Pathological Science

[Crafty_Dog]

http://news.bostonherald.com/news/na...osition=recent


Former astronaut speaks out on global warming

By Associated Press | Sunday, February 15, 2009 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Around the Nation

SANTA FE, N.M. - Former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, who walked on the moon and once served New Mexico in the U.S. Senate, doesn’t believe that humans are causing global warming.

"I don’t think the human effect is significant compared to the natural effect," said Schmitt, who is among 70 skeptics scheduled to speak next month at the International Conference on Climate Change in New York.  Schmitt contends that scientists "are being intimidated" if they disagree with the idea that burning fossil fuels has increased carbon dioxide levels, temperatures and sea levels.

"They’ve seen too many of their colleagues lose grant funding when they haven’t gone along with the so-called political consensus that we’re in a human-caused global warming," Schmitt said.

Dan Williams, publisher with the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which is hosting the climate change conference, said he invited Schmitt after reading about his resignation from The Planetary Society, a nonprofit dedicated to space exploration.  Schmitt resigned after the group blamed global warming on human activity. In his resignation letter, the 74-year-old geologist argued that the "global
warming scare is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making."

Williams said Heartland is skeptical about the crisis that people are proclaiming in global warming.

"Not that the planet hasn’t warmed. We know it has or we’d all still be in the Ice Age," he said. "But it has not reached a crisis proportion and, even among us skeptics, there’s disagreement about how much man has been responsible for that warming."

Schmitt said historical documents indicate average temperatures have risen by 1 degree per century since around 1400 A.D., and the rise in carbon dioxide is because of the temperature rise.  Schmitt also said geological evidence indicates changes in sea level have been going on for thousands of years. He said smaller changes are related to changes in the elevation of land masses — for example, the Great Lakes are rising because the earth’s crust is rebounding from being depressed by glaciers.

Schmitt, who grew up in Silver City and now lives in Albuquerque, has a science degree from the California Institute of Technology. He also studied geology at the University of Oslo in Norway and took a doctorate in geology from Harvard University in 1964.
In 1972, he was one of the last men to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 17 mission.

Schmitt said he’s heartened that the upcoming conference is made up of scientists who haven’t been manipulated by politics.
Of the global warming debate, he said: "It’s one of the few times you’ve seen a sizable portion of scientists who ought to be objective take a political position and it’s coloring their objectivity."

[Body-by-Guinness]

How to Bring Real Science Into the Courtroom

A disturbing new report says our criminal courts have been relying on bad evidence.

Radley Balko | February 20, 2009

A forthcoming study from the National Academy of Sciences on the poor quality of forensic science in America’s courtrooms is expected to send shockwaves through the criminal justice system. According to The New York Times:

People who have seen it say it is a sweeping critique of many forensic methods that the police and prosecutors rely on, including fingerprinting, firearms identification and analysis of bite marks, blood spatter, hair and handwriting. The report says such analyses are often handled by poorly trained technicians who then exaggerate the accuracy of their methods in court.

Law enforcement organizations have tried to derail the report nearly every step of the way, and with good reason. Police and prosecutors have been relying on bad science to get convictions for decades. It’s only recently, as the onset of DNA testing has begun uncovering a disturbing spate of wrongful convictions, that some of the criminal justice system’s cottage industry pseudo-sciences like "bite mark analysis" have been exposed for the quackery they are.

The power of DNA to exonerate the condemned has us quickly learning that our courts have for years been corrupted by charlatans and snake-oil salesmen, such as Mississippi’s dubious “bite mark expert” Dr. Michael West and impossibly industrious medical examiner Dr. Steven Hayne; Oklahoma City’s Dr. Joyce Gilchrist; or Maryland’s Joseph Kopera, to name just a few.

The report’s critique of forensic evidence is much needed, but the proposed solution doesn’t sound promising. According to The New York Times, the report "concludes that Congress should create a federal agency to guarantee the independence of the field, which has been dominated by law enforcement agencies."

The problems with the forensics system aren’t going to be resolved by creating a new federal bureaucracy. Lack of federal oversight isn’t the problem. According to the Times article, the NAS report is particularly critical of the FBI crime lab, long considered the gold standard in forensics, and whose technicians often advise state crime labs on best practices.

The problem with criminal forensics is the government monopoly on courtroom science in criminal trials. In too many states, forensic evidence is sent only to state-owned or state-operated crime labs. There’s no competition, no peer review, and in some cases, crime lab workers either report to or can be pressured by prosecutors when test results don’t confirm preexisting theories about how a crime may have occurred. This sort of bias can creep in unintentionally, or it can be more overt. But studies show it’s always there. The only way to compensate for it is to bring competitors into the game, other labs who gain by revealing another lab’s mistakes. Every other area of science is steered by the peer review process. It’s really unconscionable that criminal forensics—where there’s so much at stake—has existed and evolved so long without it.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to set up some sort of task force within the Department of Justice devoted to investigating and prosecuting cases of outright forensic fraud. If prosecutors are conspiring with or pressuring experts to deny criminal defendants a fair trial, that would be a due process violation and under the Fourteenth Amendment, the federal government would be permitted, or even obligated, to step in. Certainly a state like Mississippi, for example, has neglected its duty to ensure that its citizens accused of violent crimes are given a fair trial.

But if we’re really serious about making a true science out of forensics, we need to fundamentally alter the way forensic evidence is generated for use in the courtroom. Roger Koppl, an economist and forensic expert at Fairleigh-Dickinson University has come up with some excellent suggestions (disclosure: Koppl outlined these suggestions in a report (pdf) for the Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason. Koppl and I have also co-written two articles on this issue). Among them:

• Defendants should be given access to their own forensic experts. For every prosecution expert, defendants should be issued a voucher to hire their own expert.

• Forensic evidence (autopsies, fingerprints, blood samples, and so on) should at least periodically be sent to more than one lab for testing. Even sending just every third or fourth sample to an independent lab would go a long way toward keeping state labs honest (state labs wouldn’t know when other labs would be doing the same testing).

• Forensic experts should refrain from talking with police and prosecutors before conducting their tests. Studies show that exposure to theories about how a crime may have been committed beforehand can bias an expert’s results, even unintentionally. States should hire evidence handlers to shepherd evidence between law enforcement and crime labs without conveying any contextual information about where or how the evidence was obtained.

• State forensic experts should not serve in the same state bureaucracy as police or prosecutors. Ideally, they should report to criminal court judges. Barring that, they should be independent, and not in any way be considered part of the prosecution’s “team.”

• States should conduct periodic statistical reviews of crime lab results, to see if any labs or individual lab technicians are producing statistically unlikely results.

These ideas sound radical, but in truth they amount to little more than applying basic scientific principles like peer review, blind testing, and repetition to the evidence and opinions currently presented in criminal cases as science, but isn’t subjected to the sort of scrutiny and review other sciences are. Forensic science is in bad need of reform, but it needs to be the right kind of reform. What we don’t need is another layer of government bureaucracy that imposes a series of negotiated, compromised-for standards and practices, then fails to properly enforce them

Radley Balko is a senior editor at Reason magazine. This article originally appeared at FoxNews.com.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/131711.html

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Second post.

http://www.reason.com/blog/show/131799.html


Battling the Threat of Famine with One Hand Tied -- Thanks Again Greenpeace and FOE

Ronald Bailey | February 20, 2009, 4:29pm

A virulent strain of stem rust identified as Ug99 is spreading rapidly through wheat crops in Africa. For decades, this devastating fungal disease has been kept in check thanks to the work of plant breeders like Peace Nobelist Norman Borlaug. As the Washington Post reported earlier this week:

Eighty percent of Asian and African wheat varieties are now susceptible, and so is barley, FAO experts said. Scientists named the new menace Ug99 for its discovery in Uganda in 1999. But they say it probably started earlier in Kenya, where more wheat is grown.

The [International Wheat and Maize] research center in Mexico published a warning of "a pending disaster in global agriculture."...

Unlike common rust infestations, which reduce but do not wipe out yields, stem rust can topple a whole field. "It can take everything," said Robert McIntosh, former director of Australia's rust-control program. "It is the most damaging of the rusts."

As Borlaug warned in a New York Times op/ed last year:

If millions of small-scale farmers see their wheat crops wiped out for want of new disease-resistant varieties, the problem will not be confined to any one country. Rust spores move long distances in the jet streams and know no political boundaries. Widespread failures in global wheat production will push the prices of all foods higher, causing new misery for the world’s poor.

Ug99 could reduce world wheat production by 60 million tons.

The good news is that wheat breeders have identified some varieties that contain genes that confer some resistance to the Ug99 strain. The bad news is that wheat breeders have to rely on slower traditional crossbreeding rather than faster modern biotech methods to get the fungus-resistant genes into productive varieties. As Nature reports:

All these approaches will probably rely on traditional breeding methods, and public reluctance about transgenic crops is likely to keep transgenic approaches off the table for some time. In 2004, Monsanto, an agricultural company headquartered in St Louis, Missouri, announced that it was halting development of transgenic herbicide-resistant strains of wheat after US farmers expressed concerns that they would not be able to export the crops to other countries. "The transgenic option is open," says [Beat] Keller [a wheat researcher from the University of Zurich in Switzerland], "but I don't think we're going to see that application very soon."
And just why is the public leery of using genetic engineering to improve crops? Because activist organizations like Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and the Organic Consumers Association, have spent millions on unscientific campaigns (aka spreading lies) about biotech crops.

Let's hope that plant breeders constrained by politicized science will, nevertheless, succeed in developing rust-resistant varieties in time to prevent a stem rust famine.

[Body-by-Guinness]

February 25, 2009
'Consensus' on global warming collapsing

Thomas Lifson
Prominent Japanese scientists have made a "dramatic break" with the IPCC findings. From the Register (UK):

Kanya Kusano is Program Director and Group Leader for the Earth Simulator at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science & Technology (JAMSTEC). He focuses on the immaturity of simulation work cited in support of the theory of anthropogenic climate change. Using undiplomatic language, Kusano compares them to ancient astrology. After listing many faults, and the IPCC's own conclusion that natural causes of climate are poorly understood, Kusano concludes: "[The IPCC's] conclusion that from now on atmospheric temperatures are likely to show a continuous, monotonous increase, should be perceived as an unprovable hypothesis," he writes. [...] Japanese scientists have made a dramatic break with the UN and Western-backed hypothesis of climate change in a new report from its Energy Commission. Three of the five researchers disagree with the UN's IPCC view that recent warming is primarily the consequence of man-made industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. Remarkably, the subtle and nuanced language typical in such reports has been set aside. One of the five contributors compares computer climate modelling to ancient astrology. Others castigate the paucity of the US ground temperature data set used to support the hypothesis, and declare that the unambiguous warming trend from the mid-part of the 20th Century has ceased. The report by Japan Society of Energy and Resources (JSER) is astonishing rebuke to international pressure, and a vote of confidence in Japan's native marine and astronomical research. Publicly-funded science in the West uniformly backs the hypothesis that industrial influence is primarily responsible for climate change, although fissures have appeared recently. Only one of the five top Japanese scientists commissioned here concurs with the man-made global warming hypothesis. JSER is the academic society representing scientists from the energy and resource fields, and acts as a government advisory panel. The report appeared last month but has received curiously little attention. So The Register commissioned a translation of the document - the first to appear in the West in any form.

Meanwhile, President Obama presses ahead with his plans to wreck the American economy on the basis of immature simulations.
Posted at 11:43 AM

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/02/consensus_on_global_warming_co.html at February 25, 2009 - 12:50:08 PM EST

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What if there is no Man-Made Global Warming? What then?
By Tom Deweese  Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Here are some questions every American should ask their elected officials – especially those supporting “climate change” legislation: If it is proven that climate change is not man-made, but natural, will you be relieved and excited to know that man is off the hook? Will you now help to remove all of the draconian regulations passed during the global warming hysteria, since it was all wrong headed and harmful to the economy and our way of life?

Their answers to these questions should be very illuminating as to the true agenda they seek to impose. Is their agenda really about helping to protect the environment, or is it about creating a new social and economic order, using the environment as the excuse?

If they are supporting climate change legislation because of a genuine concern for the environment, then they should now be greatly relieved to know that true science is showing more and more evidence that there is no man-made global warming, and in fact, a natural cooling period has begun.

Last year, 52 scientists authored a much hyped report issued by the UN’s IPCC which said global warming was man-made and getting worse. But in the past year, more than 650 scientists from around the world have now expressed their doubts about the reports findings – 12 times the number of IPCC global warming alarmists now agree it’s bunk.

“I am a skeptic…Global Warming has become a new religion,” says Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.  “Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly…as a scientist I remain skeptical,” says Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, formally with NASA and called “among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years.” Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in history… When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists,” said UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh. “It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming,” said U.S. Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B, Glodenberg.  Top these very few quotes with the fact that 34,000 scientists have now signed a petition saying global warming is probably natural and is not man-made.

Instead, they say the science shows warming actually stopped in 1999. That the brief warming period we experienced in the past decade was completely natural, caused, in part, by storms on the sun, not CO2 emissions from SUVs. The Sun storms have ended and now, a cooling period has begun. That’s it. Done. Crisis over. Man is not to blame.

Hurray! The nation should be rejoicing. No need for expensive green cars, mercury-filled light bulbs, special house building materials, alternative energy, no bird- killing windmills, no special energy taxes, no extra government oversight committees, no more global climate change conferences – and no need for a Climate Czar. Carol Browner can go back into mothballs. We can finally clean out the ten feet of fuel on the bottom of the forests and prevent the massive forest fires. And that will help us reestablish the timber industry and all the jobs that were killed. We can drill American oil and end our dependency on foreigners who hate us. In fact, that stable source of energy and its prices will help restore the Detroit auto industry and all of those jobs. Why, we don’t need a stimulus package – the economy will rebound on its own. We are free. The environment is not in crisis. Rejoice! Rejoice!

Because global warming never was about protecting the environment. It was the excuse to enforce global governance on the planet

That silence you hear is the news media, which refuses to report what any skeptic has to say. That silence you hear is the lack of effort on Capitol Hill to start to pull back from the climate change hysteria. That silence you hear is from the White House where President of Change, Barack Obama now has an EPA director, a Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) director and a full blown Climate Change Czar, all working to impose huge cut backs in energy use, taxes, rules and regulations that will bring an already damaged economy to its knees – all in the name of man-made Global Warming – which doesn’t exist. That silence you hear is from global corporations which have bought into Al Gores lie and invested heavily in the promised green economy. In fact, their dollars are the only thing green about any of it. Their commercials are promoting the lie and changing our way of life. None of them are about to change any of these policies, simply to accommodate a few scientific facts.

In spite of all the facts to the contrary, in spite of literally thousands of real scientists joining the ranks of the skeptics, Gore just told Congress that the Global Warming crisis is even worse than predicted. Obama said “the science is settled.”

Why? Because global warming never was about protecting the environment. It was the excuse to enforce global governance on the planet, by creating a new global economy based on the environment rather than on goods and services. In short, it’s all about wealth redistribution. Your wealth into a green rat hole.  We used to call it communism. Now we call it environmentalism. It sounds so friendly. So meaningful. So urgent. The devastation is the same.

So, go ahead. Ask your elected representatives how they would react to the fact that global warming is not real. Are they happy and relieved, or do they continue to promote the same insanity called Climate Change? Their answers will tell you their true agenda.

[Body-by-Guinness]

A piece debunking global warming hysteria that amusingly compares warming zealots to prohibitionists.


Global Warming and Climate Change in Perspective: Truths and Myths About Carbon Dioxide, Scientific Consensus, and Climate Models
by William Happer  (February 28, 2009)
Statement to the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee by William Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics Princeton University, made on February 25, 2009.

Madam Chairman and members, thank you for the opportunity to appear before the Committee on Environment and Public Works to testify on Climate Change. My name is William Happer, and I am the Cyrus Fogg Bracket Professor of Physics at Princeton University. I am not a climatologist, but I don't think any of the other witnesses are either. I do work in the related field of atomic, molecular and optical physics. I have spent my professional life studying the interactions of visible and infrared radiation withgases - one of the main physical phenomena behind the greenhouse effect. I have published over 200 papers in peer reviewed scientific journals. I am a member of a number of professional organizations, including the American Physical Society and the National Academy of Sciences. I have done extensive consulting work for the US Government and Industry. I also served as the Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy (DOE) from 1990 to 1993, where I supervised all of DOE's work on climate change. I have come here today as a concerned citizen to express my personal views, and those of many like me, about US climate-change policy. These are not official views of my main employer, Princeton University, nor of any other organization with which I am associated.

Let me state clearly where I probably agree with the other witnesses. We have been in a period of global warming over the past 200 years, but there have been several periods, like the last ten years, when the warming has ceased, and there have even been periods of substantial cooling, as from 1940 to 1970. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) have increased from about 280 to 380 parts per million over past 100 years. The combustion of fossil fuels, coal, oil and natural gas, has contributed to the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. And finally, increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause the earth's surface to warm. The key question is: will the net effect of the warming, and any other effects of the CO2, be good or bad for humanity?

I believe that the increase of CO2 is not a cause for alarm and will be good for mankind. I predict that future historians will look back on this period much as we now view the period just before the passage of the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution to prohibit "the manufacturing, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors." At the time, the 18th amendment seemed to be exactly the right thing to do - who wanted to be in league with demon rum? It was the 1917 version of saving the planet. More than half the states enacted prohibition laws before the 18th amendment was ratified. Only one state, Rhode Island, voted against the 18th amendment. Two states, Illinois and Indiana, never got around to voting and all the rest voted for it. There were many thoughtful people, including a majority of Rhode Islanders, who thought that prohibition might do more harm than good. But they were completely outmatched by the temperance movement, whose motives and methods had much in common with the movement to stop climate change. Deeply sincere people thought they were saving humanity from the evils of alcohol, just as many people now sincerely think they are saving humanity from the evils of CO2. Prohibition was a mistake, and our country has probably still not fully recovered from the damage it did. Institutions like organized crime got their start in that era. Drastic limitations on CO2 are likely to damage our country in analogous ways.

But what about the frightening consequences of increasing levels of CO2 that we keep hearing about? In a word, they are wildly exaggerated, just as the purported benefits of prohibition were wildly exaggerated. Let me turn now to the science and try to explain why I and many scientists like me are not alarmed by increasing levels of CO2.

The earth's climate really is strongly affected by the greenhouse effect, although the physics is not the same as that which makes real, glassed-in greenhouses work. Without greenhouse warming, the earth would be much too cold to sustain its current abundance of life. However, at least 90% of greenhouse warming is due to water vapor and clouds. Carbon dioxide is a bit player. There is little argument in the scientific community that a direct effect of doubling the CO2 concentration will be a small increase of the earth's temperature -- on the order of one degree. Additional increments of CO2 will cause relatively less direct warming because we already have so much CO2 in the atmosphere that it has blocked most of the infrared radiation that it can. It is like putting an additional ski hat on your head when you already have a nice warm one below it, but your are only wearing a windbreaker. To really get warmer, you need to add a warmer jacket. The IPCC thinks that this extra jacket is water vapor and clouds.

Since most of the greenhouse effect for the earth is due to water vapor and clouds, added CO2 must substantially increase water's contribution to lead to the frightening scenarios that are bandied about. The buzz word here is that there is "positive feedback." With each passing year, experimental observations further undermine the claim of a large positive feedback from water. In fact, observations suggest that the feedback is close to zero and may even be negative. That is, water vapor and clouds may actually diminish the already small global warming expected from CO2, not amplify it. The evidence here comes from satellite measurements of infraredradiation escaping from the earth into outer space, from measurements of sunlight reflected from clouds and from measurements of the temperature the earth's surface or of the troposphere, the roughly 10 km thick layer of the atmosphere above the earth's surface that is filled with churning air and clouds, heated from below at the earth's surface, and cooled at the top by radiation into space.

But the climate is warming and CO2 is increasing. Doesn't this prove that CO2 is causing global warming through the greenhouse effect? No, the current warming period began about 1800 at the end of the little ice age, long before there was an appreciable increase of CO2. There have been similar and even larger warmings several times in the 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age. These earlier warmings clearly had nothing to do with the combustion of fossil fuels. The current warming also seems to be due mostly to natural causes, not to increasing levels of carbon dioxide. Over the past ten years there has been no global warming, and in fact a slight cooling. This is not at all what was predicted by the IPCC models.

The climate has changed many times in the past with no help by mankind. Recall that the Romans grew grapes in Britain around the year 100, and Viking settlers prospered on small farms in Greenland for several centuries during the Medieval Climate Optimum around 1100. People have had an urge to control the climate throughout history so I suppose it is no surprise that we are at it again today. For example, in June of 1644, the Bishop of Geneva led a flock of believers to the face of a glacier that was advancing "by over a musket shot" every day. The glacier would soon destroy a village. The Bishop and his flock prayed over the glacier, and it is said to have stopped. The poor Vikings had long since abandoned Greenland where the advancing glaciers and cooling climate proved much less susceptible to prayer. Sometimes the obsession for control of the climate got a bit out of hand, as in the Aztec state, where the local scientific/religious establishment of the year 1500 had long since announced that the debate was over and that at least 20,000 human sacrifices a year were needed to keep the sun moving, the rain falling, and to stop climate change. The widespread dissatisfaction of the people who were unfortunate enough to be the source of these sacrifices played an important part in the success of the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

The existence of climate variability in the past has long been an embarrassment to those who claim that all climate change is due to man and that man can control it. When I was a schoolboy, my textbooks on earth science showed a prominent "medieval warm period" at the time the Vikings settled Greenland, followed by a vicious "little ice age" that drove them out. So I was very surprised when I first saw the celebrated "hockey stick curve," in the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC. I could hardly believe my eyes. Both the little ice age and the Medieval Warm Period were gone, and the newly revised temperature of the world since the year 1000 had suddenly become absolutely flat until the last hundred years when it shot up like the blade on a hockey stick. This was far from an obscure detail, and the hockey stick was trumpeted around the world as evidence that the end was near. We now know that the hockey stick has nothing to do with reality but was the result of incorrect handling of proxy temperature records and incorrect statistical analysis. There really was a little ice age and there really was a medieval warm period that was as warm or warmer than today. I bring up the hockey stick as a particularly clear example that the IPCC summaries for policy makers are not dispassionate statements of the facts of climate change. It is a shame, because many of the IPCC chapters are quite good. The whole hockey-stick episode reminds me of the motto of Orwell's Ministry of Information in the novel "1984:" "He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future." The IPCC has made no serious attempt to model the natural variations of the earth's temperature in the past. Whatever caused these large past variations, it was not due to people burning coal and oil. If you can't model the past, where you know the answer pretty well, how can you model the future?

Many of us are aware that we are living in an ice age, where we have hundred-thousand-year intervals of big continental glaciers that cover much of the land area of the northern hemisphere, interspersed with relative short interglacial intervals like the one we are living in now. By looking at ice cores from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, one can estimate past temperatures and atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Al Gore likes to display graphs of temperature and CO2 concentrations over the past million years or so, showing that when CO2 rises, the temperature also rises. Doesn't this prove that the temperature is driven by CO2? Absolutely not! If you look carefully at these records, you find that first the temperature goes up, and then the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere goes up. There is a delay between a temperature increase and a CO2 increase of about 800 years. This casts serious doubt on CO2 as a climate driver because of the fundamental concept of causality. A cause must precede its effect. For example, I hear my furnace go on in the morning about six o'clock, and by about 7 o'clock, I notice that my house is now so warm that I have too many covers on my bed. It is time to get up. It would never occur to me to assume that the furnace started burning gas at 6 o'clock because the house got warm at 7 o'clock. Sure, temperature and gas burning are correlated, just like temperature and atmospheric levels of CO2. But the thing that changes first is the cause. In the case of the ice cores, the cause of increased CO2 is almost certainly the warming of the oceans. The oceans release dissolved CO2 when they warm up, just like a glass of beer rapidly goes flat in a warm room. If not CO2, then what really causes the warming at the end of the cold periods of ice ages? A great question and one of the reasons I strongly support research in climate.

I keep hearing about the "pollutant CO2," or about "poisoning the atmosphere" with CO2, or about minimizing our "carbon footprint." This brings to mind another Orwellian pronouncement that is worth pondering: "But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." CO2 is not a pollutant and it is not a poison and we should not corrupt the English language by depriving "pollutant" and "poison" of their original meaning. Our exhaled breath contains about 4% CO2. That is 40,000 parts per million, or about 100 times the current atmospheric concentration. CO2 is absolutely essential for life on earth. Commercial greenhouse operators often use CO2 as a fertilizer to improve the health and growth rate of their plants. Plants, and our own primate ancestors evolved when the levels of atmospheric CO2 were about 1000 ppm, a level that we will probably not reach by burning fossil fuels, and far above our current level of about 380 ppm. We try to keep CO2 levels in our US Navy submarines no higher than 8,000 parts per million, about 20 time current atmospheric levels. Few adverse effects are observed at even higher levels.

We are all aware that "the green revolution" has increased crop yields around the world. Part of this wonderful development is due to improved crop varieties, better use of mineral fertilizers, herbicides, etc. But no small part of the yield improvement has come from increased atmospheric levels of CO2. Plants photosynthesize more carbohydrates when they have more CO2. Plants are also more drought-tolerant with more CO2, because they need not "inhale" as much air to get the CO2 needed for photosynthesis. At the same time, the plants need not "exhale" as much water vapor when they are using air enriched in CO2. Plants decrease the number of stomata or air pores on their leaf surfaces in response to increasing atmospheric levels of CO2. They are adapted to changing CO2 levels and they prefer higher levels than those we have at present. If we really were to decrease our current level of CO2 of around 400 ppm to the 270 ppm that prevailed a few hundred years ago, we would lose some of the benefits of the green revolution. Crop yields will continue to increase as CO2 levels go up, since we are far from the optimum levels for plant growth. Commercial greenhouse operators are advised to add enough CO2 to maintain about 1000 ppm around their plants. Indeed, economic studies like those of Dr. Robert Mendelsohn at Yale University project that moderate warming is an overall benefit to mankind because of higher agricultural yields and many other reasons.

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I remember being forced to read Voltaire's novel, Candide, when I was young. You recall that Dr. Pangloss repeatedly assured young Candide that he was living in "the best of all possible worlds," presumably also with the best of all CO2 concentrations. That we are (or were) living at the best of all CO2 concentrations seems to be a tacit assumption of the IPCC executive summaries for policy makers. Enormous effort and imagination have gone into showing that increasing concentrations of CO2 will be catastrophic, cities will be flooded by sea-level rises that are ten or more times bigger than even IPCC predicts, there will be mass extinctions of species, billions of people will die, tipping points will render the planet a desert. A few months ago I read that global warming will soon bring on a devastating epidemic of kidney stones. If you write down all the ills attributed to global warming you fill up a very thick book.

Much is made about tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever devastating the populations of temperate climates because of the burning of fossil fuels and the subsequent warming of the earth. Many people who actually work with tropical diseases, notably Dr. Paul Reiter, a specialist on tropical diseases, have pointed out how silly all of this is. Perhaps I can add a few bits of history to illustrate this point. One of the first military expenditures of the Continental Congress in 1775 was $300 to purchase quinine for the Continental Army and to mitigate the effects of malaria. The Continental Congress moved from the then Capital of the United States , Philadelphia, to my home town of Princeton, New Jersey, in the summer of 1783 for two reasons. The first was that the Congress had not yet paid many soldiers of the Revolutionary War their promised wages, and disgruntled veterans were wandering up and down the streets of Philadelphia. Secondly, there were outbreaks of malaria in cities as far north as Boston. The Congress knew you were less likely to catch malaria in Princeton than in Philadelphia. In 1793 there was not only malaria, but a horrendous outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia. Many thousands of people died in a city with a population of about 50,000. And I should point out that Philadelphia was a bit cooler then than now, since the little ice age was just coming to an end. Controlling tropical diseases and many other diseases has little to do with temperature, and everything to do with curtailing the factors that cause the spread - notably mosquitoes in the case of malaria and yellow fever.

Many of the frightening scenarios about global warming come from large computer calculations, "general circulation models," that try to mimic the behavior of the earth's climate as more CO2 is added to the atmosphere. It is true that climate models use increasingly capable and increasingly expensive computers. But their predictions have not been very good. For example, none of them predicted the lack of warming that we have experienced during the past ten years. All the models assume the water feedback is positive, while satellite observations suggest that the feedback is zero or negative.

Modelers have been wrong before. One of the most famous modeling disputes involved the physicist William Thompson, later Lord Kelvin, and the naturalist Charles Darwin. Lord Kelvin was a great believer in models and differential equations. Charles Darwin was not particularly facile with mathematics, but he took observations very seriously. For evolution to produce the variety of living and fossil species that Darwin had observed, the earth needed to have spent hundreds of millions of years with conditions not very different from now. With his mathematical models, Kelvin rather pompously demonstrated that the earth must have been a hellish ball of molten rock only a few tens of millions of years ago, and that the sun could not have been shining for more than about 30 million years. Kelvin was actually modeling what he thought was global and solar cooling. I am sorry to say that a majority of his fellow physicists supported Kelvin. Poor Darwin removed any reference to the age of the earth in later editions of the "Origin of the Species." But Darwin was right the first time, and Kelvin was wrong. Kelvin thought he knew everything but he did not know about the atomic nucleus, radioactivity and nuclear reactions, all of which invalidated his elegant modeling calculations.

This brings up the frequent assertion that there is a consensus behind the idea that there is an impending disaster from climate change, and that it may already be too late to avert this catastrophe, even if we stop burning fossil fuels now. We are told that only a few flat-earthers still have any doubt about the calamitous effects of continued CO2 emissions. There are a number of answers to this assertion.

First, what is correct in science is not determined by consensus but by experiment and observations. Historically, the consensus is often wrong, and I just mentioned the incorrect consensus of modelers about the age of the earth and the sun. During the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 in Philadelphia the medical consensus was that you could cure almost anything by bleeding the patient. Benjamin Rush, George Washington's Surgeon General during the War of Independence, and a brave man, stayed in Philadelphia throughout the yellow fever epidemic. He worked tirelessly to save the stricken by bleeding them, the consensus treatment of the day. A few cautious observers noticed that you were more likely to survive the yellow fever without the services of the great man. But Dr. Rush had plenty of high level-friends and he was backed up by the self-evident consensus, so he went ahead with his ministrations. In summary, a consensus is often wrong.

Secondly, I do not think there is a consensus about an impending climate crisis. I personally certainly don't believe we are facing a crisis unless we create one for ourselves, as Benjamin Rush did by bleeding his patients. Many others, wiser than I am, share my view. The number of those with the courage to speak out is growing. There may be an illusion of consensus. Like the temperance movement one hundred years ago the climate-catastrophe movement has enlisted the mass media, the leadership of scientific societies, the trustees of charitable foundations, and many other influential people to their cause. Just as editorials used to fulminate about the slippery path to hell behind the tavern door, hysterical op-ed's lecture us today about the impending end of the planet and the need to stop climate change with bold political action. Many distinguished scientific journals now have editors who further the agenda of climate-change alarmism. Research papers with scientific findings contrary to the dogma of climate calamity are rejected by reviewers, many of whom fear that their research funding will be cut if any doubt is cast on the coming climate catastrophe. Speaking of the Romans, then invading Scotland in the year 83, the great Scottish chieftain Calgacus is quoted as saying "They make a desert and call it peace." If you have the power to stifle dissent, you can indeed create the illusion of peace or consensus. The Romans have made impressive inroads into climate science. Certainly, it is a bit unnerving to read statements of Dr. James Hansen in the Congressional Record that climate skeptics are guilty of "high crimes against humanity and nature."

Even elementary school teachers and writers of children's books are enlisted to terrify our children and to promote the idea of impending climate doom. Having observed the education of many children, including my own, I am not sure how effective the effort will be. Many children seem to do just the opposite of what they are taught. Nevertheless, children should not be force-fed propaganda, masquerading as science. Many of you may know that in 2007 a British Court ruled that if Al Gore's book, "An Inconvenient Truth," was used in public schools, the children had to be told of eleven particularly troubling inaccuracies. You can easily find a list of the inaccuracies on the internet, but I will mention one. The court ruled that it was not possible to attribute hurricane Katrina to CO2. Indeed, had we taken a few of the many billions of dollars we have been spending on climate change research and propaganda and fixed the dykes and pumps around the New Orleans, most of the damage from Hurricane Katrina could have been avoided.

The sea level is indeed rising, just as it has for the past 20,000 years since the end of the last ice age. Fairly accurate measurements of sea level have been available since about 1800. These measurements show no sign of any acceleration. The rising sea level can be a serious local problem for heavily-populated, low-lying areas like New Orleans, where land subsidence compounds the problem. But to think that limiting CO2 emissions will stop sea level rise is a dangerous illusion. It is also possible that the warming seas around Antarctica will cause more snowfall over the continent and will counteract the sea-level rise. In any case, the rising sea level is a problem that needs quick local action for locations like New Orleans rather than slow action globally.

In closing, let me say again that we should provide adequate support to the many brilliant scientists, some at my own institution of Princeton University, who are trying to better understand the earth's climate, now, in the past, and what it may be in the future. I regret that the climate-change issue has become confused with serious problems like secure energy supplies, protecting our environment, and figuring out where future generations will get energy supplies after we have burned all the fossil fuel we can find. We should not confuse these laudable goals with hysterics about carbon footprints. For example, when weighing pluses and minuses of the continued or increased use of coal, the negative issue should not be increased atmospheric CO2, which is probably good for mankind. We should focus on real issues like damage to the land and waterways by strip mining, inadequate remediation, hazards to miners, the release of real pollutants and poisons like mercury, other heavy metals, organic carcinogens, etc. Life is about making decisions and decisions are about trade-offs. The Congress can choose to promote investment in technology that addresses real problems and scientific research that will let us cope with real problems more efficiently. Or they can act on unreasonable fears and suppress energy use, economic growth and the benefits that come from the creation of national wealth.


William Happer is the Cyrus Fogg Bracket Professor of Physics at Princeton University where his main areas of focus have been on atomic, molecular and optical physics. His professional work has been in studying the interactions of visible and infrared radiation with gases -- one of the main physical phenomena behind the greenhouse effect.

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5441

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James Hansen's Political Science
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, March 02, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Climate Change: NASA's James Hansen leads a protest against a District of Columbia power plant in the middle of a snowstorm. Meanwhile, a scientist fired by Al Gore says we need to emit more carbon dioxide, not less.
Read More: Global Warming

Speaking before Bill Clinton's Global Initiative in New York City last Nov. 2, Gore advocated the concept of civil disobedience to fight climate change. "I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration," Gore said to loud applause.
Following Gore's lead, a group called Capitol Climate Action organized a protest that took place Monday at the 99-year-old Capitol Power Plant in southeast Washington, D.C. Its Web site invited fellow warm-mongers to "mass civil disobedience at the coal-fired" plant that heats and cools the hallowed halls of Congress.
The site features Gore's quote as well as a video by Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a leading global-warming activist, urging attendance at the event. The storm that hit the Northeast and dropped upwards of three inches of snow on the nation's capitol should not discourage those attending the global- warming protest, he says on the video.
Hansen has called such coal-fired facilities "factories of death" and considers climate-change skeptics guilty of "high crimes against humanity and nature." In the video he says what "has become clear from the science is that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet" and that the "only practical way to solve the problem is to phase out the biggest source of carbon — and that's coal."
What is clear is that Dr. Hansen has had problems with the facts. Last Nov. 10 he announced from his scientific perch that October had been the hottest on record, and we were doomed. Except that it wasn't true.
Scores of temperature records used in the computations from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running, something your high-school science teacher wouldn't allow.
Despite Dr. Hansen's hysterical animus toward carbon, the fact is that CO2 is still a mere 0.038% of the gaseous layer that surrounds the Earth, and only 3% of that thin slice is released by man. According to Dr. William Happer, a professor of physics at Princeton University, current atmospheric CO2 levels are inadequate in historical terms and even higher levels "will be good for mankind."
Happer, who was fired by Gore at the Department of Energy in 1993 for disagreeing with the vice president on the effects of ozone to humans and plant life, disagrees with both Gore and Hansen on the issue of the impact of man-made carbon emissions. He testified before the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) on Feb. 25 that CO2 levels are in fact at a historical low.
"Many people don't realize that over geological time, we're really in a CO2 famine now. Almost never has CO2 . . . been as low as it has been in the Holocene (geologic epoch) — 280 (parts per million) — that's unheard of," said Happer. He notes the earth and humanity did just fine when CO2 levels were much higher.
"You know, we evolved as a species in those times, when CO2 levels were three to four times what they are now," Happer said. "And, the oceans were fine, plants grew, animals grew fine. So it's baffling to me that . . . we're so frightened of getting nowhere close to where we started."
"Jim Hansen has gone off the deep end here," one of Hansen's former supervisors, Dr. John Theon, said. Theon, a former senior NASA atmospheric scientist, rebuked Hansen last month in a letter to EPW. "Why he has not been fired, I do not understand," Theon said. Neither do we.
Critics contend that Hansen's involvement in the protests is a violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees from engaging in partisan political activity. If he wants to agitate for policy changes, let him do it on his own time and on his own dime. The science can speak for itself.

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=320893446242107

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http://www.eventsounds.com/wav/haha.wav

March 03, 2009
NRO Writer Predicted Yesterday's DC 'Gore Effect' last December

Marc Sheppard
It's hard not to crack a smile watching wild-eyed protesters carrying placards decrying the evils of planet-cooking coal in hands fighting the onset of frostbite.  Of course, a March blizzard lends no more evidence that the planet is cooling than a May cyclone implied the antithesis.  Be that as it may, the so called "Gore-Effect" has become so commonplace that when the "largest mass civil disobedience for the climate in U.S. history" was announced last December, Greg Pollowitz at NRO's Planet Gore actually predicted:

"Anyone want to bet on a snowstorm hitting D.C. on March 2, 2009?"

Talk about a nice call.

Turnout for yesterday's childish gate blockades at the Capital Coal Plant was seriously stifled by the potent mid-winter storm that blanketed the Northeast with snow, effectively shutting down much of the nation's capital.  Writing from my home on Long Island, I can assure you -- this storm was the hairiest in many years.

Surely, such coincidences are of virtually no statistical significance.  But then again - global warming alarm-a-thons and extreme winter weather recently go together like - well, trailer parks and tornadoes.  And that's making the hysterical projections of the likes of Gore and Hansen sound all the more hysterical.  And speaking of the latter, perhaps, on top of recent overall cooling trends, both observed and measured, the snickering might somehow be contributing to a certain high-profile alarmist's increasingly erratic behavior of late.

The man has equated coal-fired plants to death camps and coal-carrying trains to the inmate-transporting box-cars leading to them, and called for Nuremburg-style war-crime trials for oil company executives.  Now, James Hansen has certainly jeopardized his top NASA position by suggesting citizens actually join him in breaking the law [video] at yesterday's silly "climate justice" assault on Capitol Hill's power source.

Luckily, alarmists aren't wise enough to hedge their bets by scheduling these warm-mongering events exclusively in the heat of summer.  That would deny us the spectacle of their leader in melt-down inciting his frenzied followers in multi-layered outerwear. 

And while climate realists appreciate the preposterousness of alarmists' sophomoric closed-mindedness each and every day of the year, those during which others join in the laughter provide hope that perhaps not all are so easily duped.
Posted at 09:23 AM | Email | Permalink | |  |   yahooBuzzArticleHeadline = "NRO Writer Predicted Yesterday's DC 'Gore Effect' last December"; yahooBuzzArticleSummary = "It's hard not to crack a smile watching wild-eyed protesters carrying placards decrying the evils of planet-cooking coal in hands fighting the onset of frostbite.  Of course, a March blizzard lends no more evidence that the planet is cooling than..."; yahooBuzzArticleCategory = "politics"; yahooBuzzArticleType = "text"; yahooBuzzArticleId = window.location.href; http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/03/nro_writer_predicted_yesterday.html


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March 04, 2009
Frustrated Warmists Pull Another Cool Fast One
Marc Sheppard

Continued global cooling has forced clamoring climate alarmists to move the goal posts – again.

A study released yesterday confirms that global temperatures have remained flat since 2001 “despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations” and predicts they may cool for another 30 years. Needless to say, that won’t silence any of the blowhards attacking George Will’s February assertion that “there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.”

But get this – study author and spokesman Kyle Swanson insists his findings change nothing in the AGW debate, as following this “cooling event,” which isn’t “like anything we've seen since 1950,” warming “will return and be very aggressive." Don’t be surprised by Swanson’s unmitigated gall – we heard this same brand of bet-hedging double-talk from egg-faced alarmists not once, but twice last year.

As we reported then, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed last April that an impending phase shift in a natural climate event – the Pacific Decadal Oscillation -- would likely bring colder temperatures for as many as the next 20-30 years. Aware of the IPCC blasphemy their prediction wrought, one JPL oceanographer and climate scientist, Josh Willis, was quick to explain:

“The comings and goings of El Niño, La Niña and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation are part of a longer, ongoing change in global climate. In fact, these natural climate phenomena can sometimes hide global warming caused by human activities. Or they can have the opposite effect of accentuating it.”

Uh-huh.

Just ten days later, a study by Dr. Noel Keenlyside et al, of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Germany, predicted that a pending weak cycle in the “conveyor belt” of southern warm water known as the Meridional Overturning Circulation would also decrease global surface temperatures – but over the next decade. And they too, took steps to cover their green-obliged derrières with the lead author telling Bloomberg News:

“If we don't experience warming over the next 10 years, it doesn't mean that greenhouse-gas warming is not with us. There can be natural fluctuations that may mask climate change in the short term.''

Words associate Mojib Latif, a professor at the Leibniz Institute, translated in no uncertain terms:

“Just to make things clear, we are not stating that anthropogenic climate change won't be as bad as previously thought.”

Nice try, guys.

In both yesterday’s and last year’s examples, the message from these courageous men of science is clear: Yes, of course it’s getting cooler – any fool can see that -- and it might for a generation to come. But does that mean that speculatively achievable plans to completely retool the world’s energy supply and delivery systems during a global recession -- based entirely on our speculative warnings of a manmade global warming apocalypse -- should perhaps be put on hold until we can figure this out?

Why, of course not.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/03/frustrated_warmists_pull_anoth_1.html

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March 06, 2009
Gore's Gruesome New Prize (Updated)

Marc Sheppard
To celebrate the 100th birthday of the late Dr. Roger Revelle, the oceanography institute he once directed is today presenting an award in his name to his most famous disciple – Al Gore.  And, while this charlatan should never seriously be considered for any scientific tribute, the specific intent of this one makes Gore a particularly unworthy maiden recipient, and he knows it.

You see, according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography website: [my emphasis]

“The Roger Revelle Prize at Scripps recognizes leaders in the public or private sectors whose outstanding contributions advance or promote research in ocean, climate, and earth sciences. These international leaders, like Roger Revelle, ask the big questions, recognize the interrelationships of global systems, and think on a planetary scale. Their pioneering work and their courage in pursuing scientific questions of critical importance to our world evoke Revelle's leadership and vision.”

And it then goes on to qualify the first man to be so honored for evoking Revelle's leadership and vision:

“Former Vice President Al Gore will accept the inaugural Roger Revelle Prize for his outstanding contribution in bringing the science and issues raised by environmental and climate change research to a worldwide audience.”

But, as we pointed out years ago in Gore's Grave New World, while Revelle’s  “vision” of “scientific questions of critical importance to our world” once included a world endangered by rising atmospheric CO2 levels, that vision changed shortly before Gore’s 1992 book Earth in the Balance was published.  You see, before he died in 1991, Dr. Revelle co-authored a Cosmos article entitled What to Do About Greenhouse Warming: Look Before you Leap, which concluded that “the scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.”  And Gore has gone to great lengths to convince the world that his aging mentor was somehow coerced into being associated with a piece whose message was that our planet is, in fact, not in the balance.

As described by one of Revelle’s coauthors, Dr. S. Fred Singer, in his personal account, The Revelle-Gore Story [PDF]:

           
“The contradiction between what Senator Gore wrote about what he learned from Dr. Revelle and what Dr. Revelle had written in the Cosmos article embarrassed Senator Gore, who had become the leading candidate for the vice presidential slot of the Democratic Party.”

Dr. Singer recalls a July 20, 1992 phone call from Dr. Justin Lancaster, one of Dr. Revelle's former associates, demanding that Revelle’s name be removed from a forthcoming inclusion of their article in a global warming anthology to be edited by Dr. Richard Geyer:

“When I refused his request, Dr. Lancaster stepped up the pressure on me. First at a memorial symposium for Dr. Revelle at Harvard in the fall of 1992 and in a lengthy footnote to his written remarks at that event, he suggested that Dr. Revelle had not really been a coauthor and made the ludicrous claim that I had put his name on the paper as a coauthor ‘over his objections.’ “

Lancaster also suggested that Singer’s sole purpose in listing Revelle as a co-author was "to undermine the pro-Revelle stance of [then] Sen. Gore."

During the discovery phase of the libel suit that followed, it was revealed that Gore had enlisted Lancaster shortly after reading a reprint of the original article in the New Republic. But Gore didn’t stop there.  As Jonathan Adler wrote in the Washington Times on July 27, 1994:

“Concurrent with Mr. Lancaster's attack on Mr. Singer, Mr. Gore himself led a similar effort to discredit the respected scientist. Mr. Gore reportedly contacted 60 Minutes and Nightline to do stories on Mr. Singer and other opponents of Mr. Gore's environmental policies. The stories were designed to undermine the opposition by suggesting that only raving ideologues and corporate mouthpieces could challenge Mr. Gore's green gospel. The strategy backfired. When Nightline did the story, it exposed the vice president's machinations and compared his activities to Lysenkoism: The Stalinist politicization of science in the former Soviet Union.”

Ted Koppel summed it up well during the February 24, 1994 Nightline edition Adler’s piece had referred to when he accused Gore of “resorting to political means to achieve what should ultimately be resolved on a purely scientific basis.”

Where are these sound media voices now?

Anyway, the libel suit was dropped a few months after the Nightline airing, and Lancaster "fully and unequivocally" retracted his claims against Dr. Singer.  Happily, and notwithstanding Gore’s extraordinarily sleazy efforts, the Geyer volume did, indeed, contain the Revelle, Singer, and Starr piece – with all attributions happily present and accounted for.

So to award this man in the name of one he selfishly sought so hard to undermine after death is nothing short of gruesome.


Hat Tip: Noel Sheppard


Update:

Weather Channel founder John Coleman has an eye-opening video report on Roger Revelle and Al Gore.


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Second post. The text of the video referred to above.

Revelle was a powerful man, a noteworthy scientist and a significant force in San Diego in the 1950s. There is no doubt he is largely responsible for the respect given Scripps Institute of Oceanography and for locating the University of California at San Diego, UCSD, in La Jolla.

While serving as Director of Scripps, Revelle and one of his researchers wrote the first modern scientific paper that linked carbon dioxide released into the air from the burning of fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect and the warming of temperatures. This triggered an avalanche of research that eventually became the impetus behind the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the entire global warming movement.

In the 1960s Revelle moved to Harvard to establish a Center for Population Studies. There is where Professor Revelle encounter student Albert Gore. He involved Gore and his class mates in tabulating the data from a carbon dioxide study. Gore was so impressed he wrote about it in his 1992 book, " Earth in the Balance ". That became the story for the movie "an Inconvenient Truth". The Oscar and Nobel Peace Prize and some people say 100 million dollars came from that effort. There is no doubt Roger Revelle had a major impact on Vice President Gore's life.

But there is a twist. In 1988 Roger Revelle was having major second thoughts about whether carbon dioxide was a significant greenhouse gas. He wrote letters to two Congressmen about it. And in 1991 he co-authored a report for the new science magazine Cosmos in which he expressed his strong doubts about global warming and urged more research before any remedial action was taken.

At that point Mr. Gore pronounced Revelle as senile and refused to debate global warming. He continues to refuse to debate today. Many offers of 10s of thousands of dollars have been made such a debate. Today Gore sequestered the media at this event and set forth rules, no questions, no interviews.

I have learned that in 1991 Roger Revelle made a speech at the high powered, very private Summer enclave of powerful men and politicians at the Bohemian Grove in Northern California, where he apologized that his research sent so many people in the wrong direction on global warming.

He worried about the political fallout from the UN IPCC and Al Gore. A man named Donn Michael Schmidtman who lives in the San Francisco area was there that day and remembers the Revelle speech very well. He has told about it in some detail.

So think of the irony. Today Al Gore received the first Roger Revelle award, an honor named after the man who sent Gore on his global warming campaign.

But the truth is; Revelle realized that it was a false alarm and the science was flawed before he died.

Revelle died of a heart attack in 1991.

It would be interesting to know if Revelle had lived whether he would have approved of this award tonight or perhaps be joining me at the International conference of global warming skeptics in New York next week.

http://www.kusi.com/weather/colemanscorner/40867912.html

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Second post.

JEFF JACOBY
Where's global warming?
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist  |  March 8, 2009
SUPPOSE the climate landscape in recent weeks looked something like this:

Half the country was experiencing its mildest winter in years, with no sign of snow in many Northern states. Most of the Great Lakes were ice-free. Not a single Canadian province had had a white Christmas. There was a new study discussing a mysterious surge in global temperatures - a warming trend more intense than computer models had predicted. Other scientists admitted that, because of a bug in satellite sensors, they had been vastly overestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice.

If all that were happening on the climate-change front, do you think you'd be hearing about it on the news? Seeing it on Page 1 of your daily paper? Would politicians be exclaiming that global warming was even more of a crisis than they'd thought? Would environmentalists be skewering global-warming "deniers" for clinging to their skepticism despite the growing case against it?

No doubt.

But it isn't such hints of a planetary warming trend that have been piling up in profusion lately. Just the opposite.

The United States has shivered through an unusually severe winter, with snow falling in such unlikely destinations as New Orleans, Las Vegas, Alabama, and Georgia. On Dec. 25, every Canadian province woke up to a white Christmas, something that hadn't happened in 37 years. Earlier this year, Europe was gripped by such a killing cold wave that trains were shut down in the French Riviera and chimpanzees in the Rome Zoo had to be plied with hot tea. Last week, satellite data showed three of the Great Lakes - Erie, Superior, and Huron - almost completely frozen over. In Washington, D.C., what was supposed to be a massive rally against global warming was upstaged by the heaviest snowfall of the season, which paralyzed the capital.

Meanwhile, the National Snow and Ice Data Center has acknowledged that due to a satellite sensor malfunction, it had been underestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles - an area the size of Spain. In a new study, University of Wisconsin researchers Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis conclude that global warming could be going into a decades-long remission. The current global cooling "is nothing like anything we've seen since 1950," Swanson told Discovery News. Yes, global cooling: 2008 was the coolest year of the past decade - global temperatures have not exceeded the record high measured in 1998, notwithstanding the carbon-dioxide that human beings continue to pump into the atmosphere.

None of this proves conclusively that a period of planetary cooling is irrevocably underway, or that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are not the main driver of global temperatures, or that concerns about a hotter world are overblown. Individual weather episodes, it always bears repeating, are not the same as broad climate trends.

But considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldn't the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isn't it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to?

There is no shame in conceding that science still has a long way to go before it fully understands the immense complexity of the Earth's ever-changing climate(s). It would be shameful not to concede it. The climate models on which so much global-warming alarmism rests "do not begin to describe the real world that we live in," says Freeman Dyson, the eminent physicist and futurist. "The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand."

But for many people, the science of climate change is not nearly as important as the religion of climate change. When Al Gore insisted yet again at a conference last Thursday that there can be no debate about global warming, he was speaking not with the authority of a man of science, but with the closed-minded dogmatism of a religious zealot. Dogma and zealotry have their virtues, no doubt. But if we want to understand where global warming has gone, those aren't the tools we need.

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com. 

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March 09, 2009
First Dispatch from the Climate Sanity Front

Marc Sheppard
Sunday – March 8th – NYC.  For the next 2 ½ days, I will be assuming the role of your humble correspondent at this year’s International Conference on Climate Change – where the only alarm I expect to hear will be waking me for breakfast.  Each evening, I will attempt to homogenize my notes from both interviews and countless expert panel discussions I’ve attended that day. 

There are some amazingly impressive names here at the beautiful Marriott Marquis in Times Square.  And many will be presenting speeches and taking questions at the plenary meal sessions, as well as at the 6 main sessions, each comprised of four simultaneous panels discussing Paleoclimatology, Climatology, Climate Change Impacts, or Economics & Politics.

And the first thing I’d like to report is that we appear to be experiencing a “Reverse Gore Effect.”  Unseasonably cold temperatures at last week’s DC global warming event have suddenly given way to an unseasonably warm metropolis for ours.  Yesterday’s temps danced around in the 60’s like girls in calve-high patent leather boots.  Can’t imagine the alarmists will miss the opportunity to exploit this exquisite turnabout.  They’ve been bashing this – the gathering they rightly fear most -- for weeks.

Anyway, today was essentially a travel / arrival / reception day, and the only official business was the Opening Dinner in the massive Broadway Ballroom.  But there’s already a feeling of excitement in the 380ppm CO2 air here

Dan Miller, Executive VP of main sponsor The Heartland Institute, welcomed the dining crowd of over 700 scientists, economists, legislators, policy activists, and media representatives and quickly turned the mike over to our MC, Heartland President Joseph Bast.  Bast set forth some of the questions to be explored in the next few days, and highlighted one with this quote from the great Charles Krauthammer: “Other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy.”

This set the stage for the two featured speakers – President of both the Czech Republic and (currently) the European Union, Vaclav Klaus, and MIT meteorologist Dr. Richard Lindzen.  (Note: I paraphrase throughout)

Klaus got an immediate laugh when he sighed and observed that “last year’s speech didn’t help much.” He then described his recent frustrating experience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he faced fellow participants who “took anthropogenic global warming for granted.”  So you can imagine their response when he pointing out that Kyoto compliant nations have had ZERO effect on CO2 levels.

As the Czech president explained, WEF participants are interested in business, not temperature or CO2 or freedom.  They profit from writing and speaking and carbon trading and investments in non-carbon fuel products.

Next came the topic of educating decision makers, as most policy makers subscribe to the idea that IPCC publications represent THE climate science.  In truth, says Klaus, there is no fixed relationship between CO2 and temperatures, as clearly illustrated by the up and down temps of the 20th century despite the continuing rise in CO2.  But enviros don’t really want to change our environment, but rather our behavior.  That’s why they push preventive, not adaptive remedies.

Outstanding.

Klaus brought the house down with his closer: Environmentalists claim to be saving the planet – but from what and whom?  We need to protect US from THEM.

Next, our old friend Dr. Lindzen stood up and immediately countered his podium-mate’s comment about last year’s effectiveness with “we should never stop trying,” which, of course, was also quite well received.

Lindzen said we need to remind people of “a few certain truths our side sometimes forgets.”  Being skeptical doesn’t make you a good scientist.  Nor does endorsing GW make you a bad one, as doing so makes their lives easier (my emphasis throughout).  And the good professor gave many examples of how underfunded scientists write a single paper endorsing GW and are suddenly inundated with offers.  Even ambiguous science that can be easily spun is financially beneficial to the scientist, so they don’t complain about the spin.

Ever wonder why you never stop hearing about studies finding GW responsible for everything from kidney stones to bee populations?   Explains Lindzen:  It’s become standard that whatever you’re studying, include global warming’s effects in your proposal and you’ll get your funding.

The professor then segued into tech talk, explaining how climate models depend entirely on positive feedback and ignore the cooling effects of negative feedback, which nature does not.  And that the warming alarmists alarm us about is so miniscule that there’s no need for any external forcing to achieve it.  He believes most scientists are unaware that doubling or even tripling CO2 will have only marginal impacts on temperatures.  And that when they do become aware, they’ll likely alter the data.  Big laughs again.

To setup his closer, Lindzen charged that sustained flat global temperatures have proven that the assumptions of the IPCC were wrong.  And that denying this must represent either “gross ignorance or gross dishonesty.”

And I’ll leave you this evening with his spot on punchline:

Unfortunately, when it comes to global warming hysteria, neither has been in short supply.


Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/03/first_dispatch_from_the_climat.html at March 09, 2009 - 10:46:17 AM EDT

[Body-by-Guinness]

What Planetary Emergency?

Dispatch from day two of the International Conference on Climate Change in New York

Ronald Bailey | March 10, 2009

March 9, New York—Assume that man-made global warming exists. So what? That was the premise of a fascinating presentation by Indur Goklany during the second day of sessions at the International Conference on Climate Change. Goklany, who works in the Office of Policy Analysis of the U.S. Department of the Interior and is the author of The Improving State of the World: Why We're Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet, made it clear that he was not speaking on behalf of the federal government.
Goklany's talk looked at three common claims: (1) Human and environmental well-being will be lower in a warmer world than it is today; (2) our descendants will be worse off than if we don't stop man-made global warming; and (3) man-made global warming is the most important problem in the world. Goklany assumed that the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) consensus view on future temperature trends is valid. For his analysis, he used data from the fast track assessments of the socioeconomic impacts of global climate change sponsored by the British government, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, global mortality estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO), and cost estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

From the Stern Review, Goklany took the worst case scenario, where man-made global warming produces market and non-market losses equal to 35 percent of the benefits that are projected to exist in the absence of climate change by 2200. What did he find? Even assuming the worst emissions scenario, incomes for both developed and developing countries still rise spectacularly. In 1990, average incomes in developing countries stood around $1,000 per capita and at aroud $14,000 in developed countries. Assuming the worst means that average incomes in developing countries would rise in 2100 to $62,000 and in developed countries to $99,000. By 2200, average incomes would rise to $86,000 and $139,000 in developing and developed countries, respectively. In other words, the warmest world turns out to be the richest world.

Looking at WHO numbers, one finds that the percentage of deaths attributed to climate change now is 13th on the list of causes of mortality, standing at about 200,000 per year, or 0.3 percent of all deaths. High blood pressure is first on the list, accounting for 7 million (12 percent) of deaths; high cholesterol is second at 4.4 million; and hunger is third. Clearly, climate change is not the most important public health problem today. But what about the future? Again looking at just the worst case of warming, climate change would boost the number of deaths in 2085 by 237,000 above what they would otherwise be according to the fast track analyses. Many of the authors of the fast track analyses also co-authored the IPCC's socioeconomic impact assessments.

Various environmental indicators would also improve. For example, 11.6 percent of the world's land was used for growing crops in 1990. In the warmest world, agricultural productivity is projected to increase so much that the amount of land used for crops would drop to just 5 percent by 2100, leaving more land for nature. In other words, if these official projections are correct, man-made global warming is by no means the most important problem faced by humanity.

Next up on the impacts panel was Paul Reiter, head of the insects and infectious disease unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Members of the global warming fraternity frequently worry that climate change will exacerbate the spread of tropical diseases like malaria. Reiter began his talk by pointing out that malaria was endemic in Yakutsk, the coldest city on earth, until 1959. In 1935, the Soviets claimed that malaria killed nearly 4,000 people in Yakutsk, a number that dropped to just 85 in 1959, the year that the disease was finally eradicated, in part by using the insecticide DDT.

Reiter then described a vast new research program that he is participating in, the Emerging Diseases in a Changing European eNvironment, or EDEN project. Sponsored by the European Union, the EDEN project is evaluating the potential impacts of future global warming on the spread of disease in Europe. The EDEN researchers have been assessing outbreaks of various diseases to see if they could discern any impact climate change may be having on their spread.

Reiter cited a recent analysis of the outbreak of tick-borne encephalitis in the early 1990s in many eastern European countries. The epidemic occurred shortly after the fall of communism, when many former Soviet bloc countries went into steep economic decline. After sifting through the data, it became apparent that the tough economic situation forced many eastern Europeans to spend more time in forests and farms trying to either find wild foods or grow more food on farms and in gardens. This meant that their exposure to deer ticks increased, resulting in more cases of encephalitis. Since the epidemic was coincident with the fall of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War, one of Reiter's colleagues quipped that it was caused by "political global warming." Reiter noted that 150 EDEN studies have been published so far and that "none of them support the notion that disease is increasing because of climate change."

Finally, Reiter pointed out that many of the claims that climate change will increase disease can be attributed to an incestuous network of just nine authors who write scientific reviews and cite each other's work. None are actual on-the-ground disease researchers and many of them write the IPCC disease analyses. "These are people who know absolutely bugger about dengue, malaria or anything else," said Reiter.

The final presenter of the panel was Stanley Goldenberg, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Hurricane Research Division in Miami, Florida. Again, he stressed that his views were his won, not that of any government agency. Goldenberg is particularly annoyed by former Vice President Al Gore's repeated claim that man-made global warming is making hurricanes more numerous and/or more powerful. For example, at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland in December, Gore flat out stated, "The warming ocean waters are also causing stronger typhoons and cyclones and hurricanes."

Goldenberg acknowledged that hurricanes have been more numerous in the North Atlantic in the last decade. But when one looks at the data from the 20th century two, factors stand out. First, the number of hurricanes has increased So have sea surface temperatures. QED: global warming causes more hurricanes, right? Not so fast, says Goldenberg. The perceived increase in the number of hurricanes is actually the result of observational biases. With the advent of satellites, scientists have become much better at finding and identifying hurricanes. In the first half of the 20th century, he pointed out, if a storm didn't come close to land, researchers would often miss it.

The second factor is that researchers have identified a multi-decadal pattern in the frequency of hurricanes in the North Atlantic. There was a very active period between 1870 and 1900, a slow-down between 1900 and 1925, another active period between 1926 and 1970, a period of fewer storms between 1970 and 1995, and the beginning of a new active period around 1995. According to Goldenberg, this new active period will probably last another 20 to 30 years. Goldenberg was a co-author of a 2001 study published in Science which concluded:

Tropical North Atlantic SST [sea surface temperature] has exhibited a warming trend of [about] ) 0.3°C over the last 100 years; whereas Atlantic hurricane activity has not exhibited trend-like variability, but rather distinct multidecadal cycles....The possibility exists that the unprecedented activity since 1995 is the result of a combination of the multidecadal-scale changes in the Atlantic SSTs (and vertical shear) along with the additional increase in SSTs resulting from the long-term warming trend. It is, however, equally possible that the current active period (1995-2000) only appears more active than the previous active period (1926-1970) due to the better observational network in place.

Since this study was published, much more data on hurricane trends has been collected and analyzed. "Not a single scientist at the hurricane center believes that global warming has had any measurable impact on hurricane numbers and strength," concluded Goldenberg. He also suggested that some proponents of the idea that global warming is exacerbating tropical storms have backed off lately. Clearly the former vice president hasn't gotten the news yet.

Tomorrow: The last day of the International Conference on Climate Change will feature presentations on the Pacific Decadal Oscillation's effect on global temperature trends, the economic impacts of carbon rationing, and how policymakers deal with scientific information.


Ronald Bailey is Reason magazine's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/132145.html.

[Body-by-Guinness]

March 15, 2009

The Clear and Cohesive Message of the International Conference on Climate Change

By Marc Sheppard

“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”  -- from the Oregon Petition, signed by over 31,000 scientists

United by that conviction, over 800 scientists, economists, and policy makers arrived in New York City last Sunday to attend the Heartland Institute’s 2nd Annual International Conference on Climate Change.  They came to talk a wide range of subjects, from climatology to energy policy, from computer climate models to cap-and-trade, from greenhouse gas (GHG) effects to solar irradiation.  But most of all they came to help spread the word that the answer to the question posed by this year’s theme -- Global warming: Was it ever really a crisis? -- is a resounding NO.

Sunday’s keynote speakers wasted no time making that point. Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus scolded those whose alarmist opinions are driven by profits from writing and speaking fees, carbon trading and investments in non-carbon fuel products.  And policy makers who blindly accept hyped Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publications as the final word in climate science.  In truth, says Klaus, there is no fixed relationship between CO2 and temperatures, as clearly illustrated by the wavering heat trends of the 20th century, despite the steady rise in CO2.

Next, M.I.T’s Richard Lindzen explained that many scientists toe the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) line to “make their lives easier,” as underfunded scientists can write a single paper endorsing AGW and suddenly be inundated with offers.  Even ambiguous or meaningless statements that can be easily spun are financially beneficial to scientists, so why complain about the spin?  Ever wonder why you never stop hearing about studies finding GW responsible for everything from kidney stones to cannibalism?   Explains Lindzen:  It’s become standard that whatever you’re studying, include global warming’s effects in your proposal and you’ll get your funding.  

Lindzen then dismissed climate models that alarmists depend on as they themselves depend entirely on warming positive feedback but, unlike nature, ignore the cooling effects of negative feedback.  And rejected the warming alarmists alarm us about as so miniscule that there’s no need for any external forcing to achieve or explain it.  In reality, said the world renowned atmospheric physicist, doubling or even tripling CO2 would have only marginal impacts on temperatures.  

Both speakers masterfully set the stage for the days and sessions to come.  What follows is just a sampling of the brilliance I encountered.

Roy Spencer echoed Lindzen’s position that negative feedbacks ultimately bring equilibrium to the energy balance, making sustained global warming a non-issue.  David Douglass assured us that ocean and atmospheric heat will always work toward such balance as per conservation of energy laws.  S. Fred Singer commented that a 2005 paper by Hansen et al claiming that Earth’s energy imbalance is proof of AGW was absurd.

Geologist and former astronaut Jack Schmidt inverted the IPCC position that burning fossil fuels increases atmospheric CO2, which in turn warms the planet.  Slowly increasing temperatures from 1660 AD or so, said he, would increase CO2 and methane from land, land confined water, the biosphere and, mostly, the oceans. The vapor pressure of CO2 is temperature sensitive. So as a matter of established physics of gases, we’d expect atmospheric CO2 to increase as temperature increases.  Therefore, he concludes, saying that CO2 causes heating is like saying “accidents cause speeding.”

Singer moderated a panel discussion thoroughly debunking a recent paper claiming that CO2 put into the atmosphere lasts thousands of years.  Participant Douglass questioned the premise as “it has nothing to do with global warming as CO2 continues to rise but GW stopped after 1991.”  But as Singer pointed out, alarmists will claim it proves that peak values reached in the next few years will determine climate for the next millennium.  

And Christopher Essex nailed it:  Their 1000 year forecast is remarkable – even groundhogs only predict 6 weeks ahead.

The Sun, The Seas and The Science

Astrophysicist Willie Soon proclaimed the sun-induced climate change theory alive and well.  He believes that, while IPCC AR4 fraudulently disregarded Milankovich's theory of orbital influences on climate, the comings and goings of the ice ages may be controlled by changes in solar insolation at climatically sensitive latitudes. He displayed adjacent line graphs overlaying 20th Century arctic temperature anomalies with solar irradiance levels on one and atmospheric CO2 levels on the other.  Whereas the former lined up almost perfectly, the latter wasn’t even close.

Jack Schmidt pointed out that the 1400 -1900 cold period known as the Little Ice Age corresponds to a cycling sequence of 3 deep minima of sunspot activity and was at its coldest during the last of these minima, the 70 year period of exceptionally few spots we now know as the Maunder Minimum.  Dennis Avery reinforced his 1,500 year climate cycle argument and its implications for the current warming period.  He told us that solar variations are linked to decade-lagging sea temperatures.  What’s more, diminished sunspot activity since 2000 and Pacific Sea Surface cooling since 2008 predict a 20-30 year global cooling due to short term Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).

Don Easterbrook neatly tied variances in the PDO and another natural climate variability, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), to that of solar activity and, ultimately, temperatures. The geologist pointed out that while the IPCC predicted 1°F warming by 2011, there’s been none since 1998, and that the 1°F drop in 2008 was the largest global temperature change ever recorded.  He too believes that the current PDO cool phase assures global cooling for as long as the next three decades.

Roy Spencer blamed the PDO for 75% of twentieth century warming. He provided a line graph plotting temperatures against the PDO and the correlation was quite remarkable.  Weaker PDOs yielded warmer temperatures and the onset of stronger circulations cooled things down.  As one might suspect -- Spencer’s graph depicted a decided cooling trend beginning in 2003.

ICECAP’s Joe D’Aleo also made an extremely compelling argument against the greenhouse effect and for the natural climate drivers of oceans, Sol, and yet another -- volcanoes.  On D’Aleo’s graphs, PDO/AMO aligned well with USHCN temperatures over last century, as did stratospheric aerosol levels from volcanic eruptions, and total solar irradiance.  He remarked that “all three show a cycle where the last few years look a lot like the 1960’s,” which immediately caught my attention.  You see, just hours prior, I had been discussing NY weather with a British representative and had commented that this winter reminded me of those I experienced as a child in the 60’s.

Lord Monckton of Brenchley suggested that the positive feedback factor might actually be half what IPCC claims.  Citing Soon’s work, he said temperatures have been plunging at the rate of 2°C per century over the last 7 years, and the reduction of Outgoing Longwave Radiation as observed by satellites is on an order of magnitude below what models predict:

“And Dick Lindzen says that’s game, set and match.”
The True Cost of Green Meddling

California Congressman Tom McClintock offered examples of just how global warming alarmism is damaging his state --- all in the form of radical construction blocking, agriculture crippling, resource wasting legislation the warm-mongers have gotten through to fight it.  Here’s a beauty -- a homeowner can be fined $1000/day for refusal to cut down his trees if they block a neighbor’s solar panels, but also faces fines if he cuts them down or clears brush for fire preventive purposes.  And Gov. Schwarzenegger – who just proposed the largest tax increase in history to make up for funds lost by his failed green policies -- wants Cal-E-Fornia to be “an example to the country.”

Bennie Peiser, founder and editor of the fabulous CCNet, explained the political backlash European greenies are experiencing.  And it’s pretty bad -- Labor and Green parties are seeing the amalgamation of the recession and failed Kyoto-inspired energy policies driving their core voters away.  Lawrence Solomon offered more examples of overseas carbon regulation disasters, declaring Kyoto the greatest single destroyer of the environment, especially in the third world.  

And speaking of bad GHG accords, Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Chris Horner explained how liberals could sneak Kyoto II through the Senate by changing it from a treaty to an executive agreement.  Treaties require a 2/3 Senate vote, and the Gore brigade knows damned well they’d never pull that one off.  But with a little legislative sleight-of-hand, the vote required could be lowered to 3/5.  And Horner warned in detail against an even slicker trick that would place it on the fast track, making it both amendment and filibuster proof – thereby requiring only 50% plus one.

Needless to say, the regressive tax increase which is Cap and Trade (CAT) was also a popular target.

[Body-by-Guinness]

CEI director Myron Ebell proclaimed John McCain’s loss last November to actually be good news, as McCain is the biggest supporter of CAT in the Senate and actually claims that energy rationing would be a net benefit to the economy. Ross Mckitrick blasted the idea of CAT systems with predetermined carbon caps as betraying a complete lack of faith in their design.  If the goal is to force down carbon output, then a “truth-based” floating cap determined by temperature is called for.  Suggesting we force down caps regardless of temperature response is a sign that they don’t believe their own rhetoric.

Dave Kreutzer warned that analytical models predict estimated aggregate losses to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $4.8 trillion and job losses in the manufacturing sector of nearly 3 million by 2029 if CAT were imposed under S. 2191. That’s over and above the million manufacturing job losses economists predict will occur even if we do nothing.

On Thursday, Easterbrook responded to a NY Times piece suggesting his positions are aligned with those of Obama’s science advisor -- John Holdren:

“[Holdren] wants carbon cap and trade that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to curb ‘global warming’ that the PDO shows isn’t going to happen in the next several decades (no matter what the cause).  The PDO data shows conclusively that global cooling is going to continue for several decades, causing increasing demands of energy and resources (while population escalates), but if we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on cap and trade (as Holdren is pushing), we will have little left with which to handle the real problems of increasing demands on dwindling resources.  Holdren’s path will lead to a real global catastrophe.”
And the losses will extend beyond the monetary.  Professor Arthur Robinson, author of the afore-quoted Oregon petition, revealed the true reasons we import 30% of our energy, even though “one Palo Verde Nuclear Installation in each state results in $200 billion net export of energy.”  Robinson says there are those who would prefer that 30% grow much larger, encouraging higher energy prices and ultimately – rationing.  And quickly advised -- once we become victims of rationing in the west we lose our all of our freedoms, but energy deprivation in third world countries will lead to the loss of tens of millions of lives. 

And Monckton took on another deadly green scheme as only his Lordship can:

“Their biofuel scam, a nasty by-product of their shoddy, senseless, failed, falsified, fraudulent ‘global warming’ bugaboo, has turned millions of acres of agricultural land from growing food for humans to growing fuel for automobiles. If we let them, they will carelessly kill tens of millions more by pursuing Osamabamarama’s stated ambition of shutting down nine-tenths of the economies of the West and flinging us back to the Stone Age without even the right to light fires in our caves.”

Such, as Kreutzer so perfectly described it, is the true “cost of accomplishing nothing.”

Of Bad Scientists, Bad Data, and Bad Conclusions

Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist John Theon expressed his regret that former employee, James Hansen, “didn’t receive the attention from me that he should have.” What followed was a heartfelt denunciation that included the fact that Hansen’s 1988 announcement of “unprecedented global warming” came as a surprise and embarrassment to Theon, as it was not NASA’s position.   He then cried foul over Hansen’s endorsement of John Kerry for president in 2004, particularly after receiving the Heinz Environment Award, a $250,000 prize honoring the late-husband of Kerry’s wife in 2001.  He pointed out that a civil servant endorsing a political cause violated the Hatch Act, and that alone should be grounds for dismissal, which he has publically called for.  Says Theon: “I think the man is sincere, but he is suffering from a bad case of megalomania.”

There were a number of problems with data collection methods discussed.

Tom Segalstad gave us a lesson in the dubious integrity of ice-core samples.  The Norwegian geologist cited numerous problems with retrieval, sampling, and storage, all of which may contaminate results.  Remember -- the accuracy of these figures, combined with temperature proxies such as dendrochronology (tree ring growth analysis) is crucial as they are used to plot past temperature/CO2 correlations.   

WUWT’s Anthony Watts favored us once again with stories and photographs of misplaced Maximum-Minimum Temperature Systems (MMTS).  He and his cohorts have photographed and analyzed 75% of the 1200 plus national weather stations, and the results range from bad to hysterically bad.  One slide showed a station in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota where the thermometer was placed within feet of not one, but two air conditioning outlets.  The fact this town reported temperature well above those of its neighbors didn’t seem to raise any red-flags with the good folks ate NOAA.  So it’s not particularly shocking that only 11% of stations surveyed met the required Class I or Class II requirement of likely measurement error under 1°C.

Joe D’Aleo believes that surface data suffer from serious issues biasing them to the warm side, this due to station dropout, missing monthly data, and inadequate or nonexistent urban heat island effect (UHI) adjustment.  Half of the warming since 1880 may be attributed to these measurement contaminations. In fact, Climate Audit’s Steve McIntyre said we don’t actually know that the 1998 was the warmest year of the millennium as minor variations in data version yield different results.

There was also much talk about response and adaptation.

Jack Schmidt believes that while we’re awaiting the collapse of the AGW scare, we should be preparing to deal with inevitable climate change, however unpredictable it may seem.  We should recognize that production of our own domestic oil and gas, coal and nuclear resources buys us time to work these challenges and preserve our liberties and our national security.  We should choose sustained R&D of potential energy sources, those with clear paths to commercialization rather than continue subsidies for premature production of flawed concepts.

Bob Carter stressed preparedness, warning that abrupt natural climate change is the dangerous hazard (both warming AND cooling) and demands a planned response, which must be assessed regionally. After all, climate hazards in the Gulf of Mexico are not the same as in Australia.  Besides, says Bob, if hypothetical AGW actually materializes, well – we’re prepared for that too!

Meanwhile, Dennis Avery reminded us that history shows that warm times have been good times.  During the Medieval Warm Period, world population doubled, crops flourished, there was less disease and no bubonic plague.  Most of Europe’s castles and cathedrals as well as India’s most famous temples were built during that period.  And that as polar bears date back 130,000 years, they’ve managed to adapt through many warming periods more severe than the current one.

So whether warmer or cooler, they’ll adapt again, as will the rest of the planet – including those self-interested homo sapiens.

The Message is Clear, Cohesive, and Catching On

Last Sunday, Klaus sparked a nervous laugh when he fretted continued alarmist mainstream acceptance with the words “last year’s speech didn’t help much.”  But immediately following Klaus to the podium, Lindzen reminded the Czech and the audience at large that “we should never stop trying,” which was, of course, warmly received.  And the next morning, Larry Solomon gave an inspiring example of why:  Recent polls in Canada showed that those who believe in “consensus” fear global warming; those who have heard from skeptics even once do not.  In fact, the dominant Canadian party that made carbon pricing a major issue just suffered a major defeat.

During Tuesday’s standing-O-rousing conference-closing speech, in which he marvelously referred to alarmists as “bed-wetting moaning Minnies of the Apocalyptic Traffic-Light Tendency -- those Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds,” Lord Monckton added:

“Every opinion poll--even those conducted by the bed-wetters themselves – shows that global public opinion is cooling as fast as the global climate. In one recent survey, ‘global warming’ came at the very bottom of a list of political and environmental concerns, immediately behind the need to clean up dog-poop on the streets. Why? Because dog-poop is a real environmental problem and ‘Global warming’ is not. The correct policy response to the non-problem of climate change is to have the courage to do nothing.”

And then emphasized unequivocally:  “There is no climate crisis. There was no climate crisis. There will be no climate crisis.”

Before gaveling the momentous proceedings, Heartland’s own James Taylor offered further encouragement to those despondent over the uphill battle it’s been to promote climate realism in an environment of mass-media-driven hyper-alarmism.  Public opinion is, avers Taylor, changing in our direction, and he cited specific polls and current events to support his optimism. And he credited talk radio, cable television, the internet, and blogs with providing information to the American public “whether the mass media wants them to have it or not.”

Yet I couldn’t help recalling something I heard the ever-wise John Sununu state during one of the Q&A sessions that morning, and I paraphrase:  Everything we talk about here needs to be translated into something you can put on the 6 o’clock news or explain to your neighbor.  He’s right, of course.  Go ask a hype-victim what causes climate variations and he’ll reflexively snap “Carbon,” and that’s quite the simple concept to propagate.  Now ask a climate realist, if you have the time and patience to sit through the response.

But leaving Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon, I wondered whether it really mattered.  After all, most believers don’t truly understand the workings of GHG theory, otherwise they’d surely question the influence of a trace gas.  And our message may not be easily dumbed-down to a few words, but it is clear, nonetheless.

The very next day Gallup announced the results of a new poll finding that a record-high 41% of Americans now believe the seriousness of global warming is being exaggerated by “mainstream reporting.” 

That’s up 11% in just three years -- despite our sometimes involute and ever media-mocked message.

Which lends undeniable assurance to Professor Lindzen’s keynote prediction that “we will eventually win against anthropogenic global warming alarm simply because we are right and they are wrong.”

Marc Sheppard is the editor of AT’s forthcoming Environment Thinker.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/03/the_clear_and_cohesive_message_1.html at March 15, 2009 - 03:54:19 PM EDT

[Body-by-Guinness]

March 17, 2009
A Tale of Two Conferences on Global Climate Change

Gregory Young
According to Christopher Booker of the UK Telegraph who attended both International Climate Change Conferences this month, one in New York City and the other in Copenhagen, nobody listens to the “real climate change experts,” stating that  “the minds of world leaders are firmly shut to anything but the fantasies of the scaremongers.”
 
Mr. Booker noted that “None of the government-funded scientists making the [claims of AGW Anthropogenic Global Warming] were particularly distinguished  [in Copenhagen]” …whereas the New York Heartland sponsored conference “was addressed by dozens of expert scientists, not a few of world rank, who for professional standing put those in Copenhagen in the shade.” Booker continued:

Cold comfort: If the present trend continues, the world will be 1.1C cooler in 2100
Considering how the fear of global warming is inspiring the world's politicians to put forward the most costly and economically damaging package of measures ever imposed on mankind, it is obviously important that we can trust the basis on which all this is being proposed. Last week two international conferences addressed this issue and the contrast between them could not have been starker.

The first in Copenhagen, billed as "an emergency summit on climate change" and attracting acres of worldwide media coverage, was explicitly designed to stoke up the fear of global warming to an unprecedented pitch. As one of the organisers put it, "this is not a regular scientific conference: this is a deliberate attempt to influence policy".

What a striking contrast this was to the second conference, which I attended with 700 others in New York, organised by the Heartland Institute under the title Global Warming: Was It Ever Really A Crisis?. In Britain this received no coverage at all, apart from a sneering mention by The Guardian, although it was addressed by dozens of expert scientists, not a few of world rank, who for professional standing put those in Copenhagen in the shade.
 
Augment this report with American Thinker’s own Marc Sheppard’s detailed and precise reporting on NY conference and it’s amazingly how clear the war has become!  Wouldn’t it be nice to combine these two conferences and let us debate the issues in real-time?  Unfortunately, Global Warming alarmists refuse to do so.  That should be enough for those still on the fence to realize what’s really going on.  As Mr. Booker pointed out:  The Copenhagen Conference “was explicitly designed to stoke up the fear of global warming to an unprecedented pitch.” As one of the organizers of the pro AGW conference put it, "this is not a regular scientific conference: this is a deliberate attempt to influence policy."   

Yep, that about sums it up!


Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/03/a_tale_of_two_conferences_on_g.html at March 17, 2009 - 09:03:08 AM EDT

[Crafty_Dog]

Lights Out for Thomas Edison

Brief Analysis

No. 637

December 10, 2008

Read Article as PDF | Get Adobe Reader

by H. Sterling Burnett and Amanda Berg

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 will soon ban the most
common light bulbs in the United States.  New efficiency standards will
require manufacturers to produce incandescent bulbs that use less energy per
unit of light produced, starting with 100-watt incandescent bulbs in 2012,
down to 40-watt bulbs in 2014.

Under the new standards:

100-watt light bulbs are banned entirely.
70-watt light bulbs will have to be 36 percent to 136 percent more
efficient.
50-watt bulbs must be 50 percent to 112 percent more efficient.
40-watt bulbs will have to improve 50 percent to 110 percent.

Incandescent bulbs cannot meet these new standards absent a significant
technological breakthrough.  Thus, the common light bulb will soon be
extinct.

Illuminating Efficiency.  The alternative for most household uses will be
compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) designed to fit standard incandescent bulb
bases.  CFLs currently make up only 5 percent of the light bulb market.
They have been touted for years as the smart choice for consumers interested
in reducing their energy bills, due to their extended lifespan and low
energy use vis-à-vis the equivalent light output from an incandescent.  For
example, a 60-watt incandescent bulb produces 850 lumens - the same light
output as a 13-watt to 18-watt CFL.   Unfortunately, except under a fairly
narrow range of circumstances, CFLs are less efficient than advertised.
Manufacturers claim the average life span of a CFL bulb is 10,000 hours.
However, in many applications the life and energy savings of a CFL are
significantly lower:

CFLs must be left on for at least 15 minutes or used for several hours per
day to achieve their full energy saving benefits, according to the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Applications in which lighting is used only briefly (such as closets,
bathrooms, motion detectors and so forth) will cause CFL bulbs to burn out
as quickly as regular incandescent bulbs.

CFLs often become dimmer over time - a study of U.S. Department of Energy
"Energy Star" products found that after 40 percent of their rated service
life, one-fourth of tested CFLs no longer produced the full amount of light.

At about $3 per bulb, CFLs are expensive, whereas incandescent bulbs cost
only 20 cents per bulb, on average.  And there are other drawbacks.  For
instance:

When initially switched on, CFLs may provide as little as 50 percent to 80
percent of their rated light output and can take up to three minutes to
reach full brightness.
CFLs often don't fit existing light fixtures, such as small-base lamps and
candlelabras, so these will have to be replaced.
Standard CFLs will not operate at low temperatures, making them unsuitable
for outdoor lighting.
CFLs can emit an annoying buzz.

CFLs emit infrared light that can interfere with remote-controlled devices,
such as televisions, video games and stereo equipment.
CFLs are simply unsuited for many common uses. The new law therefore
excludes whole classes of light bulbs from the standards, including
appliance light bulbs (ovens and refrigerators), flashing and colored
lights, traffic signals, shatter-resistant bulbs, three-way adjustable bulbs
and so forth.

Hidden Dangers of CFLs.  CFLs contain potentially toxic mercury.  Thus,
there are health and environmental concerns regarding their proper disposal.
Shattered CFLs in municipal landfills have the potential to leach mercury
into the soil.  Over time this mercury could seep into the groundwater or
nearby streams.  For this reason, a number of states and localities have
outlawed disposing CFLs with normal trash - instead, consumers must take
their used CFLs to authorized hazardous waste disposal sites.

The EPA recommends recycling CFLs.  However, curbside recycling is not
available everywhere and often doesn't include CFLs.  Recycling facilities
that accept CFLs are not common within major metropolitan areas, much less
in rural areas where on-site incineration or trenches are often used - both
of which release mercury into the atmosphere.
Perhaps even more important is the danger of broken CFLs in the home. The
EPA has provided detailed guidelines to avoid unsafe indoor mercury levels
[see the sidebar].

Cleaning up mercury from a shattered CFL can be costly.  For example, when a
CFL broke in her daughter's bedroom, Brandy Bridges of Prospect, Maine,
called on the state's  Department of Environmental Protection to make sure
she cleaned up the broken glass and mercury powder safely.  A specialist
found unsafe levels of mercury in the air and recommended an environmental
cleanup firm, who estimated the clean up cost of at $2,000.  Beause her
mother was unable to pay the exorbitant cleaning bill, the girl's room
remained sealed off in plastic for more than a month.

Conclusion.  Consumers consider many factors in addition to energy
efficiency when they purchase light bulbs.  The ban on incandescent bulbs
will be costly and potentially dangerous.  The public has not yet embraced
CFLs, and the government should not impose on consumers its preferences
regarding the types of lights used in the home.  As the deficiencies of CFLs
become more apparent with widespread use, perhaps Congress will let
consumers decide.

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba637/

[Body-by-Guinness]

March 19, 2009
Global Warming researchers stranded in Arctic

Ethel C. Fenig
You just gotta to love this Fox News headline and story which says all you need to know about global warming. 

Explorers On Global Warming Expedition Stranded in North Pole by Cold Weather

“We’re hungry, the cold is relentless, our sleeping bags are full of ice,” expedition leader Pen Hadow said in e-mailed statement. “Waiting is almost the worst part of an expedition as we’re in the lap of the weather gods.”
 

Don't worry Pen Hadow.  There is just one weather god, Al Gore, and now that he knows of your plight he will produce global warming and order one of his environmentally correct jets to whisk you environmentally correct food so you can continue your valiant journey to prove the existence of global nonsensical hot air. 



Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/03/global_warming_researchers_str.html at March 19, 2009 - 06:36:23 PM EDT

[Body-by-Guinness]

Max Schulz
The Green-Jobs Engine That Can’t
Inefficient eco-friendly technologies destroy more jobs than they create.
Winter 2009

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to transform America’s energy economy by creating millions of “green jobs.” Accepting his party’s nomination at the Democratic convention in Denver, Obama proclaimed: “I’ll invest $150 billion over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy—wind power and solar power and the next generation of biofuels; an investment that will lead to new industries and 5 million new jobs that pay well and can’t ever be outsourced.” This new energy economy, Obama explained weeks later at the second presidential debate in Nashville, would be an “engine of economic growth” to rival the computer and one, moreover, that we could build “easily.” Though he would have quibbled with Obama over details, Republican candidate John McCain similarly praised the virtues of creating millions of these environmentally friendly jobs, both as an answer to the nation’s economic woes and as a way to reduce carbon emissions.

In a time of grave economic uncertainty, it’s surely positive news that we can agree on the benefits of green jobs, right? Not quite. If the green-jobs claim sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. Holding it up to the light exposes it as economically hollow. Making matters worse, a powerful green-jobs movement has emerged, made up of left-wing antipoverty activists and union leaders, all of them clamoring for a more conventional kind of green: government dollars.

What exactly is a “green job,” anyway? The definition seems maddeningly vague. According to Time, “if you make wind turbines or solar panels, your job is reliably green.” But the American Solar Energy Society (ASES), a leading proponent of the cause, says that green employment isn’t reserved for scientists and researchers; the industry also needs “project managers, accountants, assemblers, IT professionals, customer service reps, marketing professionals and account executives.” ASES estimates that more than 8 million people already work in the field of renewable energy and energy efficiency, and it predicts that figure to quadruple by 2030. But ASES acknowledges that no real standards exist for what constitutes a green job, so these numbers are fuzzy. Work in an energy-intensive smelting plant producing steel for a wind turbine, and you might wind up in the green-jobs column, despite the belching pollution. According to the Political Economy Research Institute, a left-wing think tank, even truck driving could be green, since long-haulers “will be in demand to transport wind turbines as well as switchgrass and woodchips for biofuels.”

Obama has yet to provide much in the way of particulars on his green-jobs agenda, though he has proposed a “renewable portfolio standard” that would require 25 percent of our electricity to come from clean sources—a move that would boost demand for windmills, solar farms, and other clean but expensive technologies (clean nuclear power, reviled by environmental groups, would be excluded). Obama has also announced a massive new national-infrastructure and public-works agenda that would foster green jobs.

The paucity of details to date isn’t surprising. For all the talk about green-job creation, there’s an unavoidable problem with renewable-energy technologies and the policies that promote them: from an economic standpoint, they’re big losers. Renewables can’t produce the large volumes of useful, reliable energy that our economy needs at attractive prices. Government subsidizes renewables because—all things being equal—the free market won’t. In many cases, these subsidies amount to little more than welfare for companies and industries with political connections.

The green subsidies are considerable. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported in early 2008 that the government subsidizes solar energy at $24.34 per megawatt-hour (MWh) and wind power at $23.37. Yet even with decades of these massive handouts, as well as numerous state-level mandates for utilities to use green power, wind and solar energy contribute less than one-half of 1 percent of our nation’s electricity. Compare the green energy subsidies to the energy sources reviled by environmentalists, such as natural gas (25 cents per MWh in subsidies), coal (44 cents), hydroelectricity (67 cents), and nuclear power ($1.59). With relatively little government largesse, these sources (along with oil, which undergirds transportation) do the heavy lifting in our energy economy.

The alternative technologies at the heart of Obama’s plan, relying on more such government handouts and mandates, will inevitably raise energy prices—and high power prices are job killers. Industries that make physical products, whether cars or chemicals or paper cups, are energy-intensive and will gravitate to low-energy-cost locales—which is why California and New York, with some of the highest electricity prices in the country, have lost manufacturing jobs in droves. But it’s not just manufacturers that need cheap electricity: Google, the poster child of California’s information-technology economy, houses its massive server farms not in the Golden State but in places with lower electricity costs, like North Carolina and Oregon. Policies that drive up energy costs across the nation, as Obama intends, will drive many of these jobs not elsewhere in the country but overseas.

Keep in mind, too, that the traditional industries currently supplying Americans with reliable, affordable energy already employ millions of workers. The American Petroleum Institute reports that the oil and gas industry employs 1.6 million Americans. Coal mining directly and indirectly supports hundreds of thousands of jobs, according to the National Mining Association and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. A radical plan to transform our energy economy in favor of clean, renewable energy technologies would put many of those men and women out of work.

But won’t all those new green jobs make up for whatever economic hardship results? That’s the contention of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, among the best-known and most influential evangelists for a green economy. In his most recent bestseller, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America, Friedman argues that a government-directed green program would rebuild America’s national strength and bolster our economy for the twenty-first century—regardless of whether global warming turns out to be a serious problem (which he believes it is). Friedman likens his proposal to training for the Olympic triathlon. “If you make it to the Olympics, you have a much better chance of winning, because you’ve developed every muscle,” he writes. “If you don’t make it to the Olympics, you’re still healthier, stronger, fitter, and more likely to live longer and win every other race in life.”

It’s a nice analogy, but Friedman, like Obama, sees only the upside. Danish economist Bjørn Lomborg, author of books like The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, which decries climate-change alarmism, agrees that global warming is real and man-made, but he differs with Friedman’s response. “It is foolish to deny climate change,” says Lomborg. “But it’s also foolish to deny climate economics, which Friedman does.” Lomborg notes that Friedman’s argument “simply fails to address the cost of his proposed solutions, and fails to weigh those costs against the benefits.”

Obama and Friedman have become the latest proponents of a common economic fallacy. One version holds that the Second World War and its aftermath were a boon for the American and European economies, since militarizing in America and rebuilding Europe spurred much-needed economic activity. Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman peddled another version when, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, he suggested a possible silver lining: the destruction of the World Trade Center would require new construction and therefore reinvigorate economic activity downtown.

Such thinking was effectively debunked a century before World War II. The nineteenth-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat made an invaluable contribution to modern economics by demolishing the notion that a broken window is a good thing inasmuch as it provides work for the glazier. As Bastiat observed, the money that goes to pay the glassmaker would, had the window never been broken at all, have supported some other productive enterprise. Society as a whole winds up poorer, even if the glassmaker profits.

With his promise of 5 million new green jobs, Barack Obama heaves a brick straight through Bastiat’s window. Yesterday’s glazier is tomorrow’s solar-panel installer. The green-jobs promise amounts to killing jobs in efficient industries to create jobs in inefficient ones—hardly a recipe for economic success. William Pizer, a researcher with Resources for the Future and a lead author of the most recent report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, reinforced the point at a symposium last April: “As an economist, I am skeptical that [dealing with climate change] is going to make money. You’ll have new industries, but they’ll be doing what old industries did but [at] a higher net cost. . . . You’ll be depleting other industries.” Consumers will be hurt, too, Pizer notes. Digging deeper each month to pay for expensive renewable energy, they will have less to save or spend in other areas of the economy.

There may be legitimate arguments for taking dramatic steps to fight climate change. Boosting the economy isn’t one of them.

Higher costs and job losses aren’t the only drawbacks of the green-jobs push. We also must contend with a burgeoning activist movement that is mobilizing around the idea of a green economy. Many of these activists come from self-styled environmental organizations, but some aren’t typical environmentalists in any sense of the word. These unlikely eco-cadres—largely composed of labor union officials and inner-city community organizers—appear far less interested in protecting the environment than in agitating for “economic justice” and airing ethnic, racial, and other grievances.

That was the case with many of the participating organizations involved in the nationwide Green Jobs Now National Day of Action last September. The list of partner organizations reads like a roll call of left-wing activism. Most of the major environmental organizations were there, such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, along with many lesser-known groups. But so were numerous decidedly non-environmental outfits, including the well-known Acorn, MoveOn, and Codepink. Color of Change—an organization “dedicated to strengthening Black America’s political voice”—was on hand, as was the Hip Hop Caucus. Democracia USA sought to mobilize Hispanics, while numerous union locals boosted turnout at various sites around the country.

Inner-city Oakland may well be the heart of this new movement. Mayor Ron Dellums, formerly one of Congress’s most left-wing legislators, has pioneered the Oakland Green Jobs Corps (OGJC), which began dispersing money this fall for eligible groups to run so-called green-job-training programs. According to OGJC documents, “The program will have a special focus on providing ‘green pathways out of poverty’ by recruiting and training people with barriers to employment (e.g., lack of job skills, lack of education, language/cultural barriers, or history in juvenile/criminal justice system).”

Dellums had help from an Oakland-based community activist named Van Jones, who played a large role in persuading Congress to pass a Green Jobs Act in 2007 that will soon start funneling more than $125 million to antipoverty and environmental groups across the country. Jones is perhaps the leading proponent of harnessing the green-jobs wave to benefit low- or no-skilled candidates, many with troubled backgrounds. A relentless self-promoter, he has had a hand in starting or directing many of the best-known green-jobs advocacy groups: Green for All, the Apollo Alliance, Color for Change, and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. He is also a skilled quotesmith who has become a go-to guy for reporters looking to add flavor to stories about the environment. He often talks about the green economy being not just for the Ph.D., but also for the “Ph.-do.” Friedman profiles Jones in Hot, Flat, and Crowded and records this Jones aphorism for disaffected youth: “You can make more money if you put down that handgun and pick up a caulk gun.” Jones has written his own book, The Green Collar Economy, which promises both to rescue the economy and to save the environment (all for just $25.95).

Reading Jones’s book or the many interviews he has given, one gets the impression that he is passionately committed to the environment. He talks up the need for a “green New Deal,” for instance, that will “help our Rust Belt cities blossom as Silicon Valleys of green capital.” But scroll through the websites and reports of the many organizations with which he’s been connected, and one begins to suspect that this “green” commitment is less about nature than about welfare—for inner-city residents without the skills or knowledge to compete in a twenty-first-century economy, and for the professional poverty organizations that collect the money for government job-training programs.

If Jones and his compatriots in the green-jobs movement truly wanted to help poor minorities, they might start by taking a long, hard look at the history of government-run job-training programs. In terms of money wasted, skills not imparted, and opportunities lost, the history of such programs is abysmal. “Many, if not most, of the participants in federal jobs and job-training programs would be better off today if the programs had never existed,” observes journalist James Bovard, who has written extensively on the failures of job-training efforts. “The primary beneficiaries of federal jobs programs have been the legions of social workers, consultants, and ‘manpower experts’ that have made a good living off these flounderings for 25 years.” Bovard made those remarks in 1986; they are no less relevant today.

It would be comforting to think that the new Community-Organizer-in-Chief has better sense on the green economy than his Oakland counterparts. If he does, he’ll recognize that the best way to a greener, more prosperous future would be for the government simply to set goals and parameters for the private sector, and then step aside and let the market work. That might mean instituting a carbon tax or a greenhouse-gas-emissions cap-and-trade program. It might even mean banning new coal plants outright. What it emphatically does not mean is spreading around yet more taxpayer wealth to uneconomic industries and establishing make-work programs for parolees and high school dropouts.

Max Schulz is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Energy Policy and the Environment.

http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_green-jobs.html

[Body-by-Guinness]

The 'Global Warming Three' are on thin ice
The ony problem with a project to prove that Arctic ice is disappearing is the fact that it is actually getting thicker, says Christopher Booker.
 
By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 4:24PM GMT 21 Mar 2009
Comments 2 | Comment on this article

Explorer Pen Hadow's Catlin Arctic Project has top-level backing Photo: Martin Hartley

What a wonderful parable of our time has been the expedition to the North Pole led by the explorer Pen Hadow. With two companions, he is measuring the thickness of the ice to show how fast it is “declining”. His expedition is one of a series of events designed to “raise awareness of the dangers of climate change” before December’s conference in Copenhagen, where the warmists hope to get a new treaty imposing much more drastic cuts on CO2 emissions.

Hadow’s Catlin Arctic Project has top-level backing from the likes of the BBC, the WWF (it could “make a lasting difference to policy-relevant science”) and Prince Charles (“for the sake of our children and grandchildren, I pray that we will heed the results of the Catlin Arctic Survey and I can only commend this remarkably important project”).
 
With perfect timing, the setting out from Britain of the “Global Warming Three” last month was hampered by “an unusually heavy snowfall”. When they were airlifted to the start of their trek by a twin-engine Otter (one hopes a whole forest has been planted to offset its “carbon footprint”), they were startled to find how cold it was. The BBC dutifully reported how, in temperatures of minus 40 degrees, they were “battered by wind, bitten by frost and bruised by falls on the ice”.

Thanks to the ice constantly shifting, it was “disheartening”, reported Hadow, to find that “when you’ve slogged for a day”, you can wake up next morning to find you have “drifted back to where you started’’. Last week, down to their last scraps of food, they were only saved in the nick of time by the faithful Otter. They were disconcerted to see one of those polar bears, threatened with extinction by global warming, wandering around, doubtless eyeing them for its dinner.

But at least one of the intrepid trio was able to send a birthday message to his mum, via the BBC, and they were able to talk by telephone to “some of the world’s most influential climate change leaders”, including Development Secretary Douglas Alexander in front of 300 people at “a conference on world poverty”.

The idea is that the expedition should take regular radar fixes on the ice thickness, to be fed into a computer model in California run by Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, whose team, according to the BBC, “is well known for producing results that show much faster ice-loss than other modelling teams”. The professor predicts that summer ice could be completely gone as early as next year. It took the Watts Up With That? science blog to point out that there is little point in measuring ice thickness unless you do it several years running, and that, anyway, Arctic ice is being constantly monitored by US Army buoys. The latest reading given by a typical sensor shows that since last March the ice has thickened by “at least half a metre”.
“In most fields of science,” comments WUWT drily, “that is considered an 'increase’ rather than a 'decline’.”

An unhealthy moral climate
A London employment tribunal has ruled that Tim Nicholson, right, was wrongly dismissed as a property firm’s “head of sustainability” because of his fervent commitment to “climate change”. Mr Nicholson had fallen out with his colleagues over his attempts to reduce the company’s “carbon footprint”. The tribunal chairman David Neath found the company guilty of discriminating against Mr Nicholson under the 2006 Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations, because his faith in global warming was a “philosophical belief”. Recalling how “eco-psychologists’’ at the University of the West of England are pressing for “climate denial” to be classified as a form of “mental disorder”, one doubts whether the same legal protection would be given to those who fail to share Mr Nicholson’s “philosophical belief”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5028380/The-Global-Warming-Three-are-on-thin-ice.html

[Body-by-Guinness]

I don't know why these folks just don't go all out and hang garlic around their neck and spout incantation meant to ward off evil warming spirits.

March 29, 2009
No Drop in Electricity Usage in NY and CA at Earth Hour (updated)

Richard Henry Lee
The Greenies did not convince the average liberal New Yorkers and Californians to turn off their lights at the appointed Earth Hour of 8:30 PM local time.

By looking at real time data in New York and California, there was no drop in electric usage.

The New York State Independent System Operator has data for electric usage here. By downloading the data and plotting it it appears that at the Earth hour of 8:30 PM, there was no discernable electric usage drop. Here is the load graph for New York in Megawatts:




In California, there was also no discernable drop in load either according to the graph provided by the California ISO. This graph uses the 24 hour clock so 20.5 is 8:30 PM. 



These results seems consistent with recent surveys that show that people believe that the MSM are exaggerating the effects of global warming. No doubt the MSM will also ignore the lack of Earth Hour participation by a skeptical public.   

If New York and California do not voluntarily reduce demand to "save the planet", then we can safely assume that the rest of the country does not believe the global warming hype either.

Update: Don Surber mocks the airheads in Sydney, Australia (where Earth Hour was first commemorated) who turned out the lights and lit candles as they got all weepy over the assault humanity has launched against Mother Gaia. There's a great photograph of them by Kate Geraghty of the Sydney Morning Herald he uses.  He writes:

So, was any carbon dioxide saved?

Noted the Christian Science Monitor: "As Australian blogger Enoch the Red pointed out after last year's Earth Hour that an average Australian who tries to replace all the light produced by an incandescent bulb with light cast by parrifin candles will result in about 10 times the greenhouse emissions.

[Body-by-Guinness]

Al Gore Leaves The Light On For Ya
Second post.

By Kleinheider
Posted on March 29, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Even during Earth Hour. President of the Tennessee Center For Policy Research Drew Johnson takes a Saturday drive by Al Gore’s during the time most environmentalists went dark:
I pulled up to Al’s house, located in the posh Belle Meade section of Nashville, at 8:48pm – right in the middle of Earth Hour. I found that the main spotlights that usually illuminate his 9,000 square foot mansion were dark, but several of the lights inside the house were on.

In fact, most of the windows were lit by the familiar blue-ish hue indicating that floor lamps and ceiling fixtures were off, but TV screens and computer monitors were hard at work. (In other words, his house looked the way most houses look about 1:45am when their inhabitants are distractedly watching “Cheaters” or “Chelsea Lately” reruns.)

The kicker, though, were the dozen or so floodlights grandly highlighting several trees and illuminating the driveway entrance of Gore’s mansion.

I [kid] you not, my friends, the savior of the environment couldn’t be bothered to turn off the gaudy lights that show off his goofy trees.

http://politics.nashvillepost.com/2009/03/29/al-gore-will-leave-the-lights-on-for-ya/

[Body-by-Guinness]

March 31, 2009
It's the Climate Warming Models, Stupid!

By Gregory Young
What's in a Model:

Mathematical Modeling is used throughout our world to help forecast the future in many arenas of life, including economics, biology, medicine, and yes, climate change.  Like all modeling, one attempts to study the past through scientific observation, accurately and unbiasedly collect the data, and then fit the data to a dynamic computer model that is meant to predict, to some degree of accuracy, some measure of tomorrow.  In this way scientists hope to discover trends that not only document the past, but could forecast the future.

Virtually all climate models are basically mathematical models, built upon a series of mathematical equations.  Change just one equation, or the number of variables in an equation, or how they relate to one another, and the results of the model can change dramatically.  Unfortunately, unlike many other forms of modeling, climate models have yet to prove their wanted accuracy.

For the most part, the reasons for their ongoing failure have everything to do with climate complexity.  The climate is such an extraordinarily difficult dynamic system to be approximated by mathematical equations.  There are literally thousands of components, all interacting in ways that we don't fully understand. Added to the cacophony of being terrifically circuitous, and involving reciprocating feedback loops with a multitude of leveraged factors nested within interdependent systems of energy exchange, some of these energy systems are not just confined to earth.  Therefore, in changing the profile or weightiness of just one variable, the model's ability to forecast results can shift critically, and indeed, can mistakenly and regularly portend catastrophes.

As Professor Ian Clark, Department of Sciences, University of Ottawa tells it: "If you haven't understood the climate system, if you haven't understood all the components -- the cosmic rays, the solar, the CO2, the water vapor, the clouds, and put it all together -- if you haven't got all that, then your model isn't worth anything."  As in most computer models, the adage of "junk in -- junk out" remains true for climate models.

Compounding the Problems of Climate Modeling:

In addition to the difficulties mentioned above, is the late arriving Anthropogenic (man-made) Global Warming (AGW) prejudice that has set the evolution of climate modeling back a few decades.  Previously known and accepted climate components have been summarily stripped from the equation --  such as the dominant factors involving the Sun and the importance of water vapor in the atmosphere as the dominant greenhouse gas.  This is because in the cause to acquire lucrative AGW-biased government grants, many scientists have opted to blatantly skew their climate models to amplify AGW-favoring evidence and amplify anthropogenic CO2 importance.  In this manner, they then qualify to receive funding and ensure publication.

Describing the compounded inaccuracies of these Johnny-come-lately modelers who would rather be funded than scientifically astute, Dr. Tim Ball, a former climate scientist at the University of Winnipeg sardonically clarifies: "The analogy that I use is that my car is not running that well, so I'm going to ignore the engine (which is the sun) and I'm going to ignore the transmission (which is the water vapor) and I'm going to look at one nut on the right rear wheel (which is the Human produced CO2) ... the science is that bad!"

Dr. Balls analogy has never proved clearer than when examining the climate models used by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  As just noted, the inaccuracy of those models cherry-picked by the IPCC revealed that the largest and most robust variables of climate change and their antecedents were intentionally dismissed and dropped from inclusion in their investigations, including the variables of solar activity, water vapor and cloud formation in the atmosphere, major ocean currents, as well as other vital components.

If you're thinking that without due consideration of the known and most weighty variables in the climate system, the forecastable conclusions should prove to be fallacious and wrong, you would be right.  Yet, that hasn't stopped the UN's IPCC from driving the propaganda of AGW, emphasizing the wrong deductions while deliberately disregarding the bigger picture altogether.

Ironically, model worthiness and accuracy can be quickly assessed by simply plugging in yesterday's numbers and seeing if the model actually yields results that are aligned with the known history.  Yet to date, climate models have failed miserably.  Though there is hope for further improvement, there is no current climate model that can, when applied to the  documented past, accurately re-forecast the known historical record, much less portend what could be happening to the weather next week, least wise the next century.  Climate modeling has yet to rise to a level of sophistication that allows us to accurately predict the future.

Knowing the primitive state of climate modeling, it is at least irresponsible, even not maleficent, to use such flawed methods to intentionally affect global public policy-making.  It is morally reprehensible, if not criminal, to promote the panicking of dire climate consequences and extinction scenarios authored by climate models known to be verifiably defective.  This tyranny of appearance has yet to be toppled.

Further Undermining Model Accuracies:

Aside from climate models not working, how they are "applied" and "used" in order to affect public opinion offers us insight into yet another scientific infraction.  For instance, AGW studies notoriously measure "short-term trends," from which they then attempt to derive long-term forecasts.  This is tantamount to predicting whether a building should be built upon a piece of ground by analyzing the topsoil alone, while ignoring the absence of any underlying bedrock.  Real risky!

When it comes to climate change, which has been ongoing for at least 4.5 Billion years, measuring short-term trends alone, such as 10-50 years at a time, is absolutely worthless.  It's worthless because short-term trends are typically just that, "short-term."  They are quick to change.  Only in the long-term does the variation of many contiguous short-term trends gradually give way to the more important real climate changes noted in the historical records.  From the short-term view point alone, nothing is really revealed except aberrant blips reflecting common statistical variation of the data pool.

Also, depending on what side of the short-term trend we choose to initially measure, the respective forecasts can be 180 degrees out.  For example, the last ice-age persisted until 11,400 years ago when the temperatures rose dramatically some 10 degrees Centigrade in just 2-3 years. An accurate forecast depends on what side of the apex of the trend you happen to measure (for a variation on this theme, see René Tomes: Catastrophe Theory), just as one would when trading a stock on Wall Street.

Mind you, all of the climate change that ended the last ice-age happened without man's influence, and it was still a few degrees warmer then, than it is today.  Further, no such exemplary temperature-rate-differentials are in evidence currently.  Most agree that we are on track to add approximately 1.0 degree Centigrade of warming over the next century.  Then again, recent short-term trends of cooling are now documented.  The lesson:  short-term analysis is generally unreliable to produce meaningful long-term forecasts.

Awkward for warming alarmists, long-term modeling does not reflect AGW.  Thus, most of the predictions that account for AGW are derived solely from the short-sightedness of short-term models.  Though such narrow and myopic targeting of the timeline gives little to no accurate indication as to what the long-term climate trends will be, it does allow alarmists to spin data to their own favorable conclusive ends through the finding of false-positives.  Indeed, depending on where AGWers want to start and stop measuring, the results can be so contrived to be anything they want them to be.  But the prejudice of a favored outcome, or an apparent coin-toss, should not be at the helm of climate modeling.  This is not the kind of modeling that good science makes.

Corrections to Recent Climate Modeling Undermines the AGW Cause:

Next, let's consider the ongoing corrections made to various climate models due to error in data accumulation, data fabrication and exaggeration and the discovery of outright forgery delightfully explained in this video of Professor Bob Carter of James Cook University in Australia, who demonstrated that on the basis of published studies, the IPCC modeling notions of AGW is not only undermined, but fatally torpedoed.

From Evidence of Modeling Bias to Spinning Propaganda:

Compounding the problems of inaccuracy in climate models is their subsequent and de facto publication, virtually assured if the study is favorable to AGW. Reporting in the journal Energy and Environment, Volume 19, Number 2, March 2008, Evidence for "publication Bias" Concerning Global Warming in Science and Nature  by Patrick J. Michaels has found significant evidence for the AGW penchant in his survey of the two premier magazines, namely Science and Nature.  Astoundingly, he found that it's more than 99.999% probable that Climate studies' extant forecasts are biased in these two publications.  In contrast the AGW party-line believes that there is an equal probability that published findings will raise or lower extant forecasts.

This is akin to believing the MSM is fair, objective and balanced.  Michaels rightly warns that such bias "...has considerable implications for the popular perception of global warming science, for the nature of ‘compendia' of climate change research, such as the reports of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change, and for the political process that uses those compendia as the basis for policy."

And such bias did, does, and will continue to influence world politics.  This predicament has been vigorously exposed by Lord Monckton, who previously revealed through consummate analysis that a whole bevy of proven modeling errors yet to be have been corrected, willfully resisted, and pugnaciously ignored by the IPPC continues to this day to prejudice world opinion in favor of AGW.

Monckton specifically found that errors "via 30 equations that computer models used by the UN's climate panel (IPCC) -- [models] which were purposely pre-programmed with such overstated or falsified values for the three variables whose product is ‘climate sensitivity' (temperature increase in response to greenhouse-gas increase)  -- resulted in a 500-2000% overstatement of CO2's effect on temperature in the IPCC's latest climate assessment report, published in 2007." 

Accordingly, and in total agreement with other published opinions,  Lord Monckton stated most recently that there is an "overwhelming weight of evidence that the UN's climate panel, the IPCC, prodigiously exaggerates both the supposed causes and the imagined consequences of anthropogenic ‘global warming;' that too many of the exaggerations can be demonstrated to have been deliberate; and that the IPCC and other official sources have continued to rely even upon those exaggerations that have been definitively demonstrated in the literature to have been deliberate."

Thus, because of (1) complicit distortion and overstatement of climate related data-values, (2) repetitive denial of published corrections of exaggerated IPCC data-modeling, (3) deliberate direct and indirect fabrications of data input through falsified methods of interpolation and extrapolation, (4) willfully and overtly creating data forgeries and conclusions, and (5) other man-made errors introduced into climate warming models, from (6) faulty data collection methods from U.S. National Weather Service pedigree measuring stations to (7) the basic corruption of data analysis itself, all climate modeling to date has been woefully inaccurate, the manipulation of which has become the basis of a deliberate IPPC self-fulfilling prophecy concerning AGW.

Nevertheless, IPCC members remain unrepentant.  They openly and truculently refuse to appropriately inculcate the corrected published data into their own conclusions because this would change their conclusions and dispel warming alarmism.  It is "priestcraft" in its darkest form.  Warming alarmists are acting as skilled magicians that can make a rabbit come out of any hat ... as long as we let them supply the hat!

The Tide is Turning:

But there is a silver lining in the clouds of despair sown by the warming alarmists.  Elsewhere, in a painstaking review of the literature accessing the scientific consensus about climate change involving 539 papers published between 2004 and 2007, Schulte and Klaus-Martin in the journal Energy and Environment, published in March 2008, found no actual evidence in any of these papers  regarding specific "catastrophic" climate change due to man.  Nada.  None.  Zero.

Additionally, from this most recent study we learn that less than 50% of the papers endorsed any notion of AGW, and only 7% did so explicitly.  This means that over half of these studies did not endorse AGW.  This is in contrast to just a few years ago when 75% of reviewed published papers between 1995-2003 suggested that the warming of the 50 years previous was likely to have been anthropogenic, or man-made.  This reversal is big news.

This study indicates that the tide is changing and the dissent from AGW markedly growing.  As AGW climate models are being continually scrutinized and vetted, there appears to be diminishing evidence witnessed en masse in the learned journals to justify the current climate-change alarm.

Though we shall fight on, now the trick is to begin the even harder task of changing the politicians' minds ... politicians who are already salivating for, and grown used to the idea of, a lucrative carbon-tax, and the additional power they will likely inherit with it.  Science alone will not likely defeat the rapaciousness of Washington.  Any suggestions?

Dr. Gregory Young is a neuroscientist and physicist, a doctoral graduate of the University of Oxford, Oxford, England, whilst previously completing postgraduate work at King's College, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and having taught graduate-level Statistical Analysis and Mathematical Modeling.  He currently chairs a privately funded think-tank engaged in experimental biophysics.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/03/its_the_climate_warming_models.html at March 31, 2009 - 09:29:53 AM EDT

[Crafty_Dog]

Climate Momentum Shifting: Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming - Now Skeptics

Growing Number of Scientists Convert to Skeptics After Reviewing New Research

Following the U.S. Senate's vote today on a global warming measure (see today's AP article: Senate Defeats Climate Change Measure,) it is an opportune time to examine the recent and quite remarkable momentum shift taking place in climate science. Many former believers in catastrophic man-made global warming have recently reversed themselves and are now climate skeptics.  The names included below are just a sampling of the prominent scientists who have spoken out recently to oppose former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, and the media driven “consensus” on man-made global warming.  

The list below is just the tip of the iceberg.  A more detailed and comprehensive sampling of scientists who have only recently spoken out against climate hysteria will be forthcoming in a soon to be released U.S. Senate report. Please stay tuned to this website, as this new government report is set to redefine the current climate debate.

In the meantime, please review the list of scientists below and ask yourself why the media is missing one of the biggest stories in climate of 2007.  Feel free to distribute the partial list of scientists who recently converted to skeptics to your local schools and universities. The voices of rank and file scientists opposing climate doomsayers can serve as a counter to the alarmism that children are being exposed to on a daily basis. (See Washington Post April 16, 2007 article about kids fearing of a “climactic Armageddon” )

The media's climate fear factor seemingly grows louder even as the latest science grows less and less alarming by the day. (See Der Spiegel May 7, 2007 article: Not the End of the World as We Know It ) It is also worth noting that the proponents of climate fears are increasingly attempting to suppress dissent by skeptics. (See UPI May 10, 2007 article: U.N. official says it's 'completely immoral' to doubt global warming fears )

Once Believers, Now Skeptics ( Link to pdf version )  

Geophysicist Dr. Claude Allegre, a top geophysicist and French Socialist who has authored more than 100 scientific articles and written 11 books and received numerous scientific awards including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States, converted from climate alarmist to skeptic in 2006. Allegre, who was one of the first scientists to sound global warming fears 20 years ago, now says the cause of climate change is "unknown" and accused the “prophets of doom of global warming” of being motivated by money, noting that "the ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people!" “Glaciers’ chronicles or historical archives point to the fact that climate is a capricious phenomena. This fact is confirmed by mathematical meteorological theories. So, let us be cautious,” Allegre explained in a September 21, 2006 article in the French newspaper L'EXPRESS. The National Post in Canada also profiled Allegre on March 2, 2007, noting “Allegre has the highest environmental credentials. The author of early environmental books, he fought successful battles to protect the ozone layer from CFCs and public health from lead pollution.” Allegre now calls fears of a climate disaster "simplistic and obscuring the true dangers” mocks "the greenhouse-gas fanatics whose proclamations consist in denouncing man's role on the climate without doing anything about it except organizing conferences and preparing protocols that become dead letters." Allegre, a member of both the French and U.S. Academy of Sciences, had previously expressed concern about manmade global warming. "By burning fossil fuels, man enhanced the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century," Allegre wrote 20 years ago. In addition, Allegre was one of 1500 scientists who signed a November 18, 1992 letter titled “World Scientists' Warning to Humanity” in which the scientists warned that global warming’s “potential risks are very great.”


Geologist Bruno Wiskel of the University of Alberta recently reversed his view of man-made climate change and instead became a global warming skeptic. Wiskel was once such a big believer in man-made global warming that he set out to build a “Kyoto house” in honor of the UN sanctioned Kyoto Protocol which was signed in 1997.  Wiskel wanted to prove that the Kyoto Protocol’s goals were achievable by people making small changes in their lives. But after further examining the science behind Kyoto, Wiskel reversed his scientific views completely and became such a strong skeptic, that he recently wrote a book titled “The Emperor's New Climate: Debunking the Myth of Global Warming.”  A November 15, 2006 Edmonton Sun article explains Wiskel’s conversion while building his “Kyoto house”: “Instead, he said he realized global warming theory was full of holes and ‘red flags,’ and became convinced that humans are not responsible for rising temperatures.” Wiskel now says “the truth has to start somewhere.”  Noting that the Earth has been warming for 18,000 years, Wiskel told the Canadian newspaper, “If this happened once and we were the cause of it, that would be cause for concern. But glaciers have been coming and going for billions of years."  Wiskel also said that global warming has gone "from a science to a religion” and noted that research money is being funneled into promoting climate alarmism instead of funding areas he considers more worthy. "If you funnel money into things that can't be changed, the money is not going into the places that it is needed,” he said.

Astrophysicist Dr. Nir Shaviv, one of Israel's top young award winning scientists, recanted his belief that manmade emissions were driving climate change. ""Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. In fact, there is much more than meets the eye,” Shaviv said in February 2, 2007 Canadian National Post article. According to Shaviv, the C02 temperature link is only “incriminating circumstantial evidence.” "Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th-century global warming" and "it is unlikely that [the solar climate link] does not exist,” Shaviv noted pointing to the impact cosmic- rays have on the atmosphere. According to the National Post, Shaviv believes that even a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere by 2100 "will not dramatically increase the global temperature." “Even if we halved the CO2 output, and the CO2 increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant,” Shaviv explained. Shaviv also wrote on August 18, 2006 that a colleague of his believed that “CO2 should have a large effect on climate” so “he set out to reconstruct the phanerozoic temperature. He wanted to find the CO2 signature in the data, but since there was none, he slowly had to change his views.”  Shaviv believes there will be more scientists converting to man-made global warming skepticism as they discover the dearth of evidence. “I think this is common to many of the scientists who think like us (that is, that CO2 is a secondary climate driver). Each one of us was working in his or her own niche. While working there, each one of us realized that things just don't add up to support the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) picture. So many had to change their views,” he wrote.

Mathematician & engineer Dr. David Evans, who did carbon accounting for the Australian Government, recently detailed his conversion to a skeptic. “I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty conclusive, but since then new evidence has weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause. I am now skeptical,” Evans wrote in an April 30, 2007 blog. “But after 2000 the evidence for carbon emissions gradually got weaker -- better temperature data for the last century, more detailed ice core data, then laboratory evidence that cosmic rays precipitate low clouds,” Evans wrote.  “As Lord Keynes famously said, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’” he added. Evans noted how he benefited from climate fears as a scientist. “And the political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By the late 1990's, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too. I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn't believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And so were lots of people around me; and there were international conferences full of such people. And we had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet!  But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence outlined above fell away or reversed,” Evans wrote. “The pre-2000 ice core data was the central evidence for believing that atmospheric carbon caused temperature increases. The new ice core data shows that past warmings were *not* initially caused by rises in atmospheric carbon, and says nothing about the strength of any amplification. This piece of evidence casts reasonable doubt that atmospheric carbon had any role in past warmings, while still allowing the possibility that it had a supporting role,” he added. “Unfortunately politics and science have become even more entangled. The science of global warming has become a partisan political issue, so positions become more entrenched. Politicians and the public prefer simple and less-nuanced messages. At the moment the political climate strongly supports carbon emissions as the cause of global warming, to the point of sometimes rubbishing or silencing critics,” he concluded. (Evans bio link )  

Climate researcher Dr. Tad Murty, former Senior Research Scientist for Fisheries and Oceans in Canada, also reversed himself from believer in man-made climate change to a skeptic.  “I stated with a firm belief about global warming, until I started working on it myself,” Murty explained on August 17, 2006.  “I switched to the other side in the early 1990's when Fisheries and Oceans Canada asked me to prepare a position paper and I started to look into the problem seriously,” Murty explained. Murty was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper which stated in part, "If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary.”  

Botanist Dr. David Bellamy, a famed UK environmental campaigner, former lecturer at Durham University and host of a popular UK TV series on wildlife, recently converted into a skeptic after reviewing the science and now calls global warming fears "poppycock." According to a May 15, 2005 article in the UK Sunday Times, Bellamy said “global warming is largely a natural phenomenon.  The world is wasting stupendous amounts of money on trying to fix something that can’t be fixed.” “The climate-change people have no proof for their claims. They have computer models which do not prove anything,” Bellamy added. Bellamy’s conversion on global warming did not come without a sacrifice as several environmental groups have ended their association with him because of his views on climate change. The severing of relations came despite Bellamy’s long activism for green campaigns. The UK Times reported Bellamy “won respect from hardline environmentalists with his campaigns to save Britain’s peat bogs and other endangered habitats. In Tasmania he was arrested when he tried to prevent loggers cutting down a rainforest.”
 
Climate scientist Dr. Chris de Freitas of The University of Auckland, N.Z., also converted from a believer in man-made global warming to a skeptic. “At first I accepted that increases in human caused additions of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere would trigger changes in water vapor etc. and lead to dangerous ‘global warming,’ But with time and with the results of research, I formed the view that, although it makes for a good story, it is unlikely that the man-made changes are drivers of significant climate variation.” de Freitas wrote on August 17, 2006. “I accept there may be small changes. But I see the risk of anything serious to be minute,” he added. “One could reasonably argue that lack of evidence is not a good reason for complacency. But I believe the billions of dollars committed to GW research and lobbying for GW and for Kyoto treaties etc could be better spent on uncontroversial and very real environmental problems (such as air pollution, poor sanitation, provision of clean water and improved health services) that we know affect tens of millions of people,” de Freitas concluded. de Freitas was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper which stated in part, “Significant [scientific] advances have been made since the [Kyoto] protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases.”

Meteorologist Dr. Reid Bryson, the founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at University of Wisconsin (now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, was pivotal in promoting the coming ice age scare of the 1970’s ( See Time Magazine’s 1974 article “Another Ice Age” citing Bryson: & see Newsweek’s 1975 article “The Cooling World” citing Bryson) has now converted into a leading global warming skeptic. In February 8, 2007 Bryson dismissed what he terms "sky is falling" man-made global warming fears. Bryson, was on the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world. “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?” Bryson told the May 2007 issue of Energy Cooperative News. “All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd. 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,” Bryson said. “You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide,” he added. “We cannot say what part of that warming was due to mankind's addition of ‘greenhouse gases’ until we consider the other possible factors, such as aerosols. The aerosol content of the atmosphere was measured during the past century, but to my knowledge this data was never used. We can say that the question of anthropogenic modification of the climate is an important question -- too important to ignore. However, it has now become a media free-for-all and a political issue more than a scientific problem,” Bryson explained in 2005.

Global warming author and economist Hans H.J. Labohm started out as a man-made global warming believer but he later switched his view after conducting climate research.  Labohm wrote on August 19, 2006, “I started as a anthropogenic global warming believer, then I read the [UN’s IPCC] Summary for Policymakers and the research of prominent skeptics.”  “After that, I changed my mind,” Labohn explained. Labohn co-authored the 2004 book “Man-Made Global Warming: Unraveling a Dogma,” with chemical engineer Dick Thoenes who was the former chairman of the Royal Netherlands Chemical Society. Labohm was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper which stated in part, “’Climate change is real’ is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural ‘noise.’”


Paleoclimatologist Tim Patterson, of Carlton University in Ottawa converted from believer in C02 driving the climate change to a skeptic. “I taught my students that CO2 was the prime driver of climate change,” Patterson  wrote on April 30, 2007. Patterson said his “conversion” happened following his research on “the nature of paleo-commercial fish populations in the NE Pacific.” “[My conversion from believer to climate skeptic] came about approximately 5-6 years ago when results began to come in from a major NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) Strategic Project Grant where I was PI (principle investigator),” Patterson explained. “Over the course of about a year, I switched allegiances,” he wrote. “As the proxy results began to come in, we were astounded to find that paleoclimatic and paleoproductivity records were full of cycles that corresponded to various sun-spot cycles.  About that time, [geochemist] Jan Veizer and others began to publish reasonable hypotheses as to how solar signals could be amplified and control climate,” Patterson noted. Patterson says his conversion “probably cost me a lot of grant money. However, as a scientist I go where the science takes me and not were activists want me to go.” Patterson now asserts that more and more scientists are converting to climate skeptics.  "When I go to a scientific meeting, there's lots of opinion out there, there's lots of discussion (about climate change). I was at the Geological Society of America meeting in Philadelphia in the fall and I would say that people with my opinion were probably in the majority,” Patterson told the Winnipeg Sun on February 13, 2007. Patterson, who believes the sun is responsible for the recent warm up of the Earth, ridiculed the environmentalists and the media for not reporting the truth. "But if you listen to [Canadian environmental activist David] Suzuki and the media, it's like a tiger chasing its tail. They try to outdo each other and all the while proclaiming that the debate is over but it isn't -- come out to a scientific meeting sometime,” Patterson said. In a separate interview on April 26, 2007 with a Canadian newspaper, Patterson explained that the scientific proof favors skeptics. “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," he said. “The world should be heating up like crazy by now, and it's not. The temperatures match very closely with the solar cycles."  

[Crafty_Dog]

Physicist Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, chairman of the Central Laboratory for the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiological Protection in Warsaw, took a scientific journey from a believer of man-made climate change in the form of global cooling in the 1970’s all the way to converting to a skeptic of current predictions of catastrophic man-made global warming. “At the beginning of the 1970s I believed in man-made climate cooling, and therefore I started a study on the effects of industrial pollution on the global atmosphere, using glaciers as a history book on this pollution,” Dr. Jaworowski, wrote on August 17, 2006. “With the advent of man-made warming political correctness in the beginning of 1980s, I already had a lot of experience with polar and high altitude ice, and I have serious problems in accepting the reliability of ice core CO2 studies,” Jaworowski added. Jaworowski, who has published many papers on climate with a focus on CO2 measurements in ice cores, also dismissed the UN IPCC summary and questioned what the actual level of C02 was in the atmosphere in a March 16, 2007 report in EIR science entitled “CO2: The Greatest Scientific Scandal of Our Time.” “We thus find ourselves in the situation that the entire theory of man-made global warming—with its repercussions in science, and its important consequences for politics and the global economy—is based on ice core studies that provided a false picture of the atmospheric CO2 levels,” Jaworowski wrote. “For the past three decades, these well-known direct CO2 measurements, recently compiled and analyzed by Ernst-Georg Beck (Beck 2006a, Beck 2006b, Beck 2007), were completely ignored by climatologists—and not because they were wrong. Indeed, these measurements were made by several Nobel Prize winners, using the techniques that are standard textbook procedures in chemistry, biochemistry, botany, hygiene, medicine, nutrition, and ecology. The only reason for rejection was that these measurements did not fit the hypothesis of anthropogenic climatic warming. I regard this as perhaps the greatest scientific scandal of our time,” Jaworowski wrote. “The hypothesis, in vogue in the 1970s, stating that emissions of industrial dust will soon induce the new Ice Age, seem now to be a conceited anthropocentric exaggeration, bringing into discredit the science of that time. The same fate awaits the present,” he added. Jaworowski believes that cosmic rays and solar activity are major drivers of the Earth’s climate. Jaworowski was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper which stated in part: "It may be many years yet before we properly understand the Earth's climate system. Nevertheless, significant advances have been made since the protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases."

Paleoclimatologist Dr. Ian D. Clark, professor of the Department of Earth Sciences at University of Ottawa, reversed his views on man-made climate change after further examining the evidence. “I used to agree with these dramatic warnings of climate disaster. I taught my students that most of the increase in temperature of the past century was due to human contribution of C02. The association seemed so clear and simple. Increases of greenhouse gases were driving us towards a climate catastrophe,” Clark said in a 2005 documentary "Climate Catastrophe Cancelled: What You're Not Being Told About the Science of Climate Change.” “However, a few years ago, I decided to look more closely at the science and it astonished me. In fact there is no evidence of humans being the cause. There is, however, overwhelming evidence of natural causes such as changes in the output of the sun. This has completely reversed my views on the Kyoto protocol,” Clark explained. “Actually, many other leading climate researchers also have serious concerns about the science underlying the [Kyoto] Protocol,” he added. 

Environmental geochemist Dr. Jan Veizer, professor emeritus of University of Ottawa, converted from believer to skeptic after conducting scientific studies of climate history. “I simply accepted the (global warming) theory as given,” Veizer wrote on April 30, 2007 about predictions that increasing C02 in the atmosphere was leading to a climate catastrophe. “The final conversion came when I realized that the solar/cosmic ray connection gave far more consistent picture with climate, over many time scales, than did the CO2 scenario,” Veizer wrote. “It was the results of my work on past records, on geological time scales, that led me to realize the discrepancies with empirical observations. Trying to understand the background issues of modeling led to realization of the assumptions and uncertainties involved,” Veizer explained. “The past record strongly favors the solar/cosmic alternative as the principal climate driver,” he added. Veizer acknowledgez the Earth has been warming and he believes in the scientific value of climate modeling. “The major point where I diverge from the IPCC scenario is my belief that it underestimates the role of natural variability by proclaiming CO2 to be the only reasonable source of additional energy in the planetary balance. Such additional energy is needed to drive the climate. The point is that most of the temperature, in both nature and models, arises from the greenhouse of water vapor (model language ‘positive water vapor feedback’,) Veizer wrote. “Thus to get more temperature, more water vapor is needed. This is achieved by speeding up the water cycle by inputting more energy into the system,” he continued. “Note that it is not CO2 that is in the models but its presumed energy equivalent (model language ‘prescribed CO2’). Yet, the models (and climate) would generate a more or less similar outcome regardless where this additional energy is coming from. This is why the solar/cosmic connection is so strongly opposed, because it can influence the global energy budget which, in turn, diminishes the need for an energy input from the CO2 greenhouse,” he wrote. 

More to follow...

Related Links:

New Peer-Reviewed Scientific Studies Chill Global Warming Fears

Global Warming "Consensus" Continues To Melt Away (Op-Ed By Senator Inhofe, Power Magazine)

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

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"

 

# # #

[Body-by-Guinness]

I should probably file this elsewhere, but it so closely parallels other sorts of quasi-empiric panic mongering that I figured it'd be good for comparative purposes if nothing else.


Fight Moral Panics — With Beer!

Posted by Jason Kuznicki

In the UK and here at home, brewers have increasingly been producing specialty beers with the alcohol content of wine. Naturally, it’s time for a moral panic:

The new breed of bitters, with their intense flavours and alcohol contents of up to 12 per cent, are the work of young brewing entrepreneurs trying capture the attention — and cash — of lager-guzzling twentysomethings.

Beer writers and aficionados have welcomed the speciality bottles, which can contain 10 times as much hops as a traditional pint, as a necessary revitalisation of a market dominated by corporate giants turning out similar 4 per cent brown bitters.

But alcohol campaigners have complained that drinkers may be unaware of the strength of the new products, a single 330ml bottle of which is enough to make an adult exceed their daily recommended alcohol intake.

In January the Portman Group, the alcohol industry watchdog, ruled the brashest exponent of the movement, BrewDog brewery in Aberdeen, had broken its code on responsible marketing for its Speed Ball beer, named after the cocktail of cocaine and heroin which killed the actor John Belushi, star of The Blues Brothers.

Despite the group rejecting complaints against three of BrewDog’s other beers, Punk IPA, Rip Tide and Hop Rocker, its managing director, James Watt, accused Portman of being “outdated” and “out of touch”. He did, however, concede that his company had been provocative. “We thought we would give them something worth banning us for,” he said.

Good for them.

Note the comically low, and comically named, “recommended daily alcohol intake,” which would apparently forbid splitting a standard bottle of wine with another drinker. (Is there any better way to drink wine?) Incidentally, today’s 750 mL bottle derives from the “fifth,” or fifth of a gallon, which in the good old barrel-chested days of yore may well have been a single-serving portion.

It’s fascinating how the narrative of moral panic just keeps getting recycled, as if journalists only ever had this one idea in their heads. Is it their fault, or is it the watchdog groups? A question worth asking.

Either way, it works like this: Someone does something faux-provocative, often as a marketing stunt (to beer connoisseurs, brews with 12% alcohol are a fine old tradition, not a terrible new menace). But a group of Very Concerned People takes it all quite seriously and issues a worried press release. An interview is set up. The young are always invoked, as are previous moral panics. Anxious stories are written. Entirely fake concerns arise. (Hops, for example, don’t intoxicate, and strong hop flavors incline one to drink less beer, not more.)

If a moral panic keeps up for long enough, the legislators will get called in, because it’s their job to protect us naive ordinary folk from the dangers of the world. Maybe something will be done about it, or maybe not. Either way, the average member of the public goes away worried, which is just what the Very Concerned People want. They feed on worry.

They hope for a perpetual climate of worry, a feeling of unease that will carry over from this issue to the next one and to the one after that. It makes what they do — taking away freedoms — that much easier. It’s our job, as freedom-loving citizens, to deny them this perpetual undercurrent of worry. And if we can do it while drinking beer, then so much the better.

Jason Kuznicki • April 3, 2009 @ 10:19 am

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/04/03/fight-moral-panics-—-with-beer/

[Crafty_Dog]

Fire And Ice
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, April 08, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Climate Change: An ice shelf in Antarctica begins to break apart, and the global warming hysterics immediately blame human activities for the crackup. Is it possible that there is some other cause?


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Read More: Global Warming


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The Wilkins Ice Shelf, a 25-mile bridge that once covered about 6,000 square miles, has split off from the Antarctic coast. Floating untethered, the Connecticut-size ledge — a mere 0.39% of all Antarctic ice — could eventually melt as it drifts northward toward warmer waters.

Naturally, activists both in and out of the scientific community, the media and political figures on the left blame human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide for warming the Earth, particularly the Antarctic peninsula, where temperatures have increased 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 50 years.

Before we panic, there are a few things we should remember that will help us to put this less-than-catastrophic event in perspective.

First, the melting of the Wilkins Ice Shelf, or any other ice shelf, will not raise ocean levels. Antarctica has lost seven shelves in the last two decades and there have been no disastrous effects. Ice displaces more volume than water because water expands when it freezes. There is no net gain in water when an ice shelf or iceberg melts, or, in other words, contracts.

Second, much of Antarctica, particularly near the South Pole, has been through a recent cooling trend.

According to NASA: "Although Antarctica warmed around the perimeter from 1982 to 2004, where huge icebergs calved and some ice shelves disintegrated, it cooled closer to the pole."

Satellite images show that between 1981 and 2007, there was more warming than cooling in Antarctica. But the warming appears to have been modest.

Third, there's an active volcano beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. A little more than a year ago, the British Antarctic Survey noted, "Heat from the volcano creates melt-water that lubricates the base of the ice sheet and increases the flow toward the sea."
That volcano is on the southernmost edge of the Pacific Ring of Fire, a chain of volcanoes that continue through the Antarctic Peninsula, which the Wilkins Shelf had been attached to, down the continent's west side.  Maybe the news is the fact that more Antarctic ice hasn't melted, not that a relatively small shelf has torn away from the coast.

The mainstream media has its global warming narrative, though, and it's not going to abandon its commitment to one-sided journalism. Exploring the possibility that climate variations are beyond man's CO2 emissions is not a service they're willing to perform.

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The mind reels on so many levels:


April 30, 2009
Global Warming Ruled a Religion by British Judge

Marc Sheppard
A fired British executive is suing his former employer on the grounds that he was unfairly dismissed due to religious views – his belief in global warming. 

According to the Independent:

“In the first case of its kind, employment judge David Sneath said Tim Nicholson, a former environmental policy officer, could invoke employment law for protection from discrimination against him for his conviction that climate change was the world's most important environmental problem.”

The judge ruled that Nicholson’s extreme green views fit the definition of “a philosophical belief under the Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations, 2003.”  So strong were these “beliefs,” that they “put him at odds with other senior executives within the firm.”  The 41-year-old told the employment tribunal that, as head of sustainability at Grainger plc, Britain's largest residential property investment company, he constantly tangled with fellow-executives over the company’s environmental policies and corporate social responsibility.

Nicholson complained that senior executives obstructed his attempts to lower the company’s “carbon footprint,” and that while Grainger advertised green policies, executives actually drove "some of the most highly polluting cars on the road".  He also griped that chief executive Rupert Dickinson refused numerous requests to change the company’s policy toward employee air travel.  Nicholson even included this personally upsetting example in his written complaint: "He [Mr Dickinson] showed contempt for the need to cut carbon emissions by flying out a member of the IT staff to Ireland to deliver his BlackBerry that he had left behind in London."

All of which offended Nicholson’s green beliefs, which he says dictate his very existence, "including my choice of home, how I travel, what I buy, what I eat and drink, what I do with my waste and my hopes and my fears".   

Harry Trory, counsel for Grainger, argued that Nicholson’s “views on climate change and the environment were based on fact and science, and did not constitute a philosophical belief.”  But the judge agreed with Nicholson, finding that “his belief goes beyond a mere opinion.”

The decision makes Nicholson the first person ever to be allowed to sue for religious discrimination with environmentalism listed as the affronted creed.

What next, Earth Day declared a religious holiday, tax-exempt status extended to recycling plants, or defacing effigies of Al Gore prosecuted as a hate crime?  Not likely.

On the other hand, greenies scoffed when Michael Crichton first called environmentalism “one of the most powerful religions in the Western World” over five years ago, insisting that “settled science” was on their side. Since then it’s become increasingly evident that alarmists’ warming beliefs are based not on reason or evidence, but a trusting acceptance in the absence of either.  They outright refuse to discuss it, debate it, or abide those daring to question it.

Antitheist Sam Harris once wrote:

“The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so.” 

If British carbo-chondriacs now choose to capitulate which better exemplifies their position in an effort to exploit victims’ status, we can only hope their American counterparts soon follow their lead.

It’d be well worth a few silly law-suits to establish precedent necessary to keep this nonsense out of our public schools on those very same grounds.

And that’s just the tip of the expanding iceberg.

Hat Tip: Larwyn

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/04/global_warming_ruled_a_religio.html at April 30, 2009 - 08:39:30 AM EDT

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Hey, those pesky AGW modelers opened the door. . . .

Shock: Global temperatures driven by US Postal Charges
The rise in global temperatures since 1880 closely correlates with increases in postal charges, sparking alarm that CO2 has been usurped as the main driver of climate change.



Back in 1885 it cost 2 cents to post a letter. Who would have thought that as postal charges climbed by 40 cents through the next 120 years, that global temperatures would mirror that rise in timing and slope and gain almost one full degree?
Ominously, US Post is set to raise the charges 2c to 44c on May 11, 2009. Postal Action Network (PAN) has already sprung into existence this afternoon and plans to produce a boycott campaign of the new 44c Homer Simpson stamps. Overworked postal workers are enthusiastic. Homer Simpson is reported to have said “Give me the number for 911.”

Barbara Boxer, majority Chairman of the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, immediately set up an inquiry, announcing that all future changes in price for US post must be approved by the EPA. “We’ll need a full environmental impact statement. We can’t just let global damage be done willy nilly on the basis of some arbitrary postal expenses committee’s need to balance the books. No other government service has to balance their budget, why should US Post?”

President Obama immediately convened a task force at the Federal Reserve to loan $450 billion to US Post to keep prices constant until 3400 A.D..
Tuvalu promptly announced they would cut their postal charges in half ‘just in case’. They are asking for donations in order to keep their postal service running, but are considering shifting to carrier pigeons.

The mechanism is far from clear. Professor Chrichton-Boots from the Chicago Schools of Economics, cautioned that US Post prices are a good proxy for inflation, and that it may be inflation that is really behind the recent change in climate. He admitted it was puzzling that there appears to have been global temperature changes for 3-5 billion years before the advent of either US Postal services, or inflation. “You would think the planetary climate would have been stable.” But Harvard social researchers are calling for funding for archaeological digs to find postage stamps from the precambrian. “It’s under-researched”. US Post said this type of finding would be very important but, if any stamps were found, they would be unable to honor them: “Since at the time, the US didn’t exist, in government, in theory, or even as a landmass”.

A spokesman from US Post pointed out that the ‘Forever’ series of stamps (which cost 41c, but are ‘good forever, regardless of price rises’) are anti-inflationary. They were issued in 2007 which “may explain the cooler weather since then”*.

Critics pointed out that correlation is not causation, and “you can produce a link between any two monotonically rising lines on a graph”. The newly formed UN Intergovernmental Panel on Postal Changes called them deniers, while Jim Hansen from NASA pronounced that executives from The Board of Governors of the U.S. Postal Service should be jailed henceforth and also retrospectively.

The Russians (Pochta Rossii) announced they would lift the cost of letters from 10 roubles to 100, effective from Monday. “Siberia is too cold”.
*(As a curious aside, the Forever stamps may have been the US Government’s most successful investment tool in recent times, gaining 14% in value since 2007, while the Dow and everything else, lost over 40%. Thus proving that the US Federal Reserve could better maintain US purchasing power parity if they switched the world’s Reserve Currency from US Dollars to “Forever Stamps”. )

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May 03, 2009
'Environmentalism' Dying?

Randall Hoven
Environmentalism is suffering a crisis of both image and reality.  Two news stories highlight this trend.

The first story is on the reality of electric cars.

"The German branch of the environmental group World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) has conducted a study together with IZES, a German institute for future energy systems, on the environmental impact of electric vehicles in Germany."

In the "best case" scenario, "overall national carbon dioxide emissions would only be cut by 0.1 percent."  In the "worst case," the electric car would be worse than gasoline-powered ones.

"An electric car with a lithium ion battery powered by electricity from an old coal power plant could emit more than 200g of carbon dioxide per km, compared with current average gasoline car of 160g of carbon dioxide per km in Europe."

So the electric car controversy will soon go the way of cloth-vs-plastic diapers, paper-or-plastic grocery bags, and disposable-cup-or-ceramic-mug controversies.  All against the original environmentalist position.  (Not to mention acid rain or the coming ice age.)

The second main story is about the image of environmentalism.  The story comes, from all places, the New York Times .  The environmental cause is getting an extreme PR makeover.  Apparently, a memo got out that was not supposed to get out.

EcoAmerica has been conducting research for the last several years to find new ways to frame environmental issues and so build public support for climate change legislation and other initiatives. A summary of the group's latest findings and recommendations was accidentally sent by e-mail to a number of news organizations...

Instead of grim warnings about global warming, the firm advises, talk about "our deteriorating atmosphere." Drop discussions of carbon dioxide and bring up "moving away from the dirty fuels of the past." Don't confuse people with cap and trade; use terms like "cap and cash back" or "pollution reduction refund."

Another consultant had recommended in 2002 that people call themselves "conservationists" not "environmentalists."

The two consultants agree that " ‘climate change' is an easier sell than ‘global warming.' "

Reality bites again.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/05/environmentalism_dying.html at May 03, 2009 - 12:27:29 PM EDT

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The United Nations' Retreat From Science in Controlling Malaria
By Roger Bate
New Ledger
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
 
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
James Gathany. Mosquito, Malaria.
Image ID 7950
 
For two years the United Nations paid lip service to the truth that the insecticide DDT is a vital component of malaria control, but last week UN abandoned science in favor of superstition. The result is UN promotion of more dangerous and less efficient malaria control techniques.

On May 5th, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Environment Program announced plans to reduce DDT use by 30% by 2014 and completely eliminate it by around 2020. In the mean time, the UN will roll out initiatives in 40 countries to test non-chemical methods of malaria control. In particular UN wants to scale up the programs of Central America, which have relied on "pharmacosuppression". Essentially, uninfected people in high risk locations are given the antimalarial drug chloroquine to suppress any future infection. In 2004, 3,400 malaria cases were diagnosed in Mexico, 6,897 in Nicaragua, and almost half a million in Brazil. But both Mexico and Nicaragua each distributed more anti-malaria pills (mostly chloroquine pills) than Brazil. Chloroquine is a wonderful drug at combating malaria and has saved millions of lives when used therapeutically, as in Brazil, but prophylactic use is not safe because it is quite toxic and has led to heart problems when used repeatedly. As scientists at the University of Colima in Mexico explained last year, chloroquine "can induce lethal ventricular arrhythmias."

Ironically, chloroquine is only slightly less toxic than DDT yet people have to eat chloroquine pills, they don't eat DDT. The UN does not mention this, or that the Central American policy cannot be used in most other regions because of extensive resistance to chloroquine and high cost. So even if pharmacosuppression were clinically appropriate, it couldn't be done in Africa anyway.

The UN's push for a "zero DDT world", ignores the millions of lives DDT has saved over the past century, with little to no adverse environmental impact and no harm to human health. From the late 1940s until the early 1970s, spraying DDT was the mainstay of anti-mosquito campaigns responsible for successfully eradicating malaria from North America and much of Europe. Thanks to DDT, by 1970, an estimated one billion people no longer lived in malaria-endemic areas; in Southeast Asia, cases fell from a high of 110 million in 1950 to nearly zero by 1969.

But by the 1980s aid agencies lost interest in funding malaria control. When malaria re-emerged as a global priority in 1998, even the most limited use of DDT — for indoor spraying, in tiny quantities — was off the table. Deaf to appeals from Southern African public health experts who were successfully using the chemical, aid groups opted to promote less controversial bed nets and antimalarial drugs.

The UN's push for a "zero DDT world", ignores the millions of lives DDT has saved over the past century.
Bed nets save lives, especially when impregnated with insecticides, and are relatively cheap. But they must be used consistently, every night, all night. Studies suggest most people do not routinely sleep under their nets—and when bed nets are accompanied by education campaigns, their per-unit cost often becomes more expensive than spraying ‑ with DDT. Most aid groups buy nets and simply count their distribution; they rarely attempt to measure how many lives they save.

Recognizing this, and with malaria rates rising throughout the 1990s and 2000s, WHO reversed its policy in 2006. "We must take a position based on the science and the data," Dr. Arata Kochi, Director of WHO's Global Malaria Programme announced in September 2006. "One of the best tools we have against malaria is indoor residual house spraying. Of the dozen insecticides WHO has approved as safe for house spraying, the most effective is DDT." Dr. Kochi wanted all the tools available to combat malaria — bed nets and insecticides like DDT.

Still, even with this WHO endorsement, only a few national governments, all helped by US Government, such as Uganda and Tanzania tried using DDT. Most nations were reliant on governmental donors and NGOs like Doctors Without Borders and more recently, Malaria No More, which favor net distribution. The only large donor that has even tried using DDT in Africa since the 1970s has been the US President's Malaria Initiative. So only a moderate increase in DDT use occurred, none funded by the UN. And then last year Dr Kochi was sidelined along with his pro-DDT policy. The result was that WHO, UN's premier health body, which had weakly championed DDT for less than two years, was back in step with the rest of UN agencies, notably UN Environment Programme, which continued to promote DDT's demise.

In its place UN promotes the highly dubious Central American pharmacosuppression project as well as other marginal trendy techniques, such as fish which eat mosquito larvae. This can work but only in very specific circumstances, and since many mosquito species can breed in tiny amounts of water – trapped in old tires or even hoof prints, it is easy to see why they are not widely deployable. Window screens are useful, but they are expensive and are only successful in houses where mosquitoes cannot enter under the eaves, through thatch, or even brush walls, which many huts in Africa have.

So while there are many alternatives to DDT, after 65 years of use, DDT is still a key, yet largely unfunded, part of the anti-malaria arsenal. The children of Africa pay the price for the UN's political correctness.

Roger Bate is the Legatum Fellow in Global Prosperity at AEI.

You can find this article online at http://www.aei.org/article/100483   

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Perhaps James Hansen should apply one of his algorithm specials.

   
Saturday » May 16 » 2009
 
Little ocean tattletales fail to find right facts
 
Lorne Gunter
Canwest News Service

Saturday, March 29, 2008

They drift along in the worlds' oceans at a depth of 2,000 metres -- more than a mile down -- constantly monitoring the temperature, salinity, pressure and velocity of the upper oceans.

Then, about once every 10 days, a bladder on the outside of these buoys inflates and raises them slowly to the surface, gathering data about each strata of seawater they pass through.

After an upward journey of nearly six hours, the Argo monitors bob on the waves while an onboard transmitter sends their information to a satellite that in turn retransmits it to several land-based research computers where it may be accessed by anyone who wishes to see it.

These 3,000 yellow sentinels -- about the size and shape of a large fencepost -- free-float the world's oceans, season in and season out, surfacing between 30 and 40 times a year, disgorging their findings, then submerging again for another fact-finding voyage.

It's fascinating to watch their progress online. (The URLs are too complex to reproduce here, but Google "Argo Buoy Movement" or "Argo Float Animation," and you will be directed to the links.)

When they were first deployed in 2003, the Argos were hailed for their ability to collect information on ocean conditions more precisely, at more places and greater depths and in more conditions than ever before.

No longer would scientists have to rely on measurements mostly at the surface from older scientific buoys or inconsistent shipboard monitors.

So why are some scientists now beginning to question the buoys' findings? Because in five years the little blighters have failed to detect any global warming. They are not reinforcing the scientific orthodoxy of the day, namely that man is causing the planet to warm dangerously. They are not proving the predetermined conclusions of their human masters. Therefore they, and not their masters' hypotheses, must be wrong.

In fact, "there has been a very slight cooling," according to a U.S. National Public Radio (NPR) interview with Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a scientist who keeps close watch on the Argo findings.

Willis insisted the temperature drop was "not anything really significant." And I trust he's right. But can anyone imagine NASA or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- the UN's climate experts -- shrugging off even a "very slight" warming.

A slight drop in the oceans' temperature over a period of five or six years probably is insignificant, just as a warming over such a short period would be. Yet if there had been a rise of any kind, even of the same slightness, rest assured this would be broadcast far and wide as yet another log on the global warming fire.

Just look how tenaciously some scientists are prepared to cling to the climate change dogma. "It may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming," Willis told NPR.

Yeah, you know, like when you put your car into reverse you are causing it to enter a period of less rapid forward motion. Or when I gain a few pounds I am in a period of less rapid weight loss.

The big problem with the Argo findings is that all the major climate computer models postulate that as much as 80-90 per cent of global warming will result from the oceans warming rapidly then releasing their heat into the atmosphere.

But if the oceans aren't warming, then (please whisper) perhaps the models are wrong.

The supercomputer models also can't explain the interaction of clouds and climate. They have no idea whether clouds warm the world more by trapping heat in or cool it by reflecting heat back into space.

Modellers are also perplexed by the findings of NASA's eight weather satellites that take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily over the entire surface of the Earth, versus approximately 7,000 random readings from Earth stations.

In nearly 30 years of operation, the satellites have discovered a warming trend of just 0.14 C per decade, less than the models and well within the natural range of temperature variation.

I'm not saying for sure the models are wrong and the Argos and satellites are right, only that in a debate as critical as the one on climate it would be nice to hear some alternatives to the alarmist theory.

http://www2.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=8c21e2dd-1945-43be-b04d-217c415f5a6b

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The Climate-Industrial Complex
Some businesses see nothing but profits in the green movement.
By BJORN LOMBORG

Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets.

The tight relationship between the groups echoes the relationship among weapons makers, researchers and the U.S. military during the Cold War. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the might of the "military-industrial complex," cautioning that "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." He worried that "there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."

This is certainly true of climate change. We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a "climate-industrial complex" is emerging, pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain.

This phenomenon will be on display at the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen this weekend. The organizers -- the Copenhagen Climate Council -- hope to push political leaders into more drastic promises when they negotiate the Kyoto Protocol's replacement in December.

The opening keynote address is to be delivered by Al Gore, who actually represents all three groups: He is a politician, a campaigner and the chair of a green private-equity firm invested in products that a climate-scared world would buy.

Naturally, many CEOs are genuinely concerned about global warming. But many of the most vocal stand to profit from carbon regulations. The term used by economists for their behavior is "rent-seeking."

The world's largest wind-turbine manufacturer, Copenhagen Climate Council member Vestas, urges governments to invest heavily in the wind market. It sponsors CNN's "Climate in Peril" segment, increasing support for policies that would increase Vestas's earnings. A fellow council member, Mr. Gore's green investment firm Generation Investment Management, warns of a significant risk to the U.S. economy unless a price is quickly placed on carbon.

Even companies that are not heavily engaged in green business stand to gain. European energy companies made tens of billions of euros in the first years of the European Trading System when they received free carbon emission allocations.

American electricity utility Duke Energy, a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, has long promoted a U.S. cap-and-trade scheme. Yet the company bitterly opposed the Warner-Lieberman bill in the U.S. Senate that would have created such a scheme because it did not include European-style handouts to coal companies. The Waxman-Markey bill in the House of Representatives promises to bring back the free lunch.

U.S. companies and interest groups involved with climate change hired 2,430 lobbyists just last year, up 300% from five years ago. Fifty of the biggest U.S. electric utilities -- including Duke -- spent $51 million on lobbyists in just six months.

The massive transfer of wealth that many businesses seek is not necessarily good for the rest of the economy. Spain has been proclaimed a global example in providing financial aid to renewable energy companies to create green jobs. But research shows that each new job cost Spain 571,138 euros, with subsidies of more than one million euros required to create each new job in the uncompetitive wind industry. Moreover, the programs resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs for every job created.

The cozy corporate-climate relationship was pioneered by Enron, which bought up renewable energy companies and credit-trading outfits while boasting of its relationship with green interest groups. When the Kyoto Protocol was signed, an internal memo was sent within Enron that stated, "If implemented, [the Kyoto Protocol] will do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory business."

The World Business Summit will hear from "science and public policy leaders" seemingly selected for their scary views of global warming. They include James Lovelock, who believes that much of Europe will be Saharan and London will be underwater within 30 years; Sir Crispin Tickell, who believes that the United Kingdom's population needs to be cut by two-thirds so the country can cope with global warming; and Timothy Flannery, who warns of sea level rises as high as "an eight-story building."

Free speech is important. But these visions of catastrophe are a long way outside of mainstream scientific opinion, and they go much further than the careful findings of the United Nations panel of climate change scientists. When it comes to sea-level rise, for example, the United Nations expects a rise of between seven and 23 inches by 2100 -- considerably less than a one-story building.

There would be an outcry -- and rightfully so -- if big oil organized a climate change conference and invited only climate-change deniers.

The partnership among self-interested businesses, grandstanding politicians and alarmist campaigners truly is an unholy alliance. The climate-industrial complex does not promote discussion on how to overcome this challenge in a way that will be best for everybody. We should not be surprised or impressed that those who stand to make a profit are among the loudest calling for politicians to act. Spending a fortune on global carbon regulations will benefit a few, but dearly cost everybody else.

Mr. Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus, a think tank, and author of "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming" (Knopf, 2007).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124286145192740987.html#mod=djemEditorialPage

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NASA Study Acknowledges Solar Cycle, Not Man, Responsible for Past Warming
Michael Andrews - June 4, 2009 9:37 AM


Report indicates solar cycle has been impacting Earth since the Industrial Revolution

Some researchers believe that the solar cycle influences global climate changes.  They attribute recent warming trends to cyclic variation.  Skeptics, though, argue that there's little hard evidence of a solar hand in recent climate changes.

Now, a new research report from a surprising source may help to lay this skepticism to rest.  A study from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland looking at climate data over the past century has concluded that solar variation has made a significant impact on the Earth's climate.  The report concludes that evidence for climate changes based on solar radiation can be traced back as far as the Industrial Revolution.

Past research has shown that the sun goes through eleven year cycles.  At the cycle's peak, solar activity occurring near sunspots is particularly intense, basking the Earth in solar heat.  According to Robert Cahalan, a climatologist at the Goddard Space Flight Center, "Right now, we are in between major ice ages, in a period that has been called the Holocene."

Thomas Woods, solar scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder concludes, "The fluctuations in the solar cycle impacts Earth's global temperature by about 0.1 degree Celsius, slightly hotter during solar maximum and cooler during solar minimum.  The sun is currently at its minimum, and the next solar maximum is expected in 2012."

According to the study, during periods of solar quiet, 1,361 watts per square meter of solar energy reaches Earth's outermost atmosphere.  Periods of more intense activity brought 1.4 watts per square meter (0.1 percent) more energy.

While the NASA study acknowledged the sun's influence on warming and cooling patterns, it then went badly off the tracks.  Ignoring its own evidence, it returned to an argument that man had replaced the sun as the cause current warming patterns.  Like many studies, this conclusion was based less on hard data and more on questionable correlations and inaccurate modeling techniques.

The inconvertible fact, here is that even NASA's own study acknowledges that solar variation has caused climate change in the past.  And even the study's members, mostly ardent supports of AGW theory, acknowledge that the sun may play a significant role in future climate changes.


Past studies have shown that sunspot numbers correspond to warming or cooling trends. The twentieth century has featured heightened activity, indicating a warming trend.  (Source: Wikimedia Commons)


Solar activity has shown a major spike in the twentieth century, corresponding to global warming. This cyclic variation was acknowledged by a recent NASA study, which reviewed a great deal of past climate data.  (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

http://www.dailytech.com/NASA+Study+Acknowledges+Solar+Cycle+Not+Man+Responsible+for+Past+Warming/article15310.htm

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The Man Who Cried Doom
NASA's James Hansen is the least-muzzled climate alarmist in America.
by Michael Goldfarb
06/15/2009, Volume 014, Issue 37

It's been more than 20 years since James Hansen first warned America of impending doom. On a hot summer day in June 1988, Hansen, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, came to Washington to announce before a Senate committee that "the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now."

The greenhouse effect would have looked obvious enough to anyone watching on television. The senators conducting the hearing, including Al Gore, had turned the committee room into an oven. That day it was a balmy 98 degrees, and as former Colorado senator Timothy Wirth later revealed, the committee members "went in the night before and opened all the windows. And so when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and [high ratings], but it was really hot."

Hansen has been a star ever since. On the 20th anniversary of his testimony to Congress and still serving in the same role at NASA, Hansen was invited back for an encore performance where he warned that time was running out. He also conducted a media tour that included calling for the CEOs of fossil fuel companies, including ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy, to be put on trial for "high crimes against humanity and nature."

If you hear the echo of Nuremberg in those trials, it's because Hansen doesn't shy away from Holocaust metaphors to make his point. In 2007, Hansen testified before the Iowa Utilities Board not in his capacity as a government employee but "as a private citizen, a resident of Kintnersville, Pennsylvania, on behalf of the planet, of life on Earth, including all species." Hansen told the board that "if we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains--no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species."

More recently, but presumably still in his capacity as a private citizen and defender of the Earth, Hansen wrote an op-ed for the Guardian in which he described coal-fired power plants as "factories of death." This on the heels of testifying in a British court on behalf of six Greenpeace activists on trial for causing $60,000 in criminal damage to a coal-fired power station in England. The Greenpeace activists had offered climate change as a "lawful excuse" for their actions and with Hansen's helpful testimony were acquitted of all charges. Less than six months later, Hansen--a federal employee--would call for "the largest display of civil disobedience against global warming in U.S. history" as part of a protest at the Capitol power plant in Washington.

Hansen, by his own count, has conducted more than 1,400 interviews in recent years. Yet Hansen would also insist, in a speech just days before the 2004 presidential election, that the Bush administration had "muzzled" him because of his global warming activism. When asked about this contradiction in 2007, Hansen told Rep. Darrell Issa that "for the sake of the taxpayers, they should be availed of my expertise. I shouldn't be required to parrot some company line."

But Hansen has never parroted the company line. As the head of NASA's Weather and Climate Research Program from 1982 to 1994, John Theon was James Hansen's supervisor. Theon says that Hansen's testimony in 1988 was "a huge embarrassment" to NASA, and he remains skeptical of Hansen's predictions. "I don't have much faith in the models," Theon says, pointing to the "huge uncertainty in the role clouds play." Theon describes Hansen as a "nice, likeable fellow," but worries "he's been overcome by his belief--almost religious--that he's going to save the world."

William Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, also describes Hansen's belief in a man-made global-warming catastrophe as "almost religious" and says he "never understood how [Hansen] got such a strong voice" in the debate. Gray's efforts to predict hurricanes also lead him to question Hansen's computer models. "He doesn't have the clouds in right, and he doesn't have the deep ocean circulation," Gray says. "It's a giant scam in my view."

Yet Hansen has been well rewarded by the scientific community for his efforts, winning the American Meteorological Society's highest award for atmospheric science earlier this year. Gray says he was "appalled at that," particularly in light of the fact that Hansen wasn't even trained as a -meteorologist. Gray distributed a paper describing the choice as a "hijacking" of the AMS: "By presenting Hansen with its highest award, the AMS implies it agrees with his faulty global temperature projections and irresponsible alarmist rhetoric," Gray wrote.

Indeed, Roy Spencer, who served as the senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Center, puts Hansen "at the extreme end of global warming alarmism." Spencer doesn't know of anyone "who thinks it's a bigger problem than [Hansen] does." Spencer, a meteorologist by training and a skeptic of man-made global warming, was genuinely muzzled during the Clinton administration. "I would get the message down through the NASA chain [of command] of what I could and couldn't say in testimony."

Spencer left NASA with little fuss for a job at the University of Alabama in 2001, but he still seems in awe of Hansen's ability to do as he pleases. "For many years Hansen got away with going around NASA rules, and they looked the other way because it helped sell Mission to Planet Earth," the NASA research program studying human effects on climate. Spencer figures that "at some point, someone in the Bush administration said 'why don't you start enforcing your rules?' "

Gray says that Hansen's "testimony is not working out" anyway. There's been a "slight cooling since 2001. .  .  . They're scrambling," he says. And indeed Hansen got caught with his hand in the cookie jar in 2007, when Stephen McIntyre, the man who debunked the infamous "hockey stick" graph showing stable Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures for most of the last millennia before a sharp upturn, found a flaw in Hansen's numbers. McIntyre analyzed NASA's temperature records for the last century and found that, contrary to Hansen's charts, 1998 was not the hottest year on record. That honor belongs to 1934, and five of the ten hottest years on record are now found prior to World War II.

Theon says the same kind of models that now predict runaway warming were predicting runaway cooling prior to 1975, when the popular fear was not melting ice caps but a new ice age, and "not one model predicted the cooling we've had since 1998." Spencer insists "it's all make believe--if you took one look at the assumptions that go into this, you'd laugh." But none of that seems to matter too much.

"Gore was in his corner and now the president is in his corner," Theon says. "They don't understand what the hell is going on."

Michael Goldfarb is a Phillips Foundation fellow and the online editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/591lnajh.asp?pg=2

[Boyo]

Found thid interesting

Obama climate czar accused of law-breaking
June 12, 2009
House Republicans Darrell Issa and James Sensenbrenner are calling for an investigation of whether Obama climate czar Carol Browner’s secrecy in developing Obama’s CAFE standards and EPA’s CO2 endangerment finding was a “deliberate and willful violation” of the Presidential Records Act.

According to the letter,

… Mary Nichols, the head of the California Air Resources Board (CARB), revealed to the New York Times that the White House held a series of secret meetings with select special interests as they were crafting the new CAFE standards. Nichols was a key player in these negotiations because of California’s determined efforts to regulate fuel economy standards at the state level. Nichols admitted there was a deliberate “vow of silence“
surrounding the negotiations between the White House and California on vehicle fuel economy [standards]. According to Nichols’ interview, “[Carol] Browner [Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change] quietly orchestrated private discussions from the White House with auto industry officials.” Great care was taken to “put nothing in writing, ever.” This coordinated effort, led by Carol Browner, to leave no paper trail of the deliberations within the White House appears to be a deliberate and willful violation of the Presidential Records Act. This Act requires the President to take, “all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of his constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented and that such records are maintained as Presidential records.” Clearly, Browner’s actions were intended to leave little to no documentation of the deliberations that lead to the development of stringent new CAFE standards.

So much for President Obama’s Jan. 21 committment to unprecedented openness in government.

By the way you guys in San Fran have fun being fined by the garbage police for improper recycling WTF

Boyo

[ccp]

"So much for President Obama’s Jan. 21 committment to unprecedented openness in government"

Exactly.

My guess as to the reasons he gets away with this con:

1) He has conned a majority of Americans that they will get something for nothing. Although poll data that suggest that a majority now feel Republicans can handle the economy better suggest they are starting to see past his BS.

2) An adoring media.  Though it is interesting your article appears to be from the NYT though probably page 2,567 in small print.  If it was W it would have been page 1.

3) Who yet is the alternative to BO?

4) People are still rightly frightened by the economy and the sense of calm the gigantic spending bills have restored have lulled them into a sense of complacency.

[Body-by-Guinness]

JUNE 18, 2009, 3:45 PM
U.S. Climate Report Assailed

By JOHN TIERNEY
The new federal report on climate change gets a withering critique from Roger Pielke Jr., who says that it misrepresents his own research and that it wrongly concludes that climate change is already responsible for an increase in damages from natural disasters. Dr. Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, asks:

[Why] is a report characterized by [White House] Science Advisor John Holdren as being the “most up-to-date, authoritative, and comprehensive” analysis relying on a secondary, non-peer source citing another non-peer reviewed source from 2000 to support a claim that a large amount of uncited and more recent peer-reviewed literature says the opposite about?

You can check out Dr. Pielke’s blog for a detailed rebuttal of how the report presents science in his area of expertise, the study of trends in natural disasters and their relation to climate change. While the new federal report (prepared by 13 agencies and the White House) paints a dire picture of climate change’s impacts, Dr. Pielke says that the authors of this new report, like those of previous reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Stern Review, cherrypick weak evidence that fits their own policy preferences. He faults all these reports for all relying on “non-peer reviewed, unsupportable studies rather than the relevant peer-reviewed literature” and for “featuring non-peer-reviewed work conducted by the authors.”

Dr. Pielke contrasts these reports’ conclusions about trends in natural disasters with the some quite different findings last year by the federal Climate Change Science Program. Dr. Pielke summarizes some of its less sensational conclusions:

1. Over the long-term, U.S. hurricane landfalls have been declining.
2. Nationwide there have been no long-term increases in drought.
3. Despite increases in some measures of precipitation . . . there have not been corresponding increases in peak streamflows (high flows above 90th percentile).
4. There have been no observed changes in the occurrence of tornadoes or thunderstorms
5. There have been no long-term increases in strong East Coast winter storms (ECWS), called Nor’easters.
6. There are no long-term trends in either heat waves or cold spells, though there are trends within shorter time periods in the overall record.

Do those benign trends seem surprising to you? What do you think of Dr. Pielke’s arguments? Here’s his overall conclusion about the dangers of hyping the link between natural disasters and climate change: “Until the climate science community cleans up its act on this subject it will continue to give legitimate opportunities for opponents to action to criticize the climate science community.”

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/us-climate-report-assailed/

[Boyo]

Go Green ! Go Green !

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5zbxJg2Lcs[/youtube]


What next?

Boyo

[Boyo]

And now for something totally amazing ......

Organic nags: Michelle Obama, Marian Burros
June 17, 2009
Marian Burros, the New York Times’ fossilized, elitist, organic food nag, today tried to lampoon the crop protection industry and the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) in a Politico.com article for defending conventionally produced food from Michelle Obama’s air-headed slander.

In a letter to the White House defending its products against the First Lady’s aspersions concerning their safety, the Mid-America CropLife Association referred to the pesticides and herbicides as “crop protection products” — a “euphemism,” according to Burros.

To the extent “crop protection products” is a euphemism, it’s a necessary one given that Burros and her ilk have spent the last 40 years publicly denigrating perfectly safe pesticides, feriltizers and other chemicals as dangerous. There is no evidence that any legally applied pesticide has ever harmed anyone.

Let’s keep in mind that it is only through “crop protection products,” conventional farming, and pesticides and herbicides — whatever name you want to use — that Western farmers have been able to supply the food that the burgeoning world’s population so desperately needs. In contrast, none of the food policies that Marian Burros advocates could come close to accomplishing what U.S. farmers have through the use of pesticides and fertilizers.

Next, Burros tries to lampoon ACSH’s Jeff Stier because Stier said in an interview on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show that if only organic food were produced, obesity and starvation would increase.

“Starvation and obesity simultaneously,” was Burros’ snarky comment.

Stier was right, of course, and Burros was, once again, way off base. If we only produced organic products, we’d have less and more expensive food. Organic products necessarily take up more land and require more inputs (water, fertilizer and labor) — and then run the risk of being wiped out by pests.

In the U.S., people wouldn’t starve but, to save money, their diets would shift toward less expensive, but more calorie-dense processed foods — leading to more obesity. In the rest of the world, the reduced production of food could very well lead to shortages and starvation.

Dumber/more dishonest (take your pick) than Burros is Michelle Obama, whose political gardening at the White House this blog has noted previously.

At yesterday’s Harvest Party for the politically exploited local school children, Michelle Obama continually showcased how ill-prepared she is to pontificate on diet and health (my comments in bold):

Obama: “Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, high-blood pressure are all diet-related health issues that cost this country more than $120 billion each year.” [This is an absolutely made-up figure. There is no evidence that diet alone is responsible for the alleged conditions and cost.]

Obama: “Nearly a third of the children in this country are either overweight or obese…” [Wrong. CDC says the figure is about 17%]

Obama: “…and a third will suffer from diabetes at some point in their lifetime.” [Less than 8% of Americans have diabetes, according to the NIH.]

Obama: “In Hispanic and African American communities, those numbers climb even higher so that nearly half of the children in those communities will suffer the same fate.” [False. The figures for minorities are generally significantly less than twice that of white children.]

Obama: “And for the first time in the history of our nation, a nation that is one of the wealthiest on the planet, medical experts have warned that our younger generation may be on track to have a shorter life span than their parents as a direct result of the obesity epidemic.” [There is no basis in fact for this dire prediction.]

Obama: “So how did we get here? How did we get in this position where we have become such an unhealthy nation, and our children are at risk?” [Ridiculous. As a whole, the U.S. is not unhealthy and neither are its children. More Americans are living longer than ever before.]

Obama: “And the fact is there are a lot of factors, but some of the more simple ones are that too many kids are consuming high-calorie food with low nutritional value…” [Obama served cupcakes to the children at the event.]

Obama: “Well, I’ve learned that if [food is] fresh and grown locally, it’s probably going to taste better. [About locally produced food, should Washington, DC children be denied, say, Florida orange juice because it’s not local? Does Obama plan to construct a White House Orange Grove?]

Obama: “But unfortunately, for too many families, limited access to healthy fruits and vegetables is often a barrier to a healthier diet.” [This is typically due to their expense, especially when they’re locally grown and/or organic.]

Obama: “In so many of our communities, particularly in poorer and more isolated communities, fresh, healthy food is simply out of reach. With few grocery stores in their neighborhoods, residents are forced to rely on convenience stores, fast food restaurants, liquor stores, drug stores and even gas stations for their groceries.” [Poverty is the root problem, not fruit/vegetable availability.]

Obama: “And I want you guys to continue to be my little ambassadors in your own homes and in your own communities, because there are kids who are going to watch this. They’re going to watch this on TV, they’re going to read a report about it or maybe their parents will read a report, and they’re going to see through you just how easy it is for kids to think differently about food. And you’re going to help a lot of people.” [Yeah, you're going to help a lot of fast food, processed food, food transportation and food retail employees out of work for no good reason.]

Marian Burros should be put to an organic pasture where she can chew her crud. As for Michelle Obama, it makes you long for the days of Bess Truman when the First Lady was hardly ever seen and much less heard from.

Boyo

[Body-by-Guinness]

Each term on the source page links to stories about this or that GW claim.

A complete list of things caused by global warming

Acne, agricultural land increase, Afghan poppies destroyed, Africa devastated, African aid threatened,  Africa in conflict, aggressive weeds, air pressure changes, Alaska reshaped, Agulhas current moves,  Alps melting, Amazon a desert, American dream end,  amphibians breeding earlier (or not),  anaphylactic reactions to bee stings,  ancient forests dramatically changed, animals head for the hills, Antarctic grass flourishes, Antarctic ice grows, Antarctic ice shrinks, Antarctic sea life at risk,   anxiety treatment, algal blooms, archaeological sites threatened, Arctic bogs melt, Arctic in bloom, Arctic ice free, Arctic ice melt faster, Arctic lakes disappear, Arctic tundra to burn, Arctic warming (not), Atlantic less salty, Atlantic more salty,   atmospheric circulation modified, attack of the killer jellyfish, avalanches reduced, avalanches increased,  Baghdad snow, Bahrain under water,  bananas grow, barbarisation, beer shortage, beetle infestation, bet for $10,000,  better beer, big melt faster, billion dollar research projects, billion homeless, billions face risk, billions of deaths, bird distributions change, bird loss accelerating, bird visitors drop, birds confused, birds return early, birds driven north, bittern boom ends, blackbirds stop singing, blackbirds threatened, Black Hawk down,  blue mussels return, bluetongue, brain eating amoebae, brains shrink, bridge collapse (Minneapolis), Britain Siberian,  brothels struggle, brown Ireland, bubonic plague, budget increases, Buddhist temple threatened,  building collapse, building season extension, bushfires, business opportunities, business risks,  butterflies move north, camel deaths,  cancer deaths in England, cannibalism,  caterpillar biomass shift, cave paintings threatened,  childhood insomnia, Cholera, circumcision in decline, cirrus disappearance, civil unrest, cloud increase,  cockroach migration,  coffee threatened, cold climate creatures survive, cold spells (Australia), cold wave (India), computer models, conferences, conflict, conflict with Russia,  consumers foot the bill, coral bleaching, coral fish suffer, coral reefs dying, coral reefs grow, coral reefs shrink , coral reefs twilight,  cost of trillions, cougar attacks,  cradle of civilisation threatened, creatures move uphill, crime increase, crocodile sex, crops devastated, crumbling roads, buildings and sewage systems, curriculum change,  cyclones (Australia),   danger to kid's health, Darfur, Dartford Warbler plague,  death rate increase (US), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, depression, desert advance,  desert retreat,  destruction of the environment,  disappearance of coastal cities,  diseases move north, Dolomites collapse, drought,   ducks and geese decline, dust bowl in the corn belt, early marriages, early spring, earlier pollen season,  Earth biodiversity crisis, Earth dying, Earth even hotter, Earth light dimming, Earth lopsided, Earth melting, Earth morbid fever, Earth on fast track, Earth past point of no return, Earth slowing down,  Earth spins faster, Earth to explode, earth upside down,  earthquakes, earthquakes redux, El Niño intensification, end of the world as we know it, erosion, emerging infections, encephalitis, English villages lost, equality threatened, Europe simultaneously baking and freezing,  eutrophication, evolution accelerating, expansion of university climate groups, extinctions (human, civilisation,  logic, Inuit, smallest butterfly, cod, ladybirds,  pikas, polar bears,     walrus,   toads,  plants, salmon, trout,  wild flowers, woodlice,  a million species, half of all animal and plant species, mountain species,  not polar bears, barrier reef, leaches, tropical insects) experts muzzled, extreme changes to California, fading fall foliage, fainting,  famine, farmers benefit, farmers go under, farm output boost,  fashion disaster, fever,figurehead sacked, fir cone bonanza, fish bigger, fish catches drop, fish downsize,  fish catches rise, fish deaf, fish get lost, fish stocks at risk, fish stocks decline, five million illnesses, flesh eating disease, flood patterns change, floods,  floods of beaches and cities, flood of migrants, flood preparation for crisis, Florida economic decline, flowers in peril, food poisoning, food prices rise, food prices soar, food security threat (SA),  footpath erosion, forest decline, forest expansion, frog with extra heads, frostbite, frost damage increased,  frosts, fungi fruitful, fungi invasion, games change, Garden of Eden wilts, genetic diversity decline, gene pools slashed, giant oysters invade,  giant pythons invade, giant squid migrate, gingerbread houses collapse, glacial earthquakes, glacial retreat,  glacial growth, glacier grows (California), glacier wrapped, global cooling, global dimming, glowing clouds,  golf Masters wrecked, grandstanding, grasslands wetter, Great Barrier Reef 95% dead, Great Lakes drop,  great tits cope, greening of the North,  Grey whales lose weight, Gulf Stream failure, habitat loss, Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome,  harmful algae,  harvest increase, harvest shrinkage, hay fever epidemic, health affected, health of children harmed, heart disease, heart attacks and strokes (Australia), heat waves, hibernation affected,   hibernation ends too soon, hibernation ends too late, HIV epidemic, homeless 50 million, hornets, high court debates, human development faces unprecedented reversal, human fertility reduced, human health risk, human race oblivion, hurricanes,  hurricane reduction, hurricanes fewer, hurricanes not,  hydropower problems, hyperthermia deaths, ice age, ice sheet growth, ice sheet shrinkage,  illness and death, inclement weather, India drowning, infrastructure failure (Canada),  industry threatened, infectious diseases,  inflation in China, insect explosion, insurance premium rises, Inuit displacement, Inuit poisoned, Inuit suing, invasion of cats,  invasion of herons, invasion of jellyfish, invasion of midges,  island disappears, islands sinking, itchier poison ivy, jellyfish explosion, jets fall from sky, jet stream drifts north, Kew Gardens taxed, kidney stones, killer cornflakes, killing us, kitten boom, koalas under threat, krill decline, lake and stream productivity decline, lake empties, lake shrinking and growing, landslides, landslides of ice at 140 mph, lawsuits increase, lawsuit successful,  lawyers' income increased (surprise surprise!),  lives saved, Loch Ness monster dead, lush growth in rain forests,   Malaria,   mammoth dung melt, mango harvest fails, Maple production advanced, Maple syrup shortage, marine diseases, marine food chain decimated, Meaching (end of the world), Mediterranean rises, megacryometeors, Melanoma, methane emissions from plants, methane burps, methane runaway, melting permafrost, Middle Kingdom convulses, migration, migration difficult (birds), migratory birds huge losses, microbes to decompose soil carbon more rapidly, minorities hit, monkeys on the move, Mont Blanc grows, monuments imperiled, moose dying, more bad air days,   more research needed, mortality increased, mountain (Everest) shrinking,  mountaineers fears,  mountains break up, mountains green and flowering,   mountains taller, mortality lower,  Myanmar cyclone, narwhals at risk, National security implications, native wildlife overwhelmed, natural disasters  quadruple, new islands, next ice age, NFL threatened, Nile delta damaged, noctilucent clouds, no effect in India, Northwest Passage opened, nuclear plants bloom, oaks dying,  oaks move north,  ocean acidification, ocean deserts expand, ocean waves speed up, opera house to be destroyed, outdoor hockey threatened,   ozone repair slowed, ozone rise, Pacific dead zone, penguin chicks frozen, personal carbon rationing, pest outbreaks, pests increase, phenology shifts,  plankton blooms, plankton destabilised,  plants march north, plants move uphill,  polar bears aggressive, polar bears cannibalistic,  polar bears drowning,   polar tours scrapped, popcorn rise, porpoise astray, profits collapse, psychiatric illness,   puffin decline,  radars taken out, railroad tracks deformed, rainfall increase, rape wave, refugees,  release of ancient frozen viruses, resorts disappear, rice threatened, rice yields crash,  rift on Capitol Hill, rioting and nuclear war,   river flow impacted, rivers raised, roads wear out, robins rampant,   rocky peaks crack apart, roof of the world a desert, rooftop bars, Ross river disease,  ruins ruined,  Russia under pressure, salinity reduction, salinity increase,  Salmonella,  satellites accelerate, school closures, sea level rise, sea level rise faster, seals mating more, sewer bills rise, severe thunderstorms, sex change, sexual promiscuity, shark attacks, sharks booming, sharks moving north, sheep shrink, shop closures, short-nosed dogs endangered,  shrinking ponds, shrinking shrine, ski resorts threatened, skin cancer, slow death, smaller brains, smog, snowfall increase, snowfall heavy,   soaring food prices, societal collapse, songbirds change eating habits, sour grapes, space problem, spectacular orchids, spiders invade Scotland, squid aggressive giants, squid population explosion, squirrels reproduce earlier, stingray invasion, storms wetter, stormwater drains stressed, street crime to increase, subsidence, suicide, swordfish in the Baltic, Tabasco tragedy, taxes, tectonic plate movement, teenage drinking, terrorism, threat to peace, ticks move northward (Sweden), tides rise, tomatoes rot, tornado outbreak, tourism increase, trade barriers, trade winds weakened, traffic jams,  transportation threatened, tree foliage increase (UK),   tree growth slowed, trees in trouble, trees less colourful,  trees more colourful, trees lush, tropics expansion, tropopause raised, truffle shortage,  turtles crash, turtles lay earlier, UK coastal impact, UK Katrina, Vampire moths, Venice flooded, volcanic eruptions,  walrus pups orphaned,  walrus stampede, war, wars over water, wars sparked, wars threaten billions, wasps, water bills double, water scarcity (20% of increase), water stress, weather out of its mind, weather patterns awry, Western aid cancelled out,  West Nile fever, whales move north, whales wiped out, wheat yields crushed in Australia,  wildfires, wind shift, wind reduced,  wine - harm to Australian industry, wine industry damage (California),  wine industry disaster (US),  wine - more English, wine -  England too hot, wine -German boon, wine - no more French ,  wine passé (Napa), wine stronger, winters in Britain colder, winter in Britain dead, witchcraft executions, wolves eat more moose, wolves eat less, workers laid off, World at war, World bankruptcy, World in crisis, World in flames, Yellow fever.

http://www.angelfire.com/ak2/intelligencerreport/global_warming.html

[Boyo]

Well now that cap and trade has past the house I think it time that all martial artists get on board and help stop global warming via their own personal CO2 emissions. this easily translates into STOP TRAINING. When you stop training you save the planet and make America safer because you people who train regularly probally own guns and  are  domestic terrorists like Ron Paul supporters,Tea party attendees and the most nafarious group of all military vets.

So do your part and stop training save mother earth because if you don't the  obamites will find you and you will be punished.

Boyo

[Body-by-Guinness]

Science is being suppressed! By Democrats, however, so quick, close your eyes and put your hands over your ears.

June 27, 2009 11:10 AM PDT
E-mails indicate EPA suppressed report skeptical of global warming
by Declan McCullagh

The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty "decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."

The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message (PDF) to a staff researcher on March 17: "The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward...and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision."

The e-mail correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be an independent review process inside a federal agency--and echoes criticisms of the EPA under the Bush administration, which was accused of suppressing a pro-climate change document.

Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, said in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. "It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else," Carlin said. "That was obviously coming from higher levels."

E-mail messages released this week show that Carlin was ordered not to "have any direct communication" with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed that his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic.

"I was told for probably the first time in I don't know how many years exactly what I was to work on," said Carlin, a 38-year veteran of the EPA. "And it was not to work on climate change." One e-mail orders him to update a grants database instead.

For its part, the EPA sent an e-mailed statement saying: "Claims that this individual's opinions were not considered or studied are entirely false. This Administration and this EPA Administrator are fully committed to openness, transparency, and science-based decision making. These principles were reflected throughout the development of the proposed endangerment finding, a process in which a broad array of voices were heard and an inter-agency review was conducted." (The endangerment finding is the EPA's decision that carbon dioxide endangers the public health and welfare.)

Carlin has an undergraduate degree in physics from CalTech and a PhD in economics from MIT. His Web site lists papers about the environment and public policy dating back to 1964, spanning topics from pollution control to environmentally-responsible energy pricing.

After reviewing the scientific literature that the EPA is relying on, Carlin said, he concluded that it was at least three years out of date and did not reflect the latest research. "My personal view is that there is not currently any reason to regulate (carbon dioxide)," he said. "There may be in the future. But global temperatures are roughly where they were in the mid-20th century. They're not going up, and if anything they're going down."

Carlin's report listed a number of recent developments he said the EPA did not consider, including that global temperatures have declined for 11 years; that new research predicts Atlantic hurricanes will be unaffected; that there's "little evidence" that Greenland is shedding ice at expected levels; and that solar radiation has the largest single effect on the earth's temperature.

If there is a need for the government to lower planetary temperatures, Carlin believes, other mechanisms would be cheaper and more effective than regulation of carbon dioxide. One paper he wrote says managing sea level rise or reducing solar radiation reaching the earth would be more cost-effective alternatives.
The EPA's possible suppression of Carlin's report, which lists the EPA's John Davidson as a co-author, could endanger any carbon dioxide regulations if they are eventually challenged in court.

"The big question is: there is this general rule that when an agency puts something out for public evidence and comment, it's supposed to have the evidence supporting it and the evidence the other way," said Sam Kazman, general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., that has been skeptical of new laws or regulations relating to global warming.

Kazman's group obtained the documents--both CEI and Carlin say he was not the source--and released the e-mails on Tuesday and the report on Friday. As a result of the disclosure, CEI has asked the EPA to reopen the comment period on the greenhouse gas regulatory proceeding, which ended on Tuesday.

The EPA also said in its statement: "The individual in question is not a scientist and was not part of the working group dealing with this issue. Nevertheless, the document he submitted was reviewed by his peers and agency scientists, and information from that report was submitted by his manager to those responsible for developing the proposed endangerment finding. In fact, some ideas from that document are included and addressed in the endangerment finding."

That appears to conflict with an e-mail from McGartland in March, who said to Carlin: "I decided not to forward your comments... I can see only one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office." He also wrote to Carlin: "Please do not have any direct communication with anyone outside of (our group) on endangerment. There should be no meetings, e-mails, written statements, phone calls, etc."

One reason why the process might have been highly charged politically is the unusual speed of the regulatory process. Lisa Jackson, the new EPA administrator, had said that she wanted her agency to reach a decision about regulating carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act by April 2--the second anniversary of a related U.S. Supreme Court decision.
"All this goes back to a decision at a higher level that this was very urgent to get out, if possible, yesterday," Carlin said. "In the case of an ordinary regulation, these things normally take a year or two. In this case, it was a few weeks to get it out for public comment." (Carlin said that he and other EPA staff members who were asked to respond to a draft only had four and a half days to do so.)

In the last few days, Republicans have begun to raise questions about the report and e-mail messages, but it was insufficient to derail the so-called cap and trade bill from being approved by the U.S. House of Representatives.

Rep. Joe Barton, the senior Republican on the Energy and Commerce committee, invoked Carlin's report in a floor speech during the debate on Friday. "The science is not there to back it up," Barton said. "An EPA report that has been suppressed...raises grave doubts about the endangerment finding. If you don't have an endangerment finding, you don't need this bill. We don't need this bill. And for some reason, the EPA saw fit not to include that in its decision."

"I'm sure it was very inconvenient for the EPA to consider a study that contradicted the findings it wanted to reach," Rep. James Sensenbrenner, the senior Republican on the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, said in a statement. "But the EPA is supposed to reach its findings based on evidence, not on political goals. The repression of this important study casts doubts on the EPA's finding, and frankly, on other analysis the EPA has conducted on climate issues."

The revelations could prove embarrassing to Jackson, the EPA administrator, who said in January: "I will ensure the EPA's efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and programs, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency." Similarly, President Barack Obama claimed that "the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over... To undermine scientific integrity is to undermine our democracy. It is contrary to our way of life."

"All this talk from the president and (EPA administrator) Lisa Jackson about integrity, transparency, and increased EPA protection for whistleblowers--you've got a bouquet of ironies here," said Kazman, the CEI attorney.

Declan McCullagh, CBSNews.com's chief political correspondent, chronicles the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics, technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10274412-38.html

[Body-by-Guinness]

Suppressed EPA scientist breaks silence, speaks on Fox News
By: MARK TAPSCOTT
Editorial Page Editor
06/30/09 12:10 PM EDT
Alan Carlin, the senior EPA research analyst who authored a study critical of global warming that was suppressed by agency officials, has broken his silence and spoken on Fox News about his situation. Carlin told "Fox & Friends" Steve Ducy and Gretchen Carlson that his most important conclusion in the study was that the U.S. should not rely upon recommendations of the UN in making policy decisions regarding global warming.
"The most important conclusion, in my view, was that EPA needed to look at the science behind global warming and not depend upon reports issued by the United Nations, which is what they were thinking of doing and in fact have done," Carlin said.
Asked what happened to his study once it was completed, Carlin said "my supervisors decided not to forward it to the group within EPA who had the responsibility for preparing an overall report which would guide EPA on whether to find that the emission of global warming gases would be something that EPA should regulate."
You can watch entire interview with Carlin here.
Carlin has been at EPA for 38 years and until the Fox interview was telling reporters seeking interviews that he was instructed by EPA officials not to speak with them. He almost certainly risks retalitation by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and other Obama appointees within the agency.
There are federal laws designed to protect whistle blowers like Carlin from political retaliation. It will be fascinating to watch how an administration of the Left deals with a whistleblower who for whatever reason opposes their political agenda. Will they persecute him or protect him?
I've had occasion to deal with quite a few whistle blowers over the years and they generally fall into two categories: First are the sincere employees who see something they believe to be wrong, are rejected when they go through channels seeking change, and are then subjected to reprisals, big and small, which ultimately exact an incredibly high emotional, professional and financial toll. It is not uncommon for these folks to become obsessed with seeking vindication, to suffer nervous breakdowns or end up divorced.
Then there are the others who somehow manage to maintain an emotional and professional balance while maintaining the rightness of their cause and pursuing it to a conclusion. It often takes years, but eventually they sometimes win vindication, though by that time the original controversy is usually long past and the wrong they exposed has either been forgotten, papered over or, occasionally, addressed and remedied.
A great example of this second kind of whistle blower is William Clinkscales, a man I greatly admire who exposed hundreds of millions of dollars of waste and fraud at the General Services Administration (GSA) during the Carter years, and was put through hell as his reward. He was vindicated by President Reagan who honored his service and recognized the importance of what he had done.
Bill once told me of his being reassigned to a do-nothing job as his boss in effect saying to him: "Now Bill, in this extremely important new job I am giving you, your task is to watch that flagpole out in front of the GSA headquarters and if it moves, you come tell me immediately." I still chuckle when I think of Bill telling me that, but it was indicative of the lot that too often greets whistle blowers like Alan Carlin.
Carlin told Fox that "things are a little tense, but as of last night, I still had a job." Sounds like he is expecting the worst.
My prediction in this case is that Carlin will be stripped of duties, given an office that was previously used as a broom closet and transferred to a duty location as far from EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C. as possible. Or he will soon opt for retirement, which will then free him to write and speak as he pleases, secure in his receipt of a pension from the federal government's old Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS).
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) broke the story about Carlin's study being suppressed last week and has posted extensive information about the situation. It appears the story has generated so much interest that CEI's web site is overwhelmed with traffic, as it is taking a loooonnnnnggggg time to load.
UPDATE: CEI demands EPA hear public comments on suppressed study
The good folks at CEI have issued astatement today demanding that EPA reopen the comment period on the proposed rule on the agency's plans to regulate global warming emissions - CO2, the same thing every human being breathes out during the normal course of living - and to which the Carlin study was addressed.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Suppressed-EPA-scientist-breaks-silence-speaks-on-Fox-News-49513762.html

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Climate change: The sun and the oceans do not lie
Even a compromised agreement to reduce emissions could devastate the economy - and all for a theory shot full of holes, says Christopher Booker.
 
By Christopher Booker
Published: 6:10PM BST 11 Jul 2009
Comments 185 | Comment on this article

The moves now being made by the world's political establishment to lock us into December's Copenhagen treaty to halt global warming are as alarming as anything that has happened in our lifetimes. Last week in Italy, the various branches of our emerging world government, G8 and G20, agreed in principle that the world must by 2050 cut its CO2 emissions in half. Britain and the US are already committed to cutting their use of fossil fuels by more than 80 per cent. Short of an unimaginable technological revolution, this could only be achieved by closing down virtually all our economic activity: no electricity, no transport, no industry. All this is being egged on by a gigantic publicity machine, by the UN, by serried ranks of government-funded scientists, by cheerleaders such as Al Gore, last week comparing the fight against global warming to that against Hitler's Nazis, and by politicians who have no idea what they are setting in train.
What makes this even odder is that the runaway warming predicted by their computer models simply isn't happening. Last week one of the four official sources of temperature measurement, compiled from satellite data by the University of Huntsville, Alabama, showed that temperatures have now fallen to their average level since satellite data began 30 years ago.
 
Faced with a "consensus" view which looks increasingly implausible, a fast-growing body of reputable scientists from many countries has been coming up with a ''counter-consensus'', which holds that their fellow scientists have been looking in wholly the wrong direction to explain what is happening to the world's climate. The two factors which most plausibly explain what temperatures are actually doing are fluctuations in the radiation of the sun and the related shifting of ocean currents.

Two episodes highlight the establishment's alarm at the growing influence of this ''counter consensus''. In March, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has a key role in President Obama's plans to curb CO2 emissions, asked one of its senior policy analysts, Alan Carlin, to report on the science used to justify its policy. His 90-page paper recommended that the EPA carry out an independent review of the science, because the CO2 theory was looking indefensible, while the "counter consensus'' view – solar radiation and ocean currents – seemed to fit the data much better. Provoking a considerable stir, Carlin's report was stopped dead, on the grounds that it was too late to raise objections to what was now the EPA's official policy.

Meanwhile a remarkable drama has been unfolding in Australia, where the new Labor government has belatedly joined the "consensus'' bandwagon by introducing a bill for an emissions-curbing "cap and trade'' scheme, which would devastate Australia's economy, it being 80 per cent dependent on coal. The bill still has to pass the Senate, which is so precisely divided that the decisive vote next month may be cast by an independent Senator, Stephen Fielding. So crucial is his vote that the climate change minister, Penny Wong, agreed to see him with his four advisers, all leading Australian scientists.

Fielding put to the minister three questions. How, since temperatures have been dropping, can CO2 be blamed for them rising? What, if CO2 was the cause of recent warming, was the cause of temperatures rising higher in the past? Why, since the official computer models have been proved wrong, should we rely on them for future projections?

The written answers produced by the minister's own scientific advisers proved so woolly and full of elementary errors that Fielding's team have now published a 50-page, fully-referenced "Due Diligence'' paper tearing them apart. In light of the inadequacy of the Government's reply, the Senator has announced that he will be voting against the bill.

The wider significance of this episode is that it is the first time a Western government has allowed itself to be drawn into debating the science behind the global warming scare with expert scientists representing the "counter consensus" – and the "consensus" lost hands down.

We still have a long way to go before that Copenhagen treaty is agreed in December, and with China, India and 128 other countries still demanding trillions of dollars as the price of their co-operation, the prospect of anything but a hopelessly fudged agreement looks slim. But even a compromise could inflict devastating damage on our own economic future – all for a theory now shot so full of holes that its supporters are having to suppress free speech to defend it.

Flying in the face of reason
Even now it is not widely appreciated that in 2003 the power to regulate air safety across the EU was taken over by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). Several times I reported evidence that this new EU body in its shiny headquarters in Cologne would be too weak, incompetent and bureaucratic to do the job properly. Since then one of many problems reported to EASA has been a serious fault in the speed probes of some Airbus airliners, which can cause the automatic piloting system unexpectedly to shut down. EASA did nothing to ensure that the fault was corrected.

Last month, when Air France’s Airbus flight 447 plunged into the Atlantic, killing everyone on board, this fault was high on the list as a possible cause. So far, apart from hinting at 'pilot error’, the authorities have come up with no explanation. But last week Air France pilots demonstrated in Paris, writing a letter to EASA and its French subordinate agency, protesting that 'appropriate measures from either agency’, forcing the manufacturers to make the necessary changes, 'would have helped prevent the sequence of events that led to the loss of control of the aircraft’. The real problem with handing over to the EU the power to govern Europe is simply that it doesn’t work.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5804831/Climate-change-The-sun-and-the-oceans-do-not-lie.html

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Global cooling hits Al Gore's home
Nashville, the home of leading global warming prophet Al Gore, has enjoyed the coolest July 21 on record, observes Christopher Booker.
 
By Christopher Booker
Published: 5:17PM BST 25 Jul 2009



Al Gore, obscured by snow Photo: AP

It was delightfully appropriate that, as large parts of Argentina were swept by severe blizzards last week, on a scale never experienced before, the city of Nashville, Tennessee, should have enjoyed the coolest July 21 in its history, breaking a record established in 1877. Appropriate, because Nashville is the home of Al Gore, the man who for 20 years has been predicting that we should all by now be in the grip of runaway global warming.

His predictions have proved so wildly wrong – along with those of the Met Office's £33 million computer model which forecast that we should now be enjoying a "barbecue summer" and that 2009 would be one of "the five warmest years ever" – that the propaganda machine has had to work overtime to maintain what is threatening to become the most expensive fiction in history.
 
The two official sources of satellite data on global temperatures, for instance, lately announced that June temperatures had again fallen, to their average level for the month over the 30 years since satellite data began. By contrast, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, run by Mr Gore's closest ally and scientific adviser, James Hansen – one of the two official sources of global temperature data from surface weather stations – announced that in that single month the world had warmed by a staggering 0.63 degrees C, more than its net warming for the entire 20th century.

In the past few years, Dr Hansen's temperature record has become ever more eccentric, often wildly at odds with the other three officially recognised data sources, all of which showed a dramatic drop in temperatures in 2007 leading to markedly cooler summers and two of the coldest and snowiest winters the world has known for decades. All this has equally made nonsense of the predictions of the computer models that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relies on, which are programmed to assume that temperatures should soar in line with rising levels of greenhouse gases.

Carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, but temperatures – apart from those revealed by Dr Hansen – have seriously parted company with them. This has not prevented the propaganda machine's media groupies continuing to peddle a daily stream of stories about how in all directions global warming is already affecting the world for the worse.

Soay sheep are shrinking in size (I am sure they've really noticed the global warming up on that bleak Scottish islet). The tiny Pacific nation of Tuvalu, we are yet again told, is pleading for international aid, as it sinks below the rising ocean – even though an expert study in 2001 showed that sea levels around Tuvalu have in fact been falling for 50 years. Even a report on the record number of Painted Lady butterflies in Britain this summer cannot resist ending with a ritual forecast that many butterfly species will soon disappear because of "climate change".
Meanwhile even America's foremost pro-warmist scientific blog, RealClimate – run by, among others, Dr Michael Mann of "hockey stick" fame – concedes that global temperatures are not only declining but are likely to continue to do so for at least another decade – after which, of course, they will leap up again higher than ever.

None of this is proving of much assistance to the politicians still desperately hoping to reach agreement on a new climate treaty in Copenhagen in December. With the still-developing countries, led by China, India, Russia and Brazil, all saying that they will only co-operate if rich governments such as the US and the EU compensate them to the tune of trillions of dollars a year, the chances of any meaningful successor to the Kyoto Protocol look like zero. (India's environment minister delights these days in saying that his country has no intention of sabotaging its fast-growing economy by agreeing to curb its CO2 emissions.)

But we are already committed, in any case, to paying out barely credible sums for our blind faith in global warming (quite apart from the £100 billion Gordon Brown wants us to spend on 10,000 more useless windmills, most of which he hasn't got a hope of seeing built).

A new study by an Australian analyst, Joanne Nova, based on official figures (available at the website of the Science and Public Policy Institute), shows that since 1991 US federal spending alone on climate change has been $79 billion. The cost of international carbon trading in 2008 was a staggering $126 billion, and is soon likely to run into trillions, making buying and selling the right to emit CO2 "the largest single commodity traded" in the world. Yet for all that money (along with countless billions more spent in Britain and elsewhere), "no one is able to point to a single piece of evidence that man-made carbon dioxide has a significant effect on global climate".

Are we all missing something – apart from all that money, of course?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5907383/Global-cooling-hits-Al-Gores-home.html

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Planet Bull’s-Eye
A vision of the end times.

By Jonah Goldberg

The year is 2109. Celebrations continue as mankind’s heroic, century-long, quintillion-dollar effort to lower the global mean temperature by 1 degree has paid off: July 2109 is just as hot as July 2009. Few can contain their jubilation.

But even as the carbon-neutral champagne corks fly, the sky darkens. A projectile of a different kind is coming our way. An asteroid streaks across the skies, giving the media just enough time to spread the word. The New York Times, now beamed directly into subscribers’ brains via digital-neural networks, fulfills ancient prophecy and warns that women and minorities will be hardest hit by the incoming object.

But there’s little we can do. The space flotsam smashes into the solar-energy farm formerly known as Arizona. The space rock, 100 meters in diameter, hits at 50,000 mph with the force of thousands of nuclear warheads. Millions die. Dust and debris blot out the sun and will chill the planet for years. Crops fail; billions starve. The heat of impact releases torrents of nitrous- and nitric-acid rain.

So horrendous is the calamity that some even wonder if the enormous investment in fending off climate change might not have been better spent.

Alas, there’s no time to defrost Al Gore’s frozen head to ask his opinion.

This vision of the end times came to me on hearing the news that something hit Jupiter in the breadbasket the other week and nobody saw it coming.

It left a Jovian scar as “small” as the Pacific Ocean or as big as Earth. An amateur astronomer in Australia saw it first because none of the pros were even looking. Then again, the rock was probably pretty small, between 50 and a few hundred meters wide. That is to say, about the size of John Edwards’s house.

Now, I know what you’re saying: So what? It’s not like we need an early-warning system for Jupiter, a “gassy giant.” What have the Jovians done for us? When God starts pelting rocks at Earth, or at our own gassy giants, like Chris Dodd, then we can worry.

Well, He has been, on a regular basis. In March, a meteor called 2009 DD45 came within a few inches, astronomically speaking, of smashing into Earth (about 45,000 miles). Fortunately, we spotted that one ahead of time — a mere three days ahead of time. That’s just enough warning for Keith Olbermann to knock out several top-notch diatribes on why George Bush is to blame, but not enough time to, you know, keep New York City from being liquefied.

In 1908, a DD45-sized meteor exploded over Siberia with a force 1,000 times the Hiroshima blast. It leveled 80 million trees over an area twice the size of Los Angeles. If it had arrived five hours later, St. Petersburg would have been gone.

Scientists think there are millions of such “small” near-Earth meteors out there, and more than 1,000 that are at least a kilometer wide. Those are the ones that really leave a mark. Just ask the dinosaurs. And we’re discovering more every day.

A few years ago, a book titled The Black Swan came out. No, it’s not about swans singled out by the Cambridge Police Department for breaking into their own roosts, but about sudden, unpredictable events occurring far more often than we’d like to think. There are flocks of black swans out there, but we find it discomfiting to contemplate their existence.

In 2008, science writer Gregg Easterbrook surveyed preparedness for a “space-object strike” for The Atlantic. He found that even though serious experts believe there’s as much as a one-in-ten chance of a significant Earth strike within the next century, NASA doesn’t much care.

Things are improving, but it’s still a cottage industry. A scientist quoted last month in Maclean’s noted that “there are more people working in a single McDonald’s than there are trying to save civilization from an asteroid.”

Meanwhile, the global-warming industry — and it is an industry now — could fill football stadiums.

It makes you wonder. For all the rush and panic, the truth is, climate change — if real — is a very slow-moving catastrophe. Moreover, it happens to align with an ideological and political agenda the Left has been pushing for generations: Unregulated economic growth is bad and must be reigned in by experts; nature is our master, and we must be her servants. What a convenient truth for environmentalists.

Meanwhile, a “deep impact” is a terribly inconvenient threat, partly because it requires making peace with the idea that nature can’t be conquered.

Better to not even think about it.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OGY5ODY5Njk1NTVjNzU5NDFhOTQ0MWYxNzZhMmU5ZGM=

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Always fun to watch the fruits of free inquiry skewer those who embrace superstitious twaddle.

Climate Revolt: World's Largest Science Group 'Startled' By Outpouring of Scientists Rejecting Man-Made Climate Fears! Clamor for Editor to Be Removed! 
Scientists seek to remove climate fear promoting editor and 'trade him to New York Times or Washington Post'
Wednesday, July 29, 2009By Marc Morano  –  Climate Depot
Climate Depot Exclusive
An outpouring of skeptical scientists who are members of the American Chemical Society (ACS) are revolting against the group's editor-in-chief -- with some demanding he be removed -- after an editorial appeared claiming “the science of anthropogenic climate change is becoming increasingly well established.”
The editorial claimed the "consensus" view was growing "increasingly difficult to challenge, despite the efforts of diehard climate-change deniers.” The editor now admits he is "startled" by the negative reaction from the group's scientific members. The American Chemical Society bills itself as the "world's largest scientific society."
The June 22, 2009 editorial in Chemical and Engineering News by editor in chief Rudy Baum, is facing widespread blowback and condemnation from American Chemical Society member scientists. Baum concluded his editorial by stating that “deniers” are attempting to “derail meaningful efforts to respond to global climate change.”
Dozens of letters from ACS members were published on July 27, 2009 castigating Baum, with some scientists calling for his replacement as editor-in-chief.
The editorial was met with a swift, passionate and scientific rebuke from Baum's colleagues. Virtually all of the letters published on July 27 in castigated Baum's climate science views. Scientists rebuked Baum's use of the word “deniers” because of the terms “association with Holocaust deniers.” In addition, the scientists called Baum's editorial: “disgusting”; “a disgrace”; “filled with misinformation”; “unworthy of a scientific periodical” and “pap.”
One outraged ACS member wrote to Baum: "When all is said and done, and you and your kind are proven wrong (again), you will have moved on to be an unthinking urn for another rat pleading catastrophe. You will be removed. I promise."
Baum 'startled' by scientists reaction
Baum wrote on July 27, that he was "startled" and "surprised" by the "contempt" and "vehemence" of the ACS scientists to his view of the global warming "consensus."
"Some of the letters I received are not fit to print. Many of the letters we have printed are, I think it is fair to say, outraged by my position on global warming," Baum wrote.
Selected Excerpts of Skeptical Scientists:
“I think it's time to find a new editor,” ACS member Thomas E. D'Ambra wrote.
Geochemist R. Everett Langford wrote: “I am appalled at the condescending attitude of Rudy Baum, Al Gore, President Barack Obama, et al., who essentially tell us that there is no need for further research—that the matter is solved.”
ACS scientist Dennis Malpass wrote: “Your editorial was a disgrace. It was filled with misinformation, half-truths, and ad hominem attacks on those who dare disagree with you. Shameful!”
ACS member scientist Dr. Howard Hayden, a Physics Professor Emeritus from the University of Connecticut: “Baum's remarks are particularly disquieting because of his hostility toward skepticism, which is part of every scientist's soul. Let's cut to the chase with some questions for Baum: Which of the 20-odd major climate models has settled the science, such that all of the rest are now discarded? [...] Do you refer to 'climate change' instead of 'global warming' because the claim of anthropogenic global warming has become increasingly contrary to fact?"
Edward H. Gleason wrote: “Baum's attempt to close out debate goes against all my scientific training, and to hear this from my ACS is certainly alarming to me...his use of 'climate-change deniers' to pillory scientists who do not believe climate change is a crisis is disingenuous and unscientific.”
Atmospheric Chemist Roger L. Tanner: "I have very little in common with the philosophy of the Heartland Institute and other 'free-market fanatics,' and I consider myself a progressive Democrat. Nevertheless, we scientists should know better than to propound scientific truth by consensus and to excoriate skeptics with purple prose."
William Tolley: "I take great offense that Baum would use Chemical and Engineering News, for which I pay dearly each year in membership dues, to purvey his personal views and so glibly ignore contrary information and scold those of us who honestly find these views to be a hoax."
William E. Keller wrote: “However bitter you (Baum) personally may feel about CCDs (climate change deniers), it is not your place as editor to accuse them—falsely—of nonscientific behavior by using insultingly inappropriate language. [...] The growing body of scientists, whom you abuse as sowing doubt, making up statistics, and claiming to be ignored by the media, are, in the main, highly competent professionals, experts in their fields, completely honorable, and highly versed in the scientific method—characteristics that apparently do not apply to you.”
ACS member Wallace Embry: “I would like to see the American Chemical Society Board 'cap' Baum's political pen and 'trade' him to either the New York Times or Washington Post." [To read the more reactions from scientists to Baum's editorial go here and see below.]
Physicists Dr. Lubos Motl, who publishes the Reference Frame website, weighed in on the controversy as well, calling Baum's editorial an "alarmist screed."
“Now, the chemists are thinking about replacing this editor who has hijacked the ACS bulletin to promote his idiosyncratic political views," Motl wrote on July 27, 2009.
Baum cites discredited Obama Administration Climate Report
To “prove” his assertion that the science was “becoming increasingly well established,” Baum cited the Obama Administration's U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) study as evidence that the science was settled. [Climate Depot Editor's Note: Baum's grasp of the latest “science” is embarrassing. For Baum to cite the June 2009 Obama Administration report as “evidence” that science is growing stronger exposes him as having very poor research skills. See this comprehensive report on scientists rebuking that report. See: 'Scaremongering': Scientists Pan Obama Climate Report: 'This is not a work of science but an embarrassing episode for the authors and NOAA'...'Misrepresents the science' - July 8, 2009 )
Baum also touted the Congressional climate bill as “legislation with real teeth to control the emission of greenhouse gases.” [Climate Depot Editor's Note: This is truly laughable that an editor-in-chief at the American Chemical Society could say the climate bill has “real teeth.” This statement should be retracted in full for lack of evidence. The Congressional climate bill has outraged environmental groups for failing to impact global temperatures and failing to even reduce emissions! See: Climate Depot Editorial: Climate bill offers (costly) non-solutions to problems that don't even exist - No detectable climate impact: 'If we actually faced a man-made 'climate crisis', we would all be doomed' June 20, 2009 ]
The American Chemical Society's scientific revolt is the latest in a series of recent eruptions against the so-called “consensus” on man-made global warming.
On May 1 2009, the American Physical Society (APS) Council decided to review its current climate statement via a high-level subcommittee of respected senior scientists. The decision was prompted after a group of 54 prominent physicists petitioned the APS revise its global warming position. The 54 physicists wrote to APS governing board: “Measured or reconstructed temperature records indicate that 20th - 21st century changes are neither exceptional nor persistent, and the historical and geological records show many periods warmer than today.”
The petition signed by the prominent physicists, led by Princeton University's Dr. Will Happer, who has conducted 200 peer-reviewed scientific studies. The peer-reviewed journal Nature published a July 22, 2009 letter by the physicists persuading the APS to review its statement. In 2008, an American Physical Society editor conceded that a “considerable presence” of scientific skeptics exists.
In addition, in April 2009, the Polish National Academy of Science reportedly “published a document that expresses skepticism over the concept of man-made global warming.” An abundance of new peer-reviewed scientific studies continue to be published challenging the UN IPCC climate views. (See: Climate Fears RIP...for 30 years!? - Global Warming could stop 'for up to 30 years! Warming 'On Hold?...'Could go into hiding for decades,' peer-reviewed study finds – Discovery.com – March 2, 2009 & Peer-Reviewed Study Rocks Climate Debate! 'Nature not man responsible for recent global warming...little or none of late 20th century warming and cooling can be attributed to humans' – July 23, 2009 )
A March 2009 a 255-page U. S. Senate Report detailed "More Than 700 International Scientists Dissenting Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims." 2009's continued lack of warming, further frustrated the promoters of man-made climate fears. See: Earth's 'Fever' Breaks! Global temperatures 'have plunged .74°F since Gore released An Inconvenient Truth' – July 5, 2009
In addition, the following developments further in 2008 challenged the “consensus” of global warming. India Issued a report challenging global warming fears; a canvass of more than 51,000 Canadian scientists revealed 68% disagree that global warming science is “settled”; A Japan Geoscience Union symposium survey in 2008 reportedly “showed 90 per cent of the participants do not believe the IPCC report.” Scientific meetings are now being dominated by a growing number of skeptical scientists. The prestigious International Geological Congress, dubbed the geologists' equivalent of the Olympic Games, was held in Norway in August 2008 and prominently featured the voices of scientists skeptical of man-made global warming fears. [See: Skeptical scientists overwhelm conference: '2/3 of presenters and question-askers were hostile to, even dismissive of, the UN IPCC' & see full reports here & here - Also see: UN IPCC's William Schlesinger admits in 2009 that only 20% of IPCC scientists deal with climate ]
Selected Excerpted Highlights of American Chemical Society Scientist's Reaction to Baum's Editorial: (For full letters see here.)
Instead of debate, members are constantly subjected to your arrogant self-righteousness and the left-wing practice of stifling debate by personal attacks on anyone who disagrees. I think ACS should make an effort to educate its membership about the science of climate change and let them draw their own conclusions. Although under your editorial leadership, I suspect we would be treated to a biased and skewed version of scientific debate. I think its time to find a new editor. [...] How about using your position as editor to promote a balanced scientific discussion of the theory behind the link of human activity to global warming? I am not happy that you continue to use the pulpit of your editorials to promote your left-wing opinions.
Thomas E. D'Ambra
Rexford, N.Y.
#
Baum's remarks are particularly disquieting because of his hostility toward skepticism, which is part of every scientist's soul. Let's cut to the chase with some questions for Baum: Which of the 20-odd major climate models has settled the science, such that all of the rest are now discarded?
Do you refer to "climate change" instead of "global warming" because the claim of anthropogenic global warming has become increasingly contrary to fact?

Howard Hayden
Pueblo West, Colo.
#
I was a geochemist doing research on paleoclimates early in my career. I have tried to follow the papers in the scientific literature. [...] I am appalled at the condescending attitude of Rudy Baum, Al Gore, President Barack Obama, et al., who essentially tell us that there is no need for further research—that the matter is solved.
The peer-reviewed literature is not unequivocal about causes and effects of global warming. We are still learning about properties of water, for goodness' sake. There needs to be more true scientific research without politics on both sides and with all scientists being heard. To insult and denigrate those with whom you disagree is not becoming.

R. Everett Langford
The Woodlands, Texas
#
Your editorial in the June 22 issue of C&EN was a disgrace. It was filled with misinformation, half-truths, and ad hominem attacks on those who dare disagree with you. Shameful!

Are you planning to write an editorial about the Environmental Protection Agency's recent suppression of a global warming report that goes against the gospel according to NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies Director James Hansen? Or do you only editorialize on matters in keeping with your biased views on global warming?

Trying to arrest climate change is a feeble, futile endeavor and a manifestation of human arrogance. Humankind's contribution to climate change is minuscule, and trying to eliminate even that minute effect will be enormously expensive, damaging to the poorest people on the planet, and ultimately ineffective.

Dennis Malpass
Magnolia, Texas
#
I can't accept as facts the reports of federal agencies, because they have become political and are more likely to support the regime in power than not. Baum's attempt to close out debate goes against all my scientific training, and to hear this from my ACS is certainly alarming to me.

Edward H. Gleason
Ooltewah, Tenn.
#
Having worked as an atmospheric chemist for many years, I have extensive experience with environmental issues, and I usually agree with Rudy Baum's editorials. But his use of "climate-change deniers" to pillory scientists who do not believe climate change is a crisis is disingenuous and unscientific. [...] Given the climate's complexity and these and other uncertainties, are we justified in legislating major increases in our energy costs unilaterally guided only by a moral imperative to "do our part" for Earth's climate? I am among many environmentally responsible citizen-scientists who think this is stupid, both because our emissions reductions will be dwarfed by increases elsewhere (China and India, for example) and because the models have large uncertainties. [...] I have very little in common with the philosophy of the Heartland Institute and other "free-market fanatics," and I consider myself a progressive Democrat. Nevertheless, we scientists should know better than to propound scientific truth by consensus and to excoriate skeptics with purple prose.
Roger L. Tanner
Muscle Shoals, Ala.
#
I would like to see the ACS Board cap Baum's political pen and trade him to either the New York Times or Washington Post.
Wallace Embry
Columbia, Tenn.
#
In the interest of brevity, I can limit my response to the diatribe of the editor-in-chief in the June 22 edition of C&EN to one word: Disgusting.
Louis H. Rombach
Wilmington, Del.
#
I am particularly offended by the false analogy with creationists. It is easy to just dismiss anyone who dares disagree as being "unscientific."
Daniel B. Rego
Las Vegas
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While Baum obviously has strong personal views on the subject, I take great offense that he would use C&EN, for which I pay dearly each year in membership dues, to purvey his personal views and so glibly ignore contrary information and scold those of us who honestly find these views to be a hoax.
William Tolley
San Diego
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I appreciate it when C&EN presents information from qualified supporters of either, and preferably both, sides of an issue to help readers decide what is correct, rather than dispensing your conclusions and ridiculing people who disagree with you.
P. S. Lowell
Lakeway, Texas
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I am a retired Ph.D. chemical engineer. During my working years, I was involved in many environmental issues concerning products and processes of the companies for which I worked. I am completely disgusted with the June 22 editorial. I do not consider it to be very scientific to castigate skeptics of man-made global warming. [...] [Global warming fears are] not of particular concern because "the ocean is a very large sink for carbon dioxide." [...] The overall problem here is that there is already an abundance of scientific illiteracy in the American public that will not be improved by Baum's stance in what should be a scientific magazine. Theories are not proven by consensus—but by data from repeatable experimentation that leaves no doubt of interpretation.
Charles M. Krutchen
Daphne, Ala.
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Please do not keep writing C&EN editorials according to the liberal religion's credo—"Attack all climate-change deniers, creationists, conservatives, people who voted for George W. Bush, etc." It is a sign of weakness in your argument when you attack those who disagree. [...] Your choice of terminology referring to skeptical scientists who don't toe your line as CCD, climate-change deniers, and putting them in association with Holocaust deniers, is unworthy of an editorial in a scientific periodical. Who don't you go head-to-head with the critics? Please don't keep doing this. Find a scientific writer for the editorial page. We get plenty of this pap from the mainstream media and do not need it in C&EN.
Heinrich Brinks
Monterey, Calif.
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Your utter disdain of CCDs and the accusations of improper tactics you ascribe to them cannot be dismissed. However bitter you personally may feel about CCDs, it is not your place as editor to accuse them—falsely—of nonscientific behavior by using insultingly inappropriate language. The growing body of scientists, whom you abuse as sowing doubt, making up statistics, and claiming to be ignored by the media, are, in the main, highly competent professionals, experts in their fields, completely honorable, and highly versed in the scientific method—characteristics that apparently do not apply to you. The results presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which you call the CCD's "favorite whipping boy," do indeed fall into the category of predictions that fail to match the data, requiring a return to the drawing board. Your flogging of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change is not only infantile but beggars you to contribute facts to back up your disdain. Incidentally, why do we fund climate studies by U.S. Global Change Research Program if the problem is settled?
William E. Keller
Santa Fe, N.M.
For all of the letters send in repsone to Baum's editorial see here.

http://www.climatedepot.com/a/2213/Climate-Revolt-Major-Science-Group-Startled-By-Outpouring-of-Scientists-Rejecting-ManMade-Climate-Fears-Clamor-for-Editor-to-Be-Removed