Showing posts with label Climate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Climate. Show all posts

Saturday, January 26, 2008

An odd series of events

 
All over the world, a bizarre series of events occurred this week.

In Atlanta, a cat shivered during a strange snow storm.

A doghouse flooded in Missouri.

A long crack suddenly appeared in a glacier.

Elvis' grave was covered with a thin coat of ice.

In New York, some dude fried an egg on his car.

A BMW's radiator overheated on a highway in Iowa.

In Beijing, China, the worst pollution on the planet killed a few more people.

In Hollywood, a constipated Michael Moore passed gas during an interview.

Kids were swinging in a park on a beautiful clear day in Baghdad.

On a quiet creek in West Virginia, an entire family of beavers mysteriously disappeared.

What's it all mean?

Al Gore is in Davos, Switzerland, bloviating about climate change to increase the value of his carbon offset scams businesses.

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Nine Inches of Global Warming

 
In the brutal, snowy commute to work this morning, I passed a car that was struggling along in the slow lane. It was a sight I'd never seen before, over many years of harsh winter driving.

It was a new Maserati Quattroporte (MSRP approximately $120,000.00) slogging along on an slick, unplowed Interstate.

Here's my guess: this dude is a believer in global warming and, rather than buying a second vehicle (say, a Jeep Wrangler), he decided to buy carbon offsets instead.

Suggested reading: U.S. Senate Report: Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007 - Senate Report Debunks "Consensus"

Monday, December 17, 2007

Line o' the Day: the Toxic Texan fails to destroy the Earth

 
Mark Steyn (hat tip: Gateway Pundit):

In the past third of a century, the American economy has swollen by 150 per cent, automobile traffic has increased by 143 per cent, and energy consumption has grown 45 per cent. During this same period, air pollutants have declined by 29 per cent, toxic emissions by 48.5 per cent, sulphur dioxide levels by 65.3 per cent, and airborne lead by 97.3 per cent. Despite signing on to Kyoto, European greenhouse gas emissions have increased since 2001, whereas America's emissions have fallen by nearly one per cent, despite the Toxic Texan's best efforts to destroy the planet.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

David Letterman in 1988: Prescient on Global Warming

 
It's been 20 years of panic-mongering and we still have the same general weather patterns. Go figure.

Top 10 Good Things about the Greenhouse Effect - August 10, 1988

10. Melting polar ice caps make for better surfing.
9. Long lines at Disney World reduced by sunstroke.
8. With five years, Jerry Lewis' hair will be bone dry.
7. Can use "stuck in road tar" as acceptable excuse for missing work.
6. ABC will take a $200 million bath on Winter Olympics.
5. Intense heat should open pores in General Noriega's forehead.
4. My dog-shaving business will take off.
3. "I'm dehydrated" will replace "I'm not gonna pay a lot for this muffler" as America's favorite phrase.
2. Can cook lobster by lowering it into toilet.
1. Hot babes, less clothes. 'Nuff said.

And are you ready for more of these?

Top Ten Other Clinton Scandals - September 29, 1998

10. Kicked 12 year-old boy to get McGwire home run ball
9. He's the real reason behind Matt Damon-Minnie Driver breakup
8. Wedding ring he gave to Hillary? Cubic Zirconia
7. Sold secret puffy thigh technology to Yeltsin
6. Once tried to build a bong out of Al Gore
5. Broke into the Watergate just for the hell of it
4. When family goes to movies, makes Chelsea pretend she's under 13
3. Paid Ken Starr to write a report that would "make him look like a stud"
2. At state dinner, once accidentally hit on Hillary
1. Secretly sold Delaware to Chinese for $500

Monday, December 10, 2007

"If you don't believe in global warming, you're a Nazi appeaser"

 
A wonderful coincidence occurred last week. Al Gore, during his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, said:

We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency, a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here...

However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world's leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler's threat, and I quote, "They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved only to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent."

Hmmm. So the thousands of scientists (many of whom are prominent climatology experts) that disagree with anthropogenic global warming (AGW) are Nazi appeasers? Interesting -- and I'm glad we haven't resorted to name-calling. There's just one problem. AGW appears to be a complete and utter scam. A hoax. A money-making bonanza for Al Gore and his UN compatriots, to be sure, but a hoax nonetheless.

Gore's proselytizing for climate hysteria revolves around the dubious "carbon offset" trading business.

Put simply, a wide range of respected scientists, environmentalists, researchers, agriculturalists, and activists believe that carbon offsets are a "scam", "fantasy", "fiction", "nonsense", "fraudulent" and worse. And they've been saying so since 2000, though to read the newspaper you wouldn't know it.

And more new evidence that the hysterical posturing -- upon which the scam is built -- has arrived. EIB reports:

...Writing in the International Journal of Climatology of the Royal Meteorological Society, professor David H. Douglass (of the University of Rochester), professor John R. Christy (of the University of Alabama), Benjamin D. Pearson and professor S. Fred Singer (of the University of Virginia) report that observed patterns of temperature changes ('fingerprints') over the last 30 years disagree with what greenhouse models predict and can better be explained by natural factors, such as solar variability. The conclusion is that climate change is 'unstoppable' and cannot be affected or modified by controlling the emission of greenhouse gases, such as CO2, as is proposed in current legislation.

Oops. Is there a return authorization number Gore can use for that Nobel? I'm pretty sure he'll get his deposit back, though.

In all seriousness, the future of the carbon offset business -- a potential $250 billion bunko scam -- hangs in the balance.

I'm taking bets on which side Al Gore, his pal Michael Milken, and troubled fundraiser Anthony ("the walking ethical cloud") Coelho are banking on.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Al Gore: Set to Profit from Eco-Suckaz... again

 
First there was global warming hysteria, aided and abetted by Al Gore's lucrative book-and-movie deal. Next, his stewardship of an investment company called Generation Investment Management, poised to take advantage of various eco-regulations. Most recently, Gore has joined a green venture capital firm to -- well, as CNN puts it -- "save the planet." Oh, and possibly make some serious coin, too.

Why do I get the distinct impression that the only thing Gore is interested in saving are dividends from the eco-suckaz' money?


Noel Sheppard at Newbusters has details on ABC's recent debunking of "global warming."

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Roy Spencer on Global Warming

 
Rush Limbaugh was fooled today by a slick, professional and plausible global warming scam. In effect, it was a false flag operation designed to perpetrate a hoax, thereby positioning Limbaugh as a gullible fraud.

James Lewis at the American Thinker:

The hoax looks very professional. A fraudulent scientific journal was created on the web, called the "Journal of Geoclimatic Studies."  The journal is fake, the article claiming to disprove the popular Global Warming meme is fake, the Editorial Board is fake, and the authors are faked.

The key to this fraud is its professionalism. All the visible features of the hoax are superficially possible. They do not stand up to deeper examination, but the hoaxers succeeded in fooling Rush for some minutes before he caught it.... We have previously warned about likely Black PR in the blogosphere. It is possible that others have been planted.  We will undoubtedly see other Black PR ops as the election season heats up.

First off, let's call 'em blog ops. Secondly, the positive side of this story was the link I discovered to Dr. Roy Spencer at WeatherQuestions.com.

...globally averaged temperatures are unusually warm today (at this writing, 2007). While a majority of climate researchers believe that this warmth is mostly (or completely) due to the activities of mankind, this is as much a statement of faith as it is of science. For in order to come to such a conclusion, we would need to know how much of the temperature increase we've seen since the 1800's is natural. So, let's examine current temperatures in their historical context. Over the last 100 years or so globally-averaged surface temperature trends have exhibited three distinct phases.

The warming up until 1940 represents the end of the multi-century cool period known as the "Little Ice Age", a particularly harsh period for humanity. This warming must have been natural because mankind had not yet emitted substantial amounts of greenhouse gases. Then, the slight cooling between 1940 and the 1970's occurred in spite of rapid increases in manmade greenhouse gas emissions. One theory is that this cooling is manmade -- from particulate pollution...

At least in the context of the last century or more, today's global temperatures are unusually warm. But when was the last time that the Earth was this warm?. You might have heard claims in the news that we are warmer now than anytime in the last 1,000 years. This claim is based upon the "Hockey Stick" temperature curve, which used temperature 'proxies', mostly tree rings, to reconstruct a multi-century temperature record. That "warmest in 1,000 years" claim lost much of its support, however, when a National Acadamy of Science review panel concluded in 2006 that the most that can be said with any confidence is that the Earth is warmer now than anytime in the last 400 years. Note that this is a good thing, since most of those 400 years occurred during the Little ice Age.

But it turns out we don't need to use "proxies" for temperature like tree ring measurements -- there are actual temperature 'measurements' that go back over 1,000 years. Borehole temperatures are taken deep in the ground, where the seasonal cycle in surface temperature sends an annual temperature pulse down into the Earth. Dating of these underground temperature pulses from Greenland, reveals much warmer temperatures 1,000 years ago than today.

...we see that substantial natural variations in temperature can, and do, occur -- which should be no surprise. So, is it possible that much of the warming we have seen since the 1970's is due to natural processes that we do not yet fully understand? I believe so. To believe that all of today's warmth can be blamed on manmade pollution is a statement of faith that assumes the role of natural variations in the climate system is small or nonexistent.

The fact is, science doesn't understand why these natural climate variations occur, and can not reliably distinguish between natural and possible human influences on global temperatures. So, if scientists have no other natural explanation for a warming trend, they tend to assume that it is manmade. And it is indeed possible to explain the temperature changes over the last 100 years by carefully tuning climate models with some estimated effects from volcanic eruptions, sunlight intensity variations, manmade aerosol emissions, and greenhouse gas increases. But this is simply one possible explanation -- one that ignores or minimizes any natural sources of temperature variability...

Climate modelers and researchers generally believe that an increase in the greenhouse effect from manmade greenhouse gases causes a warming effect that is similar to that from an increase in sunlight.

I believe that this is incorrect.

It is now reasonably certain that changes in solar radiation cause temperature changes on Earth. For instance, the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo caused a 2% to 4% reduction in sunlight, resulting in two years of below normal temperatures, especially over Northern Hemisphere land areas.

But the Earth's natural greenhouse effect (again, mostly from water vapor and clouds) is under the control of weather systems -- especially precipitation systems -- which are generated in response to solar heating. Either directly or indirectly, those precipitation systems determine the moisture (water vapor and cloud) characteristics for most of the rest of the atmosphere.

Read the whole thing and be sure to forward it to your liberal progressive friends.

Sorry, I keep doing that. I keep forgetting that the left is trying to escape its horrifically failed, liberal past through a careful rebranding effort. My sincere apologies to the liberals progressives.

Sunday, October 28, 2007

And the Oscar Winner for Best Science Fiction Film is...

 
The Science & Public Policy Institute has published a position paper by Christopher Monckton. Its title -- 35 Inconvenient Truths, The errors in Al Gore’s movie -- is sending chills down the spines of global warming alarmists who were poised to profit from hysterical public policy responses to climate change.

Chock full of graphs, data, and statistics, Monckton rips Gore apart in a manner reminiscent of, well, Jenghis Kahn:

A spokesman for Al Gore has issued a questionable response to the news that in October 2007 the High Court in London had identified nine “errors” in his movie An Inconvenient Truth. The judge had stated that, if the UK Government had not agreed to send to every secondary school in England a corrected guidance note making clear the mainstream scientific position on these nine “errors”, he would have [ruled that the] distribution of the film... had been an unlawful contravention of an Act of Parliament prohibiting the political indoctrination of children.

Al Gore’s spokesman and “environment advisor,” Ms. Kalee Kreider, begins by saying that the film presented “thousands and thousands of facts.” It did not: just 2,000 “facts” in 93 minutes would have been one fact every three seconds. The film contained only a few dozen points, most of which will be seen to have been substantially inaccurate. The judge concentrated only on nine points which even the UK Government, to which Gore is a climate-change advisor, had to admit did not represent mainstream scientific opinion...

Read it all and pass it on. As more and more citizens find out about the "UN's IPCC Global Warming Bunko Scam," you'll see the climate change frauds running for the exits.

Hat tip: What Bubba Knows

Saturday, October 20, 2007

An Inconvenient Judge

 
A British High Court judge determined that the film An Inconvenient Truth contains so many scientific errors that it could not be shown in schools. So if you edit out all of the errors and misstatements, how much "real science" remains?

Junk Science demands a refund.

Hat tip: LGF

Saturday, October 13, 2007

All you need to know about the Nobel Peace Prize

 
With Al Gore's triumph in the Nobel competition over Krusty the Clown -- primarily for his incessant marketing of global warming hysteria -- it's worth recalling the nature of the prize itself.

Past winners of the Nobel Peace Prize

Yasser Arafat: father of modern terrorism, founder of Black September and Fatah, and murderer of numerous American diplomats and Israeli civilians...

Le Duc Tho, North Vietnamese dictator: progenitor of the boat people, murderer of millions, and supporter of Pol Pot (yes, the "Killing Fields" Pol Pot)...

Jimmy Carter, former US president: friend and supporter of literally every murderous dictator in the world...

Non-winners of the Nobel Peace Prize

Ronald Reagan: the man who freed hundreds of millions from the tyranny of Communism without firing a shot.

Do the math

If my math is right, Gore's panic-stricken calls for dampening the global economy -- in a futile attempt to set Earth's temperature dial -- will surely result in food shortages and continued third-world suffering.

Perhaps the next Nobel Peace Prize should go to a large volcano that remains dormant during the course of a whole year. After all, a single massive volcanic explosion -- along the lines of Krakatoa -- could result in significant climate change.

Credits: EIB for the Al Gore/Nobel image

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Believe in global warming? $125K is up for grabs...

 
Have a favorite liberal progressive who still believes in the myth of anthropogenic global warming? Send 'em this offer.

The Ultimate Global Warming Challenge announced today that it raised to $125,000 the cash award to the first person to prove in a scientific manner that human emissions of greenhouse gases will cause catastrophic global climate change...

"Surprisingly no one has entered the contest yet," said Steven Milloy, founder and publisher of JunkScience.com and the sponsor of the Ultimate Global Warming Challenge. "I'm surprised since Al Gore, the United Nations and the mainstream media all seem to think that the notion of man made catastrophic global warming is a no-brainer," Milloy added.

The Ultimate Global Warming Challenge was launched on Aug. 7, 2007 with the popular and highly rated YouTube video entitled, "Can You Save Al Gore?"


"It appears that [the prize] is not enough to spur Al Gore and other climate alarmists to submit their proofs that humans are causing global warming," explained Milloy. "If it's a matter of money, Al Gore and the alarmists should just come out and tell us what sum it will cost the rest of us to see what proof they have..."

$125K probably isn't enough to fund Al Gore's private jet for a month. The carbon offset business is far too lucrative to risk over a measly $125K.

Update: Real scientists object to the AP's hysterical posturing on climate change.

Update II: "Dr. James Hansen, who approves and issues NASA climate change statements and is one of the most alarmist global warming advocates in the US, is apparently deep in the pocket of George Soros."

Hat tip: The Astute Bloggers

Sunday, September 02, 2007

Al Gore's global warming "consensus" spontaneously combusts

 
The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has published some fascinating articles on climate change, though to read the daily newspaper you'd never know it.

A July 2007 review of 539 abstracts in peer-reviewed scientific journals over the last three years reveals a "shift toward the views of global warming skeptics."

For the journal Energy and Environment, author Michael Asher submitted additional detail that blows the lid off Al Gore's "consensus view" on anthropogenic (human causation of) global warming.

...In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the "consensus view," defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes' work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated...

Researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte used the same database and search terms and examined papers from 2004 through February 2007. The results are stunning:

* Of 528 papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of anthropogenic global warming (AGW)
* 32 papers (6%) reject AGW outright
* 48% refuse to accept or reject AGW, i.e., take no position for or against
* Only one paper speculates that AGW could lead to catastrophic results

The figures are even more surprising when we consider how AGW is defined for the purpose of this reporting. In this context, supporting AGW requires that:

* Humans need not be the primary cause of warming (i.e., they can have "any" impact whatsoever)
* No belief or support for "catastrophic" warming is necessary

Why then would Schulte's survey contradict the UN's IPCC 2007 Report, which gave a "90% likely" figure for AGW?

Simple. Despite the media's breathless exhortations that "thousands of scientists" are involved in the IPCC report, the reality is that the text is actually written by a small number of "lead authors." Furthermore, the executive summary -- the portion most frequently quoted in the mainstream media -- is written by politicians and approved by political operatives from member nations.

By IPCC policy, the individual report chapters -- the only text actually written by scientists -- are edited to "ensure compliance" with the summary, which is typically published months before the actual report itself... By contrast, the ISI Web of Science database covers 8,700 journals and publications, including every leading scientific journal in the world.

In short, scientists are offering a very different consensus than that which is marketed by Al Gore and the United Nations.

Is that because Al Gore and the UN stand to make billions from 'carbon trading markets', which have spun up from the IPCC to take financial advantage of various hysterical AGW pronouncements?

The World Rainforest Movement -- a very left-leaning organization -- investigated these bizarre financial ties and came to a shocking conclusion.

[they] concluded that the IPCC report "must now be shelved due to their clear conflict of interest and a new report instigated which will be free of the taint of intellectual corruption."

And solar energy portal Ecotopia reports that members of the IPCC "...had vested interests in reaching unrealistically and unjustifiably optimistic conclusions about the possibility of compensating for emissions with trees... [and] should have been automatically disqualified from serving on an intergovernmental panel charged with investigating impartially the feasibility and benefits of such... projects."

In short, the IPCC had an inherent conflict of interest.

As for Al Gore's vaunted "consensus view"? It seems to have spontaneously combusted, perhaps due to all of the desert-hot wind emanating from greedy politicians.

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Newsweek '75: Scientific Consensus on Global Cooling

 
Yep, you read that headline right. In 1975, Newsweak claimed "scientific consensus" on the topic of global cooling.

Back in '75, some scientists were proposing solutions to global cooling like melting the polar ice caps.

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change... They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality...

Dennis Dutton has the whole article. Honestly, I couldn't stop giggling.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Line o' the day: If we can save even one baby seal...

 
D.C. resident John Lockwood was conducting research at the Library of Congress and came across an intriguing Page 2 headline in the Nov. 2, 1922 edition of The Washington Post: "Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt." Lockwood noted that he "had [just] read of the just-released NASA estimates, that four of the 10 hottest years in the U.S. were actually in the 1930s, with 1934 the hottest of all."

                                                      --John McCaslin, Washington Times (hat tip: Don Surber)

Friday, August 10, 2007

Y2K claims another victim: Al Gore

 
Oops!

DailyTech reveals a teensy, weensy problem with the climate change data that made the case for global warming.

Steve McIntyre, who operates the site climateaudit.org [was] inspecting historical temperature graphs [and] noticed a strange discontinuity, or "jump" in many locations, all occurring around the time of January, 2000.

These graphs were created by NASA's Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data... McKintyre notified the pair of the bug; Ruedy replied and acknowledged the problem as an "oversight" that would be fixed in the next data refresh.

NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II. Anthony Watts has put the new data in chart form, along with a more detailed summary of the events...

If you're waiting to see this reported in the New York Times, don't hold your breath. Unless you're being driven around on Martha's Vineyard by a Kennedy.

Al Gore has already apologized for the entire "global warming" fiasco. He was recently quoted as saying, "What? You haven't made a mistake? My bad! Is that apology sufficient? My bad!"

Sunday, August 05, 2007

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

The 'Hockey Stick' is on fire... must be global warming

 
Orson Scott Card has published a wonderful, wonderful article in Meridian Magazine concerning the provable falsehood of the so-called "hockey stick."

If you pay close attention, you'll find that Global Warming alarmists are not actually saying "Global Warming" lately. No, nowadays it's "Climate Change." Do you know why?

Because for the past three years, global temperatures have been falling.

Oops.

The thing is, we've had twenty years since the Alarmists first raised the banner of Global Warming. They told us that "If This Goes On" by 2010 or 2020, sea levels will be rising so high that coastal cities will be flooded, famines will cover the earth, and ... Oh, you know the list. They're still making the same predictions — they just move the dates farther back.

It's like those millennarian religious cults in the 1800s. Religious leaders would arise who would predict the Second Coming of Christ in 1838. When Christ didn't oblige them by showing up, they went back to their visions or scripture calculations or whatever they claimed and report that they miscalculated, now it was going to be 1843. Or whatever.

Here's the raw truth:

All the computer models are wrong. They have not only failed to predict the future, they can't even predict that past.

That is, when you run their software with the data from, say, the 1970s or 1980s, and project what should happen in the 1990s or 2000s, they project results that have absolutely nothing to do with the known climate data for those decades.

In other words, the models don't work. The only way to make them "work" is to take the known results and then fiddle with the software until it finally produces them. That's not how honest science is done.

It's light years beyond a "must read". Send it to all of your progressive friends who believe in this UN-sponsored scam. Just don't ask them why Greenland is called Greenland - that might make their heads explode.

Meridian Magazine: All in a Good Cause (hat tip: Noel Sheppard)

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Buenos Aires Gets its First Snow Since 1918

 
Here's some climate change news that somehow escaped the attention of the U.S. media. Foreign newspapers (in the UK, Thailand, etc.) are reporting that Argentina's capitol has received its first snow in nearly a century.

Thousands of Argentines cheered and threw snowballs in the streets of Buenos Aires on Monday as the capital's first major snowfall since 1918 spread a thin white mantle across the region...

Wet snow fell for hours in the Argentine capital, accumulating in a mushy but thin white layer late Monday, after freezing air from Antarctica collided with a moisture-laden low pressure system that blanketed higher elevations in western and central Argentina with snow... Argentina's National Weather Service said it was the first major snow in Buenos Aires since June 22, 1918.

This is Argentina's second unseasonal cold snap in two months.

While reported across the globe, apparently U.S. newspapers didn't find this story newsworthy. But, no, I don't think the mainstream media has its own agenda.