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

Friday, May 02, 2008

Is it just me, or is it warm in here?


• South Dakota was slammed with 48 inches of global warming and 60 mile-an-hour winds.

• The diversion of food to biofuel production has resulted in soaring food prices throughout the world. Among the hardest hit: Haitians have been forced to eat mud patties, which consist of dirt, oil and sugar.

• Perhaps this explains why one UN official called the biofuel frenzy a "crime against humanity." The biofuel boondoggle -- a humanitarian disaster -- needs to be rectified, and fast.

Let's hope Al Gore wins another Nobel Prize for this lunacy. It'll keep him from tinkering with more stuff that can go horribly, fatally wrong.

Update: Tom Nelson has an excellent digest of climate-change folderol.

Update II: Noel Sheppard links Rex Murphy's blistering commentary on biofuels (hat tip: Larwyn).

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

There will be no questions allowed during the Planetary Emergency


Remember - the science is settled and there is no dispute that anthropogenic global warming is real.

That's why it's standard practice for Al Gore to ban the press during his (very expensive) appearances.

Gore, who reportedly receives $100,000 for personal appearances, apparently has a standard contract that bans the fourth estate from all of his speeches. No one seems to know why, and we can’t ask — on account of we’re out here, and he’s in there.

The Smoking Gun has Gore's standard contract. Terms include:

* No press, no questions, no statements, no interviews
* No photographs (perhaps they make Gore's ass look fat)
* No recording (audio or video) of Gore
* An Apple MacBook Pro must be provided for his presentation.

Brother, can you spare a carbon offset?

Hat tip: Vanderleun.

Hungry Africans thank Al Gore


Thanks, Al Gore.

The world just had one of the coldest winters on record.

And the price of food has skyrocketed...

...thanks to your "global warming" -- oops, I meant "climate change" -- initiatives.

Problem is, researchers, environmentalists and scientists of all political persuasions say that your "carbon offset" businesses are money-making scams and do absolutely nothing for the environment.

And the current lack of sunspots likely indicates a solar cooling cycle beyond human control.

We're hungry, Al Gore. Thanks for all of your help.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Oops. Another Line o' the Day.


Bidinotto:

Katie [Couric], forget worrying about "carbon footprints." The only footprint you should worry about is the one soon to appear on the backside of your skirt, when CBS finally bounces you out on the sidewalk of 52nd Street.

Sunday, April 27, 2008

RFK, Jr.'s latest hilarious satire


We last heard from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. when he promoted the whackadoodle leftist meme that the Rethuglicans stole the 2004 election. Not the 2000 election, mind you, but 2004 -- the very year the Kerry campaign bused thousands of out-of-state voters to Wisconsin where they could easily vote early and often in a state with "same day voter registration."

83,000 people executed a same-day registration for Milwuakee County, which is more than 20% of all voting-age residents in the county. Now, Wisconsinites may procrastinate a bit, but in order to believe that number, you'd have to expect that 20% of the county had moved or became newly eligible within the past two years (after the previous national cycle). Not only that, but the state now reports that 10,000 of those registrations cannot be verified, a whopping 12% of all same-day registrations and almost the entire margin of victory for Kerry for the entire state.

While RFK's Rolling Stone story is worthy of its own laugh-track, his latest in Vanity Fair is sure to cause giggling even in the rarefied, low-oxygen atmosphere of Kosworld.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to ‘abolish’ carbon usage and sees a direct comparison to the end of slavery.

According to Kennedy, “industry and government warnings” about avoiding “economic ruin” should not be heeded because abolishing slavery did not cripple the British economy as was predicted “Instead of collapsing, as slavery’s proponents had predicted, Britain’s economy accelerated,” he argued.

...The piece ended on a utopian note with Kennedy imagining that carbon abolition would result in America "[living] free from Middle Eastern wars and entanglements with petty tyrants who despise democracy and are hated by their own people.”

Kennedy didn't describe now the U.S. could eliminate carbon emissions, which will require retooling all automobiles, humans (who exhale carbon dioxide) and volcanoes.

Update: Global Warming Insanity looks like a promising new site that will track much of the carbon craziness.

Update II: Bidinotto highlights the climate menace represented by the Olympic Torch.

Friday, April 25, 2008

Can "green" fuels replace oil? Short answer: hell, no.


CNet has the bad news.

4.2 billion ...That's how many rooftops you'd have to cover with solar panels to displace a cubic mile of oil (CMO), a measure of energy consumption, according to Ripudaman Malhotra, who oversees research on fossil fuels at SRI International... [in other words,] we'd need to equip 250,000 roofs a day with solar panels for the next 50 years to have enough photovoltaic infrastructure to provide the world with a CMO's worth of solar-generated electricity for a year. We're nowhere close to that pace.

Many of these stats and a far lengthier discussion of the issue will be found in a book coming from Oxford University Press by Crane, Malhotra, and Ed Kinderman called A Cubic Meter of Oil... And judging by some of the stats Malhotra gave me, the book will alarm policy makers, environmentalists, and pretty much anyone else interested in weaning ourselves from fossil fuels...

One of the more compelling aspects of Malhotra's research is how it highlights the amount of energy, particularly in the form of fossil fuels, that the world consumes. Oil provided about one-third of worldwide energy (1.06 CMO) in 2006 followed by coal (0.81) and natural gas (0.61). Together, the three fossil fuels accounted for 2.48 CMOs of the 3 CMOs consumed that year.

The figures drop quickly after that. The fourth largest source of energy is biomass, mostly in the form of burning wood. Biomass, however, only provide 0.19 CMOs, while hydroelectric and nuclear provided, respectively, 0.17 and .015 CMOs...

The minuscule size of renewables, unfortunately, also means progress will come slowly. Some more comparisons: A large hydroelectric dam can generate about 18 gigawatts of power a year. To get an annual CMO from new hydroelectric dams, you'd need to build the equivalent of 200 Three Gorges Dams. There aren't that many available rivers in the world left to dam up. Solar thermal? 7,700 plants, or 150 a year for 50 years, required for an annual CMO. One plant went up last year, and it was the first in over 15 years. In his calculations, Malhotra takes into account the fact that solar, wind, hydroelectric, and even nuclear plants don't operate at optimal conditions 24-7; in other words, he has baked in real-world assumptions.

If consumers worldwide could replace 1 billion incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents, it would save only 0.01 CMOs in a year...

"What is truly humbling is that we aren't going to make any impact on CO2 emission levels for the next 20 to 30 years," Malhotra said. Much of the growth for energy demand will come from emerging markets...

Saying that we may need oil for the next few decades is like telling someone in the path of a hurricane that they may experience moisture.

Update: Charlie Foxtrot: "Starvation = Greener Planet."

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

The scariest photo you will see all day


Writing in The Australian, Phil Chapman -- geophysicist and former NASA astronaut -- sounds the alarm claxons for climate change. Problem is that it relates to catastrophic cooling -- not global warming.

Is this the scariest climate photo ever?

The sun: sans sunspots. Not a good sign.
What's the big deal you might ask?

No sunspots. Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh

THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.

What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.

All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.

It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.

This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.

It didn't happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.

The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.

Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon's Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.

That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern.

It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.

There is no doubt that the next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do. There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the US and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it.

Millions will starve if we do nothing to prepare for it (such as planning changes in agriculture to compensate), and millions more will die from cold-related diseases.

There is also another possibility, remote but much more serious. The Greenland and Antarctic ice cores and other evidence show that for the past several million years, severe glaciation has almost always afflicted our planet.

The bleak truth is that, under normal conditions, most of North America and Europe are buried under about 1.5km of ice. This bitterly frigid climate is interrupted occasionally by brief warm interglacials, typically lasting less than 10,000 years.

The interglacial we have enjoyed throughout recorded human history, called the Holocene, began 11,000 years ago, so the ice is overdue. We also know that glaciation can occur quickly: the required decline in global temperature is about 12C and it can happen in 20 years.

The next descent into an ice age is inevitable but may not happen for another 1000 years. On the other hand, it must be noted that the cooling in 2007 was even faster than in typical glacial transitions. If it continued for 20 years, the temperature would be 14C cooler in 2027.

By then, most of the advanced nations would have ceased to exist, vanishing under the ice, and the rest of the world would be faced with a catastrophe beyond imagining.

Australia may escape total annihilation but would surely be overrun by millions of refugees. Once the glaciation starts, it will last 1000 centuries, an incomprehensible stretch of time.

If the ice age is coming, there is a small chance that we could prevent or at least delay the transition, if we are prepared to take action soon enough and on a large enough scale...

It just goes to prove the old adage about Al Gore: beauty is only skin deep, but stupid goes down to the bone.

Hat tip: catmman. Gateway Pundit has the essential linkfarm.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

World temperatures keep falling while CO2 keeps rising


A group of scientists has formally petitioned the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to cease and desist on their message that CO2 emissions relate to warming temperatures.

And they issue this challenge: "If you believe there is evidence of the CO2 driver theory in the available data please present a graph of it."

The letter is signed by Hans Schreuder (Analytical Chemist), Piers Corbyn (Astrophysicist), and Dr Don Parkes Svend Hendriksen (1988 Nobel Laureate), and a copy is available at a website operated by the International Climate Science Association.

Evidence presented in the letter goes well beyond putting the “hockey stick” graph, made famous in Al Gore's movie, in doubt. The hockey stick presented exponentially increasing global temperature in the near future due to uncontrolled increases in CO2 – and got its name from the shape of the graph – an apparently long stable period with an upward increase in CO2 and temperature during the industrial age. The UN panel claimed that human activity was driving what Mr. Gore explained as a certain end to civilization as we know it, if extreme political and economic measures are not taken.

The scientists assembled a graph based on actual measurements and did not find evidence that CO2 was the main driving force behind temperature. In fact, temperature increases and decreases, showing little interest in CO2 level.

The scientists go on to renounce the unintended consequences of the UN's position: that the policy of burning food (to produce biofuel) has driven food prices sharply higher and is causing hunger and deforestation in countries around the world (especially the poorer countries).

Given the economic devastation that is already happening and which is now widely recognised will continue to flow from this policy, what possible justification can there be for its retention?

Easy answer: money. The carbon offset market, which environmentalists, researchers and scientists decry as utterly "fraudulent", represents more money than the UN and its related entities can walk away from. And, yes, that's a preposition I ended that last sentence with.

Update: AJ Strata has more. Hat tip: Larwyn.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Another UN Scandal: Carbon offset market bogus from day one!


Executive Summary: the UN has facilitated a "fraudulent" market worth tens of billions of dollars that was justified by a critical report; this report was authored by the very project developers and "auditors" who would profit from the report's publication. This appears to be a major UN scandal that could surpass the Oil-for-Food Program in terms of total economic impact.

This weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the multibillion-dollar experiment created to control global warming is faltering as officials questions the program's efficacy.

[Companies] ...can pay for the right to pollute by buying "carbon credits," essentially permission slips to spew carbon dioxide. Sale of the credits is supposed to help fund clean-air projects in China and other developing countries that would otherwise be too costly to build...

...U.N. regulators are... concerned that some independent auditors of these projects, who are responsible for vetting their environmental legitimacy, have been letting project developers push through ventures of questionable environmental value.

...Developing-world projects like [wind farms and palm-oil plants] are part of the burgeoning global carbon trade [which] last year was worth 40.4 billion euros...

The carbon market was created by the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 global treaty underlying environmental rules...

A dozen or so project developers, most based in Europe, dominate the business. Among the largest is EcoSecurities...

Three auditors dominate the business... Det Norske Veritas, Tüv Süd AG, ...and SGS Group...

Let's hit the pause button right there. Those company names sound familiar.

Let's rewind to the year 2000. The World Rainforest Movement published a bulletin ("Sinks that stink") decrying the emerging carbon trade as suffering "the taint of intellectual corruption". In effect, the WRM and other evironmentalists assert that the entire carbon market is a "scam", "fantasy", "fiction", "nonsense", "fraudulent" and worse.

But why? WRM states:

...some of the most polluting countries are trying to find ways out of their commitments, using potential loopholes in the Protocol which may allow them to plant millions of hectares of trees in Southern countries as a substitute for cutting emissions at [the] source...

in order to assess the scientific validity of this approach, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) appointed a panel to put together a Special Report on Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry. The report, released in May, has disappointed many activists by giving a "scientific" stamp of approval to a carbon market which would generate profits for a small number of mostly Northern companies and consultants...

...one of the reason's for the report's failure is, sadly, surely quite simple: some of the authors (and the companies they work for) will benefit financially from having drawn the conclusions they drew... [just] a few examples:

Pedro Moura-Costa, another important author of Chapter 5, is a UK-based executive of Ecosecurities..

Gareth Philips..., another Lead Author of Chapter 5, works for Societe Generale de Surveillance (SGS) Forestry of Geneva...

The bulletin concludes:

These and many other authors and editors of the IPCC Special Report on Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry had vested interests in reaching unrealistically and unjustifiably optimistic conclusions about the possibility of compensating for emissions with trees. They should therefore have been automatically disqualified from serving on an intergovernmental panel charged with investigating impartially the feasibility and benefits of such "offset" projects...

That's where I've heard of EcoSecurities and SGS before.

In short, the very authors of the original UN climate report that justified the carbon market were themselves poised to profit from that market. And, now, the UN does business directly with firms like Ecosecurities and SGS, enriching the authors of the original report!

Furthermore, the project developers and the "auditors" co-wrote the chapter justifying the carbon offset market! In what other field -- aside from the UN, that is -- would companies and their "auditors" both be permitted to conspire in such a fraudulent manner?

If any of us thought the corruption in the UN ended with the "Oil-for-Food" scandal, it appears we were all sadly mistaken. The UN has no right doing business with any of these firms. By continuing to do so, they are reinforcing America's image of the organization: that it is utterly useless and thoroughly infested with corrupt officials.

Related: The World Rainforest Movement, which buys into anthropogenic global warming (note: I do not) runs a website completely devoted to monitoring the carbon offset trade: SinksWatch.org.

Update: Linked by Pajamas Media. Thanks!

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Energy use dimmed during Earth Hour: North Korea celebrates


Energy authorities say the impact of last night's Earth Hour event was the equivalent of the entire country of North Korea going without lights. Which they do every night.

Kim Jong-Il was said to be pleased with the demonstration.

Update: Linked by Dr. Sanity's Carnival of the Insanities. Thanks!

Sunday, March 23, 2008

What a record year for snowfall meant for a friend's backyard

 
Global warming notwithstanding, it turns out to be a record year for snowfall in many places around the world.

T sent along some before-and-after pictures of his backyard.


June 2006 (a gentle bank descends to a tiny creek, which is hidden by the foliage)

March 2008 (after the most recent 20 inches of snow melted and the resulting flood tore out a good chunk of the backyard)

T wanted to know whether he could sue the town for some out-of-control runoff. I helpfully suggested he go after Al Gore. John Edwards may be available.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Line o' the Day: It's (not) settled

 
Edmonton Journal:

Only about one in three [of 51,000] Alberta earth scientists and engineers believe the culprit behind climate change has been identified, a new poll reported today.

The expert jury is divided, with 26 per cent attributing global warming to human activity like burning fossil fuels and 27 per cent blaming other causes such as volcanoes, sunspots, earth crust movements and natural evolution of the planet.

A 99-per-cent majority believes the climate is changing. But 45 per cent blame both human and natural influences, and 68 per cent disagree with the popular statement that "the debate on the scientific causes of recent climate change is settled."

A mere 51,000 specialists -- licensed to practice by the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicists of Alberta -- were surveyed.

Sunday, March 02, 2008

Barack Obama's Honesty Parade (#309): Energy & Climate

 
BARACK OBAMA HONESTY PARADEBarack Obama on "global warming" (or is it "climate change" now? I forget).

[We must] deal with an energy situation where we are sending $800 million [a] day to some of the most hostile nations on earth and melting the polar ice caps in the process.

Why are we sending $800 million a day to pay overseas?

Because Democrats have blocked all oil exploration around the continental United States.


The accompanying map depicts "The No Zone." This is the region surrounding the United States in which Democrats have blocked oil exploration. From the tiny spit of land within the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to the Continental Shelf, Democrats have uniformly opposed every form of exploration that would allow us to stop sending our funds overseas and give us the time to transition to clean energy technologies.


In the mean time, Cuba has leased drilling rights to foreign countries, which will permit them to drain the Gulf of Mexico of its oil. For example, Cuba recently granted China drilling rights in the Gulf. And, in fact, China will be drilling within 50 miles of Florida.

While countries such as China suck oil out of the Gulf, Democrats continue to stonewall against sensible energy policies.

And are we really "melting the polar ice-caps"?

Actually, the verdict is in: the last twelve months have seen a long drop in world temperatures that literally wipes out a century of warming.


In fact, solar data suggests our concerns should be about global cooling. The sun's 'disturbingly quiet' cycle suggests the possibility of a "Maunder Minimum," which presages a massive cooling event.

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.

Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe...

As for the polar ice caps?

The Antarctic (South Pole) is seeing "record levels of... sea ice":

The Southern Hemisphere sea ice area narrowly surpassed the previous historic maximum of 16.03 million sq. km to 16.17 million sq. km...

And how about the Arctic? On February 15, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that Arctic sea ice has seen a "significant increase" in size following an extremely cold winter.

There's an upside to the extreme cold temperatures northern Canadians have endured in the last few weeks: scientists say it's been helping winter sea ice grow across the Arctic, where the ice shrank to record-low levels last year. Temperatures have stayed well in the -30s C and -40s C range since late January throughout the North, with the mercury dipping past -50 C in some areas. Satellite images are showing that the cold spell is helping the sea ice expand in coverage by about 2 million square kilometres, compared to the average winter coverage in the previous three years... If temperatures remain cold this winter, Langis said winter sea ice coverage will continue to expand.

Energy & Climate

With respect to both energy independence and "climate change", Barack Obama's truthiness leaves a lot to be desired.

I'm Doug Ross and I approved this message.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The verdict is in: Earth in midst of widescale global cooling

 
DailyTech's latest bulletin confirms that the last twelve months have seen a long drop in world temperatures that literally wipes out a century of warming.

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down...

Sounds like I need to sell my hybrid and buy a traditional gas-guzzler. My shpringies are getting frostbitten.

And I wonder how long Al Gore's carbon-offset bunko scam is going to last when penguins start freezing to death.

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Hilarious global warming pic o' the day

 

A Druze man is watched by his wife as he shovels snow from in front of his shop in the village of Sofar, east of the Lebanese capital Beirut (AFP)

Monday, February 18, 2008

Al Gore in Concert

 
Reliapundit notes that $117 billion was spent on "clean energy" in 2007. I wonder if all of this cash changing hands is linked in any way to Al Gore and Michael Milken flitting about the peripheries of the carbon offset trade?

Al Gore says that the Earth has got a fever and the only cure is more cowbell. Or maybe some carbon offsets, which will do about as much good as the cowbell.

Friday, February 08, 2008

The hysteria formerly known as global warming

 
Unremarked upon by the media -- especially as they are co-conspirators in the scam -- is the rebranding of global warming as Climate Change™.

I guess that's what's required as China, South America, central Asia and Antarctica are all experiencing record-setting deep freezes.

Of course, Barack Obama and John McCain are now battling over who can dampen the economy more in order to control the climate.

Meanwhile, the world's scientists are now turning their attention to the issue of global cooling. Anyone need a used copy of An Inconvenient Truth?

Update: Even NOAA reluctantly confirms it's getting colder.

Sunday, February 03, 2008

Crushing Al Gore and his UN global warming profiteers

 
Christopher Monckton shreds the UN's IPCC, the body behind "global warming" hysteria. Read it all.

As a contributor to the IPCC’s 2007 report, I share the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. Yet I and many of my peers in the British House of Lords - through our hereditary element the most independent-minded of lawmakers - profoundly disagree on fundamental scientific grounds with both the IPCC and my co-laureate’s alarmist movie An Inconvenient Truth, which won this year’s Oscar for Best Sci-Fi Comedy Horror.

Two detailed investigations by Committees of the House confirm that the IPCC has deliberately, persistently and prodigiously exaggerated not only the effect of greenhouse gases on temperature but also the environmental consequences of warmer weather.

My contribution to the 2007 report illustrates the scientific problem. The report’s first table of figures - inserted by the IPCC’s bureaucrats after the scientists had finalized the draft, and without their consent - listed four contributions to sea-level rise. The bureaucrats had multiplied the effect of melting ice from the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets by 10.

The result of this dishonest political tampering with the science was that the sum of the four items in the offending table was more than twice the IPCC’s published total. Until I wrote to point out the error, no one had noticed. The IPCC, on receiving my letter, quietly corrected, moved and relabeled the erroneous table, posting the new version on the internet and earning me my Nobel prize.

The shore-dwellers of Bali need not fear for their homes. The IPCC now says the combined contribution of the two great ice-sheets to sea-level rise will be less than seven centimeters after 100 years, not seven meters imminently, and that the Greenland ice sheet (which thickened by 50 cm between 1995 and 2005) might only melt after several millennia, probably by natural causes, just as it last did 850,000 years ago. Gore, mendaciously assisted by the IPCC bureaucracy, had exaggerated a hundredfold.

Recently a High Court judge in the UK listed nine of the 35 major scientific errors in Gore’s movie, saying they must be corrected before innocent schoolchildren can be exposed to the movie. Gore’s exaggeration of sea-level rise was one.

Others being peddled at the Bali conference are that man-made “global warming” threatens polar bears and coral reefs, caused Hurricane Katrina, shrank Lake Chad, expanded the actually-shrinking Sahara, etc.

At the very heart of the IPCC’s calculations lurks an error more serious than any of these. The IPCC says: “The CO2 radiative forcing increased by 20 percent during the last 10 years (1995-2005).” Radiative forcing quantifies increases in radiant energy in the atmosphere, and hence in temperature. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 in 1995 was 360 parts per million. In 2005 it was just 5percent higher, at 378 ppm. But each additional molecule of CO2 in the air causes a smaller radiant-energy increase than its predecessor. So the true increase in radiative forcing was 1 percent, not 20 percent. The IPCC has exaggerated the CO2 effect 20-fold.

Why so large and crucial an exaggeration? Answer: the IPCC has repealed the fundamental physicalthe Stefan-Boltzmann equation - that converts radiant energy to temperature. Without this equation, no meaningful calculation of the effect of radiance on temperature can be done. Yet the 1,600 pages of the IPCC’s 2007 report do not mention it once.

The IPCC knows of the equation, of course. But it is inconvenient. It imposes a strict (and very low) limit on how much greenhouse gases can increase temperature. At the Earth’s surface, you can add as much greenhouse gas as you like (the “surface forcing”), and the temperature will scarcely respond.

That is why all of the IPCC’s computer models predict that 10km above Bali, in the tropical upper troposphere, temperature should be rising two or three times as fast as it does at the surface. Without that tropical upper-troposphere “hot-spot”, the Stefan-Boltzmann law ensures that surface temperature cannot change much.

For half a century we have been measuring the temperature in the upper atmosphere - and it has been changing no faster than at the surface. The IPCC knows this, too. So it merely declares that its computer predictions are right and the real-world measurements are wrong. Next time you hear some scientifically-illiterate bureaucrat say, “The science is settled”, remember this vital failure of real-world observations to confirm the IPCC’s computer predictions. The IPCC’s entire case is built on a guess that the absent hot-spot might exist.

Even if the Gore/IPCC exaggerations were true, which they are not, the economic cost of trying to mitigate climate change by trying to cut our emissions through carbon trading and other costly market interferences would far outweigh any possible climatic benefit.

The international community has galloped lemming-like over the cliff twice before. Twenty years ago the UN decided not to regard AIDS as a fatal infection. Carriers of the disease were not identified and isolated. Result: 25 million deaths in poor countries.

Thirty-five years ago the world decided to ban DDT, the only effective agent against malaria. Result: 40 million deaths in poor countries. The World Health Organization lifted the DDT ban on Sept. 15 last year. It now recommends the use of DDT to control malaria. Dr. Arata Kochi of the WHO said that politics could no longer be allowed to stand in the way of the science and the data. Amen to that.

If we take the heroically stupid decisions now on the table at Bali, it will once again be the world’s poorest people who will die unheeded in their tens of millions, this time for lack of the heat and light and power and medical attention which we in the West have long been fortunate enough to take for granted.

If we deny them the fossil-fueled growth we have enjoyed, they will remain poor and, paradoxically, their populations will continue to increase, making the world’s carbon footprint very much larger in the long run.

As they die, and as global temperature continues to fail to rise in accordance with the IPCC’s laughably-exaggerated predictions, the self-congratulatory rhetoric that is the hallmark of the now-useless, costly, corrupt UN will again be near-unanimously parroted by lazy, unthinking politicians and journalists who ought to have done their duty by the poor but are now - for the third time in three decades - failing to speak up for those who are about to die.

My fellow-participants, there is no climate crisis. The correct policy response to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. Take courage! Do nothing, and save the world’s poor from yet another careless, UN-driven slaughter.

The Telegraph (2006) has more info.

Even after the "hockey stick" graph was exposed, scientific papers apparently confirming its abolition of the medieval warm period appeared. The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found that the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of the scientists who had compiled it had written many of the papers supporting its conclusion.

The UN, echoed by Stern, says the graph isn't important. It is. Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland: now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none.

The Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and nearly all its 160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years, reversing a 6,000-year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes worldwide show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than now. And the snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit temperature is rising (it isn't) but because post-colonial deforestation has dried the air. Al Gore please note.

In some places it was also warmer than now in the Bronze Age and in Roman times. It wasn't CO2 that caused those warm periods. It was the sun. So the UN adjusted the maths and all but extinguished the sun's role in today's warming.

In Monckton's paper, Apocalypse Cancelled, he calmly lays waste to every facet of Al Gore's propaganda.

ALL TEN of the propositions listed below must be proven true if the climate-change “consensus” is to be proven true. The first article considers the first six of the listed propositions and draws the conclusions shown. The second article will consider the remaining four propositions.

Proposition and Conclusion

1. That the debate is over and all credible climate scientists are agreed. False
2. That temperature has risen above millennial variability and is exceptional. Very unlikely
3. That changes in solar irradiance are an insignificant forcing mechanism. False
4. That the last century’s increases in temperature are correctly measured. Unlikely
5. That greenhouse-gas increase is the main forcing agent of temperature. Not proven
6. That temperature will rise far enough to do more harm than good. Very unlikely
7. That continuing greenhouse-gas emissions will be very harmful to life. Unlikely
8. That proposed carbon-emission limits would make a definite difference. Very unlikely
9. That the environmental benefits of remediation will be cost-effective. Very unlikely
10. That taking precautions, just in case, would be the responsible course. False

In short, Monckton painstakingly deconstructs the hype around global warming. An example: concern about rising sea levels.

By 2005, the following islands had exhibited no rise in sea levels at all for the periods shown (Khandekar et al., 2005):

Johnston Island: no sea level rise for 50 years
Tuvalu: no sea level rise for 48 years
Tarawa, Kiribati: no sea level rise for 24 years
Kanton Island: no sea level rise for 28 years
Nauru: no sea level rise for 26 years
Honiara, Solomons: no sea level rise for 26 years
Saipan: no sea level rise for 22 years

Global warming appears to be nothing less than a UN-backed bunko scam that aims to regulate and control the U.S. economy.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

This climate-change situation is getting out of control

 
I spotted this "urgent winter weather" alert this morning. Al Gore is right - this climate-change thing is getting out of hand.

Monday, January 28, 2008

Eerie Portents

 
In Dallas, Texas, a washer-dryer combo suddenly caught on fire.

In Kitchener, Ontario, a dog was covered in freezing rain.

In Antarctica, a massive snow storm prevented aircraft from landing on Roosevelt Island.

In Tokyo, a department store marked down all bath towels for no apparent reason.

On the I-5, traffic suddenly came to a stop, even though there were no accidents.

Near Kenosha, Wisconsin, a tragic snowmobile accident resulted in two fatalities.

Low tide in Brittany, France left dozens of small boats temporarily land-locked.

In Key West, Florida, a kite unexpectedly crashed into the sandy beach.

In Bogota, Colombia, an anthill was mysteriously abandoned by its inhabitants.

A car was crushed in Perth, Australia, after an unexpected storm uprooted trees.

And in Honolulu, a man spit out a rotten tomato onto a picnic table.

This is all happening as we speak. We can only expect more of the same as climate change continues to transform the Earth.

Al Gore explains.

New evidence shows "the climate crisis is significantly worse and unfolding more rapidly than those on the pessimistic side of the IPCC projections had warned us," the former US vice president and climate campaigner told delegates at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos......the North Pole ice cap may disappear entirely during summer months in as little as five years, Gore said.

"This is a planetary emergency. There has never been anything remotely like it in the entire history of human civilisation. We are putting at risk all of human civilisation," he added.

As if to reinforce the point, Al Gore announced a once-in-a-lifetime carbon offset sale. Don't miss out on this unique opportunity to pollute guilt-free.