Climate Socrates

"Activism" Trumps Science

2010-10-12T19:48:00.000-07:00

A letter to the San Jose Mercury News:

Sharon Noguchi's understanding of "global warming" seems a bit sketchy.

Instead of writing adoring paeans to the genius of college sophomores making cardboard playhouses incorporating "emission free" batteries (where does the lead in batteries come from?) perhaps Ms. Noguchi should spend a bit of quality intellectual time with Emeritus Professor of Physics Harold Lewis, formerly a fellow of the American Physics Society (APS).

As a starting point for Sharon's desperately needed education, Professor Lewis could begin by explaining some facts about global warming and Big Science: " It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist."

Ms. Noguchi appears not to know or even suspect that there might be some valid scientific issues that call into question the actual scientific reality of "human caused global warming", and therefore, the need for goofy, pointless, and wasteful cult rituals like "Earth Day", "The California Global Warming Act", "Global Work Party" and other feel good nonsense.

President Bush Enjoys the Olympics

2008-08-11T13:17:00.000-07:00

Climate Expert Calls for "Carbonless Planet"

2008-07-26T14:23:00.000-07:00

Internationally known climate expert, Thurston Thatcher Hedgewick, has proposed a bold plan to reduce the earth's carbon footprint to zero.

"The reason we all have to worry ourselves sick over having a large carbon footprint is simply because there is too much carbon," declared Hedgewick, an environmentalist and community organizer.

"Carbon is the fourth most abundant element in the universe, but it is far less abundant on earth. That proves we can exist just fine without a lot of carbon. We probably can't do much about the universe just yet, but we CAN do something about planet earth."

"From a science perspective," said the Hedgewick, "we know how to get rid of carbon: we just ship it to Mars or Venus, or dump it into space."

"There will be some engineering problems to be overcome, but we've solved those kinds of problems before".

Hedgewick estimates that the earth is made up of about 0.02 percent carbon by mass.

"That's a nit", explains Hedgewick. "We could pack it all into a ball the size a small asteroid and jettison it out into space."

"And once we do, we've solved a whole lot of problems: No carbon footprints. No global warming. No melting icecaps. No Kyoto Conferences. No Congressional Hearings. No carbon taxes. It's amazing how much we gain as a planet by going carbonless".

NYT: In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm

2008-01-02T16:54:00.000-08:00

January 1, 2008

Findings

In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm

By JOHN TIERNEY

I’d like to wish you a happy New Year, but I’m afraid I have a different sort of prediction.
You’re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change — and that these images are a mere preview of what’s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.

Unfortunately, I can’t be more specific. I don’t know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.

But there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).

Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.

A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on record. At year’s end, even though the British scientists reported the global temperature average was not a new record — it was actually lower than any year since 2001 — the BBC confidently proclaimed, “2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend.”

When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has warmed.

When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, it was supposed to be a harbinger of the stormier world predicted by some climate modelers. When the next two hurricane seasons were fairly calm — by some measures, last season in the Northern Hemisphere was the calmest in three decades — the availability entrepreneurs changed the subject. Droughts in California and Australia became the new harbingers of climate change (never mind that a warmer planet is projected to have more, not less, precipitation over all).

The most charitable excuse for this bias in weather divination is that the entrepreneurs are trying to offset another bias. The planet has indeed gotten warmer, and it is projected to keep warming because of greenhouse emissions, but this process is too slow to make much impact on the public.

When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what’s called the availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of it are readily available in our minds. Thus we overestimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash because we’ve seen such dramatic deaths so often on television; we underestimate the risks of dying from a stroke because we don’t have so many vivid images readily available.

Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an “availability cascade,” a term coined by Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and law at the University of Southern California, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and “The China Syndrome,” minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy.

“Many people concerned about climate change,” Dr. Sunstein says, “want to create an availability cascade by fixing an incident in people’s minds. Hurricane Katrina is just an early example; there will be others. I don’t doubt that climate change is real and that it presents a serious threat, but there’s a danger that any ‘consensus’ on particular events or specific findings is, in part, a cascade.”

Once a cascade is under way, it becomes tough to sort out risks because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global warming, there’s not much interest in hearing other explanations of why the ice is melting — or why the globe’s other pole isn’t melting, too.
Global warming has an impact on both polar regions, but they’re also strongly influenced by regional weather patterns and ocean currents. Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention — and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.

Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, recently noted the very different reception received last year by two conflicting papers on the link between hurricanes and global warming. He counted 79 news articles about a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and only 3 news articles about one in a far more prestigious journal, Nature.

Guess which paper jibed with the theory — and image of Katrina — presented by Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth”?

It was, of course, the paper in the more obscure journal, which suggested that global warming is creating more hurricanes. The paper in Nature concluded that global warming has a minimal effect on hurricanes. It was published in December — by coincidence, the same week that Mr. Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize.

In his acceptance speech, Mr. Gore didn’t dwell on the complexities of the hurricane debate. Nor, in his roundup of the 2007 weather, did he mention how calm the hurricane season had been. Instead, he alluded somewhat mysteriously to “stronger storms in the Atlantic and Pacific,” and focused on other kinds of disasters, like “massive droughts” and “massive flooding.”
“In the last few months,” Mr. Gore said, “it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter.” But he was being too modest. Thanks to availability entrepreneurs like him, misinterpreting the weather is getting easier and easier.

Global Warming Will Save America from the Right...Eventually

2007-12-27T10:47:00.000-08:00

COMMENTARY:

Global Warming Will Save America from the Right...Eventually
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by Dave Lindorff
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The future political map of America is likely to look a lot different, with much of the so-called “red” state region either gone or depopulated.Sat., 12/22/2007 - 19:21—Say what you will about the looming catastrophe facing the world as the pace of global heating and polar melting accelerates. There is a silver lining.

Look at a map of the US.

The area that will by completely inundated by the rising ocean—and not in a century but in the lifetime of my two cats—are the American southeast, including the most populated area of Texas, almost all of Florida, most of Louisiana, and half of Alabama and Mississippi, as well as goodly portions of eastern Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. While the northeast will also see some coastal flooding, its geography is such that that aside from a few projecting sandbars like Long Island and Cape Cod, the land rises fairly quickly to well above sea level. Sure, Boston, New York and Philadelphia will be threatened, but these are geographically confined areas that could lend themselves to protection by Dutch-style dikes. The West Coast too tends to rise rapidly to well above sea level in most places. Only down in Southern California towards the San Diego area is the ground closer to sea level.

So what we see is that huge swaths of conservative America are set to face a biblical deluge in a few more presidential cycles.

Then there’s the matter of the Midwest, which climate experts say is likely to face a permanent condition of unprecedented drought, making the place largely unlivable, and certainly unfarmable. The agribusinesses and conservative farmers that have been growing corn and wheat may be able to stretch out this doomsday scenario by deep well drilling, but west of the Mississippi, the vast Ogallala Aquifer that has allowed for such irrigation is already being tapped out. It will not be replaced.

So again, we will see the decline and depopulation of the nation’s vast midsection—noted for its consistent conservatism. Only in the northernmost area, around the Great Lakes (which will be not so great anymore), and along the Canadian border, will there still be enough rain for farming and continued large population concentrations, but those regions, like Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois, are also more liberal in their politics.

Finally, in the Southwest, already parched and stiflingly hot, the rise in energy costs and the soaring temperatures will put an end to right-wing retirement communities like Phoenix, Tucson and Palm Springs. Already the Salton Sea is fading away and putting Palm Springs on notice that the good times are coming to an end. Another right-wing haven soon to be gone.
So the future political map of America is likely to look as different as the much shrunken geographical map, with much of the so-called “red” state region either gone or depopulated.
There is a poetic justice to this of course. It is conservatives who are giving us the candidates who steadfastly refuse to have the nation take steps that could slow the pace of climate change, so it is appropriate that they should bear the brunt of its impact.

The important thing is that we, on the higher ground both actually and figuratively, need to remember that, when they begin their historic migration from their doomed regions, we not give them the keys to the city. They certainly should be offered assistance in their time of need, but we need to keep a firm grip on our political systems, making sure that these guilty throngs who allowed the world to go to hell are gerrymandered into political impotence in their new homes.
There will be much work to be done to help the earth and its residents—human and non-human—survive this man-made catastrophe, and we can’t have these future refugee troglodytes, should their personal disasters still fail to make them recognize reality, mucking things up again.

It should be considered acceptable, in this stifling new world, to say, “Shut up. We told you this would happen.”

U.N. Blackballs International Scientists from Climate Change Conference

2007-12-11T14:35:00.000-08:00

U.N. Blackballs International Scientists from Climate Change Conference

Voice of dissent excluded from participation in Bali

Author: Tom Swiss
Published by: The Heartland Institute
Published in: News Releases
Publication date: December 2007

(CHICAGO, Illinois - December 5, 2007) -- The United Nations has rejected all attempts by a group of dissenting scientists seeking to present information at the climate change conference taking place in Bali, Indonesia.

The International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) has been denied the opportunity to present at panel discussions, side events, and exhibits; its members were denied press credentials. The group consists of distinguished scientists from Africa, Australia, India, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The scientists, citing pivotal evidence on climate change published in peer-reviewed journals, have expressed their opposition to the UN's alarmist theory of anthropogenic global warming. As the debate on man-made global warming has been heating up, the UN has tried to freeze out the scientists and new evidence, summarily dismissing them with the claim "the science is settled."

James M. Taylor, senior fellow for The Heartland Institute explained, "It is not surprising the UN has completely rejected dissenting voices. They have been doing this for years. The censorship of scientists is necessary to promote their political agenda. After the science reversed on the alarmist crowd, they claimed 'the debate is over' to serve their wealth redistribution agenda."

Taylor continued, "For example, ICSC scientist Dr. Vincent Gray recently published Unsound Science by the IPCC, which proves the main claims by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are scientifically unsound. Dr. Gray is an expert reviewer for the IPCC and has submitted more than 1,800 comments on IPCC reports. He is an expert on the IPCC methodology and published Spinning the Climate.

"Dr. Gray is the last person the politicized UN wants speaking," Taylor noted. "He single-handedly debunks the entire alarmist theory. And there are more than 600 Dr. Grays trying to be the voice of reason and science. All are being censored."

Tayor said, "The ICSC scientists don't agree with the pre-determined 'Bali Mandate,' so instead of discussion and debate, we get censorship. Until the UN rejects the politicization of climate change, their reports, protocols, and mandates aren't worth reading--much less ratifying."
The ICSC scientists will be available for advice and counsel in Bali, but they expect scientists to be ignored at the Bali conference.

Skeptical Scientists Urge World To ‘Have the Courage to Do Nothing' At UN Conference

2007-12-11T13:06:00.000-08:00

Skeptical Scientists Urge World To ‘Have the Courage to Do Nothing' At UN Conference

December 11, 2007

BALI, Indonesia - An international team of scientists skeptical of man-made climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore, descended on Bali this week to urge the world to "have the courage to do nothing" in response to UN demands.

Lord Christopher Monckton, a UK climate researcher, had a blunt message for UN climate conference participants on Monday.

"Climate change is a non-problem. The right answer to a non problem is to have the courage to do nothing," Monckton told participants.

"The UN conference is a complete waste of our time and your money and we should no longer pay the slightest attention to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,)" Monckton added. (LINK)

Monckton also noted that the UN has not been overly welcoming to the group of skeptical scientists.

"UN organizers refused my credentials and appeared desperate that I should not come to this conference. They have also made several attempts to interfere with our public meetings," Monckton explained.

"It is a circus here," agreed Australian scientist Dr. David Evans. Evans is making scientific presentations to delegates and journalists at the conference revealing the latest peer-reviewed studies that refute the UN's climate claims.

"This is the most lavish conference I have ever been to, but I am only a scientist and I actually only go to the science conferences," Evans said, noting the luxury of the tropical resort. (Note: An analysis by Bloomberg News on December 6 found: "Government officials and activists flying to Bali, Indonesia, for the United Nations meeting on climate change will cause as much pollution as 20,000 cars in a year." - LINK)

Evans, a mathematician who did carbon accounting for the Australian government, recently converted to a skeptical scientist about man-made global warming after reviewing the new scientific studies. (LINK)

"We now have quite a lot of evidence that carbon emissions definitely don't cause global warming. We have the missing [human] signature [in the atmosphere], we have the IPCC models being wrong and we have the lack of a temperature going up the last 5 years," Evans said in an interview with the Inhofe EPW Press Blog. Evans authored a November 28 2007 paper "Carbon Emissions Don't Cause Global Warming." (LINK)

Evans touted a new peer-reviewed study by a team of scientists appearing in the December 2007 issue of the International Journal of Climatology of the Royal Meteorological Society which found "Warming is naturally caused and shows no human influence." (LINK)

"Most of the people here have jobs that are very well paid and they depend on the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. They are not going to be very receptive to the idea that well actually the science has gone off in a different direction," Evans explained.
[Inhofe EPW Press Blog Note: Several other recent peer-reviewed studies have cast considerable doubt about man-made global warming fears. For most recent sampling see: New Peer-Reviewed Study finds 'Solar changes significantly alter climate' (11-3-07) (LINK) & "New Peer-Reviewed Study Halves the Global Average Surface Temperature Trend 1980 - 2002" (LINK) & New Study finds Medieval Warm Period '0.3C Warmer than 20th Century' (LINK) For a more comprehensive sampling of peer-reviewed studies earlier in 2007 see "New Peer-Reviewed Scientific Studies Chill Global Warming Fears" LINK ]

‘IPCC is unsound'

UN IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr. Vincent Gray of New Zealand, an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports since its inception going back to 1990, had a clear message to UN participants.

"There is no evidence that carbon dioxide increases are having any effect whatsoever on the climate," Gray, who shares in the Nobel Prize awarded to the UN IPCC, explained. (LINK)
"All the science of the IPCC is unsound. I have come to this conclusion after a very long time. If you examine every single proposition of the IPCC thoroughly, you find that the science somewhere fails," Gray, who wrote the book "The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of "Climate Change 2001," said.

"It fails not only from the data, but it fails in the statistics, and the mathematics," he added.
‘Dangerous time for science'

Evans, who believes the UN has heavily politicized science, warned there is going to be a "dangerous time for science" ahead.

"We have a split here. Official science driven by politics, money and power, goes in one direction. Unofficial science, which is more determined by what is actually happening with the [climate] data, has now started to move off in a different direction" away from fears of a man-made climate crisis, Evans explained.

"The two are splitting. This is always a dangerous time for science and a dangerous time for politics. Historically science always wins these battles but there can be a lot of causalities and a lot of time in between," he concluded.

Carbon trading ‘fraud?'

New Zealander Bryan Leland of the International Climate Science Coalition warned participants that all the UN promoted discussions of "carbon trading" should be viewed with suspicion.
"I am an energy engineer and I know something about electricity trading and I know enough about carbon trading and the inaccuracies of carbon trading to know that carbon trading is more about fraud than it is about anything else," Leland said.

"We should probably ask why we have 10,000 people here [in Bali] in a futile attempt to ‘solve' a [climate] problem that probably does not exist," Leland added.

‘Simply not work'

Owen McShane, the head of the International Climate Science Coalition, also worried that a UN promoted global approach to economics would mean financial ruin for many nations.
"I don't think this conference can actually achieve anything because it seems to be saying that we are going to draw up one protocol for every country in the world to follow," McShane said. (LINK)

"Now these countries and these economies are so diverse that trying to presume you can put all of these feet into one shoe will simply not work," McShane explained.

"Having the same set of rules apply to everybody will blow some economies apart totally while others will be unscathed and I wouldn't be surprised if the ones who remain unscathed are the ones who write the rules," he added.

‘Nothing happening at this conference'

Professor Dr. William Alexander, emeritus of the University of Pretoria in South Africa and a former member of the United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters, warned poor nations and their residents that the UN policies could mean more poverty and thus more death.

"My message is specifically for the poor people of Africa. And there is nothing happening at this conference that can help them one little bit but there is the potential that they could be damaged," Alexander said. (LINK)

"The government and people of Africa will have their attention drawn to reducing climate change instead of reducing poverty," Alexander added.

Related Links:

New UN Children's Book Promotes Global Warming Fears to Kids (11-13-2006)

Scientists Counter AP Article Promoting Computer Model Climate Fears

New Peer-Reviewed Scientific Studies Chill Global Warming Fears

Newsweek Editor Calls Mag's Global Warming 'Deniers' Article 'Highly Contrived'

Newsweek's Climate Editorial Screed Violates Basic Standards of Journalism

Latest Scientific Studies Refute Fears of Greenland Melt

EPA to Probe E-mail Threatening to ‘Destroy' Career of Climate Skeptic

Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming - Now Skeptics

Senator Inhofe declares climate momentum shifting away from Gore (The Politico op ed)

Scientific Smackdown: Skeptics Voted The Clear Winners Against Global Warming Believers in Heated NYC Debate

Global Warming on Mars & Cosmic Ray Research Are Shattering Media Driven "Consensus'

Global Warming: The Momentum has Shifted to Climate Skeptics

Prominent French Scientist Reverses Belief in Global Warming - Now a Skeptic

Top Israeli Astrophysicist Recants His Belief in Manmade Global Warming - Now Says Sun Biggest Factor in Warming

Warming On Jupiter, Mars, Pluto, Neptune's Moon & Earth Linked to Increased Solar Activity, Scientists Say

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

MIT Climate Scientist Calls Fears of Global Warming 'Silly' - Equates Concerns to ‘Little Kids' Attempting to "Scare Each Other"

Weather Channel TV Host Goes 'Political'- Stars in Global Warming Film Accusing U.S. Government of ‘Criminal Neglect'

Weather Channel Climate Expert Calls for Decertifying Global Warming Skeptics

ABC-TV Meteorologist: I Don't Know A Single Weatherman Who Believes 'Man-Made Global Warming Hype'

The Weather Channel Climate Expert Refuses to Retract Call for Decertification for Global Warming Skeptics

Senator Inhofe Announces Public Release Of "Skeptic's Guide To Debunking Global Warming"

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Rat's Milk Fights Global Warming

2007-11-19T10:34:00.000-08:00

London,
Monday 19.11.07

Vegan Heather Mills's latest bizarre outburst: 'Why don't we drink rat's milk?'

19.11.07

It has been a hotspot for tub-thumpers and eccentrics alike for more than a century.

So it was perhaps fitting that Heather Mills - fresh from her TV tirades complaining about her treatment - should choose Speakers' Corner to launch her latest onslaught.

But as the former model got on the popular London soapbox yesterday for a global awareness campaign, there was speculation her real target may have been her estranged husband Sir Paul McCartney.

For while the 39-year-old was there to unveil billboards for animal welfare charity Viva! the giant posters were draped in an ad for the National Domestic Violence helpline.

The cover - which bore the logo: "Well, he said he was sorry" and was whipped off as she made her entrance - echoed Miss Mills' previous allegations of being assaulted by the former Beatle during their marriage. Last year she also hinted she was applying for an occupation order, commonly used in domestic violence cases to decide who keeps the family home.

Officials from the charity insisted it was a "coincidence" Miss Mills' posters were covered with the ad.

A spokeswoman said: "The domestic violence posters were for an old campaign that is nothing to do with us."

The Viva! campaign, which will involve 100 billboards going up around the country, feature Miss Mills in two controversial poses.

In one, she appears to be announcing her newly-single status with the caption: "Hey Meaty, you're making me so hot!" as she writhes in a gold sequined dress. The poster aims to highlight how the meat and dairy industry is contributing to the greenhouse effect.

In the second billboard the campaigner - whose leg was amputated after a motorbike accident - sends herself up with the logo: "You haven't got a leg to stand on!" aimed at meat eaters for playing a part in global warming.

But Miss Mills triggered accusations of hypocrisy after she arrived at the launch in a gas-guzzling Mercedes 4x4 and kept the engine running for part of the morning.

She said: "The startling truth is that animals farmed for met and dairy are now one of the greatest threats to the planet.

"The United Nations last year issued a shocking report on the environmental damage being done by livestock.

"I became a vegetarian for health reasons. Then I found out about the awful animal abuse in factory farms and dairy herds and became vegan.

"The easiest and most effective way of cutting our contribution is to change our diet and go vegan. It is that simple.

"We are the only species that drinks another creature's milk so why aren't we drinking rats' milk, dogs' milk or cats' milk? That is how crazy it is."

Viva! director Juliet Gellatley said: "Heather was not the slightest bit precious about her disability and loved the idea of mocking all those who have called her a fantasist.

"Meat and dairy animals are literally destroying the Earth and are the second biggest cause of greenhouse gases at 18 per cent compared to 13.5 per cent from all the world's different modes of transport combined."

Earlier Miss Mills caused a stir with a rant on a radio chat show in which she snapped at the interviewer then stormed out halfway through.

During a 10-minute interview by Nick Ferrari on LBC radio, she complained she was being treated like a "murderer or a paedophile" before cutting him short after six minutes and walking out saying: "Let's forget it. He is just a waste of time."

The radio chat got off to a bad start when Ferrari asked her about her recent slew of TV and magazine interviews, to which Miss Mills retorted: "Shall I fall asleep now or do you want to get on with talking about global warming?" before making snoring noises.

She went on: "You don't know me as a person. To have an opinion about somebody you've never met before is pretty superficial."

When Ferrari responded, "I can have an opinion on murderers, on corrupt politicians. I don't have to meet them all", she hit back: "I am not a murderer or a paedophile. I am a charity campaigner.

"To put me in the same bracket as those is exactly why I've been treated like one."

After several more clashes Miss Mills said: "Just cut him off," and walked out.

She has previously told how her marriage breakdown drove her to the brink of suicide and is currently wrangling with Sir Paul, 65, for a slice of his £825million fortune.

Global Warming's Senseless Consensus

2007-11-16T18:48:00.000-08:00

Global Warming's Senseless Consensus
Monday , November 12, 2007
By Steven Milloy

Is there a "consensus" on global warming among the scientists participating in the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)?

To find out, I conducted the first-ever survey of scientists participating in the most recent IPCC report.

In early October, I e-mailed a six-question survey on climate change to 345 U.S. scientists involved in the IPCC's 2007 report.

By month's end, I had received responses from a surprising 95 scientists (28 percent).
Some of the responders claimed that the survey questions were flawed and declined to participate.

Some wanted to know, ironically enough, what was meant by the term "climate change" even though the term is part of the IPCC's name.

One IPCC-er declined to participate because, he said, the climate science debate was over.
Another, who acknowledged that current climate had probably just resulted from a "just a geological wiggle," declined because it was wrong to deny that humans are "adding undesirable stress to natural systems."

Another refused to answer, claiming that the IPCC report "is a much more powerful statement than any individual scientist can make."

One survey refusenik said, "Science is not a vote or survey. It is not democratic. It is not debatable."

Another said he didn't "see the point of frequently uninformed free-for-all style debates about topics that require diligent study instead."

Others accused me of having a biased agenda, being "reckless and irresponsible," and wanting to misrepresent the IPCC's work.

One National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist responded simply by dropping an f-bomb-laced insult into an e-mail.

This particular response and any institutional intolerance for climate skepticism, so I am informed, is being investigated by NOAA chief Vice Admiral (Ret.) Conrad Lautenbacher.
In the end, 54 of the IPCC-ers completed the survey, including such alarmist bigwigs as the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Kevin Trenberth and Tom Wigley. Trenberth and several other survey participants are lead authors of the IPCC report.

The survey results are quite illuminating about the much-touted "consensus."

The responses to the survey's first four questions were predictable — 83 percent to 90 percent of the respondents favored the view that man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are driving global climate to unprecedentedly warmer temperatures and that limiting manmade CO2 emissions would reduce such climate change.

The responses to the last two questions, however, raise questions about the consensus's credibility.

Less than 50 percent of the respondents said that an increase in global temperature of 1 degree Celsius — twice the level of warming occurring during the 20th century — is flatly undesirable.
Half of the respondents said that such a temperature increase is desirable, desirable for some but undesirable for others, or too difficult to assess.

Only 14 percent said that the ideal climate was cooler than the present climate. Sixty-one percent said that there is no such thing as an ideal climate.

But if there's no agreement on whether a target climate even exists, what precisely is the point of taking action on global warming?

Other notable results from my survey include the 20 percent who bizarrely said that human activity is the principal driver of climate change.

So was climate a static phenomenon before the arrival of man? And if there was natural climate change before man, why not now also? And 44 percent don't think that current global climate is unprecedentedly warm.

The survey indicates that when asked routine questions about the role of man-made CO2, the IPCC-ers respond in the Pavlovian fashion seemingly demanded of them by the global-warming establishment.

But when asked questions off the usual script, the supposed consensus falls apart.
Don't forget that many scientists don't participate in the IPCC because they perceive it as biased.

The Pasteur Institute's Dr. Paul Reiter, for example, resigned from the IPCC because he and a colleague found themselves "at loggerheads with persons who insisted on making authoritative pronouncements, although they had little or no knowledge of our specialty."

There's also the Petition Project, where 19,000 scientists have endorsed a statement questioning the scientific basis of climate alarmism.

The whole idea of a consensus in science is dubious.

As economist John Kay recently wrote in an op-ed entitled "Science is the pursuit of truth, not consensus" (Financial Times, Oct. 10), "Statements about the world derive their value from the facts and arguments that support them, not from the status and qualifications of the people who assert them."

This week, Al Gore attacked IPCC-er John Christy for a Nov. 1 Wall Street Journal op-ed in which Christy questioned the global-warming orthodoxy.

Appearing on NBC's "Today" show, Gore described Christy as an "outlier" who no longer belonged to the IPCC and who is "way outside the scientific consensus."

Gore also said that it was wrong for the media to pay any attention to opinions outside the consensus.

Christy told me that, as far as he knows, he remains part of the IPCC process.

As to being an outlier, it just so happens that Christy's survey responses were within the 50 percent who didn't think that a 1-degree Celsius rise in global temperature was uniformly undesirable and the 86 percent who didn't think there was any such thing as an ideal climate.
The "climate consensus" notion functions primarily as a marketing tool for converting the public to a political viewpoint, rather than as a valid scientific approach toward understanding global warming.

But even then, the survey indicates that the claimed IPCC consensus is not nearly as monolithic as we've been led to believe. That alone is good reason for demanding that the IPCC scientists declare and defend their positions in a public forum.

Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and DemandDebate.com. He is a junk science expert and advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Ice Age Defrosted by Warming Ocean, Not Rise in CO2

2007-09-29T16:17:00.001-07:00

September 27, 2007

In Hot Water: Ice Age Defrosted by Warming Ocean, Not Rise in CO2

Warmer waters in the deep Pacific triggered the end of the last ice age, preceding the rise in greenhouse gas levels

Earth's climate can be sensitive, changing after a variety of events. A volcanic eruption or meteorite impact, for instance, can send enough particles into the air to block the sun and cool the climate. A thickening blanket of greenhouse gases can trap heat. And, more commonly, according to some scientists, slight changes in Earth's orientation toward the sun can cause it to cool or warm in so-called Milankovitch cycles (named after the Serbian engineer who first described them). Now, new evidence from a marine sediment core from the deep Pacific points to warmer ocean waters around Antarctica (in sync with the Milankovitch cycle)—not greenhouse gases—as the culprit behind the thawing of the last ice age.

Ice cores drawn from Antarctica and Greenland have shown that carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere began to rise at roughly the same time as the vast ice sheets began to melt. But it remained unclear exactly which came first: melting ice and warming seas released more CO2 or more CO2 led to melting ice and warming seas.

By studying sediment cores from the deep Pacific near the Philippines, paleoclimatologist Lowell Stott of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and his colleagues revealed that the temperatures of the deepest seas rose by around 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) at least 1,000 years before sea-surface temperatures. "Even accounting for the uncertainties of the age of CO2, the deep sea warmed substantially before the CO2 began to rise," Stott says. "The deep Pacific is such an enormously large volume of water that [this warming] reflects the input of a tremendous amount of energy into the global system."

Stott and his colleagues used the isotopes of oxygen contained within the remnants of microscopic surface and deep-sea creatures to establish temperatures; they then used a radioactive isotope of carbon to date their age. Combining the two techniques showed that deep-sea creatures dealt with a warmer climate long before their surface brethren did, they report in the online edition of Science.

Because such deep seawater circulates from the coast of Antarctica, this deep-water warming implies that the Southern Ocean drove the last major climate change. Stott notes that the periodic wobble in the Earth's rotational axis described by the Milankovitch cycles led to more sunshine falling on the Antarctic at the same time—a likely cause of the warming waters. "The amount of solar energy increased at the same time as this deep-sea warming," he says. "Sea ice around the Southern Ocean was withdrawing."

According to the marine core sample, a full millennium passed—enough time for both the deep and surface waters to entirely switch places—before sea-surface temperatures and global atmospheric levels of CO2 began to rise. The greenhouse gas then further warmed the changing climate, Stott says.

This year, the sea ice around Antarctica grew to its largest extent since satellite observation began in 1979—whereas the Arctic arrived at record minimum—meaning present climate change is a far different scenario. In fact, the Milankovitch cycles would predict gradual global cooling. Man-made greenhouse gases, primarily CO2, are unequivocally driving present-day warming, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "This kind of study discusses the natural cycle and could help define the likely positive feedbacks we can expect in the long-term future, [for example] as temperatures warm, the ocean will want to give up more CO2, or rather absorb less," says climatologist Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies. "But it has no direct impact on attribution of 20th century warming."*

Soros' "Politicizaton of Science"

2007-09-25T10:51:00.000-07:00

The Soros Threat To Democracy
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 9/24/2007

Democracy: George Soros is known for funding groups such as MoveOn.org that seek to manipulate public opinion. So why is the billionaire's backing of what he believes in problematic?

In a word: transparency.

George Soros & MoveOn.org: Exclusive Series

How many people, for instance, know that James Hansen, a man billed as a lonely "NASA whistleblower" standing up to the mighty U.S. government, was really funded by Soros' Open Society Institute , which gave him "legal and media advice"?

That's right, Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros' flagship "philanthropy," by as much as $720,000, most likely under the OSI's "politicization of science" program.

That may have meant that Hansen had media flacks help him get on the evening news to push his agenda and lawyers pressuring officials to let him spout his supposedly "censored" spiel for weeks in the name of advancing the global warming agenda.

Hansen even succeeded, with public pressure from his nightly news performances, in forcing NASA to change its media policies to his advantage. Had Hansen's OSI-funding been known, the public might have viewed the whole production differently. The outcome could have been different.

That's not the only case. Didn't the mainstream media report that 2006's vast immigration rallies across the country began as a spontaneous uprising of 2 million angry Mexican-flag waving illegal immigrants demanding U.S. citizenship in Los Angeles, egged on only by a local Spanish-language radio announcer?

Turns out that wasn't what happened, either. Soros' OSI had money-muscle there, too, through its $17 million Justice Fund. The fund lists 19 projects in 2006. One was vaguely described involvement in the immigration rallies. Another project funded illegal immigrant activist groups for subsequent court cases.

So what looked like a wildfire grassroots movement really was a manipulation from OSI's glassy Manhattan offices. The public had no way of knowing until the release of OSI's 2006 annual report.

Meanwhile, OSI cash backed terrorist-friendly court rulings, too.

Do people know last year's Supreme Court ruling abolishing special military commissions for terrorists at Guantanamo was a Soros project? OSI gave support to Georgetown lawyers in 2006 to win Hamdan v. Rumsfeld — for the terrorists.

OSI also gave cash to other radicals who pressured the Transportation Security Administration to scrap a program called "Secure Flight," which matched flight passenger lists with terrorist names. It gave more cash to other left-wing lawyers who persuaded a Texas judge to block cell phone tracking of terrorists.

They trumpeted this as a victory for civil liberties. Feel safer?

It's all part of the $74 million OSI spent on "U.S. Programs" in 2006 to "shape policy." Who knows what revelations 2007's report will bring around events now in the news?

OSI isn't the only secretive organization that Soros funds. OSI partners with the Tides Foundation, which funnels cash from wealthy donors who may not want it known that their cash goes to fringe groups engaged in "direct action" — also known as eco-terrorism.

On the political front, Soros has a great influence in a secretive organization called "Democracy Alliance" whose idea of democracy seems to be government controlled solely of Democrats.

"As with everything about the Democracy Alliance, the strangest aspect of this entire process was the incessant secrecy. Among the alliance's stated values was a commitment to political transparency — as long as it didn't apply to the alliance," wrote Matt Bai, describing how the alliance was formed in 2005, in his book "The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics."

Soros' "shaping public policies," as OSI calls it, is not illegal. But it's a problem for democracy because it drives issues with cash and then only lets the public know about it after it's old news.
That means the public makes decisions about issues without understanding the special agendas of groups behind them.

Without more transparency, it amounts to political manipulation. This leads to cynicism. As word of these short-term covert ops gets out, the public grows to distrust what it hears and tunes out.

The irony here is that Soros claims to be an advocate of an "open society." His OSI does just the legal minimum to disclose its activities. The public shouldn't have to wait until an annual report is out before the light is flipped on about the Open Society's political action.

Global Warming Quotes

2007-09-24T08:12:00.000-07:00

Quotes on Global Warming

"The answer to global warming is in the abolition of private property and production for human need. A socialist world would place an enormous priority on alternative energy sources. This is what ecologically-minded socialists have been exploring for quite some time now."
- Louis Proyect, Columbia University

"No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits.... climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world."
- Christine Stewart, Canadian Environment Minister

Bush Administration Capitulates on Global Warming?

2007-09-14T21:23:00.000-07:00

Bush aide says warming man-made

By Roger Harrabin Environment analyst, BBC News

The US chief scientist has told the BBC that climate change is now a fact.
Professor John Marburger, who advises President Bush, said it was more than 90% certain that greenhouse gas emissions from mankind are to blame.

The Earth may become "unliveable" without cuts in CO2 output, he said, but he labelled targets for curbing temperature rise as "arbitrary".

His comments come shortly before major meetings on climate change at the UN and the Washington White House.

There may still be some members of the White House team who are not completely convinced about climate change - but it is clear that the science advisor to the President and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy is not one of them.

In the starkest warning from the White House so far about the dangers ahead, Professor Marburger told the BBC that climate change was unequivocal, with mankind more than 90% likely to blame.

The CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere and there's no end point, it just gets hotter and hotter

Marburger interview

Despite disagreement on the details of climate science, he said: "I think there is widespread agreement on certain basics, and one of the most important is that we are producing far more CO2 from fossil fuels than we ought to be.

"And it's going to lead to trouble unless we can begin to reduce the amount of fossil fuels we are burning and using in our economies."

Trouble ahead

This is an explicit endorsement of the latest major review of climate science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Marburger said humanity would be in trouble if we did not stop increasing carbon emissions.

"The CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere and there's no end point, it just gets hotter and hotter, and so at some point it becomes unliveable," he said.

Professor Marburger said he wished he could stop US emissions right away, but that was obviously not possible.

US backing for the scientific consensus was confirmed by President Bush's top climate advisor, James Connaughton.

The chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality told BBC News that advancing technology was the best way to curb the warming trend.

"You only have two choices; you either have advanced technologies and get them into the marketplace, or you shut down your economies and put people out of work," he said.

"I don't know of any politician that favours shutting down economies."

'Arbitrary' targets

Mr Bush has invited leaders of major developed and developing nations to the White House later this month for discussions on a future global direction on climate change.

It will follow a UN General Assembly session on the same issue.

Last week the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum in Sydney backed the UN climate convention as the right body for developing future global policy.

The European Union wants such a policy to adopt its own target of stabilising temperature rise at or below 2C.

But Mr Marburger said the state of the science made it difficult to justify any particular target.
"It's not clear that we'll be in a position to predict the future accurately enough to make policy confidently for a long time," he said.

"I think 2C is rather arbitrary, and it's not clear to me that the answer shouldn't be 3C or more or less. It's a hunch, a guess."

The truth, he said, was that we just do not know what the 'safe' limit is.

Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/6994760.stmPublished: 2007/09/14 11:52:26 GMT© BBC MMVII

Challenge to Scientific Consensus on Global Warming

2007-09-12T09:32:00.000-07:00

Challenge to Scientific Consensus on Global Warming: Analysis Finds Hundreds of Scientists Have Published Evidence Countering Man-Made Global Warming Fears

Posted on : 2007-09-12 Author : Hudson Institute News Category : PressRelease

WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new analysis of peer-reviewed literature reveals that more than 500 scientists have published evidence refuting at least one element of current man-made global warming scares. More than 300 of the scientists found evidence that 1) a natural moderate 1,500-year climate cycle has produced more than a dozen global warmings similar to ours since the last Ice Age and/or that 2) our Modern Warming is linked strongly to variations in the sun's irradiance. "This data and the list of scientists make a mockery of recent claims that a scientific consensus blames humans as the primary cause of global temperature increases since 1850," said Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Dennis Avery.
Other researchers found evidence that 3) sea levels are failing to rise importantly; 4) that our storms and droughts are becoming fewer and milder with this warming as they did during previous global warmings; 5) that human deaths will be reduced with warming because cold kills twice as many people as heat; and 6) that corals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well to the routine reality of changing climate.

Despite being published in such journals such as Science, Nature and Geophysical Review Letters, these scientists have gotten little media attention. "Not all of these researchers would describe themselves as global warming skeptics," said Avery, "but the evidence in their studies is there for all to see."

The names were compiled by Avery and climate physicist S. Fred Singer, the co-authors of the new book Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, mainly from the peer-reviewed studies cited in their book. The researchers' specialties include tree rings, sea levels, stalagmites, lichens, pollen, plankton, insects, public health, Chinese history and astrophysics.

"We have had a Greenhouse Theory with no evidence to support it-except a moderate warming turned into a scare by computer models whose results have never been verified with real-world events," said co-author Singer. "On the other hand, we have compelling evidence of a real-world climate cycle averaging 1470 years (plus or minus 500) running through the last million years of history. The climate cycle has above all been moderate, and the trees, bears, birds, and humans have quietly adapted."

"Two thousand years of published human histories say that the warm periods were good for people," says Avery. "It was the harsh, unstable Dark Ages and Little Ice Age that brought bigger storms, untimely frost, widespread famine and plagues of disease." "There may have been a consensus of guesses among climate model-builders," says Singer. "However, the models only reflect the warming, not its cause." He noted that about 70 percent of the earth's post-1850 warming came before 1940, and thus was probably not caused by human-emitted greenhouse gases. The net post-1940 warming totals only a tiny 0.2 degrees C.

The historic evidence of the natural cycle includes the 5000-year record of Nile floods, 1st-century Roman wine production in Britain, and thousands of museum paintings that portrayed sunnier skies during the Medieval Warming and more cloudiness during the Little Ice Age. The physical evidence comes from oxygen isotopes, beryllium ions, tiny sea and pollen fossils, and ancient tree rings. The evidence recovered from ice cores, sea and lake sediments, cave stalagmites and glaciers has been analyzed by electron microscopes, satellites, and computers. Temperatures during the Medieval Warming Period on California's Whitewing Mountain must have been 3.2 degrees warmer than today, says Constance Millar of the U.S. Forest Service, based on her study of seven species of relict trees that grew above today's tree line.

Singer emphasized, "Humans have known since the invention of the telescope that the earth's climate variations were linked to the sunspot cycle, but we had not understood how. Recent experiments have demonstrated that more or fewer cosmic rays hitting the earth create more or fewer of the low, cooling clouds that deflect solar heat back into space-amplifying small variations in the intensity of the sun.

Avery and Singer noted that there are hundreds of additional peer-reviewed studies that have found cycle evidence, and that they will publish additional researchers' names and studies. They also noted that their book was funded by Wallace O. Sellers, a Hudson board member, without any corporate contributions.

Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years is available from Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/Unstoppable-Global-Warming-Every-Years/dp/0742551172 /ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-6773465-0779318?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1189603742&sr=1-1

For more information, please contact Dennis Avery, Hudson Institute Senior Fellow and co-author of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years, at 540-337-6354: Email: cgfi@hughes.net Hudson Institute

A Denier's Confession

2007-08-28T20:43:00.000-07:00

A Denier's Confession

Global warming is more alarmist than alarming.

BY BRET STEPHENS
Tuesday, August 28, 2007 12:01 a.m.

The recent discovery by a retired businessman and climate kibitzer named Stephen McIntyre that 1934--and not 1998 or 2006--was the hottest year on record in the U.S. could not have been better timed. August is the month when temperatures are high and the news cycle is slow, leading, inevitably, to profound meditations on global warming. Newsweek performed its journalistic duty two weeks ago with an exposé on what it calls the global warming "denial machine." I hereby perform mine with a denier's confession

I confess: I am prepared to acknowledge that Mr. McIntyre's discovery amounts to what a New York Times reporter calls a "statistically meaningless" rearrangement of data.

But just how "meaningless" would this have seemed had it yielded the opposite result? Had Mr. McIntyre found that a collation error understated recent temperatures by 0.15 degrees Celsius (instead of overstating it by that amount, as he discovered), would the news coverage have differed in tone and approach? When it was reported in January that 2006 was one of the hottest years on record, NASA's James Hansen used the occasion to warn grimly that "2007 is likely to be warmer than 2006." Yet now he says, in connection to the data revision, that "in general I think we want to avoid going into more and more detail about ranking of individual years."

I confess: I am prepared to acknowledge that the world has been and will be getting warmer thanks in some part to an increase in man-made atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. I acknowledge this in the same way I'm confident that the equatorial radius of Saturn is about 60,000 kilometers: not because I've measured it myself, but out of a deep reserve of faith in the methods of the scientific community, above all its reputation for transparency and open-mindedness.

But that faith is tested when leading climate scientists won't share the data they use to estimate temperatures past and present and thus construct all-important trend lines. This was true of climatologist Michael Mann, who refused to disclose the algorithm behind his massively influential "hockey stick" graph, which purported to demonstrate a sharp uptick in global temperatures over the past century. (The accuracy of the graph was seriously discredited by Mr. McIntyre and his colleague Ross McKitrick.) This was true also of Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, who reportedly turned down one request for information with the remark, "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"

I confess: I understand that global warming may have negative consequences. Heat waves, droughts and coastal flooding may become more intense. Temperature-sensitive parasites such as malaria could become more widespread. Lakes may be depleted by evaporation. Animal life will suffer.

But as Bjorn Lomborg points out in his sharp, persuasive and aptly titled book "Cool It," a warming climate has advantages, too, and not just trivial ones. Though global warming will cause more heat deaths, it will also mean many fewer cold deaths. Drought may increase in some areas, but warming also means both more rain and longer growing seasons. Temperature changes will harm some wildlife in some places. But many species will benefit from a bit more warmth. Does anyone know for certain that the net human and environmental losses from global warming will exceed overall gains?

I confess: Denial never solves anything. But neither does sensational and deceptive journalism.
Newsweek illustrates this point by its choice of cover art--a picture of the sun, where the surface temperature hovers around 6,000 degrees Celsius. Given that the consensus scientific estimate for average temperature increases over the next century is a comparatively modest 2.6 degrees, this would seem a rather Murdochian way of convincing readers about the gravity of the climate threat. On the inside pages is a photograph of a polar bear stranded on melting ice. But the caption that the bears are "at risk" belies clear evidence that the bear population has risen five-fold since the 1960s. Another series of photographs, of a huge Antarctic ice shelf that quickly disintegrated in 2002, suggests the imminence of doom. But why not also mention that temperatures at the South Pole have been going down for 50 years?

I confess: It's easy to be indifferent to far-off and diffuse threats. It's hard to work toward solutions the benefits of which will not be felt in our lifetime.

Then again, if Americans are not fully persuaded of the dangers of global warming, as Newsweek laments, don't chalk it up to the pernicious influence of the so-called deniers and their enablers at ExxonMobil and Fox News. Today, global warming is variously suggested as the root cause of terrorism, the conflict in Darfur and the rising incidence of suicides in Italy. Yet the 20th century offers excellent reasons to be suspicious of monocausal explanations for the world's ills, monomaniacs intent on saving us from ourselves, and the long train of experts predicting death by overpopulation, resource depletion, global cooling, nuclear winter and prions. Also, hypocrites. When we are called on to bike to work, permanently abjure air travel, "eat locally" and so on, we expect to be led by example, not by a new nomenklatura.

I confess: Though it may surprise those who use the term "denier" so as to put me on a moral plane with Holocaust deniers, I have children for whom I would not wish an environmental apocalypse.

Yet neither do I wish the civilizational bounties built up over two centuries by an industrial, inventive, adaptive, globalized and energy-hungry society to be squandered chasing comparatively small environmental benefits at gigantic economic costs. One needn't deny global warming as a problem to deny it as the only or greatest problem. The great virtue of Mr. Lomborg's book is its insistence on trying to measure the good done per dollar spent. Do we save a few lives, at huge cost, as a byproduct of curbing global warming? Or do we save many, for less, by acting on problems directly?

Some might argue it is immoral to think this way. Maybe they are the ones living in denial.

Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal Tuesdays.

Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

'Hockey Stick' only 'Poor Mathematics'

2007-08-22T22:10:00.000-07:00

October 15, 2004

Global Warming Bombshell

A prime piece of evidence linking human activity to climate change turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.

By Richard Muller

Progress in science is sometimes made by great discoveries. But science also advances when we learn that something we believed to be true isnt. When solving a jigsaw puzzle, the solution can sometimes be stymied by the fact that a wrong piece has been wedged in a key place.
In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the hockey stick, the famous plot (shown below), published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago--just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.
I talked about this at length in my December 2003 column. Unfortunately, discussion of this plot has been so polluted by political and activist frenzy that it is hard to dig into it to reach the science. My earlier column was largely a plea to let science proceed unmolested. Unfortunately, the very importance of the issue has made careful science difficult to pursue.

But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.

But it wasnt so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.

Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!
That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen? What is going on? Let me digress into a short technical discussion of how this incredible error took place.

In PCA and similar techniques, each of the (in this case, typically 70) different data sets have their averages subtracted (so they have a mean of zero), and then are multiplied by a number to make their average variation around that mean to be equal to one; in technical jargon, we say that each data set is normalized to zero mean and unit variance. In standard PCA, each data set is normalized over its complete data period; for key climate data sets that Mann used to create his hockey stick graph, this was the interval 1400-1980. But the computer program Mann used did not do that. Instead, it forced each data set to have zero mean for the time period 1902-1980, and to match the historical records for this interval. This is the time when the historical temperature is well known, so this procedure does guarantee the most accurate temperature scale. But it completely screws up PCA. PCA is mostly concerned with the data sets that have high variance, and the Mann normalization procedure tends to give very high variance to any data set with a hockey stick shape. (Such data sets have zero mean only over the 1902-1980 period, not over the longer 1400-1980 period.)

The net result: the principal component will have a hockey stick shape even if most of the data do not.

McIntyre and McKitrick sent their detailed analysis to Nature magazine for publication, and it was extensively refereed. But their paper was finally rejected. In frustration, McIntyre and McKitrick put the entire record of their submission and the referee reports on a Web page for all to see. If you look, youll see that McIntyre and McKitrick have found numerous other problems with the Mann analysis. I emphasize the bug in their PCA program simply because it is so blatant and so easy to understand. Apparently, Mann and his colleagues never tested their program with the standard Monte Carlo approach, or they would have discovered the error themselves. Other and different criticisms of the hockey stick are emerging (see, for example, the paper by Hans von Storch and colleagues in the September 30 issue of Science).
Some people may complain that McIntyre and McKitrick did not publish their results in a refereed journal. That is true--but not for lack of trying. Moreover, the paper was refereed--and even better, the referee reports are there for us to read. McIntyre and McKitricks only failure was in not convincing Nature that the paper was important enough to publish.

How does this bombshell affect what we think about global warming?

It certainly does not negate the threat of a long-term global temperature increase. In fact, McIntyre and McKitrick are careful to point out that it is hard to draw conclusions from these data, even with their corrections. Did medieval global warming take place? Last month the consensus was that it did not; now the correct answer is that nobody really knows. Uncovering errors in the Mann analysis doesnt settle the debate; it just reopens it. We now know less about the history of climate, and its natural fluctuations over century-scale time frames, than we thought we knew.

If you are concerned about global warming (as I am) and think that human-created carbon dioxide may contribute (as I do), then you still should agree that we are much better off having broken the hockey stick. Misinformation can do real harm, because it distorts predictions. Suppose, for example, that future measurements in the years 2005-2015 show a clear and distinct global cooling trend. (It could happen.) If we mistakenly took the hockey stick seriously--that is, if we believed that natural fluctuations in climate are small--then we might conclude (mistakenly) that the cooling could not be just a random fluctuation on top of a long-term warming trend, since according to the hockey stick, such fluctuations are negligible. And that might lead in turn to the mistaken conclusion that global warming predictions are a lot of hooey. If, on the other hand, we reject the hockey stick, and recognize that natural fluctuations can be large, then we will not be misled by a few years of random cooling.

A phony hockey stick is more dangerous than a broken one--if we know it is broken. It is our responsibility as scientists to look at the data in an unbiased way, and draw whatever conclusions follow. When we discover a mistake, we admit it, learn from it, and perhaps discover once again the value of caution.

Moose blamed for global warming

2007-08-22T09:43:00.000-07:00

Norway's Moose Population in Trouble for Belching

The poor old Scandinavian moose is now being blamed for climate change, with researchers in Norway claiming that a grown moose can produce 2,100 kilos of methane a year -- equivalent to the CO2 output resulting from a 13,000 kilometer car journey.

Now poor moose are being blamed for global warming.Norway is concerned that its national animal, the moose, is harming the climate by emitting an estimated 2,100 kilos of carbon dioxide a year through its belching and farting.

Norwegian newspapers, citing research from Norway's technical university, said a motorist would have to drive 13,000 kilometers in a car to emit as much CO2 as a moose does in a year.
Bacteria in a moose's stomach create methane gas which is considered even more destructive to the environment than carbon dioxide gas. Cows pose the same problem.

Norway has some 120,000 moose but an estimated 35,000 are expected to be killed in this year's moose hunting season, which starts on September 25, Norwegian newspaper VG reported.

Rupert Murdoch's climate crusade

2007-08-15T08:55:00.000-07:00

Rupert Murdoch's climate crusade

News Corp.'s campaign against global warming includes free light bulbs, subsidized hybrids and babes in green, reports Fortune's Marc Gunther.

By Marc Gunther, Fortune senior writer
August 15 2007: 6:01 AM EDT

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Readers of the The Sun, a British tabloid best known for its bare-breasted Page Three girls, opened their newspapers to see a young woman named Keeley Hazell wearing only green paint. Ms. Hazell is the face - well, not just the face - of the paper's campaign against global warming.

When subscribers to the British satellite TV provider BSkyB order new set-top boxes, some installers now also deliver, at no additional charge, three energy-efficient light bulbs and a low-flow shower head.

Viewers of Fox-owned TV stations in the United States, meanwhile, are urged in news stories to join the FOX-e (pronounced foxy) energy team, to save money and the environment. ("Switch off lights and turn off basic appliances when you're not using them...")

What all these audiences are witnessing is a major media company tackling the problem of climate change. The surprise is that the initiative - which is sweeping and serious - comes from Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and CEO of News Corp. (Charts, Fortune 500) and purveyor of Fox News, The New York Post and The Weekly Standard, none of which are generally regarded as friends of the earth. Soon Murdoch will own The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial pages rarely find much to admire about the likes of Al Gore.

Then again, maybe it makes sense that Murdoch's ahead of the other media barons on the climate change issue. Historically, he has proven willing to imbue his media properties with his conservative politics. Other CEOs - say, at Disney (Charts, Fortune 500) and Time Warner (Charts, Fortune 500) (parent of Fortune and CNNMoney.com), which have their own smaller-scale green projects underway - are either reluctant or unwilling to rule by fiat.

By contrast, Murdoch has boldly promised to make News Corp. carbon neutral by 2010 and to weave environmental issues and themes into his newspapers, TV shows, movies and online properties - a tricky business, particularly when it comes to news.

"Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats," Murdoch said last spring, in a speech webcast to all News Corp. employees (and available here.) "We may not agree on the extent, but we certainly can't afford the risk of inaction."

He went on to say, "Our audience's carbon footprint is 10,000 times bigger than ours. That's the carbon footprint we want to conquer."

So it may not be coincidental that in "The Simpsons Movie," Homer dumps pig manure into a lake, with dire consequences. But News Corp. executives hasten to say that they won't force global warming stories into programming in heavy-handed ways.

"Jack Bauer's not going to be driving a Prius," says Roy Bahat, the News Corp. executive who has led the efforts on energy use and climate change. Behind the scenes, though, the Fox drama "24" will use biodiesel fuel to power generators, purchase "green power," and integrate hybrids into its production fleet. You can read a ponderous press release about the show's climate change efforts here.)

Murdoch's evolution into a climate change crusader took time. Australia, where he grew up and still owns newspapers, has been experiencing its worst drought in a century. Closer to home, his son James Murdoch, who drives a Prius to work and a hybrid SUV on weekends, has been influential. James is the chief executive of BSkyB, which became carbon neutral in 2006. "This had enormous appeal to their subscribers and employees," Bahat said.

About a year ago, Murdoch hosted an all-star team of environmental leaders at a News Corp. management conference in Pebble Beach, Ca. They included then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Al Gore, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, energy strategist Amory Lovins and solar power evangelist Bill Gross.

News Corp. hired a consultant and learned that its own carbon emissions amounted to 641,150 tons. It has promised to reduce that by 10 percent by 2012, mostly through energy efficiency measures and by buying renewable power. It will offset the rest by investing in projects to reduce emissions elsewhere; this year, News Corp. purchased its first offsets, which ended up helping to finance a wind energy project in the state of Maharashtra, India.

The climate change initiative is being felt in many corners of the Murdoch empire. Working with Wal-Mart (Charts, Fortune 500), Fox's home video unit has reduced the cardboard used in packaging DVDs. HarperCollins UK replaced its car service provider with one that uses only hybrids. Fox employees are getting incentives to buy hybrid vehicles. A MySpace channel called OurPlanet has about 120,000 "friends."

This internal work will be easier than selling the company's mission to Hollywood writers, who can be an independent lot. (As Samuel Goldwyn reportedly said, "If you want to send a message, call Western Union.") Fox made a successful movie about a global warming catastrophe called "The Day After Tomorrow" in 2004, but there are only so many times you can go to that well.
Still, Murdoch should not be underestimated. He's the most powerful media mogul in the world, with big broadcast properties in India and China as well as Britain and the United States. If you think "An Inconvenient Truth" helped shift the debate, just wait to see what Rupert can do.

BBC: "'Scepticism' over climate claims"

2007-07-02T23:34:00.000-07:00

'Scepticism' over climate claims

The public believes the effects of global warming on the climate are not as bad as politicians and scientists claim, a poll has suggested.

The Ipsos Mori poll of 2,032 adults - interviewed between 14 and 20 June - found 56% believed scientists were still questioning climate change.

There was a feeling the problem was exaggerated to make money, it found.

The Royal Society said most climate scientists believed humans were having an "unprecedented" effect on climate.

The survey suggested that terrorism, graffiti, crime and dog mess were all of more concern than climate change.

Ipsos Mori's head of environmental research, Phil Downing, said the research showed there was "still a lot to do" in encouraging "low-carbon lifestyles".

"We are alive to climate change and very few people actually reject out of hand the idea the climate is changing or that humans have had at least some part to play in this," he added.

"However, a significant number have many doubts about exactly how serious it really is and believe it has been over hyped."

People had been influenced by counter arguments, he said.

Royal Society vice-president Sir David Read said: "People should not be misled by those that exploit the complexity of the issue, seeking to distort the science and deny the seriousness of the potential consequences of climate change.

"The science very clearly points towards the need for us all - nations, businesses and individuals - to do as much as possible, as soon as possible to avoid the worst consequences of a changing climate."

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/6263690.stm

Published: 2007/07/03 00:25:26 GMT

Alarmist Global Warming Claims Melt

2007-06-30T12:59:00.000-07:00

Alarmist global warming claims melt under scientific scrutiny

(http://www.suntimes.com/news/otherviews/450392,CST-EDT-REF30b.article)

June 30, 2007
BY JAMES M. TAYLOR

In his new book, The Assault on Reason, Al Gore pleads, "We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public's ability to discern the truth." Gore repeatedly asks that science and reason displace cynical political posturing as the central focus of public discourse.

If Gore really means what he writes, he has an opportunity to make a difference by leading by example on the issue of global warming.

A cooperative and productive discussion of global warming must be open and honest regarding the science. Global warming threats ought to be studied and mitigated, and they should not be deliberately exaggerated as a means of building support for a desired political position.

Many of the assertions Gore makes in his movie, ''An Inconvenient Truth,'' have been refuted by science, both before and after he made them. Gore can show sincerity in his plea for scientific honesty by publicly acknowledging where science has rebutted his claims.

For example, Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame. Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate reported, "Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame."

Gore claims the snowcap atop Africa's Mt. Kilimanjaro is shrinking and that global warming is to blame. Yet according to the November 23, 2003, issue of Nature magazine, "Although it's tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain's foothills is the more likely culprit. Without the forests' humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine."

Gore claims global warming is causing more tornadoes. Yet the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in February that there has been no scientific link established between global warming and tornadoes.

Gore claims global warming is causing more frequent and severe hurricanes. However, hurricane expert Chris Landsea published a study on May 1 documenting that hurricane activity is no higher now than in decades past. Hurricane expert William Gray reported just a few days earlier, on April 27, that the number of major hurricanes making landfall on the U.S. Atlantic coast has declined in the past 40 years. Hurricane scientists reported in the April 18 Geophysical Research Letters that global warming enhances wind shear, which will prevent a significant increase in future hurricane activity.

Gore claims global warming is causing an expansion of African deserts. However, the Sept. 16, 2002, issue of New Scientist reports, "Africa's deserts are in 'spectacular' retreat . . . making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa."

Gore argues Greenland is in rapid meltdown, and that this threatens to raise sea levels by 20 feet. But according to a 2005 study in the Journal of Glaciology, "the Greenland ice sheet is thinning at the margins and growing inland, with a small overall mass gain." In late 2006, researchers at the Danish Meteorological Institute reported that the past two decades were the coldest for Greenland since the 1910s.

Gore claims the Antarctic ice sheet is melting because of global warming. Yet the Jan. 14, 2002, issue of Nature magazine reported Antarctica as a whole has been dramatically cooling for decades. More recently, scientists reported in the September 2006 issue of the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Series A: Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences, that satellite measurements of the Antarctic ice sheet showed significant growth between 1992 and 2003. And the U.N. Climate Change panel reported in February 2007 that Antarctica is unlikely to lose any ice mass during the remainder of the century.

Each of these cases provides an opportunity for Gore to lead by example in his call for an end to the distortion of science. Will he rise to the occasion? Only time will tell.

James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at the Heartland Institute.

They Call This a Consensus?

2007-06-03T08:20:00.000-07:00

They call this a consensus?

Lawrence Solomon
Financial Post
Saturday, June 02, 2007
CREDIT: David McNew, Getty Images File Photo

Al Gore's views have credible dissenters.

"Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled."

So said Al Gore ... in 1992. Amazingly, he made his claims despite much evidence of their falsity. A Gallup poll at the time reported that 53% of scientists actively involved in global climate research did not believe global warming had occurred; 30% weren't sure; and only 17% believed global warming had begun. Even a Greenpeace poll showed 47% of climatologists didn't think a runaway greenhouse effect was imminent; only 36% thought it possible and a mere 13% thought it probable.

Today, Al Gore is making the same claims of a scientific consensus, as do the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of government agencies and environmental groups around the world. But the claims of a scientific consensus remain unsubstantiated. They have only become louder and more frequent.

More than six months ago, I began writing this series, The Deniers. When I began, I accepted the prevailing view that scientists overwhelmingly believe that climate change threatens the planet. I doubted only claims that the dissenters were either kooks on the margins of science or sell-outs in the pockets of the oil companies.

National Post's Deniers series: Scientists who challenge the climate change debate

The series

Statistics needed -- The Deniers Part I Warming is real -- and has benefits -- The Deniers Part II
The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science -- The Deniers Part III
Polar scientists on thin ice -- The Deniers Part IV
The original denier: into the cold -- The Deniers Part V
The sun moves climate change -- The Deniers Part VI
Will the sun cool us? -- The Deniers Part VII
The limits of predictability -- The Deniers Part VIII
Look to Mars for the truth on global warming -- The Deniers Part IX
Limited role for C02 -- the Deniers Part X
End the chill -- The Deniers Part XI
Clouded research -- The Deniers Part XII
Allegre's second thoughts -- The Deniers XIII
The heat's in the sun -- The Deniers XIV
Unsettled Science -- The Deniers XV
Bitten by the IPCC -- The Deniers XVI
Little ice age is still within us -- The Deniers XVII
Fighting climate 'fluff' -- The Deniers XVIII
Science, not politics -- The Deniers XIX

More on the environment

My series set out to profile the dissenters -- those who deny that the science is settled on climate change -- and to have their views heard. To demonstrate that dissent is credible, I chose high-ranking scientists at the world's premier scientific establishments. I considered stopping after writing six profiles, thinking I had made my point, but continued the series due to feedback from readers. I next planned to stop writing after 10 profiles, then 12, but the feedback increased. Now, after profiling more than 20 deniers, I do not know when I will stop -- the list of distinguished scientists who question the IPCC grows daily, as does the number of emails I receive, many from scientists who express gratitude for my series.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists -- the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects -- and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction. Not only do most of my interviewees either discount or disparage the conventional wisdom as represented by the IPCC, many say their peers generally consider it to have little or no credibility. In one case, a top scientist told me that, to his knowledge, no respected scientist in his field accepts the IPCC position.

What of the one claim that we hear over and over again, that 2,000 or 2,500 of the world's top scientists endorse the IPCC position? I asked the IPCC for their names, to gauge their views. "The 2,500 or so scientists you are referring to are reviewers from countries all over the world," the IPCC Secretariat responded. "The list with their names and contacts will be attached to future IPCC publications, which will hopefully be on-line in the second half of 2007."

An IPCC reviewer does not assess the IPCC's comprehensive findings. He might only review one small part of one study that later becomes one small input to the published IPCC report. Far from endorsing the IPCC reports, some reviewers, offended at what they considered a sham review process, have demanded that the IPCC remove their names from the list of reviewers. One even threatened legal action when the IPCC refused.

A great many scientists, without doubt, are four-square in their support of the IPCC. A great many others are not. A petition organized by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine between 1999 and 2001 claimed some 17,800 scientists in opposition to the Kyoto Protocol. A more recent indicator comes from the U.S.-based National Registry of Environmental

Professionals, an accrediting organization whose 12,000 environmental practitioners have standing with U.S. government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. In a November, 2006, survey of its members, it found that only 59% think human activities are largely responsible for the warming that has occurred, and only 39% make their priority the curbing of carbon emissions. And 71% believe the increase in hurricanes is likely natural, not easily attributed to human activities.

Such diversity of views is also present in the wider scientific community, as seen in the World Federation of Scientists, an organization formed during the Cold War to encourage dialogue among scientists to prevent nuclear catastrophe. The federation, which encompasses many of the world's most eminent scientists and today represents more than 10,000 scientists, now focuses on 15 "planetary emergencies," among them water, soil, food, medicine and biotechnology, and climatic changes. Within climatic changes, there are eight priorities, one being "Possible human influences on climate and on atmospheric composition and chemistry (e.g. increased greenhouse gases and tropospheric ozone)."

Man-made global warming deserves study, the World Federation of Scientists believes, but so do other serious climatic concerns. So do 14 other planetary emergencies. That seems about right.

- Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.

Email: LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com.

Russia knows how to prevent global warming

2007-05-31T10:00:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-31T09:54:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-23T09:55:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-19T20:18:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-16T10:43:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-16T10:25:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-05-13T10:43:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-12T18:41:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-06T17:23:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-06T17:16:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-06T13:33:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-05T18:37:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-05T17:56:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-04T13:07:00.000-07:00

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."

Carbon-Neutral Is Hip, but Is It Green?

2007-05-03T11:50:00.000-07:00

Global Coolness

Carbon-Neutral Is Hip, but Is It Green?

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Published: April 29, 2007

THE rush to go on a carbon diet, even if by proxy, is in overdrive.

In addition to the celebrities — Leo, Brad, George — politicians like John Edwards and Hillary Clinton are now running, at least part of the time, carbon-neutral campaigns. A lengthening list of big businesses — international banks, London’s taxi fleet, luxury airlines — also claim “carbon neutrality.” Silverjet, a plush new trans-Atlantic carrier, bills itself as the first fully carbon-neutral airline. It puts about $28 of each round-trip ticket into a fund for global projects that, in theory, squelch as much carbon dioxide as the airline generates — about 1.2 tons per passenger, the airline says.

Also, a largely unregulated carbon-cutting business has sprung up. In this market, consultants or companies estimate a person’s or company’s output of greenhouse gases. Then, these businesses sell “offsets,” which pay for projects elsewhere that void or sop up an equal amount of emissions — say, by planting trees or, as one new company proposes, fertilizing the ocean so algae can pull the gas out of the air. Recent counts by Business Week magazine and several environmental watchdog groups tally the trade in offsets at more than $100 million a year and growing blazingly fast.

But is the carbon-neutral movement just a gimmick?

On this, environmentalists aren’t neutral, and they don’t agree. Some believe it helps build support, but others argue that these purchases don’t accomplish anything meaningful — other than giving someone a slightly better feeling (or greener reputation) after buying a 6,000-square-foot house or passing the million-mile mark in a frequent-flier program. In fact, to many environmentalists, the carbon-neutral campaign is a sign of the times — easy on the sacrifice and big on the consumerism.

As long as the use of fossil fuels keeps climbing — which is happening relentlessly around the world — the emission of greenhouse gases will keep rising. The average American, by several estimates, generates more than 20 tons of carbon dioxide or related gases a year; the average resident of the planet about 4.5 tons.

At this rate, environmentalists say, buying someone else’s squelched emissions is all but insignificant.

“The worst of the carbon-offset programs resemble the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences back before the Reformation,” said Denis Hayes, the president of the Bullitt Foundation, an environmental grant-making group. “Instead of reducing their carbon footprints, people take private jets and stretch limos, and then think they can buy an indulgence to forgive their sins.”
“This whole game is badly in need of a modern Martin Luther,” Mr. Hayes added.

Some environmental campaigners defend this marketplace as a legitimate, if imperfect, way to support an environmental ethic and political movement, even if the numbers don’t all add up.
“We can’t stop global warming with voluntary offsets, but they offer an option for individuals looking for a way to contribute to the solution in addition to reducing their own emissions and urging their elected representatives to support good policy,” said Daniel A. Lashof, the science director of the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

But he and others agree that more oversight is needed. Voluntary standards and codes of conduct are evolving in Europe and the United States to ensure that a ton of carbon dioxide purchased is actually a ton of carbon dioxide avoided.

The first attempt at an industry report card, commissioned by the environmental group Clean Air/Cool Planet (which has some involvement in the business), gave decidedly mixed reviews to the field, selecting eight sellers of carbon offsets that it concluded were reasonably reliable.
But the report, “A Consumer’s Guide to Retail Carbon-Offset Providers,” concluded that this market was no different than any other, saying, “if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

Prices vary widely for offsetting the carbon dioxide tonnage released by a long plane flight, S.U.V. commute or energy-hungry house. The report suggested that the cheapest offsets may not be legitimate.

For example, depending on where you shop for carbon credits, avoiding the ton of carbon dioxide released by driving a midsize car about 2,000 miles could cost $5 or $25, according to data in the report.

Mr. Hayes said there were legitimate companies and organizations that help people and companies measure their emissions and find ways to cut them, both directly and indirectly by purchasing certain kinds of credits. But overall, he said, an investment in such credits — given the questions about their reliability — should be looked at more as conventional charity (presuming you check to be sure the projects are real) and less as something like a license to binge on private jet travel.

In many ways, the carbon-neutral campaign mimics other efforts that use markets to save the environment. For nearly two decades, for example, forest protection groups have disputed the merits of “certified” tropical hardwood and other products that manufacturers claim are harvested in ways that don’t imperil virgin forests.

Some environmentalists say it’s better to offer some income to those who use forests in a renewable way. But others insist that instead of trying to police the trade by rooting our fraudulent planks, it’s better to avoid the timber altogether. Only one of many forest certification programs, run by the Forest Stewardship Council, has been widely endorsed by environmental groups.

Michael R. Solomon, the author of “Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having and Being” and a professor at St. Joseph's University, said he was not surprised by the allure of the carbon-offsetting market.

“Consumers are always going to gravitate toward a more parsimonious solution that requires less behavioral change,” he said. “We know that new products or ideas are more likely to be adopted if they don’t require us to alter our routines very much.”
But he said there was danger ahead, “if we become trained to substitute dollars for deeds — kind of an ‘I gave at the office’ prescription for the environment.”

Charles Komanoff, an energy economist in New York, said the commercial market in climate neutrality could have even more harmful effects.

It could, by suggesting there’s an easy way out, blunt public support for what will really be needed in the long run, he said: a binding limit on emissions or a tax on the fuels that generate greenhouse gases.

“There isn’t a single American household above the poverty line that couldn’t cut their CO2 at least 25 percent in six months through a straightforward series of fairly simple and terrifically cost-effective measures,” he said.

Jonathan Shopley, the chief executive of Britain’s CarbonNeutral Company, which does only 5 percent of its offsetting directly for individuals and the rest for businesses, insisted that the voluntary markets fill a vital gap.

This is particularly true, he said, because laws or treaties, like the Kyoto Protocol, that have mandatory limits on greenhouse gases have so far failed to blunt the relentless global rise in such emissions.

“That isn’t going to get us where we need to go,” Mr. Shopley said.

Is Global Warming a Sin?

2007-05-02T22:46:00.000-07:00

From Papal Indulgences to Carbon Credits

Is Global Warming a Sin?

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

In a couple of hundred years, historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the Christian millennium approached. Then, as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet's rapid downward slide.

Then as now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman Catholic Church was a bank whose capital was secured by the infinite mercy of Christ, Mary and the Saints, and so the Pope could sell indulgences, like checks. The sinners established a line of credit against bad behavior and could go on sinning. Today a world market in "carbon credits" is in formation. Those whose "carbon footprint" is small can sell their surplus carbon credits to others, less virtuous than themselves.

The modern trade is as fantastical as the medieval one. There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely entirely on unverified, crudely oversimplified computer models to finger mankind's sinful contribution. Devoid of any sustaining scientific basis, carbon trafficking is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism and greed, just like the old indulgences, though at least the latter produced beautiful monuments. By the sixteenth century, long after the world had sailed safely through the end of the first millennium, Pope Leo X financed the reconstruction of St. Peter's Basilica by offering a "plenary" indulgence, guaranteed to release a soul from purgatory.

Now imagine two lines on a piece of graph paper. The first rises to a crest, then slopes sharply down, then levels off and rises slowly once more. The other has no undulations. It rises in a smooth, slowly increasing arc. The first, wavy line is the worldwide CO2 tonnage produced by humans burning coal, oil and natural gas. On this graph it starts in 1928, at 1.1 gigatons (i.e. 1.1 billion metric tons). It peaks in 1929 at 1.17 gigatons. The world, led by its mightiest power, the USA, plummets into the Great Depression, and by 1932 human CO2 production has fallen to 0.88 gigatons a year, a 30 per cent drop. Hard times drove a tougher bargain than all the counsels of Al Gore or the jeremiads of the IPCC (Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change). Then, in 1933 it began to climb slowly again, up to 0.9 gigatons.

And the other line, the one ascending so evenly? That's the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, parts per million (ppm) by volume, moving in 1928 from just under 306, hitting 306 in 1929, to 307 in 1932 and on up. Boom and bust, the line heads up steadily. These days it's at 380.There are, to be sure, seasonal variations in CO2, as measured since 1958 by the instruments on Mauna Loa, Hawai'i. (Pre-1958 measurements are of air bubbles trapped in glacial ice.) Summer and winter vary steadily by about 5 ppm, reflecting photosynthesis cycles. The two lines on that graph proclaim that a whopping 30 per cent cut in man-made CO2 emissions didn't even cause a 1 ppm drop in the atmosphere's CO2. Thus it is impossible to assert that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from human burning of fossil fuels.

I met Dr. Martin Hertzberg, the man who drew that graph and those conclusions, on a Nation cruise back in 2001. He remarked that while he shared many of the Nation's editorial positions, he approved of my reservations on the issue of supposed human contributions to global warming, as outlined in columns I wrote at that time. Hertzberg was a meteorologist for three years in the U.S. Navy, an occupation which gave him a lifelong mistrust of climate modeling. Trained in chemistry and physics, a combustion research scientist for most of his career, he's retired now in Copper Mountain, Colorado, still consulting from time to time.

Not so long ago, Hertzberg sent me some of his recent papers on the global warming hypothesis, a construct now accepted by many progressives as infallible as Papal dogma on matters of faith or doctrine. Among them was the graph described above so devastating to the hypothesis.

As Hertzberg readily acknowledges, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has increased about 21 per cent in the past century. The world has also been getting just a little bit warmer.
The not very reliable data on the world's average temperature (which omit most of the world's oceans and remote regions, while over-representing urban areas) show about a 0.5Co increase in average temperature between 1880 and 1980, and it's still rising, more sharply in the polar regions than elsewhere. But is CO2, at 380 parts per million in the atmosphere, playing a significant role in retaining the 94 per cent of solar radiation that's absorbed in the atmosphere, as against water vapor, also a powerful heat absorber, whose content in humid tropical atmosphere, can be as high as 2 per cent, the equivalent of 20,000 ppm. As Hertzberg says, water in the form of oceans, clouds, snow, ice cover and vapor "is overwhelming in the radiative and energy balance between the earth and the sun Carbon dioxide and the greenhouse gases are, by comparison, the equivalent of a few farts in a hurricane." And water is exactly that component of the earth's heat balance that the global warming computer models fail to account for.

It's a notorious inconvenience for the Greenhousers that data also show carbon dioxide concentrations from the Eocene period, 20 million years before Henry Ford trundled his first model T out of the shop, 300-400 per cent higher than current concentrations. The Greenhousers deal with other difficulties like the medieval warming period's higher-than-today's temperatures by straightforward chicanery, misrepresenting tree-ring data (themselves an unreliable guide) and claiming the warming was a local, insignificant European affair.

We're warmer now, because today's world is in the thaw following the last Ice Age. Ice ages correlate with changes in the solar heat we receive, all due to predictable changes in the earth's elliptic orbit round the sun, and in the earth's tilt. As Hertzberg explains, the cyclical heat effect of all of these variables was worked out in great detail between 1915 and 1940 by the Serbian physicist, Milutin Milankovitch, one of the giants of 20th-century astrophysics. In past postglacial cycles, as now, the earth's orbit and tilt gives us more and longer summer days between the equinoxes.

Water covers 71 per cent of the surface of the planet. As compared to the atmosphere, there's at least a hundred times more CO2 in the oceans, dissolved as carbonate. As the postglacial thaw progresses the oceans warm up, and some of the dissolved carbon emits into the atmosphere, just like fizz in soda water taken out of the fridge. "So the greenhouse global warming theory has it ass backwards," Hertzberg concludes. "It is the warming of the earth that is causing the increase of carbon dioxide and not the reverse." He has recently had vivid confirmation of that conclusion. Several new papers show that for the last three quarter million years CO2 changes always lag global temperatures by 800 to 2,600 years.

It looks like Poseidon should go hunting for carbon credits. Trouble is, the human carbon footprint is of zero consequence amid these huge forces and volumes, and that's not even to mention the role of the giant reactor beneath our feet: the earth's increasingly hot molten core.

Light Bulb Lunacy

2007-05-01T10:44:00.000-07:00

FoxNews.com

Sunday , April 29, 2007

By Steven Milloy

How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent lightbulb? About $4.28 for the bulb and labor — unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about $2,004.28, which doesn’t include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health.

Sound crazy? Perhaps no more than the stampede to ban the incandescent light bulb in favor of compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) — a move already either adopted or being considered in California, Canada, the European Union and Australia.

According to an April 12 article in The Ellsworth American, Bridges had the misfortune of breaking a CFL during installation in her daughter’s bedroom: It dropped and shattered on the carpeted floor.

Aware that CFLs contain potentially hazardous substances, Bridges called her local Home Depot for advice. The store told her that the CFL contained mercury and that she should call the Poison Control hotline, which in turn directed her to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

The DEP sent a specialist to Bridges’ house to test for mercury contamination. The specialist found mercury levels in the bedroom in excess of six times the state’s “safe” level for mercury contamination of 300 billionths of a gram per cubic meter.

The DEP specialist recommended that Bridges call an environmental cleanup firm, which reportedly gave her a “low-ball” estimate of $2,000 to clean up the room. The room then was sealed off with plastic and Bridges began “gathering finances” to pay for the $2,000 cleaning. Reportedly, her insurance company wouldn’t cover the cleanup costs because mercury is a pollutant.

Given that the replacement of incandescent bulbs with CFLs in the average U.S. household is touted as saving as much as $180 annually in energy costs — and assuming that Bridges doesn’t break any more CFLs — it will take her more than 11 years to recoup the cleanup costs in the form of energy savings.

Even if you don’t go for the full-scale panic of the $2,000 cleanup, the do-it-yourself approach is still somewhat intense, if not downright alarming.

Consider the procedure offered by the Maine DEP’s Web page entitled, “What if I accidentally break a fluorescent bulb in my home?”

Don’t vacuum bulb debris because a standard vacuum will spread mercury-containing dust throughout the area and contaminate the vacuum. Ventilate the area and reduce the temperature. Wear protective equipment like goggles, coveralls and a dust mask.
Collect the waste material into an airtight container. Pat the area with the sticky side of tape. Wipe with a damp cloth. Finally, check with local authorities to see where hazardous waste may be properly disposed.

The only step the Maine DEP left off was the final one: Hope that you did a good enough cleanup so that you, your family and pets aren’t poisoned by any mercury inadvertently dispersed or missed.

This, of course, assumes that people are even aware that breaking CFLs entails special cleanup procedures.

The potentially hazardous CFL is being pushed by companies such as Wal-Mart, which wants to sell 100 million CFLs at five times the cost of incandescent bulbs during 2007, and, surprisingly, environmentalists.

It’s quite odd that environmentalists have embraced the CFL, which cannot now and will not in the foreseeable future be made without mercury. Given that there are about 4 billion lightbulb sockets in American households, we’re looking at the possibility of creating billions of hazardous waste sites such as the Bridges’ bedroom.

Usually, environmentalists want hazardous materials out of, not in, our homes.
These are the same people who go berserk at the thought of mercury being emitted from power plants and the presence of mercury in seafood. Environmentalists have whipped up so much fear of mercury among the public that many local governments have even launched mercury thermometer exchange programs.

As the activist group Environmental Defense urges us to buy CFLs, it defines mercury on a separate part of its Web site as a “highly toxic heavy metal that can cause brain damage and learning disabilities in fetuses and children” and as “one of the most poisonous forms of pollution.”

Greenpeace also recommends CFLs while simultaneously bemoaning contamination caused by a mercury thermometer factory in India. But where are mercury-containing CFLs made? Not in the U.S., under strict environmental regulation. CFLs are made in India and China, where environmental standards are virtually non-existent.

And let’s not forget about the regulatory nightmare known as the Superfund law, the EPA regulatory program best known for requiring expensive but often needless cleanup of toxic waste sites, along with endless litigation over such cleanups.

We’ll eventually be disposing billions and billions of CFL mercury bombs. Much of the mercury from discarded and/or broken CFLs is bound to make its way into the environment and give rise to Superfund liability, which in the past has needlessly disrupted many lives, cost tens of billions of dollars and sent many businesses into bankruptcy.

As each CFL contains 5 milligrams of mercury, at the Maine “safety” standard of 300 nanograms per cubic meter, it would take 16,667 cubic meters of soil to “safely” contain all the mercury in a single CFL. While CFL vendors and environmentalists tout the energy cost savings of CFLs, they conveniently omit the personal and societal costs of CFL disposal.

Not only are CFLs much more expensive than incandescent bulbs and emit light that many regard as inferior to incandescent bulbs, they pose a nightmare if they break and require special disposal procedures. Should government (egged on by environmentalists and the Wal-Marts of the world) impose on us such higher costs, denial of lighting choice, disposal hassles and breakage risks in the name of saving a few dollars every year on the electric bill?

Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and CSRWatch.com. He is a junk science expert, and advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Gore Calls Canada Climate Plan a 'Fraud'

2007-04-30T10:01:00.000-07:00

Gore Calls Canada Climate Plan a 'Fraud'

Apr 29, 11:31 PM (ET)

TORONTO (AP) - Al Gore condemned Canada's new plan to reduce greenhouse gases, saying it was "a complete and total fraud" because it lacks specifics and gives industry a way to actually increase emissions.

Under the initiative announced Thursday, Canada aims to reduce the current level of greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent by 2020. But the government acknowledged it would not meet its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol, which requires 35 industrialized countries to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

The country's emissions are now 30 percent above 1990 levels.

The conservative government's strategy focuses both on reducing emissions of gases blamed for global warming and improving air quality. But the plan failed to spell out what many of its regulations will look like.

Gore said the plan did not make clear how Canada would reach its 2020 emissions goal. He also criticized the plan for allowing industries to pollute more if they use emissions-cutting technologies while increasing production.

"In my opinion, it is a complete and total fraud," Gore said Saturday. "It is designed to mislead the Canadian people."

He said "intensity reduction" - which allow industries to increase their greenhouse gas outputs as they raise production - was a poll-tested phrase developed by think tanks financed by Exxon Mobil and other large polluters.

Canadian Environment Minister John Baird rejected Gore's criticisms.

"The fact is our plan is vastly tougher than any measures introduced by the administration of which the former vice president was a member," Baird said in a statement.

Baird also invited Gore to discuss climate change and the government's environmental policies with him.

Gore was in Toronto to present his documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," at a consumer environmental show. He acknowledged that as an American, he had "no right to interfere" in Canadian decision.

However, he said, the rest of the world looks to Canada for moral leadership, and that was why Thursday's announcement was so "shocking."

Canadian opposition Liberal Leader Stephane Dion said Sunday that Gore was right.

"Mr. Baird is embarrassing Canada around the world," Dion said. "The world expects Canada will do its share - more than that, that Canada will be a leader and we are failing the world. We are failing Canadians."

Climate change hits Mars

2007-04-30T09:58:00.000-07:00

From The Sunday Times
April 29, 2007

Climate change hits Mars

Mars is being hit by rapid climate change and it is happening so fast that the red planet could lose its southern ice cap, writes Jonathan Leake.

Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.
Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.

The mechanism at work on Mars appears, however, to be different from that on Earth. One of the researchers, Lori Fenton, believes variations in radiation and temperature across the surface of the Red Planet are generating strong winds.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, she suggests that such winds can stir up giant dust storms, trapping heat and raising the planet’s temperature.

Fenton’s team unearthed heat maps of the Martian surface from Nasa’s Viking mission in the 1970s and compared them with maps gathered more than two decades later by Mars Global Surveyor. They found there had been widespread changes, with some areas becoming darker.
When a surface darkens it absorbs more heat, eventually radiating that heat back to warm the thin Martian atmosphere: lighter surfaces have the opposite effect. The temperature differences between the two are thought to be stirring up more winds, and dust, creating a cycle that is warming the planet.

Carbon Trading

2007-04-26T14:18:00.000-07:00

Industry caught in carbon ‘smokescreen’

By Fiona Harvey and Stephen Fidler in London

Published: April 25 2007 22:07 Last updated: April 25 2007 22:07

Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on “carbon credit” projects that yield few if any environmental benefits.

A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place.

Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway.

The growing political salience of environmental politics has sparked a “green gold rush”, which has seen a dramatic expansion in the number of businesses offering both companies and individuals the chance to go “carbon neutral”, offsetting their own energy use by buying carbon credits that cancel out their contribution to global warming.

The burgeoning regulated market for carbon credits is expected to more than double in size to about $68.2bn by 2010, with the unregulated voluntary sector rising to $4bn in the same period.

The FT investigation found:

■ Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.
■ Industrial companies profiting from doing very little – or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.
■ Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.
■ A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.
■ Companies and individuals being charged over the odds for the private purchase of European Union carbon permits that have plummeted in value because they do not result in emissions cuts.

Francis Sullivan, environment adviser at HSBC, the UK’s biggest bank that went carbon-neutral in 2005, said he found “serious credibility concerns” in the offsetting market after evaluating it for several months.

“The police, the fraud squad and trading standards need to be looking into this. Otherwise people will lose faith in it,” he said.

These concerns led the bank to ignore the market and fund its own carbon reduction projects directly.

Some companies are benefiting by asking “green” consumers to pay them for cleaning up their own pollution. For instance, DuPont, the chemicals company, invites consumers to pay $4 to eliminate a tonne of carbon dioxide from its plant in Kentucky that produces a potent greenhouse gas called HFC-23. But the equipment required to reduce such gases is relatively cheap. DuPont refused to comment and declined to specify its earnings from the project, saying it was at too early a stage to discuss.

The FT has also found examples of companies setting up as carbon offsetters without appearing to have a clear idea of how the markets operate. In response to FT inquiries about its sourcing of carbon credits, one company, carbonvoucher.com, said it had not taken payments for offsets.
Blue Source, a US offsetting company, invites consumers to offset carbon emissions by investing in enhanced oil recovery, which pumps carbon dioxide into depleted oil wells to bring up the remaining oil. However, Blue Source said that because of the high price of oil, this process was often profitable in itself, meaning operators were making extra revenues from selling “carbon credits” for burying the carbon.

There is nothing illegal in these practices. However, some companies that are offsetting their emissions have avoided such projects because customers may find them controversial.
BP said it would not buy credits resulting from improvements in industrial efficiency or from most renewable energy projects in developed countries.

Additional reporting by Rebecca Bream

Global Warming and Weather Control

2007-04-26T12:51:00.000-07:00

April 25, 2007, 5:59 pm

Could Global Warming Be Halted by Controlling the Weather?

Frustrated with the limits of public policy to tackle global warming, some scientists say the time has come to engineer a way to control the weather. The idea might seem appealing, says a science scholar, but it could have potentially harmful ramifications.

Climate engineering has become a popular topic among a group of scientists who are skeptical of the potential other environmental remedies, from carbon taxes to alternative energy, James R. Fleming, a professor of science, technology and society at Colby College, writes in the Wilson Quarterly’s spring issue. But the potential fixes being discussed reflect an overconfidence in technology, Mr. Fleming says, as well as an ignorance of the history of failed efforts to control the weather.

One idea put forth by a physicist involved in climate-control discussions would involve bombarding the Arctic stratosphere with specially engineered particles to deflect the sun’s rays, thereby lowering temperatures. Alternatively, a fleet of crop-dusting airplanes could deliver the particles by flying continuously around the Arctic Circle. An astronomer suggested placing a huge fleet of mirrors in orbit to divert solar radiation. Some of these ideas, says Mr. Fleming, are reminiscent of the optimism that framed the first attempts at climate control, which date to the 19th century. In the 1940s, scientists developed cloud-seeding to produce rainfall, a technique that was later adopted by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War to hinder enemy troops movements.

The risk that modern climate controls would be similarly used for military purposes is one of the dangers of the latest batch of ideas, says Mr. Fleming. “It is virtually impossible to imagine governments resisting the temptation to explore military uses of any potentially climate-altering technology,” he says. What’s more, the climate system is so complex that it would be difficult to ever predict how such controls would affect nature. And which countries, Mr. Fleming wonders, could be trusted to equitably control weather in different parts of the world. In the face of a potential climate crisis, doing nothing or too little is “clearly wrong, but so is doing too much.” – Wendy Pollack

Global warming debate 'irrational': scientists

2007-04-26T10:26:00.000-07:00

Stephanie Stein

Thursday, April 26, 2007 - 10:00

Local News - The current debate about global warming is "completely irrational," and people need to start taking a different approach, say two Ottawa scientists.

Carleton University science professor Tim Patterson said global warming will not bring about the downfall of life on the planet.

Patterson said much of the up-to-date research indicates that "changes in the brightness of the sun" are almost certainly the primary cause of the warming trend since the end of the "Little Ice Age" in the late 19th century. Human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas of concern in most plans to curb climate change, appear to have little effect on global climate, he said.

"I think the proof in the pudding, based on what (media and governments) are saying, (is) we're about three quarters of the way (to disaster) with the doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere," said Patterson. "The world should be heating up like crazy by now, and it's not. The temperatures match very closely with the solar cycles."

Patterson explained CO2 is not a pollutant, but an essential plant food.

Billions of taxpayers' dollars are spent to control the emissions of this benign gas, in the mistaken belief that they can stop climate change, he said.

"The only constant about climate is change," said Patterson.

Patterson said money could be better spent on places like Africa.

"All the money wasted on Kyoto in a year could provide clean drinking water for Africa," said Patterson. "We're into a new era of science with the discussion of solar forces. Eventually, Kyoto is going to fall by the wayside. In the meantime, I'm worried we're going to spend millions that could have been spent on something better like air pollution."

Tom Harris, executive director of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project - an organization that attempts to debunk some of the popular beliefs about climate change - supported Patterson's findings.

Global warming assertions are based on inconclusive evidence put forth in science reports that had not been published yet, he said.

"The media takes (inconclusive) information that only suggests there could be a climate problem and turns it into an environmental catastrophe," said Harris.

"They continually say we only have 10 years left, and they've been saying it for 20 years, and it's ridiculous," he said. "The only reason I got involved in talking to media is that I think our resources are being mismanaged.

"Go after something real and tangible like air pollution."

After hearing a second scientist say climate change is part of a natural cycle, Elaine Kennedy - a local environmental activist - is interested in investigating the issue further.

She looks forward to examining scientific reports that will be published in a couple of months by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"The problem may not be climate change, but the problem is still pollution," said Kennedy.

She's not alone in her assertion global warming is a pollution problem.

David Phillips, a senior government environment expert, believes there is more than one contributing factor to global warming. There's a human element, as well as natural cycles.

Difficult to convince

"I'm a man that's difficult to convince," he said. "What convinces me is the large body of evidence, and highly reputable people promoting global warming, who are not lobbyists, but only seeking truth in science. They say the the earth is warming up faster and greater now than in the past."

People who are contradicting the global warming reality, Phillip thinks, have their own motives for doing so.

"These skeptics are keeping the debate alive (for their own interests). They try to confuse people into inaction," said Phillips.

Phillips believes global warming is solvable.

"We solved the ozone and acid rain problem. With effort, and a new way of doing things we could solve this one too," said Phillips.

Warming Skeptic Film Attacked

2007-04-25T14:44:00.000-07:00

Film on Global Warming Is Challenged

Wednesday April 25, 3:22 pm ET

By Raphael G. Satter, Associated Press Writer

Scientists Demand Changes to Global Warming Skeptic's Film

LONDON (AP) -- A group of British climate scientists is demanding changes to a skeptical documentary about global warming, saying there are grave errors in the program billed as a response to Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth."

"The Great Global Warming Swindle" aired on British television in March and is coming out soon on DVD. It argues that man-made emissions have a marginal impact on the world's climate and warming can better be explained by changing patterns of solar activity.

An open letter sent Tuesday by 38 scientists, including the former heads of Britain's academy of sciences and Britain's weather office, called on producer Wag TV to remove what it called "major misrepresentations" from the film before the DVD release -- a demand its director said was tantamount to censorship.

Bob Ward, the former spokesman for the Royal Society, Britain's academy of science, and one of the letter's signatories, said director Mark Durkin made a "long catalog of fundamental and profound mistakes" -- including the claim that volcanoes produce more carbon dioxide than humans, and that the Earth's atmosphere was warmer during the Middle Ages than it is today.
"Free speech does not extend to misleading the public by making factually inaccurate statements," he said. "Somebody has to stand up for the public interest here."

Durkin called the letter "loathsome."

"This is a contemptible, weasel-worded attempt to gag scientific criticism, and it won't work," he said. "I don't believe they're interested in quality control when it comes to the reporting of science -- so long as it's on their side."

Durkin acknowledged two of the errors highlighted by the scientists -- including the claim about volcanic emissions -- but he described those changes as minor and said they would be corrected in the expanded DVD release.

But the scientists do not want the DVD released without edits to completely remove the material they object to -- something Ward said would fatally weaken the film's argument.

"The fact is that it's a very convincing program, and if you're not very aware of the science you wouldn't necessarily see what the errors are," Ward said. "But the errors are huge. ... Without those errors in, he doesn't have a story."

Ward has also complained to Britain's media regulator, which said it was investigating the matter. British broadcast law demands impartiality on matters of major political and industrial controversy -- and penalties can be imposed for misrepresentations of fact.

The decision to broadcast Durkin's documentary on Channel 4 was an unusual move in a country where the role of man-made carbon emissions in heating the globe is largely taken for granted and politicians regularly spar over which party has the greenest environmental policy.

As for the former vice president, Gore has been hired as an adviser to the British government, which plans to send copies of his film to schools around England.

Doofinator Invades Blogspace

2007-04-25T12:09:00.000-07:00

Notorious global warming heretic and skeptic, The Respected Doofinator, has announced his intrusion into internet blogspace.

News of his presence was greeted with disbelief, shock, and horror in the Global Warming Community.

The effects of The Respected Doofinator's arrival were difficult to gauge, said one blog expert: "As far as we know, sales of Al Gore's books and DVD's have not been affected, but we are watching the situation closely".

A spokesman for The Respected Doofinator's camp pledged magnanimity for all members of the internet blogging community and said that he hoped that Global Warming Activists would remain calm and refrain from engaging in activities that might be dangerous or self-destructive.