason why I remain a climate skeptic. From my
background in turbulence I look forward with grim anticipation to the day
that climate models will run with a horizontal resolution of less than a
kilometre. The horrible predictability problems of turbulent flows then will
descend on climate science with a vengeance.
Reid Bryson, Emeritus Professor at the University of Wisconsin, and regarded by
many climatologists as the ‘father of climatology’ has written:
A model is nothing more than a formal statement about how the modeller
believes the part of the world of his concern actually works … it may be
years before computer capacity and human knowledge are adequate for
reasonable simulation … the main models in use all have similar errors,
but it is hardly surprising, for they are all essentially clones of each other.
Australia’s Bill Kininmonth, director of the National Climate Centre from 1986 to
1998, writes:
The apparent ability of the computer models to simulate the global surface
temperatures of the 20th century comes with too many assumptions and
shortcomings. Despite the IPCC advocacy, it is not possible to isolate
anthropogenic greenhouse gases as the cause (or even a major cause) for
the observed warming of the last two and a half decades of the 20th century.
The world-wide advance of mountain glaciers until the mid-19th century,
and their steady retreat since, point toward large-scale natural processes
systematically affecting the climate system over prolonged intervals.
Whether the systematic processes are internal to the climate system, an
outcome of external forcing, or a combination of these, cannot be
determined with any confidence from existing data and analysis tools. As a
corollary, the sensitivity of the earth’s temperature response to greenhouse
11
gas forcing cannot be scaled by reference to the magnitude of recent global
temperature increase and the forcing by anthropogenic greenhouse gases
as represented in computer model simulations of the 20th century.5

8. Tropical diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will spread from the tropics to the temperate regions.

This claim is astonishing in its mendacity. As soon as the IPCC ran this argument
in 1995, it was pointed out, amongst other things, that Oliver Cromwell had died of
malaria in London in September 1658 at a particularly cold period in English history.
Paul Reiter, formerly Chief of the Entomology Section, Dengue Branch, at the
US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in San Juan, Puerto Rico and now
at the Pasteur Institute in Paris has written extensively on malaria in England and
Northern Europe during the seventeenth century.6 His discussion of ‘the ague’ as it
is described in Shakespeare and other contemporary documents, gives a fascinating
insight into the perils of living in swampy areas such as Westminster and the coastal
marshes of the Thames estuary.

In his submission to the House of Lords Inquiry into the Economic Consequences
of Climate Change, Professor Reiter commented on the IPCC’s discussion of malaria
in its Second Assessment Report:

The scientific literature on mosquito-borne diseases is voluminous, yet the
text references in the chapter were restricted to a handful of articles, many
of them relatively obscure, and nearly all suggesting an increase in prevalence
of disease in a warmer climate. The paucity of information was hardly
surprising: not one of the lead authors had ever written a research paper
on the subject! Moreover, two of the authors, both physicians, had spent
their entire career as environmental activists. [One of these has published
‘professional’ articles as an ‘expert’ on 32 different subjects, ranging from
mercury poisoning to land mines, globalization to allergies and West Nile
virus to AIDS].

Among the contributing authors there was one entomologist, plus a person
who had written an obscure article on dengue and El Niño, but whose
principal interest was the effectiveness of motor cycle crash helmets (plus
one paper on the health effects of cell phones).

Reiter has pointed out that malaria and other ‘tropical’ diseases have more to do
with living conditions than temperature. For example he has analysed the Texas–
Mexico border, where dengue fever was prevalent in Mexico and rare in Texas despite
the similar environmental conditions. The only difference was living conditions.
Malaria is making a comeback in Africa, in central Asia, and other parts of the
world suffering from political upheaval. The IPCC’s attempt to link this to global
warming is farcical, but it is a farce with serious consequences.
12

9. Shutting down coal-fired power stations and replacing them with renewable energy sources such as windmills and solar panels (or even nuclear power plants) will not cause unemployment or economic deprivation.

The Environmentalists persist in denying the economic consequences of
decarbonisation. In one particular sense they are theoretically correct. If we were
all to give up our motor cars and ride bicycles instead; if we were content to use
electricity only when the wind was blowing; if we were prepared to give up the use
of fertilizers and tractors; in effect if we were prepared to accept a standard of living
similar to that of our forebears of the early nineteenth century; we could still all be
employed, although working at night would be difficult in the absence of electricity.
In the early 1990s Aaron Wildavsky noted the implications of decarbonisation:
Global warming is the mother of environmental scares. In the scope of its
consequences for life on planet Earth and the immense size of its remedies,
global warming dwarfs all the environmental and safety scares of our time
put together. Warming (and warming alone), through its primary antidote
of withdrawing carbon from production and consumption, is capable of
realizing the environmentalist’s dream of an egalitarian society based on
rejection of economic growth in favour of a smaller population’s eating
lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower
level of resources much more equally.7

The costs of abandoning coal-based electricity in Australia would result in the demise
of most of our export industries, namely, mining, metals processing, agriculture,
and food processing, which are highly energy intensive and thus benefit from
low-cost electricity. The numbers are important. Coal-based power in Australia
costs about $30–$40 per Megawatt hour (MWh). Nuclear power, the only practical
alternative to coal, costs $70–$80 per MWh, about twice what we now pay. Windmills,
which generate electricity when the wind is blowing, cost about $80–$130
per MWh, but require backup from reliable sources which makes them completely
uneconomic. They are currently being built on pristine coast lines and mountain
ranges because of the substantial subsidies which electricity consumers provide to
the operators of these behemoths. The burning of fuels such as bagasse, straw, sawdust,
to generate electricity is commercially attractive when the fuel is essentially a
waste product (eg bagasse), with a negative value. This happens without the need
for legislation or subsidies. Solar power costs anything between $300 and $500 per
MWh and is available when the sun is shining.

A number of economists have climbed onto the global warming bandwagon in order
to promote so-called market mechanisms to reduce carbon emissions. Emissions
trading is a popular proposal. All of these schemes are variants on the market for
taxi-cab licences. Every major city in Australia has a regime of taxi licensing in
which the number of taxis allowed to operate is limited by State regulation. This
creates a scarcity factor which increases the value of the taxi licence, and these licences are traded for sums in the order of $250,000. If the regulation requiring taxi
drivers to have a licence for their taxi was abolished (as happened in New Zealand)
the value of the licence would be zero.

These licences constitute a tax which has to be paid by taxi users. Emission licences for
power stations or petrol refineries would operate in the same way. What is not known is
how great the tax on carbon emissions would have to be to ensure that electricity users
would reduce their consumption by the desired amount. In the first instance, large
electricity users such as aluminium smelters and fertilizer plants would relocate to other
countries. The Australian motor car industry, already under threat from international
competition, would close. And the ripple effect would spread out through the Australian
economy causing unemployment first in one industry and then in another.

The impact of such price increases and consequent economic dislocation would have
political consequences. No government which introduced such a regime of carbon taxation
would survive an election, but the damage that would be wrought in the meantime
would be long-lasting.

Conclusion

The global warming scam has been, arguably, the most extraordinary scientific event
in the post-War period. So many people, and institutions, have been caught up in
the web of deceit, master-minded by environmental activists working through the
NGOs and their manipulation of the IPCC processes, that the integrity of Western
science is seriously at risk. The unravelling of this web will result in the loss of
reputation for many individuals, but more importantly, in the restructuring of those
scientific institutions in Australia and elsewhere which have tied their reputations
to that of the IPCC. That issue is now moving onto the political agenda.

Endnotes
1. Calgary Herald, 14 December 1998.
2. London Daily Telegraph, 6 December 2005.
3. In his book Civilisation, based on the incomparable TV series, Kenneth Clark wrote,
‘There have been times in the history of man when the earth seems suddenly to have
grown warmer or more radioactive…. [one such time] was about the year 1100 that
seemed to affect the whole world but had its most dramatic effect in Western Europe
… The cathedrals of Durham and Canterbury arose out of clusters of wooden houses
… in a single lifetime.
4. See Warwick Hughes’ analysis at: http://www.warwickhughes.com/cool/cool15.htm
5. Bill Kininmonth, Climate Change: A Natural Hazard, Multi-Science Publishing Co.
Ltd, UK, pages 192–3.
6. For example, ‘From Shakespeare to Defoe: Malaria in England in the Little Ice Age’,
available at: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol6no1/reiter.htm
7. ‘Introduction’ to Robert Balling Jr, The Heated Debate, PRIPP, San Francisco, 1992.
The Lavoisier Group is named after the founder of modern chemistry, Antoine-
Laurent Lavoisier, who discovered oxygen, identified carbon dioxide as the product
of combustion of carbon in air, and who laid down the theoretical basis of
modern chemistry. He was also an ingenious experimenter and instrument-maker
who insisted on the highest possible accuracy when taking measurements. He
was executed by the French Revolutionary Government in 1794.
The Lavoisier Group was incorporated in April 2000. At that time, the founders
were concerned that the Australian Government might ratify the Kyoto Protocol
without proper understanding of the scientific claims on which it was based, or
of the economic implications of the decarbonisation regime which ratification
would have required.
In June 2002, Prime Minister John Howard stated in the Parliament that Australia
would not ratify Kyoto because it was ‘not in Australia’s interests to do so’. The
ALP has consistently adhered to a policy of ratification, but having lost the
2004 election, the possibility of Australia’s ratification has been deferred until
2007.
Meanwhile the debate has moved on. The Kyoto Protocol is now almost dead;
only two of its parties can possibly meet the 2012 emissions targets which were
accepted in 1997, and no country is prepared to commit to post-2012 emission
targets. Following a change in government, Canada may now formally withdraw
from the Kyoto Protocol, thus setting an example to be followed by other nations.
Nevertheless, there still exists a huge global network of institutions and scientists
who have hitched their wagons to the global warming star. Although the science
debate is now virtually over, the political debate will continue for years to come.
The Lavoisier Group provides a network and a Website which enables Australians
who are concerned about this issue to keep abreast of developments here and
overseas. Those who sympathise with our aims, and wish to join, can apply for
membership through the Website: www.lavoisier.com.au

Education Malpractice

School row over Al Gore film

By Liz Lightfoot, Education Editor

Last Updated: 2:23am BST 19/04/2007

Parents who claim that an award-winning film on climate change is inaccurate and politically motivated are threatening a legal challenge over the Government's decision to send it to every secondary school.

The film by Al Gore, the former US vice-president, won an Oscar for the best documentary this year and Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, says he wants teachers to use it to stimulate children into discussing climate change and global warming.

But a group of parents in the New Forest say the circulation of the film by the Government amounts to political indoctrination and is in breach of the Education Act 2002. Derek Tipp, their spokesman, has urged Mr Johnson to stop the film being sent out.

He said: "The film goes well beyond the consensus view and is not therefore suitable material to present to children who need to be given clear and balanced, factually accurate information."

Surprise: Biofuels Harm Environment!

Environmental warning on biofuels

The drive to switch over to biofuels could lead to rising food prices and deforestation, a report has warned.

The government and EU have said by the year 2020 they want 10% of all fuel in cars to come from biofuels.

But a study by the Co-op Insurance Society suggests achieving this could have a severe environmental impact.

It comes days after a UN report with similar warnings said that biofuels are more effective when used for heat and power, rather than in transport.

Biofuels can be anything made with vegetable matter that burns.

They are seen as a potential solution to climate change because they can reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

'Radical effects'

The Co-op report claims there is a future for biofuels, but current targets for growing so much fuel could have unintended consequences, BBC correspondent Damian Kahya says.

Professor Dieter Helm, a senior advisor to the British government, told the BBC: "The sort of targets being set for biofuels will have quite radical effects on agriculture and therefore will have very substantial consequences for food prices and agriculture more generally."

The report says that around nine per cent of the world's agricultural land may be needed to replace just 10% of the world's transport fuels.

This means the production of biofuels could lead to a decrease in land available for food production in countries where famine already exists.

"People are felling rainforests to plant crops to grow energy fuels, biofuels," Professor Helm said.
"Think of the energy involved in felling those rainforests. Think about the damage to the climate being done by the loss of those trees. Think about the ploughing and the cultivation of fields.

"Think about the transport of those fuels, and you start to realise the carbon imprints are about much more than simply what happens to grow in a particular field at a particular point in time."

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/6650743.stm

Published: 2007/05/13 04:38:03 GMT

Climate Flip-Flop

May 12, 2007

ERAU professor seeks balance in global warming debate

By MARK HARPER Education Writer

DAYTONA BEACH -- Nick Shipley, an Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University freshman, had just spent a week of classes watching two films with polar-opposite conclusions about global warming.

"After watching 'An Inconvenient Truth,' I was relatively convinced," Shipley said one day last month in class. "(Al Gore) did a good job in presenting his points very methodically one after the other. They all build up to essentially prove his point.

"After watching 'The Great Global Warming Swindle,' my thinking completely changed," he said. "I kind of did a complete flip-flop."

College students aren't the only ones being confronted with climate change, its causes and what -- if anything -- can be done about it.

A Democratic Congress, an Academy Award for "An Inconvenient Truth" and continuing United Nations' proclamations have all contributed to the drumbeat for reducing carbon dioxide emissions as a strategy for fighting global warming. Some scientists are concerned the forces that are shaping debate and making policy decisions are not based on truths -- convenient or not.

James Wanliss, a space physicist who teaches at Embry-Riddle, showed students the two films in an honors course titled "The Politics and Science of Fear" because he said more and more the public is being sold one side of an issue with many dimensions.

"I fear that attempts are being made to purposefully subvert the public understanding of the nature of science in order to achieve political goals," he wrote in an e-mail. "Science is not about consensus, and to invoke this raises the hackles of scientists such as myself. The lure of politics and publicity is no doubt seductive, but it nevertheless amazes me that so many scientists have jumped on the bandwagon of consensus science, apparently forgetting or ignoring the sad history of consensus science."

"An Inconvenient Truth," the documentary starring Gore and a lot of graphs, makes the case that humans have contributed mightily to a 1-degree rise in the Earth's temperature in the last 50 years. It uses images of melting ice caps and dying polar bears to nudge viewers toward action for reasons of morality.

"The Great Global Warming Swindle," an anti-Gore documentary, doesn't question the Earth's temperature increase but takes to task the questions of why and what's next. For example, it suggests solar activity may have more to do with the planet's warming than carbon dioxideemissions.

Wanliss said he doesn't necessarily subscribe to either film, but believes his students -- and the public -- should remain skeptical of theories such as Gore's explanation of global warming.
Other Embry-Riddle scientists are less outspoken than Wanliss, but one -- John Olivero, professor and chairman of the department of physical science -- allowed that skepticism is an essential tool of the scientific method.

"Science lives with internal conflict all the time," Olivero said. "Part of what we have to do is continually challenge each other."

That process, they say, leads scientists closer to truths that may be elusive for lifetimes.

The truths of global warming are, if not inconvenient, incomprehensible, Wanliss argues.

"The atmosphere is incredibly complicated, and we know very little about it," he said. "We are studying a system which is so big . . . we don't know what all the variables are."

Pointing to quotes in magazine articles, Wanliss says Gore and the producers of the "Swindle" film are purposefully overstating their science as a means to a political end.

His views are certainly controversial.

Penelope Canan, a professor of sociology at the University of Central Florida, leans toward Gore's way of thinking.

"There's really no doubt that human activities have altered the global carbon cycle and the natural balances that have thickened the blanket of greenhouse gases that have kept our planet like Baby Bear's soup for thousands of years," she said in an e-mail. "I am certain that the data presented by Al Gore was digested by hundreds of thousands of research hours and peer-reviewed data by the world's leading scientists."

Sam Rabin, a freshman activist at Stetson University who helped screen "An Inconvenient Truth" on his campus, said many policymakers avoid difficult decisions that may come from carbon dioxide emission limitations, while journalists ramp up the skeptics' arguments in the name of balance.

"This is horribly misguided and counterproductive," Rabin wrote in an e-mail. "There is virtually no scientific debate about global warming or its cause."

But Wanliss' students at Embry-Riddle leaned toward the skeptical. The professor said that is an important lesson about science.

"You want certainty, but it's hard to get that," he said. "Science isn't about certainty."

mark.harper@news-jrnl.com

And Your Icky Kids, Too

Children 'bad for planet'

By Sarah-Kate Templeton in London
May 07, 2007 12:00am

HAVING large families should be frowned upon as an environmental misdemeanour in the same way as frequent long-haul flights, driving a big car and failing to reuse plastic bags, says a report to be published today by a green think tank.

The paper by the Optimum Population Trust will say that if couples had two children instead of three they could cut their family's carbon dioxide output by the equivalent of 620 return flights a year between London and New York.

John Guillebaud, co-chairman of OPT and emeritus professor of family planning at University College London, said: "The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights.

"The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child."

In his latest comments, the academic says that when couples are planning a family they should be encouraged to think about the environmental consequences.

"The decision to have children should be seen as a very big one and one that should take the environment into account," he added.

Professor Guillebaud says that, as a general guideline, couples should produce no more than two offspring.

The world's population is expected to increase by 2.5 billion to 9.2 billion by 2050. Almost all the growth will take place in developing countries.

The population of developed nations is expected to remain unchanged and would have declined but for migration.

The British fertility rate is 1.7. The EU average is 1.5. Despite this, Professor Guillebaud says rich countries should be the most concerned about family size as their children have higher per capita carbon dioxide emissions.

The Sunday Times

Too Many Icky Humans

Eco-Extremist Wants World Population to Drop below 1 Billion

Sea Shepherd founder says mankind is a 'virus' and we need to 're-wild the planet.'

By Dan Gainor
The Boone Pickens Free Market Fellow
Business & Media Institute
5/6/2007 7:41:33 PM

Apparently, saving the whales is more important than saving 5.5 billion people. Paul Watson, founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and famous for militant intervention to stop whalers, now warns mankind is “acting like a virus” and is harming Mother Earth.

Watson’s May 4 editorial asked the question “The Beginning of the End for Life as We Know it on Planet Earth?” Then he left no doubt about the answer. “We are killing our host the planet Earth,” he claimed and called for a population drop to less than 1 billion.

The commentary reminded readers that Watson had called humans a disease before and he wasn’t sorry. “I was once severely criticized for describing human beings as being the ‘AIDS of the Earth.’ I make no apologies for that statement,” the column continued.

Watson was invoking the worst of Robert Malthus, an English political economist who claimed that mankind was overpopulating the earth. That claimed first appeared in the late 1700s. Watson urged some solutions for mankind as part of a process to “need to re-wild the planet”:

· “No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas.” New York, London, Paris, Moscow are all too big. Then again, so are Moose Jaw, Timbuktu and even Annapolis, Md.

· “We need vast areas of the planet where humans do not live at all and where other species are free to evolve without human interference.”

· “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.”

· “Sea transportation should be by sail. The big clippers were the finest ships ever built and sufficient to our needs. Air transportation should be by solar powered blimps when air transportation is necessary.”

· At least Watson was generous and said people could still talk with one another across great distances. “Communication systems can link the communities,” he proclaimed from on high.

The Watson rant kept on going calling for everything from cutting down on the population of domesticated dogs and cats to cutting down on everything else in what he called “simplify, simplify, simplify.”

Watson essentially called for humans to return to primitive lifestyles. “We need to stop flying, stop driving cars, and jetting around on marine recreational vehicles. The Mennonites survive without cars and so can the rest of us."

Climate Heretic Disses CO2

The Faithful Heretic

A Wisconsin Icon Pursues Tough Questions

Some people are lucky enough to enjoy their work, some are lucky enough to love it, and then there’s Reid Bryson. At age 86, he’s still hard at it every day, delving into the science some say he invented.

Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the history of American education. Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology—now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences—in the 1970s he became the first director of what’s now the UW’s Gaylord Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies. He’s a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor—created, the U.N. says, to recognize “outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment.” He has authored five books and more than 230 other publications and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world.

Long ago in the Army Air Corps, Bryson and a colleague prepared the aviation weather forecast that predicted discovery of the jet stream by a group of B-29s flying to and from Tokyo. Their warning to expect westerly winds at 168 knots earned Bryson and his friend a chewing out from a general—and the general’s apology the next day when he learned they were right. Bryson flew into a couple of typhoons in 1944, three years before the Weather Service officially did such things, and he prepared the forecast for the homeward flight of the Enola Gay. Back in Wisconsin, he built a program at the UW that’s trained some of the nation’s leading climatologists.

How Little We Know

Bryson is a believer in climate change, in that he’s as quick as anyone to acknowledge that Earth’s climate has done nothing but change throughout the planet’s existence. In fact, he took that knowledge a big step further, earlier than probably anyone else. Almost 40 years ago, Bryson stood before the American Association for the Advancement of Science and presented a paper saying human activity could alter climate.

“I was laughed off the platform for saying that,” he told Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News.
In the 1960s, Bryson’s idea was widely considered a radical proposition. But nowadays things have turned almost in the opposite direction: Hardly a day passes without some authority figure claiming that whatever the climate happens to be doing, human activity must be part of the explanation. And once again, Bryson is challenging the conventional wisdom.

“Climate’s always been changing and it’s been changing rapidly at various times, and so something was making it change in the past,” he told us in an interview this past winter. “Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay?”

“All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd,” Bryson continues. “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.”

Little Ice Age? That’s what chased the Vikings out of Greenland after they’d farmed there for a few hundred years during the Mediaeval Warm Period, an earlier run of a few centuries when the planet was very likely warmer than it is now, without any help from industrial activity in making it that way. What’s called “proxy evidence”—assorted clues extrapolated from marine sediment cores, pollen specimens, and tree-ring data—helps reconstruct the climate in those times before instrumental temperature records existed.

We ask about that evidence, but Bryson says it’s second-tier stuff. “Don’t talk about proxies,” he says. “We have written evidence, eyeball evidence. When Eric the Red went to Greenland, how did he get there? It’s all written down.”

Bryson describes the navigational instructions provided for Norse mariners making their way from Europe to their settlements in Greenland. The place was named for a reason: The Norse farmed there from the 10th century to the 13th, a somewhat longer period than the United States has existed. But around 1200 the mariners’ instructions changed in a big way. Ice became a major navigational reference. Today, old Viking farmsteads are covered by glaciers.
Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for current headlines. “What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps?”

We recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and agricultural water-management structures had been discovered emerging from the ice, seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of years. Bryson interrupts excitedly.

“A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never went,” he says. “There used to be less ice than now. It’s just getting back to normal.”

What Leads, What Follows?

What is normal? Maybe continuous change is the only thing that qualifies. There’s been warming over the past 150 years and even though it’s less than one degree, Celsius, something had to cause it. The usual suspect is the “greenhouse effect,” various atmospheric gases trapping solar energy, preventing it being reflected back into space.

We ask Bryson what could be making the key difference:

Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?

A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?

Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor…

A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.

This begs questions about the widely publicized mathematical models researchers run through supercomputers to generate climate scenarios 50 or 100 years in the future. Bryson says the data fed into the computers overemphasizes carbon dioxide and accounts poorly for the effects of clouds—water vapor. Asked to evaluate the models’ long-range predictive ability, he answers with another question: “Do you believe a five-day forecast?”

Bryson says he looks in the opposite direction, at past climate conditions, for clues to future climate behavior. Trying that approach in the weeks following our interview, Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News soon found six separate papers about Antarctic ice core studies, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1999 and 2006. The ice core data allowed researchers to examine multiple climate changes reaching back over the past 650,000 years. All six studies found atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations tracking closely with temperatures, but with CO2 lagging behind changes in temperature, rather than leading them. The time lag between temperatures moving up—or down—and carbon dioxide following ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand years.

Renaissance Man, Marathon Man

When others were laughing at the concept, Reid Bryson was laying the ground floor for scientific investigation of human impacts on climate. We asked UW Professor Ed Hopkins, the assistant state climatologist, about the significance of Bryson’s work in advancing the science he’s now practiced for six decades.

“His contributions are manifold,” Hopkins said. “He wrote Climates of Hunger back in the 1970s looking at how climate changes over the last several thousand years have affected human activity and human cultures.”

This, he suggests, is traceable to Bryson’s high-school interest in archaeology, followed by college degrees in geology, then meteorology, and studies in oceanography, limnology, and other disciplines. “He’s looked at the interconnections of all these things and their impact on human societies,” Hopkins says. “He’s one of those people I would say is a Renaissance person.”
The Renaissance, of course, produced its share of heretics, and 21 years after he supposedly retired, one could ponder whether Bryson’s work today is a tale of continuing heresy, or of conventional wisdom being outpaced by an octogenarian.

Without addressing—or being asked—that question, UW Green Bay Emeritus Professor Joseph Moran agrees that Bryson qualifies as “the father of the science of modern climatology.”
“In his lifetime, in his career, he has shaped the future as well as the present state of climatology,” Moran says, adding, “We’re going to see his legacy with us for many generations to come.”

Holding bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston College, Moran became a doctoral candidate under Bryson in the late 1960s and early ’70s. “I came to Wisconsin because he was there,” Moran told us.

With Hopkins, Moran co-authored Wisconsin’s Weather and Climate, a book aimed at teachers, students, outdoor enthusiasts, and workers with a need to understand what the weather does and why. Bryson wrote a preface for the book but Hopkins told us the editors “couldn’t fathom” certain comments, thinking he was being too flippant with the remark that “Wisconsin is not for wimps when it comes to weather.”

Clearly what those editors couldn’t fathom was that Bryson simply enjoys mulling over the reasons weather and climate behave as they do and what might make them—and consequently us—behave differently. This was immediately obvious when we asked him why, at his age, he keeps showing up for work at a job he’s no longer paid to do.

“It’s fun!” he said. Ed Hopkins and Joe Moran would undoubtedly agree.

“I think that’s one of the reasons for his longevity,” Moran says. “He’s so interested and inquisitive. I regard him as a pot-stirrer. Sometimes people don’t react well when you challenge their long-held ideas, but that’s how real science takes place.”

—Dave Hoopman

Some Inconvenient Truths About Al Gore

The inside track on "Cousin Albert"

By Stephen Marshall

Published: Thursday May 25th, 2006

Editor’s note: With the release of his global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore has reemerged as one of the Democratic Party’s most high-profile stars. Despite his repeated statements that he is a “recovering politician” and is not interested in running for office, many believe Gore will throw his hat into the presidential ring come 2008. But despite his many years in high elected office, what do we really know about Gore’s politics? In this exclusive excerpt from his forthcoming book Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing (Disinfo, Jan. 2007), GNN’s Stephen Marshall talks with Gore Vidal about some inconvenient truths about his relative:

While his “cousin Albert” has effortlessly inhabited the vestments of a liberal politician, to hear Gore Vidal tell it, the former Vice President’s liberalism is merely a prop developed to bring him to the head of the Democratic Party.

“Well, although we are cousins, and I was a friend of his father’s, I’ve always thought he was absolutely pointless as a politician. He’s just another conservative southerner.”

In fact, Al Gore’s voting record as a senator was surprisingly conservative until he rolled his eye toward the White House. Throughout most of his career, he was pro-life and had an 84% anti-abortion rating from the National Right to Life Committee. From 1979 – 81, he voted five times on the side of a Republican sponsored rider that granted a tax exemption for schools like Bob Jones University that discriminate on the basis of race. He was openly anti-gay, calling homosexuality “abnormal” and “wrong,” and telling the Tennessean in 1984 that he did “not believe it is simply an acceptable alternative that society should affirm.” Gore was such a strong supporter of the gun lobby – ultimately voting against the critical 1985 legislation for a mandatory 14-day waiting period for handgun purchases – that National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre once said, “We could have made Al Gore NRA Man of the Year – every single vote.” Finally, when it came time to vote on conservative Supreme Court nominees, Gore publicly praised but voted against the scandal-ridden Clarence Thomas. He voted in Antonin Scalia. If the wider public had been more aware of his legacy, few would have recognized the Al Gore of 1988 who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Pulling his hat down so that his eyes are shadowed from the sun, Vidal continues his effortless assault on Al Gore: “Another border-state, southern lover of the Pentagon…there was never anything the Pentagon asked for that Cousin Albert wasn’t down there giving it to them; he voted for the first war in the Gulf.”

Indeed, Al Gore was one of only ten Democrats to break with the party and vote for President Bush Sr.’s Gulf War in 1991. But while Vidal sees this as a facet of Gore’s eager-to-please statism, others have attributed his dissenting vote to self-interest. Former Republican Senator Alan Simpson accused Gore of peddling his vote on the Iraq War in exchange for high-visibility, headline-grabbing speech time on the floor. According to Simpson, the night before the vote Gore stopped by the GOP cloakroom and asked, “How much time will you give me if I support the President?” Taking him at his word, Simpson and Senator Bob Dole offered Gore twenty minutes, thirteen more than his own party would grant. In Simpson’s account, over the course of the night Gore jockeyed to have the floor during prime time to ensure that he would get coverage in the next day’s news cycle. The negotiations went right up to the last minute, leaving Simpson to conclude that Gore “arrived on the Senate floor with… two speeches in hand. [He] was still waiting to see which side – Republicans or Democrats – would offer him the most and the best speaking time.”

For Vidal, stories like this just prove the moral bankruptcy of American politicians who serve no master other than their own ambition. And their corporate backers. In Gore’s case, this meant Russian-born oil tycoon Armand Hammer, owner of Occidental Petroleum. Though it was Gore’s father, Senator Al Gore Sr. who was the primary beneficiary of Hammer’s support – in exchange for political and diplomatic favors to further his international business interests – Gore Jr. slipped quietly into his father’s shoes.

Occidental is one of the worst corporate polluters in the world. In its most scandalous case, an Occidental subsidiary dumped thousands of tons of toxic chemical waste near the residential area of Love Canal, New York, causing birth defects, miscarriages, and incidences of cancer in the nearby community. But Gore remained a friend of the company. And the company, a good friend to Al Gore.

Despite being a predominantly Republican supporter, Occidental funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to the Clinton/Gore Democrats over the course of their two-term administration. In return, Gore maneuvered to facilitate Occidental’s acquisition of oil drilling rights in the Elk Hills National Petroleum Reserve outside Bakersfield, California. Long held as a federal oil resource, Elk Hills represented the largest turnover of public lands to a private corporation in American history. It tripled Occidental’s U.S. petroleum reserves, increasing the company’s stock value by ten percent. Gore later admitted to controlling between $250,000 – $500,000 worth of shares through a family held trust.

Gore’s vaunted record as an environmental populist clashed harshly with the 1996 Elk Hills-Occidental deal. Democratic fund-raiser (and former Gore campaign manager) Tony Cohelo sat on the board of the private company hired to provide an environmental impact report for the Energy Department. After the deal was approved, Peter Eisner of the DC-based Center for Public Integrity remarked, “I can’t say that I’ve ever seen an environmental assessment prepared so quickly.” Perhaps even more damning, Elk Hills is part of the Kitanemuk people’s traditional lands. Despite protests from the tribe, it took less than five years for Occidental’s massive operations to wipe out any trace of the 100 native archaeological sites, including ancient burial grounds, that were left in Elk Hills.

Throughout Al Gore’s campaign for the 2000 Democratic presidential candidacy, environmentalists protested his relationship to Occidental. This time the issue was Gore’s defense of the company’s plan to drill near the sacred grounds of the Colombian U’wa tribes people. During Clinton’s second term, Occidental spent millions lobbying for American military aide to Colombia in order to bolster the country’s ability to defend its pipelines from rebel armies. The close links between the company and national security forces surfaced when U’wa leaders sued Occidental, claiming the Colombian army used the company’s planes in an operation that ultimately resulted in the murder of 18 innocent peasants. As a measure of last resort, the 5,000 remaining U’wa threatened collective suicide if Occidental refused to alter their drilling plans. And, in February 2000, when U’wa representative Robert Perez traveled to Washington in order to make his people’s case against the company, Gore refused to meet him. In 2002, after a protracted public battle over the U’wa drill site, Occidental pulled out, saying that U’wa protests had “no effect at all” on Occidental’s withdrawal decision. Apparently, neither did Al Gore.

But, for Vidal, the act that most proves Gore’s contempt for representative politics was his total acquiescence in the face of the contested 2000 presidential election result in Florida. The image of Gore presiding over the certification of Bush’s victory was a moving, if tragic, scene in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. There he stood, banging his gavel as each successive member of the Congressional Black Caucus rose to challenge the assignment of Florida’s 25 electoral votes to Bush. “There was a hell of a lot of people ready to march,” Vidal says defiantly. But Al Gore wasn’t one of them.

“He is of above average intelligence, on issues that people didn’t really care about, like the environment. But if there’s a hot issue, he runs the mile,” Vidal concludes firmly and then, looking up at the clouds that have moved over the sun, rises.

GNN co-founder Stephen Marshall is the director of BattleGround: 21 Days on the Empire’s Edge, and This Revolution, a political thriller starring Rosario Dawson, and the co-author of True Lies (Penguin/Plume). He is currently shooting a new documentary entitled Holy Wars and finishing a new book entitled Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing, due out in January 2007.

Al Gore's Environmentally Shabby Past

February 22, 2007

Global warming detractor defends himself

Ed Jackson of Chatfield has been a dart board of criticism on our Opinions Page since we published his letter a week or so ago in which he pooh-poohed global warming. Ed wants a chance to defend himself...

Hey, three long derisive letters against my one short, lighthearted effort?

No fair, Post-Bulletin. What's next? Are you going to bring out the big guns like Paul Klugman and Ellen Goodman to ridicule me, too? (Oops, sorry. I forgot that liberals hate guns.)

I don't suppose you want to give me any more ink, but I can't let these unfortunate and uninformed people attack me without rebuttal, no matter how well-intentioned they may be. (Have you noticed that environmentalists and other liberals have no sense of humor? With them, everything is doom and gloom 24/7/365, and 366 in a Leap Year. Maybe they could resolve to lighten up at least every February 29. I guess itís hard to laugh when youíre always waiting for the sky to fall. But I digress.)

We do need to look seriously at the many sides of this global warming debate, so here goes another try to bring some light where now there is mostly heat (heh, heh). Does anyone out there remember the story of the Six Blind Men and the Elephant? (Oops, sorry, I meant 'Visually Challenged.')

First, let me tell you why I referred to the 'pseudo-scientists'. These are people who have politicized science. This was a method favored by the Bolsheviks who believed that crop genetics would improve under the sheer will power of Communist thought.

Today, there are people who either don't know what the true scientific method is, or have chosen for ideological reasons to abandon it. Having learned at a young age to look at things through scientific eyes, I know that hypothesis and theory are the not same thing, even though these terms are often used interchangeably in common parlance, especially by so-called journalists who are notoriously deficient in scientific knowledge.

Second, about consensus: While a hypothesis might be based on a consensus that there is something to investigate, theory is not. Theory is only based on honest investigation, fact and replicable cause and effectñor in other words, provable, objective truth. If every consensus made truth, the earth would still be flat, the West Indies would be next to India, man would never fly, humans would never walk on the moon, and viruses could be treated with antibiotics. We also would now be in the midst of the Ice Age some of these same people were agonizing about 30 years ago.

Third, I would like to address the issue of future generations. Yes, I worry about my descendants, I worry about them often and very much. And I do have children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, one only a few weeks old. But my concern about them is not based on climate change, but on the fear of demagogic politicians, ideological 'scientists,' and mushy- headed go-gooders and elites who think they have the divine right to tell the rest of the world how to live, what to eat, what to drive, how to spend our own money, and generally everything we can and can't do. I even worry about the world my wife and I will have to experience in our few remaining years as our nation creeps inexorably into socialism.

Fourth, good old Al Gore.

Now there is a study in hypocrisy if there ever was one. Has the main stream media ever told you about Gore's background and financial holdings? The story of all this is too long to cover here. But suffice to say that Al Gore's father, Al Gore Sr., (the first Senator Gore from Tennessee) developed close ties with Armand Hammer and Occidental Petroleum. Through inheritance Gore ended up controlling a big block of Occidental stock and also continued his father's coziness with Occidental. While serving as Vice-President, Gore is reported to have engineered the sale of the federal government's Elk Hills Naval Petroleum Reserve to Occidental, not only enriching himself, but setting up environmental destruction on a grand scale.

The Reserve was rich in Indian archaeological and burial sites, as well as sensitive plant and animal habitat areas. According to published reports, it took Occidental less than five years to obliterate more than 100 native American archaeological sites and burial grounds. (Look up 'Kitanemuk' tribes and especially go to

http://gnn.tv/print/2301/Some_Inconvenient_Truths_About_Al_Gore.

If you are paying any attention to the world around you, you know that 'The Nation' is about the most liberal rag of all the liberal press. During the 2000 Presidential campaign, the magazine published a lengthy article by Ken Silverstein about Al Gore's sweetheart relationship with Occidental Petroleum, and about his involvement with environment destruction not only in the Elk Hills Reserve but also in Colombia, South America.

Look up 'Gore's Oil Money' in 'The Nation.'

Also look up 'U'wa tribe.'

Especially see:

http://thirdworldtraveler.com/Oil_watch/Colombias_Oil_War.html,

which details Gore's involvement in the South American scandal, which resulted in 5,000 U'was pledging to commit mass suicide rather than let Occidental drill. There is lots more on the web if anyone wants to look for it.

You will also find great support for Gore, including some who deny that Gore ever owned any Occidental stock. Why then, did he report holding between $500,000 and $1,000,000 in such stock on his mandatory senatorial financial reports?

Oh, and while youíre at it, look up 'Love Canal.'

Many readers will remember this scandal, the responsibility for which ended up at the feet of Occidental Petroleum, who had to pay $60 million to help clean it up. This is the kind of company Al Gore keeps while ranting and raving about environmental pollution and global warming. If I remember correctly, Al Gore tried to make political hay from this atrocity, all the while knowing his buddies were responsible for it. He claimed to have discovered and revealed the problem, when in fact it had been made public months before he ever thought of trying to capitalize on it.

There is much more to look at, but this is getting too long anyway. If you are inclined to be a seeker of truth and wisdom, instead of slogans and emotions, do some research on your own—read books, look at opposing viewpoints. Try to sort out provable truth from emotional feelings. Look to see how many doom and gloom ideas lend themselves so conveniently to anti-capitalist, anti-corporate and anti-American solutions. Be careful who you take your education from. Take advantage of the vast resources found on the internet. You will see a lot of trash and irrational emotion there, but you can also find truth, rationality and wisdom.

(One more subject to look up is the 'Medieval Warm Period.' Another is Dr. Timothy Ball on http://canadafreepress.com.)

If nothing else, you will see opposing viewpoints, and that's a good thing. I know this is too long to be a 'letter to the editor', but if you are interested in providing a few facts and different viewpoints, you could run it as a free-lance contribution, the same as you have done with Paul Scott with his recent screed about government control of private property. Being a good money-grubbing conservative, I should ask for payment, but I won't.

Ed Jackson

A freelance writer from Chatfield, MN

Dems Shift Intelligence Funds to Global Warming

The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com

House GOP hits shift of spy funds to study climate

By Christina Bellantoni
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Published May 4, 2007


Senior House Republicans are complaining about Democrats' plans to divert "scarce" intelligence funds to study global warming.

The House next week will consider the Democrat-crafted Intelligence Authorization bill, which includes a provision directing an assessment of the effects that climate change has on national security.

"Our job is to steal secrets," said Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the ranking Republican on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

"There are all kinds of people analyzing global warming, the Democrats even have a special committee on this," he told The Washington Times.

"There's no value added by the intelligence community here; they have no special expertise, and this takes money and resources away from other threats."

Democrats, who outnumber Republicans on the committee, blocked the minority from stripping the warming language from the bill.

Intelligence panel Chairman Silvestre Reyes, Texas Democrat, said the climate-change study is one of several shifts his party has made to intelligence policy.

"We're concerned that global warming might impact our ability to maintain national security," he told The Times, describing the idea as "cutting edge."

"We want to get feedback from the intelligence community to understand if there are possible global issues," Mr. Reyes said, noting the change was on the advice of "several former military commanders."

The panel voted 11-9 to keep the provision that directs a National Intelligence Estimate "on the anticipated geopolitical effects of global climate change and the implications of such effects on the national security of the United States," according to a Republican staffer familiar with the bill.

The study, which so far has an undetermined cost, would examine the science of climate change, among other things. Few details about its method were available, but the staffer said it would "divert already scarce resources to study the climate."

The staffer added that the U.S. already tried using intelligence resources for this purpose in the 1990s.

"There are other parts of the government better suited to doing this type of study," agreed Rep. Darrell Issa, California Republican. "Our government should not commit expensive spy satellites and human intelligence sources to target something as undefined as the environment."

The Clinton administration's Director of Central Intelligence created the DCI Environmental Center in 1997 to examine environmental issues.

In 1999, President Clinton announced he was declassifying satellite images of Antarctica captured by the intelligence community under an initiative to make public previously classified data.

A Clinton White House press release outlines Vice President Al Gore's role in making sure that 59 satellite images of the Arctic were released to "help scientists better understand the interaction between polar ice caps and global warming."

"Together with data gathered on the ground, the newly released images will help scientists better understand ecological dynamics in this extreme environment and their response to climate change," the release read.

Several Republicans trotted out the statistic that the government already spends $6.5 billion annually on global-warming related issues through several agencies, including NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency.

But Mr. Reyes said the provision "makes sense" because of the growing international concern over climate change. "We think it's time," he said.

Republicans were critical yesterday after The Times first reported the provision on its Web site.

"It's hard to imagine how anyone could believe that climate change represents a more clear and present danger to the United States than radical Islamic terrorists armed with bombs, but that's essentially what Democrats have concluded in this bill," said Brian Kennedy, a spokesman for Minority Leader John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican.

The House is expected to vote Wednesday or Thursday on the overall authorization measure, which identifies how intelligence appropriations can be spent in 2008. It is not clear whether Democrats will allow Republicans to offer amendments to the bill.

Last year, the Republican-controlled Senate failed to pass its Intelligence Authorization bill.

Mr. Reyes lauded his panel's work on the bill, noting that it will lead to "stronger, better intelligence," especially by adding money for human intelligence training and for sending analysts abroad.

For the first time, the bill will fund a "baseline" for intelligence activities related to terrorism and Iraq, he said.

He also said it will strengthen counterintelligence, enhance oversight and eliminate wasteful spending.

The completed bill, mostly considered behind closed doors because it includes sensitive information, passed the committee on a voice vote after a more-than-eight-hour markup session. Observers characterized the hearing as "chaotic and contentious."