CO2 TAX CON

2011-05-23T12:03:00.000+01:00

Liberal powerbroker Nick Minchin attack Climate Commission report 'nonsense'

The Australian May 23, 2011 11:22AM

Julia Gillard receives The Critical Decade report from Tim Flannery (left) and Will Steffen in Canberra. Picture: Ray Strange Source: The Australian

LIBERAL powerbroker Nick Minchin has attacked a new report that declares the world is in imminent danger from human-induced climate change as offensive nonsense from known "global warming alarmists".

Senator Minchin, who played a key role in terminating Malcolm Turnbull's leadership over his support for emissions trading, said there was still a legitimate debate over the role of humans in climate change.

“The so-called Climate Commission is a Labor government-appointed committee of known climate alarmists, selectively appointed ... to further the cause of global warming alarmism,” he said following today's release of the commission's first report.

“I think everybody should take anything they say with a grain of salt,” Senator Minchin said.

“What's most offensive is (climate commissioner) Will Steffen suggesting the scientific debate is over.

“That's nonsense because there is a very lively scientific debate about the role of human-induced Co2 emissions in climate change.”

The Climate Commission report says the world has at best 10 years to cut carbon emissions or it will face dangerous atmospheric warming and sea level rises.

Professor Steffen also called today for an end to “fruitless, phoney” debate, saying climate change denial is a luxury the world can no longer afford.

Senator Minchin is retiring in July but he remains a close confidant of Tony Abbott and his views as a party elder are widely sought.

He is on the record as being sceptical of mainstream climate science, saying earlier this year he believed the world was more likely to be cooling than getting hotter.

Senator Minchin said the new report did nothing to further Labor's case for a carbon tax.

“What I think is most frustrating in all of this is this report provides no basis for Australia acting unilaterally on a carbon tax,” he said.

“Given we are responsible for about one per cent of the world's emissions of CO2 and when it's clear that China's additional emissions over the next few decades will completely swamp any reductions in our emissions, anything Australia does will be utterly pointless and have no impact whatsoever on the global climate.”

Greens senator Christine Milne backed the commission's finding that Australia faced a critical decade on climate change, and also called for an end to the debate over whether climate change is real.

“What this report will do is actually help the Australian population see that what we've been having is a phoney debate in Australia that's been run by the sceptics, financed by big business, by coal, by oil around the world,” she said.

Source:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/make-carbon-tax-hurt-julia-gillard-advised/story-fn59niix-1226061007488

2011-04-23T03:24:00.003+01:00

Bias in the Peer Review Process: A Cautionary and Personal Account

by Ross McKitrick

This article appears in the book:

Michaels, Patrick J., 2011: Climate Coup: Global Warming’s Invasion of Our Government and Our Lives. Cato Institute. ISBN: 978-1-935308447

The second chapter in this volume goes to the core of what we consider to be the canon of science, which is the peer reviewed, refereed scientific literature. McKitrick’s and my trials and tribulations over journal publication are similar to those experienced by many other colleagues. Unfortunately, the Climategate e-mails revealed that indeed there has been systematic pressure on journal editors to reject manuscripts not toeing the line about disastrous climate change. Even more unfortunate, my experience and that of others are that the post Climategate environment has made this situation worse, not better. It is now virtually impossible to publish anything against the alarmist grain. The piles of unpublished manuscripts sitting on active scientists’ desks are growing into gargantuan proportions. Surely, one day, there will be an incentive and an initiative to put them in the public domain probably after people realize the enormous costs that will accrue in futile attempts to stop planetary warming.

One interpretation of the infiltration of global warming into so many aspects of our political life is that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, by claiming to be the ‘‘consensus of scientists,’’ is actually defining a ‘‘paradigm’’ in the sense of the late historian of science Thomas Kuhn. To Kuhn, paradigms are overarching logical structures, and the work of ‘‘normal science’’ is the care and feeding of paradigms with data and research findings that confirm that indeed the paradigm is a correct representation of scientific reality.

Kuhn notes that paradigms are very resistant to change, despite data or experiments that don’t ‘‘fit.’’ In his 1962 classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he states:

‘‘In science, . . . novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation. Initially, only the anticipated and usual are experienced even under circumstances where anomaly is later to be observed.1

Consequently, I wasn’t very surprised when the IPCC dismissed, without appropriate logic or citation, findings about systematic errors in global temperature records that Ross McKitrick and I had published in the peer reviewed literature. Nor was I surprised at how resistant the scientific community was to publishing those results or important follow on work.

This is the story of those difficulties with the IPCC and with the keepers of the paradigm. It is a story of how the core of the science literature is becoming one dimensional. How much this has to do with the grief caused to editors by the Climategate gang will never be known; it’s equally possible that the responsible editors were quite sympathetic with the authors of the emails and simply wanted to demonstrate their fealty by excluding work that the Climatgaters wouldn’t like from their journals.

This is a problem with profound consequences. The abject difficulty of publishing virtually anything that concludes that warming is likely to be lower than the current mean projections of the IPCC is creating a remarkable bias in climate science. Unfortunately, policymakers and the political class cannot see what is happening because the absence of these publications gives the appearance of unanimity of science that is hardly there.

—PJM

2011-04-23T03:05:00.000+01:00

Don’t Look Now, But C02 Output Is Falling

Environment: Two years ago, greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. fell to their lowest levels since 1995. The list of reasons carbon dioxide emissions should not be regulated continues to grow.

The Environmental Protection Agency's data show that emissions of what are considered the six main greenhouses gases fell 6.1% in 2009 from their 2008 levels.

Yes, levels increased by 7.3% from 1990 to 2009. But the average annual rate of increase since 1990 has been a mere 0.4%, a data point that doesn't seem worthy of the high-intensity hysteria that's been spread by the alarmists.

In the same year greenhouse emissions fell, the EPA, which should be an acronym for Eternally Panicked and Alarmed, determined "that climate change caused by emissions of greenhouse gases threatens the public's health and the environment." Regarding politics to be more important than science, it has taken it upon itself to regulate carbon dioxide as a "pollutant."

"Climate change is happening now," the EPA has claimed, "and humans are contributing to it."

This is the same EPA, it was revealed in congressional testimony last week, that ignores the negative impact its regulations have on jobs, even though an executive order requires EPA rule makers to protect job creation. And it's the same EPA that plans to regulate CO2 without congressional approval.

If the agency is so keen on regulating carbon dioxide, maybe it should turn its attention to China, which has surpassed the U.S. in CO2 emissions. While U.S. greenhouse gas emissions increased 7.3% from 1990 to 2009, China's carbon dioxide emissions have soared roughly 175% since 1999. If CO2 emissions must be cut, then China is where the cutting has to start.

If not, it doesn't matter what the U.S. does. For every part per million of carbon dioxide that Americans cut, China, and its ever-burgeoning population and growing economy, will be pumping out even more.

Fortunately, there's no reason for any nation to cut its carbon dioxide emissions. CO2 is not a pollutant in the usual sense. It is, in the words of John R. Christy, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Alabama, "a plant food."

"The green world we see around us would disappear if not for atmospheric CO2," Christy says.

"These plants largely evolved at a time when the atmospheric CO2 concentration was many times what it is today," he adds. "Indeed, numerous studies indicate the present biosphere is being invigorated by the human-induced rise of CO2."

It is because of its presence in everything from breathing to driving to manufacturing to reading at home under the lights that CO2 makes a strong leverage point for those who want bureaucratic control over the rest of us, says Richard S. Lindzen, a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

And if CO2 continues to fall, or remains nearly flat, what will the alarmists do? Will environmentalists find a new bogeyman? They will. But they better hurry. The time they have left to demonize CO2 is running short.

Source:

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/569632/201104191841/A-Green-World-Needs-Its-CO2.htm

2011-04-21T04:34:00.000+01:00

The Climate Refugee Hoax

Junk Science: Five years ago, the U.N. predicted that by 2010 some 50 million people would be fleeing climate change, rising seas, mega-hurricanes and so on. Instead, no islands have sunk and their populations are booming.

It's been said that when you make a prediction and provide a date, never give a number, and if you give a number, never provide a date. That way you can always claim to be right, even when you are wrong, and that it just hasn't happened yet.

The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) made that mistake in 2005 when it produced a map showing areas to be impacted by the effects of climate change. These areas would produce 50 million "climate refugees" driven out by rising sea levels, increased frequency and ferocity of hurricanes, disruptions in food production, etc.

As related by blogger Gavin Atkins, who unearthed the forgotten prophecy of doom, some of these areas have conducted censuses and if they are facing any problems at all, it's caused by their rapid and sustained population growth. If anybody is leaving any of the danger zones, it's because they are getting too crowded.

For example, the latest census report shows that the population of the Solomon Islands near Australia has passed a half-million, up 100,009 in the last decade. The Seychelles, in the Indian Ocean, has seen its population rise from 81,755 in 2002 to 88,311.

The Bahamas, a favorite vacation spot for those rich capitalists plundering the earth, has added more than 50,000 people. China's six fastest-growing cities are in the middle of one of UNEP's climate change-affected danger zones, as are many U.S. coastal cities. At last report there was no mass migration inland. Apparently these endangered populations didn't get the memo.

In 2005, Britain's Guardian reported the refugee prediction by Janos Bogardi of the Institute for Environment and Human Security at the United Nations University in Bonn. He spoke of "well-founded fears that the number of people fleeing untenable environmental conditions may grow exponentially as the world experiences the effects of climate change." Well-founded?

The article noted that New Zealand had agreed to accept the 11,600 inhabitants of the low-lying Pacific island state Tuvalu if rising sea levels swamp the country. At last report, Tuvalu is alive and well and above water.

Apocalyptic changes forecast by climate change alarmists, according to Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Morner, former head of the International Commission on Sea Level Change, are not in the cards. Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10 cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10 cm."

Source:

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/569069/201104131900/The-Climate-Refugee-Hoax.aspx

2011-04-03T03:16:00.000+01:00

Prof. Dr. Vincent Courtillot

Scientifically Exposing The Problems With IPCC Science

http://www.eike-klima-energie.eu/">

2011-03-28T07:53:00.001+01:00

Dr David Evans, Carbon Accounting Modeler, Says It's A Scam.

Dr David Evans’ address to the Anti-Carbon-Tax rally, Perth Australia, 23 March 2011.

Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen.

The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro thin half-truths and misunderstandings. I am a scientistwho was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence, was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic. Watching this issue unfold has been amusing but, lately, worrying. This issue is tearing society apart, making fools and liars out of our politicians.

Let’s set a few things straight.

The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now cheat and lie outrageously to maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.

Let’s be perfectly clear. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and other things being equal, the more carbon dioxide in the air, the warmer the planet. Every bit of carbon dioxide that we emit warms the planet. But the issue is not whether carbon dioxide warms the planet, but how much.

Most scientists, on both sides, also agree on how much a given increase in the level of carbon dioxide raises the planet’s temperature, if just the extra carbon dioxide is considered. These calculations come from laboratory experiments; the basic physics have been well known for a century.

The disagreement comes about what happens next.

The planet reacts to that extra carbon dioxide, which changes everything. Most critically, the extra warmth causes more water to evaporate from the oceans. But does the water hang around and increase the height of moist air in the atmosphere, or does it simply create more clouds and rain? Back in 1980, when the carbon dioxide theory started, no one knew. The alarmists guessed that it would increase the height of moist air around the planet, which would warm the planet even further, because the moist air is also a greenhouse gas.

This is the core idea of every official climate model: for each bit of warming due to carbon dioxide, they claim it ends up causing three bits of warming due to the extra moist air. The climate models amplify the carbon dioxide warming by a factor of three – so two thirds of their projected warming is due to extra moist air (and other factors), only one third is due to extra carbon dioxide.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that. Hardly anyone in the public does, but it’s the core of the issue. All the disagreements, lies, and misunderstanding spring from this. The alarmist case is based on this guess about moisture in the atmosphere, and there is simply no evidence for the amplification that is at the core of their alarmism. Which is why the alarmists keep so quiet about it and you’ve never heard of it before. And it tells you what a poor job the media have done in covering this issue.

Weather balloons had been measuring the atmosphere since the 1960s, many thousands of them every year. The climate models all predict that as the planet warms, a hot-spot of moist air will develop over the tropics about 10km up, as the layer of moist air expands upwards into the cool dry air above. During the warming of the late 1970s, 80s, and 90s, the weather balloons found no hot-spot. None at all. Not even a small one. This evidence proves that the climate models are fundamentally flawed, that they greatly overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide.

This evidence first became clear around the mid 1990s.

At this point official “climate science” stopped being a science. You see, in science empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide theory — that just happens to keep them in well-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their government masters.

There are now several independent pieces of evidence showing that the earth responds to the warming due to extra carbon dioxide by dampeningthe warming. Every long-lived natural system behaves this way, counteracting any disturbance, otherwise the system would be unstable. The climate system is no exception, and now we can prove it.

But the alarmists say the exact opposite, that the climate system amplifies any warming due to extra carbon dioxide, and is potentially unstable. Surprise surprise, their predictions of planetary temperature made in 1988 to the US Congress, and again in 1990, 1995, and 2001, have all proved much higher than reality.

They keep lowering the temperature increases they expect, from 0.30C per decade in 1990, to 0.20C per decade in 2001, and now 0.15C per decade – yet they have the gall to tell us “it’s worse than expected”. These people are not scientists. They over-estimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide, selectively deny evidence, and now they cheat and lie to conceal the truth.

One way they cheat is in the way they measure temperature.

The official thermometers are often located in the warm exhaust of air conditioning outlets, over hot tarmac at airports where they get blasts of hot air from jet engines, at wastewater plants where they get warmth from decomposing sewage, or in hot cities choked with cars and buildings. Global warming is measured in tenths of a degree, so any extra heating nudge is important. In the US, nearly 90% of official thermometers surveyed by volunteers violate official siting requirements that they not be too close to an artificial heating source. Nearly 90%! The photos of these thermometers are on the Internet; you can get to them via the corruption paper at my site, sciencespeak.com. Look at the photos, and you’ll never trust a government climate scientist again.

They place their thermometers in warm localities, and call the results “global” warming. Anyone can understand that this is cheating. They say that 2010 is the warmest recent year, but it was only the warmest at various airports, selected air conditioners, and certain car parks.

Global temperature is also measured by satellites, which measure nearly the whole planet 24/7without bias. The satellites say the hottest recent year was 1998, and that since 2001 the global temperature has leveled off.

So it’s a question of trust.

If it really is warming up as the government climate scientists say, why do they present only the surface thermometer results and not mention the satellite results? And why do they put their thermometers near artificial heating sources? This is so obviously a scam now.

So what is really going on with the climate?

The earth has been in a warming trend since the depth of the Little Ice Age around 1680. Human emissions of carbon dioxide were negligible before 1850 and have nearly all come after WWII, so human carbon dioxide cannot possibly have caused the trend. Within the trend, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation causes alternating global warming and cooling for 25 – 30 years at a go in each direction. We have just finished a warming phase, so expect mild global cooling for the next two decades.

We are now at an extraordinary juncture.

Official climate science, which is funded and directed entirely by government, promotes a theory that is based on a guess about moist air that is now a known falsehood. Governments gleefully accept their advice, because the only way to curb emissions are to impose taxes and extend government control over all energy use. And to curb emissions on a world scale might even lead to world government — how exciting for the political class!

A carbon tax?

Even if Australia stopped emitting all carbon dioxide tomorrow, completely shut up shop and went back to the stone age, according to the official government climate models it would be cooler in 2050 by about 0.015 degrees. But their models exaggerate tenfold – in fact our sacrifices would make the planet in 2050 a mere 0.0015 degrees cooler!

Sorry, but you’ve been had.

Finally, to those of you who still believe the planet is in danger from our carbon dioxide emissions: sorry, but you’ve been had. Yes carbon dioxide a cause of global warming, but it’s so minor it’s not worth doing much about.

————————————————————————————

Dr David Evans consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part-time 2008 to 2010, modeling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. Evans is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees including a PhD from Stanford University in electrical engineering. The area of human endeavor with the most experience and sophistication in dealing with feedbacks and analyzing complex systems is electrical engineering, and the most crucial and disputed aspects of understanding the climate system are the feedbacks. The evidence supporting the idea that CO₂ emissions were the main cause of global warming reversed itself from 1998 to 2006, causing Evans to move from being a warmist to a skeptic.

Source:

http://www.climatedepot.com/r/10313/Aussie-Scientist-Dr-David-Evans-former-Carbon-Accounting-Modeler-Now-Says-Its-a-Scam

2011-03-23T10:59:00.001Z

Helmut Schmidt Calls For IPCC Inquiry

Sunday, 06 March 2011 12:07 Dr. Benny Peiser

In a keynote speech to the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Germany's most eminent science organisation, Helmut Schmidt,Germany's former Chancellor, has cast serious doubt on the integrity and credibility of the IPCC and called for an independent, scientific investigation into the IPCC's questionable practices:

Responsibility of Scientific Research in the 21st Century. Address by Helmut Schmidt to the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin, 11 January 2011

Global Warming: In addition to all the aforementioned problems caused by humans, we are also concerned, at the same time, by the phenomenon of global warming and its alleged consequences. We know that there have always been naturally occurring ice ages and warm periods; what we don't know is how significant the human-induced contribution to present and future global warming is and will be.

The climate policy adopted by many governments is still in its infancy. The publications provided by an international group of scientists (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC) have encountered skepticism, especially since some of their researchers have shown themselves to be fraudsters (Betrüger). In any case, some governments' publicly stated targets are far less scientific, but rather politically endorsed.

It seems to me that the time has come that one of our top scientific organisations should scrutinise, under the microscope, the work of the IPCC, in a critical and realistical way, and then present the resulting conclusions to the German public in a comprehensible manner. [...]

Full lecture (in German) here

Source:

http://www.thegwpf.org/the-climate-record/2591-helmut-schmidt-calls-for-ipcc-inquiry.html

2011-03-22T13:51:00.000Z

German Physicist Slams Climate Science, Says “Climate Politics Is Grand Déjà Vu Of Communist East Germany”

Prof. Knut Löschke, a solid state physicist, who conducted research until 1986, founded PC-Ware AG, and then turned it into a European IT company before leaving in 2009, had some harsh words about climate science and policy in an interview with the magazine Smart Investor.

: Dr. Knut Löschke

This is reported in the German realist blog Ökowatch. Dr. Löschke:

What is happening with regards to the climate hypothesis today is that profound and far-reaching conclusions are being based on pure suspicions. That’s religion, and not science. There are also many other well-founded hypotheses on climate dynamics that allow completely other conclusions to be drawn. But strangely, they are being massively suppressed – simply because they don’t accommodate the political concept of rescuing the planet. That’s propaganda, manipulation, suppression of the freedom of expression and demagoguery. As ‘an educated citizen of former communist East Germany’, I’m experiencing grand déjà-vu.”

Today Löschke is also honorary professor at the Leipzig Technical University, a member of the supervisory board of the Deutsche Bahn AG (German Railway) and a board member of Softline AG. In the interview with Smart Investor he added:

Rescuing the climate – which is absolute nonsense – and the discussion about energy systems and energy policy, which is absolutely necessary, are unfortunately all getting thrown into one pot and mixed into a formless slop. Moreover, environmental protection is getting lumped with ‘climate protection’, which in turn is only harming the correct idea of environmental protection. Not only does the German Railway (Deutsche Bundesbahn) have to preoccupy itself with the topic of energy, but so do many other large energy consumers. Not in relation to “climate”, but in relation to economics and environmental protection.”

Smart Investor can be ordered in a printed edition here: http://www.smartinvestor.de/.

==================================================
Note: Ökowatch commits to be an objective, realist blogsite, and is led by leading German analysts of climate science and policy. Its focus is presenting the merits and arguments of both sides of the issue with the aim of reaching rational conculsions. It’s in both German and English. Ökowatch contributing authors:

Heinrich Bonnenberg
Benny Peiser
Dirk Maxeiner
Steffen Hentrich
Fabian Heinzel
Peter Heller
Rudolf Kipp
Michael Krüger
Jim Manzi
Michael Miersch
Burkhard Müller-Ullrich

Source:

http://notrickszone.com/2011/03/10/german-physicist-slams-climate-science-says-climate-politics-is-grand-deja-vu-of-communist-east-germany/

2011-03-22T13:38:00.001Z

Global warming down under: 10 little facts

by Professor Bob Carter

Control the language, and you control the outcome of any debate

Ten dishonest slogans about global warming, and ten little facts.

Each of the following ten numbered statements reproduces verbatim, or almost verbatim, statements made recently by Australian government leaders, and repeated by their media and other supporters. The persons making these arguments might be termed (kindly) climate-concerned citizens or (less kindly, but accurately) as global warming alarmists.
Despairing of ever hearing sense from such people, some of whom have already attributed the cause of the devastating Japanese earthquake to global warming, a writer from the well regarded American Thinker has badged them as “idiot global warming fanatics”.
Be that as it may, most of the statements below, self-evidently, were crafted as slogans, and all conform with the obnoxious and dishonest practice of political spin – in which, of course, the citizens of Australia have been awash for many years. The statements also depend heavily upon corrupt wordsmithing with propaganda intent, a technique that international Green lobbyists are both brilliant at and relentless in practising.
The ten statements below comprise the main arguments that are made in public in justification for the government’s intended new tax on carbon dioxide. Individually and severally these arguments are without merit. That they are intellectually pathetic too is apparent from my brief commentary on each.
It is a blight on Australian society that an incumbent government, and the great majority of media reporters and commentators, continue to propagate these scientific and social inanities.
1. We must address carbon (sic) pollution (sic) by introducing a carbon (sic) tax.
The argument is not about carbon or a carbon tax, but rather about carbon dioxide emissions and a carbon dioxidetax, to be levied on the fuel and energy sources that power the Australian economy.
Carbon dioxide is a natural and vital trace gas in Earth’s atmosphere, an environmental benefit without which our planetary ecosystems could not survive. Increasing carbon dioxide makes many plants grow faster and better, and helps to green the planet.
To call atmospheric carbon dioxide a pollutant is an abuse of language, logic and science.
2. We need to link much more closely with the climate emergency.
There is no “climate emergency”; the term is a deliberate lie. Global average temperature at the end of the 20^th century fell well within the bounds of natural climate variation, and was in no way unusually warm, or cold, in geological terms.
Earth’s temperature is currently cooling slightly.
3. Putting a price on carbon (sic) will punish the big polluters (sic).
A price on carbon dioxide will impose a deliberate financial penalty on all energy users, but especially energy-intensive industries. These imaginary “big polluters” are part of the bedrock of the Australian economy. Any cost impost on them will be passed straight down to consumers.
It is consumers of all products who will ultimately pay, not the industrialists or their shareholders.
4. Putting a price on carbon (sic) is the right thing to do; it’s in our nation’s interest.
The greatest competitive advantage of the Australian economy is cheap energy generated by coal-fired power stations.
To levy an unnecessary tax on this energy source is economic vandalism that will destroy jobs and reduce living standards for all Australians.
5. Putting a price on carbon (sic) will result in lower carbon dioxide emissions.
Economists know well that an increase in price of some essential things causes little reduction in usage. This is true for both energy (power) and petrol, two commodities that will be particularly hit by a tax on carbon dioxide emissions.
Norway has had an effective tax on carbon dioxide since the early 1990s, and the result has been a 15% INCREASE in emissions.
At any reasonable level ($20-50/t), a carbon dioxide tax will result in no reduction in emissions.
6. We must catch up with the rest of the world, who are already taxing carbon dioxide emissions.
They are not. All hope of a global agreement on emissions reduction has collapsed with the failure of the Copenhagen and Cancun climate meetings. The world’s largest emitters (USA and China) have made it crystal clear that they will not introduce carbon dioxide tax or emissions trading.
The Chicago Climate Exchange has collapsed, chaos and deep corruption currently manifests the European exchange and some US states are withdrawing from anti-carbon dioxide schemes.
Playing “follow the leader” is not a good idea when the main leader (the EU) has a sclerotic economy characterised by lack of employment and the flight of manufacturers overseas.
7. Australia should show leadership, by setting an example that other countries will follow.
Self-delusion doesn’t come any stronger than this.
For Australia to introduce a carbon dioxide tax ahead of the large emitting nations is to render our whole economy to competitive and economic disadvantage for no gain whatsoever.
8. We must act, and the earlier we act on climate change the less painful it will be.
The issue at hand is global warming, not the catch-all, deliberately ambiguous term climate change.
Trying to prevent hypothetical “dangerous” warming by taxing carbon dioxide emissions will be ineffectual, and is all pain for no gain.
9. The cost of action on carbon (sic) pollution (sic) is less than the cost of inaction.
This statement is fraudulent. Implementing a carbon dioxidetax will carry large costs for workers and consumers, but bring no measurable cooling (or other change) for future climate.
For Australia, the total cost for a family of four of implanting a carbon dioxide tax will exceed $2,500/yr* – whereas even eliminating all of Australia’s emissions might prevent planetary warming of 0.01 deg. C by 2100.
10. There is no do-nothing option in tackling climate change.
Indeed.
However, it is also the case that there is no demonstrated problem of “dangerous” global warming. Instead, Australia continues to face many self-evident problems of natural climate change and hazardous natural climate events. A national climate policy is clearly needed to address these issues.
The appropriate, cost-effective policy to deal with Victorian bushfires, Queensland floods, droughts, northern Australian cyclones and long-term cooling or warming trends is the same.
It is to prepare carefully for, and efficaciously deal with and adapt to, all such events and trends whether natural or human-caused, as and when they happen. Spending billions of dollars on expensive and ineffectual carbon dioxide taxes serves only to reduce wealth and our capacity to address these only too real world problems.
Preparation for, and adaptation to, all climate hazard is the key to formulation of a sound national climate policy.
Professor Bob Carter is a geologist, environmental scientist and Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Notes:
*Assuming a tax rate of $25/tonne of CO₂, and Australia’s emissions being 550 million tonnes, indicates a total cost of $13.8 billion. Spread across a population of 22 million persons, that equates with $627/person/year.
This essay originally appeared in Quadrant online and was reposted here at the invitation of Dr. Carter
For more information:
Australian Climate Science Coalition
The Carbon Sense Coalition
Institute of Public Affairs
Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC)
joannenova.com.au

Source:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/13/global-warming-10-little-facts/

2011-03-22T12:15:00.000Z

Will The Real Prime Minister Of Australia Please Step Forward

2011-03-11T05:50:00.000Z

New study affirms natural climate change

A new paper affirms the earth’s long, moderate, natural climate cycle. Dr. U.R. Rao, former chair of India’s Space Research Organization, says solar variations and cosmic rays account for 40 percent of the world’s recent global warming.

January 31, 2011

by DENNIS AVERY

CHURCHVILLE, VA—It’s nice when people validate your work. Fred Singer and I—co-authors of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years—are currently basking in the glow of a new paper that affirms the earth’s long, moderate, natural climate cycle. The study is by Dr. U.R. Rao, former chair of India’s Space Research Organization. He says solar variations and cosmic rays account for 40 percent of the world’s recent global warming.

Dr. Rao says the data between 1960 and 2005 show lots fewer cosmic rays hitting the earth, due to a periodic expansion of the sun’s magnetic field. The bigger solar magnetic field blocked many of the cosmic rays that would otherwise have hit earth. Fewer cosmic rays hitting the earth meant fewer water droplets shattering in our atmosphere, and thus fewer of the low, wet clouds that deflect solar heat back into space. So the earth warmed.

Fred and I tried to tell the world in 2007 that the moderate 1500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle was the cause of the warming since 1850, based on historic and paleoclimatic evidence. The cosmic ray linkage was put forth in 2008 by Henrik Svensmark of Denmark. The UN’s panel on climate change dismissed that whole approach, claiming the variations in the sun’s irradiance were far too small to account for the rapid warming from 1976–98.

The flaw in the UN reasoning is clear, however. The alarmists claim the global warming since 1976 has been too rapid to be caused by natural forces, and therefore must be man-made. However, the earth’s Industrial Revolution went global after 1945—releasing the first big flush of CO2 emissions. That burst of greenhouse gases should have sharply boosted the earth’s temperatures. Instead, the earth’s temperature declined from 1940–75.

Commenting on Rao’s paper, V. Ramanathan of the U.S.-based Scripps Institute of Oceanography says, “The observed rapid warming trends during the last 40 years cannot be accounted for by trends in [cosmic rays].” But didn’t earth’s warming from 1915–1940, too early to blame on CO2, move just about as fast for just about as long as the “unnatural” warming from 1976–98?

Did human greenhouse emissions account for the other 60 percent of our Modern Warming? Well, a modern city is fully capable of warming its own temperatures by 7 degrees C or more through expanded brick and blacktop and lost greenery. A huge number of rural weather stations have been dropped from the rolls in recent years, putting our thermometers still more heavily in debt to Urban Heat Islands.

A study by Dr. Eugenia Kalnay of the University of Maryland says 40 percent of our net temperature increase since 1940 was actually caused by expanding urban heat islands and land use changes. Since the official net warming over that period is only about 0.2 degree C, that doesn’t leave much for Al Gore to deplore.

Nor do these studies offer much support for the EPA’s recent finding that global warming presents “public endangerment.” One of EPA’s own senior scientists produced a contrary evaluation, but he’s been retired and his paper has been ignored up by the government and the mass media.

India may be the most scientifically advanced country that refuses to agree the current global warming is man-made. Dr. Rao’s paper has just been accepted by India’s most prestigious science journal, Current Science.

Sources

1) The Hindustan Times, January 21, 2011.
2) E. Kalney and M. Cai. “Estimating the Impact of Urbanization and Land Use on U.S. Surface Temperature Trends: Preliminary Report,” Nature 423 (29 May 2003): 528-31.

source:

http://www.cfact.org/a/1875/New-study-affirms-natural-climate-change?utm_source=CFACT+Updates&utm_campaign=331f46161b-Can%27t_sell_warming_Call_it_clean_energy3_7_2011&utm_medium=email

2011-03-11T05:42:00.003Z

UNICEF GOES INSANE WITH THE HELP OF A C4 NEWS PRESENTER

2011-03-02T00:12:00.001Z

Beware the global warming fascists: Johnny Ball on how he has been vilified for daring to question green orthodoxy

At London’s Royal Court Theatre last week, a new play opened to rave reviews. It’s about an environmental scientist who — horror of horrors — doesn’t believe in global warming.
The play is called The Heretic and, though I haven’t seen it yet, I could already sink to my knees in gratitude. Because in my own quiet and reasonable way, I am that global warming heretic.
In the past decade or so I’ve been mocked, vilified, besmirched — I’ve even been booed off a theatre stage — simply for expressing the view that the case for global warming and climate change, and in particular the emphasis on the damage caused by carbon dioxide, the so-called greenhouse gas that is going to do for us all, has been massively over-stated.
Demonised: Johnny Ball, pictured with DJ daughter Zoe, has faced a vicious campaign because of his views on climate change and greenhouse gases
For daring to take this contrarian view, I’ve lost bookings, had talks cancelled and been the subject of a sinister internet campaign against me that only came to an end following the intervention of the police.
There was even a painful moment recently when if you Googled my name, the second site that came up mysteriously redirected you to a site offering explicit pornographic pictures. Nothing to do with me, I hasten to add, and one call was enough to quickly rectify the problem, but I fear more damage had been done.
For taking an intellectual stand, my name and reputation have been comprehensively trashed. And something very similar has happened to Dr David Bellamy, who has never been shy about expressing his belief that climate change is an entirely natural phenomenon. His media career, particularly in television, has suffered as a result.
Britain seems to have become a remarkably intolerant place, a place where healthy debate seems to be stifled rather than encouraged.
But am I going to bow to this bullying and keep quiet? No I am not, and for one simple reason.
As someone who has dedicated his life to popularising science and mathematics for young people, I find it hard — hurtful even — to be cast in the role of villain.
Blinded, maybe even brainwashed by the climate-change zealots, we are spending so much money on reducing carbon emissions that there is a danger of us bankrupting ourselves — and future generations — to solve a problem that in the opinions of a growing number of scientists and opinion-formers has been wildly exaggerated.
To put it another way, those who have been worshipping so ardently at the altar of reduced carbon emissions — and how quickly they adopted the messianic zeal and intolerance of a religion — may find that they have been deifying not just a false god but a ruinously expensive one, too.
As someone who has dedicated his life to popularising science and mathematics for young people, I find it hard — hurtful even — to be cast in the role of villain. I’m also aware that many of the people who have been kind enough to enjoy my TV programmes over the years are surprised to hear me — nice, cheery, Johnny Ball — expressing such strong and arguably provocative views. So let me explain how I came to them.
A quarter of a century ago, when I was churning out television series almost twice a year, I hit upon a successful way of working. For every series of six science shows, I would come up with seven ideas — six plus a spare — and every one of those shows, including the spares, got made. Except for one: about renewable energy, a subject then very much in its infancy.
I instinctively warmed to the almost Heath Robinson-like engineering behind those early attempts to harvest the energy of the wind and the waves, the tide and the sun.
But there was a big problem: Hard as I tried, I couldn’t make the sums add up. These devices either didn’t produce anything like enough energy, or the energy they produced was too expensive to be economically viable.
None came close to reproducing the power of the physical process that has driven our civilisation since the Industrial Revolution — the heating of water. Be it by charcoal, coal, gas or nuclear energy, it’s warmed until the temperature approaches 100C, and it suddenly expands to become power-generating, engine-driving steam.
High price: Producing electricity using gas or nuclear power costs less than 3p per unit, but wind power costs 9.8p
Until renewable energy could do something like that, I couldn’t see how it had a serious future. I checked the sums — they were right — and walked away. The show never got made.
Which would be completely unimportant but for one thing. In the 25 years since, the ‘science’ of global warming and climate change, with its carefully selected graphs of rising temperatures, sea-level and CO2 levels (by the way, other carefully selected graphs can show the exact opposite) has all but conquered the world, and no opposing view is to be tolerated.
The cult of reducing carbon emissions shapes everything we do, at local, national and global levels. The very future of the planet, we are told, hangs on our dispensing with fossil fuels and adopting renewable energy sources as quickly as possible.
But here’s the problem — 25 years may have passed since I tried to make that TV programme and the technology has improved a little, but the sums still don’t add up.
I’m quite sure renewable sources have a minor contribution to make to our energy needs, but they still don’t produce anything like enough energy at anything resembling the right price to offer a viable future.
If it costs 2.3p to produce one unit of electricity using gas, it costs 2.5p to produce the same electricity using nuclear energy and perhaps 2.9p using coal. Using wind power, the cost is an astonishing 9.8p.
In the face of such figures, most reasonable people interested in cleaner, sustainable energy would surely go off and build carbon-free, nuclear power stations or gas-fuelled ones.
David Bellamy's TV career has suffered because he dared to express his views that climate change was a natural phenomenon
But advocates of global warming with their dire warnings about the evils of CO2 emissions have got too firm a hold, their thinking become too widely accepted, for anything that sensible to be an option. Instead, they’re changing the sums, and manipulating the maths.
The result is a growing burden of green taxes, renewable energy subsidies and unseen charges that will cost us — and particularly our children — billions and billions of pounds.
Already, these additional costs are adding 50 per cent to all our energy bills, and 50 per cent to air-fares. At a time of severe economic hardship, when thousands of jobs are being lost and households struggle to make ends meet, this is a potentially ruinous burden.
But it’s also — in my opinion and that of a growing number of others — an unnecessary burden. I’m all for the careful use of the Earth’s resources and I applaud the many breakthroughs that have been made both in the recycling of these scarce resources and in the battle against environmental pollution.
I want a clean, green planet. But this obsession with controlling carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere is now as dangerous as it is ridiculous.
Along with water and oxygen, carbon dioxide is one of the three basic requirements for sustainable life. And yet this natural gas — only 4 per cent of which is produced by man — has been branded as the greatest threat to the future of this planet. Well, forgive me, but I think that’s nonsense.
My own view, for what it’s worth, is that the water content of air has far more impact on temperature than carbon dioxide levels do. It’s a common-sense belief based on simple observation — we all know the impact that a layer of cloud has on temperature — and basic chemistry that tells us that when we burn any sort of fossil fuel two molecules of water are produced for every one molecule of carbon dioxide.
But any increase in air temperature produced by raised water vapour levels will be minor and largely self-regulating. So climate change is absolutely normal and in my lifetime has never yet resulted in any signs that should cause alarm.
Already I can hear those wholeheartedly committed to the global warming cause queuing up to cast the first stone at such blatant heresy. But should we trust them?
Not if they include the likes of Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who last year was forced to admit the panel had exaggerated the rate at which Himalayan glaciers were shrinking. Or Dr Phil Jones, the Cambridge climatologist at the centre of a scandal after he was accused of manipulating and supressing climate change data.
Or the scientists who realised that a 0.7C rise in global temperatures over the past 100 years was hardly the stuff of environmental Armageddon, so they looked for a particularly chilly year against which to compare today’s figures, and found 1961.
Suddenly, global temperatures had gone up at 0.7 degrees in just 50 years: now, that was more like it.
My own view, for what it’s worth, is that the water content of air has far more impact on temperature than carbon dioxide levels do.
It’s statistics like these that give rise to the sort of absurd pronouncement we saw at the Copenhagen climate change conference late in 2009, where it was grandly announced that at a cost of $100 billion a year we might just be able to limit the increase in global temperatures to 1.5C by the end of the 21st century.
I regard that as an almost unimaginable amount of money effectively being poured down the drain, taking the futures of millions of young people with it. And that makes even a mild-mannered chap like me very angry.
I’ve had the good fortune to live in a period when things have always got progressively better, where each ten years is always a bit better than the previous ten years, where children can grow up pretty safe in the knowledge that they will enjoy better lives than their parents. Until now, when we’re suddenly told it all has to stop.
I don’t make television programmes any more, but I do still visit 80-100 schools a year and I know what children are taught about climate change, and what the result is. They accept it absolutely and will solemnly tell you that they always turn off lights, close doors and, at school, have installed solar panels on the roof.
They tell me how worried they are about global warming, rising sea-levels and, having seen alarmist films such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, the imminent prospect of all human life being wiped out.
And this breaks my heart. I want children to be excited about the future, not cowed by it. I want them to grow up in a world which is going to be better than the one their parents knew, not significantly worse. I want them to grow up excited by technology and new inventions, not worrying about where the electricity is going to come from to power them.
Efficient: Power stations are as working at twice the level they were 18 years ago and their safety record is second to none
And that exciting future could still be theirs. There is plenty of power out there if we’ll only let them have it.
Gas-powered power stations are now twice as efficient as they were 18 years ago, while the safety record of nuclear power in Western Europe is second to none. We ought to be investing in these, not ridiculous and highly inefficient wind farms that are only being built because of the huge government subsidies and guaranteed profits that are being offered.
People have a right to know the truth, but it’s so difficult to break the strangle-hold the global warming gang have on the debate. David Bellamy can’t get on television and I can’t even get a ten-minute meeting with the controller of Radio 4.
Maybe that doesn’t matter, maybe our time has passed. But what does matter is that the view held by the so-called climate change sceptics must be heard too.
We’re not going to hell in a handcart because of some tiny increase in atmospheric CO2 levels, but hell is certainly where we’ll end up if we insist on spending hundreds of billions of unaffordable pounds trying to correct a problem that is grossly over-stated.
It’s time to get back to the real science and the real sums. It’s time to get back to the future which, if we adopt the right policies, will be brighter than we can yet imagine.

source
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1359350/Zoe-Balls-father-Johnny-vilified-questioning-global-warming.html#comments

2011-02-21T10:25:00.005Z

American Senator Jim Inhofe confronted by catastrophist environmentalists.

http://www.youtube.com/jiminhofepressoffice

2011-02-17T14:22:00.000Z

Simple Question: If the science is settled why is this happening?

Answer : Because it's not about the science it's about Money, Power and Politics.

2011-02-17T13:58:00.000Z

The Nazi Origins of Apocalyptic Global Warming Theory

By Mark Musser February 15, 2011

One of the primary pioneering theorists on apocalyptic global warming is Guenther Schwab (1902-2006), an Austrian Nazi.[i] In 1958, Schwab wrote a fictional novel built off of Goethe's (1749-1832) Faustian religious play entitled "Dance with the Devil." While a few scientists since the late 1800's had contemplated the possibility of minor global warming coming from industrial pollution, Schwab used Goethe's dramatic approach to convert the theory into an apocalyptic crisis. The book outlines many looming environmental emergencies, including anthropogenic global warming. Guenther Schwab's very popular novel was an apocalyptic game changer. By the early 1970's, it had been translated into several languages and had sold over a million copies.

At one point in his novel, Schwab opines on the fragile relationship between oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Assuming the planet has only about 100 years remaining, Schwab frets over the continuing rise of carbon dioxide that "will absorb and hold fast the warmth given out by the earth. This will cause the climate to become milder and the Polar ice will begin to thaw. As a result, there will be a rise in the level of the ocean and whole continents will be flooded."

Schwab had been a strong nature lover since boyhood, and by the 1920's he became very active in the emerging environmental movement in Austria. Later, he joined the Nazi Party. While this may sound odd to many who have bought into the Marxian propaganda over the years that the Nazis were right wing capitalistic extremists, greens who signed up for the Nazi Party were actually very typical of the day. The most widelyrepresented group of people in the Nazi Party was the greens, and Guenther Schwab was just one of among many. The greens' interest in lonely places found a solitary niche in the singleness of Adolf Hitler, who ruled the Third Reich from his spectacular mountain compound, high in the Bavarian Alps called theBerghof. In English, this could easily be translated as Mountain Home, Bavaria.

After the war in the 1950's, Guenther Schwab's brand of environmentalism also played afundamental role in the development of the green anti-nuclear movement in West Germany. The dropping of the atom bomb and the nuclear fallout of the Cold War helped to globalize the greens into an apocalyptic 'peace' movement with Guenther Schwab being one of its original spokesmen. The unprecedented destruction in Germany brought on by industrialized warfare never before seen in the history of the world only served to radicalize the German greens into an apocalyptic movement. Their hatred toward global capitalism became even more vitriolic precisely because the capitalists were now in charge of a dangerous nuclear arsenal that threatened the entire planet.

Later, Guenther Schwab joined the advisory panel of "The Society of Biological Anthropology, Eugenics and Behavior Research." Schwab was especially concerned with the burgeoning population explosion of the Third World that he was sure would eventually overrun Europe. By advocating modern racial science based on genetics, Schwab believed that the population bomb, together with its associated environmental degradation, could be averted. Here, Schwab shows his basic commitment to the Nazi SS doctrine of 'blood and soil' -- an explosive concoction of eugenics and environmentalism loaded with eco-imperialistic ambitions that had devastating consequences on the Eastern Front in World War II.

The success of Schwab's book helped him to establish an international environmental organization called "The World League for the Defense of Life." Not surprisingly, Werner Haverbeck, former Hitler Youth member and Nazi environmental leader of the Reich's League for Folk National Character and Landscape, later became the chairman of Schwab's organization. In 1973, Haverbeck blamed the environmental crisis in Germany on American capitalism. It was an unnatural colonial import that had infected Germany like a deadly foreign body.

Both Schwab's organization and Haverbeck were also instrumental in establishing the German Green Party in 1980. Such embarrassing facts were later managed with a little housecleaningand lots of cosmetics, which was further buoyed by characterizing such greens as extreme 'right wing' ecologists -- a counterintuitive label that continues to misdirect and plague all environmental studies of the Third Reich. Worst of all is that Haverbeck's wife is also a Holocaust denier.

Long before Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth," green Nazi Guenther Schwab played a large role in catalyzing the frightening theory of global warming. With no small thanks to Schwab, the Great Tribulation of Global Warming was ushered into the modern consciousness behind the collapse of the Millennial 1,000 year Third Reich. There is therefore a swastika in the German woods that needs to be closely watched here.

Mark Musser is the author of "Nazi Oaks: The Green Sacrificial Offering of the Judeo-Christian Worldview in the Holocaust" and a commentary on the warning passages in the book of Hebrews called "Wrath or Rest: Saints in the Hands of an Angry God."

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/02/the_nazi_origins_of_apocalypti.html

2011-02-01T10:20:00.000Z

Oceans, Clouds and Cosmic Rays Drive the Climate, Not CO2.

Dr Noor van Andel spoke at the Dutch Meteorological Institute (KNMI), provocatively concluding there is no observational evidence for the influence of CO2 on past or present climate. He has released a high caliber slide set. He is the former head of research at Akzo Nobel.

In the very long run, we need not mind about CO2 or global warming, but instead about higher [galactic cosmic ray] activity and global cooling. There is no way we can influence [galactic cosmic ray] activity, originating in active black holes and imploding supernovae.

Essentially he uses empirical evidence to draw the conclusion that most recent climate variability is due to Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and to Cosmic Ray effect as described by Svensmark. This fits with what William Kinninmonth explained and I described as essentially a massive pool of “stored cold” in the abyssal depths of the oceans, which erratically reaches up and pulls in heat from the insubstantial atmosphere above. Air temperatures are at the beck and call of the releases of this “cold” (yes I know cold is just an absence of heat). In El Nino years when the cold pool lies deep and unstirred, the incoming solar heat builds up on the surface.
With the oceans covering 70% of the planet and the clouds covering over 60% of the sky, water in its various forms, dominates our climate. Solar magnetic effects correlate with changes in clouds. This graph below shows the rise and fall over the last 1000 years. Both the Medieval Warm Period and the The Little Ice Age (upper graph) match the highs and lows of Galactic Cosmic rays (lower graph).
Originally from Jasper Kirkby’s paper – see page 3. http://aps.arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0804/0804.1938v1.pdf

Source:
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/02/the-oceans-clouds-and-cosmic-rays-drive-the-climate-not-co2/#more-13061

2010-12-26T03:27:00.000Z

2010-11-17T11:00:00.002Z

Telegraph blogger James Delingpole wins Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism

By Damian Thompson

At an awards ceremony in New York last night, James Delingpole was announced as the winner of the 2010 Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism for his Telegraph blog.

This is great news. James’s posts on the Climategate scandal made a huge international impact on the debate over global warming, raising serious questions about the scientific basis of some of the more extravagant predictions of environmental apocalypse.

Also, it is fair to say, the scandal gravely damaged the reputation of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which was accused – on the basis of leaked emails – of manipulating data in order to exaggerate the extent of global warming.

After James’s posts appeared, generating in some cases over a million page views each, the scientific consensus over climate suddenly appeared a good deal more fragile than it had previously, as even some supporters of the global warming thesis concede. (Others, in contrast, splutter with rage at the mere mention of Delingpole’s name.)

A word about the Bastiat Prize: it’s a heavy-hitting award by the free-market International Politics Network, given for both print and online journalism. This is the second year running that a Telegraph blogger has won the digital prize: Daniel Hannan was the 2009 winner. Judges in previous years have included the Nobel Prize Winners James Buchanan and Milton Friedman, and also Margaret Thatcher; this year they included Douglas Ginsburg of the US Court of Appeals and the science writer Matt Ridley.

Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal won the 2010 Bastiat print award; also shortlisted in the two categories were Mark Perry of the Carpe Diem blog, Martin Wolf of the FT and Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe.

Anyway, many congratulations to James. I’m sure he will be too modest to mention his achievement – or, heaven forbid, to rub it in.

Source:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100063465/telegraph-blogger-james-delingpole-wins-bastiat-prize-for-online-journalism/

2010-11-17T01:34:00.001Z

Why the BBC cannot be trusted on 'Climate Change': the full story

By : James Delingpole

"Watermelon? Me? But I'm such a lovely old man..."

When the history of the greatest pseudoscience fraud in history -aka “Climate Change” – comes to be written, no media organisation, not even the Guardian or the New York Times, will deserve greater censure than the steaming cess pit of ecofascist bias that is the BBC. That’s because, of all the numerous MSM outlets which have been acting as the green movement’s useful idiots, the BBC is the only one which is taxpayer funded and which is required by its charter to adopt an ideologically neutral position.
How then has it managed to breach its social responsibility so frequently and flagrantly?
Thanks to the combined efforts of the great Bishop Hill and the similarly wondrous Tony Newbery at the Harmless Sky blog, we now have the most comprehensive and thoroughly damning account yet of how the BBC became such an important part of a sinister political campaign to promote climate change alarmism. I recommend reading their report in full at either of their sites linked above. But here below are some of the highlights.
The story begins in autumn 2004 when the government’s hysterically warmist chief scientific adviser Sir David King successfully persuaded the then Prime Minister Tony Blair to put action on global warming at the heart of UK government policy. This resulted in the creation of a propaganda body called The Climate Change Working Group which in turn sought PR advice from a company called Futerra communications.
Futerra – Britain’s answer to Fenton communications in the US – recommended the following policy:
Many of the existing approaches to climate change communications clearly seem unproductive. And it is not enough simply to produce yet more messages, based on rational argument and top-down persuasion, aimed at convincing people of the reality of climate change and urging them to act. Instead, we need to work in a more shrewd and contemporary way, using subtle techniques of engagement.
To help address the chaotic nature of the climate change discourse in the UK today, interested agencies now need to treat the argument as having been won, at least for popular communications. This means simply behaving as if climate change exists and is real, and that individual actions are effective. The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken. (emphasis added)
Government policy soon became BBC policy too. In Feb 2007, Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman had this to say about BBC “impartiality” on Climate Change:
I have neither the learning nor the experience to know whether the doomsayers are right about the human causes of climate change. But I am willing to acknowledge that people who know a lot more than I do may be right when they claim that it is the consequence of our own behaviour.
I assume that this is why the BBC’s coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago.
So when did naked bias on AGW become official BBC policy? Newbery and the Bishop trace to the notorious seminar mentioned before in this blog. (Can anyone find the link? I can’t yet….)
This was the one where the keynote speaker was Lord May whose warmist bias is elegantly encapsulated in this paragraph of the Bishop/Newbery report.
Although Lord May is unquestionably a distinguished scientist, he is not a climate scientist, and he has been a dedicated and vociferous environmental activist throughout his career. In recent years he has expressed strong opinions on global warming. He has been a trustee of the World Wildlife Fund a leading environmental pressure group and during his presidency of the Royal Society an attempt was made to disrupt funding to climate sceptics. It would not be reasonable to suppose that Lord May could provide the seminar with either an authoritative or impartial assessment of the current state of the scientific evidence supporting the AGW hypothesis.
The BBC has done its level best to keep the details of the seminar under wraps. But we know that “30 key BBC staff” attended; that it was hosted by Jana Bennett and Helen Boaden and chaired by Fergal Keane. We also know that the seminar effected a distinct shift in BBC policy, because the BBC admitted as much in its June 2007 report From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century.
The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus.
As the Newbery/Bishop report drily notes:
There is abundant evidence that this is not an accurate description of the seminar.
No indeed. But this hasn’t stopped the BBC going ahead as if it were. The report details just a few of the more notable examples of the BBC’s flagrant pursuit of the Warmist political agenda:
(a) Climate Wars was a four part television programme which purported to describe sceptic arguments. It could best be described as a four-part ‘hit piece’, with sceptic arguments caricatured by a confirmed ‘warmist’ presenter and in one case, some serious misrepresentation of widely agreed scientific evidence. Despite this, a member of the BBC Trust has described this programme to one of us as representing coverage that balanced the more normal mainstream coverage of global warming, suggesting that the BBC Trust have been misled about how unbalanced the corporation’s coverage has been. We are unaware of any BBC programme that has allowed sceptics to present their own arguments without being filtered through a ‘green’ presenter or being subject to immediate rebuttal.
(b) David Attenborough’s two part series The Truth about Climate Change was broadcast in May and June 2006 as part of the Climate Chaos season. At no point in the series was there any suggestion that there are scientists, albeit a minority, who do not support the majority view on this subject, or that scientific understanding of the climate system remains very limited with major uncertainties still unresolved. Therefore the use of the term ‘Truth’ in the title of the series suggests an exercise in indoctrination rather than education. No claim could reasonably be made that this series was impartial about the science of climate change, but the DVD of this series is still being offered for sale on the BBC Shop website.
(c) The BBC’s partisan coverage of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) was particularly egregious.
When the Summary for Policy Makers of the Working Group 1 (The Physical Science Basis) was launched on 2ndFebruary 2007, the 10pm News devoted most of the programme to this story. At no point was there any suggestion that anthropogenic Co2 emissions may not be entirely responsible for climate change, a claim that the IPCC report did not make. All those interviewed on the subject, as ‘experts’, expressed complete certainty about this.
On the same evening, Newsnight went much further, with an assertion by Susan Watts that scientists were being offered thousands of pounds to challenge the IPCC report, and this claim was reiterated by the presenter, Martha Kearney. This was based on a report that had appeared inThe Guardian on the same day. It later emerged that the story had no basis in fact and had probably originated from an environmental advocacy group in the US. The BBC would have discovered this if it checked out the story before using it; an example of very sloppy and inaccurate reporting or worse, a willingness to use a third party report because it appeared to confirm the BBC’s position on climate change. During the programme Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, and an authority on the physics of clouds, was introduced as a climate sceptic. He was then shown smoking a cigarette while a voice over explained that he had a lot of contrarian beliefs including on smoking. It is most unusual for anyone to be shown smoking on BBC programmes now and the sequence was clearly intended to discredit his sceptical views on climate change.
(d) It is also worth noting that the BBC website has a dedicated area for environmentalists: The Green Room. Searching its archives papers related to climate change gives the following list of contributors: Prof Mike Hulme (Tyndall Centre), Bryony Worthington (from an NGO involved in emissions trading, ‘EU is not doing enough to deliver meaningful cuts’), Chris Smith ‘Climate change is very real’, Sir David King (green activist), Malini Mehra (green NGO), Andrew Simms (‘economic growth cannot continue’), Richard Betts (Met Office), Greig Whitehead (NGO, ‘For millions of people in Africa, climate change is a reality’), Tim Aldred (NGO. World leaders must listen to the people who put them in power and quickly make amends for failing to deliver a binding climate deal’). We have been unable to identify any sceptics invited to contradict mainstream environmentalist views on this site. The Green Room appears to exist only as an outlet for propaganda pieces by environmentalists.
Apologies that this post is so long. And there’s plenty more where this came, not least on the key role played by the BBC’s Chief Guardian of the Warmist Flame Roger Harrabin which surely deserves a post of its own.
In the meantime, I would appeal to the wisdom and scientific integrity of the geneticist Steve Jones who besides being one of this newspaper’s most distinguished and readable science columnists happens to be chairing the official investigation into bias within BBC’s science covering.
It is to Professor Jones that Newbery and the Bishop have addressed their submission.
They conclude:
It would appear that, through the activities of CMEP [Cambridge Media and Environment Programme - the Harrabin outfit which deserves a blog of its own...] BBC Newsgathering has got very much too close to government, environmental activism, and the climate research community for its reputation for impartiality and accuracy to be preserved with regard to the science of climate change.
I don’t believe any responsible scientist, journalist or indeed human being could read this detailed, thorough report and conclude otherwise. Over to you Professor Jones. We shall all be awaiting your verdict – in Spring 2011 – with keen interest.

Source:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100063937/why-the-bbc-cannot-be-trusted-on-climate-change-the-full-story/

2010-10-31T07:07:00.008Z

CLIMATE FOOLS DAY 28TH OCT 2010

Piers Corbyn from Weather Action continues to expose the fraud science of Anthropogenic Climate Change.

See the Weather Action forecast for UK/IRL November here:
http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews09No75.pdf

2010-10-17T01:02:00.001+01:00

Global Warming Scam

Professor Emiritus Hal Lewis Resigns from American Physical Society -

"It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists"

The following is a letter to the American Physical Society released to the public by Professor Emiritus of physics Hal Lewis of the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis

From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society

6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.

Hal

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)

source http://my.telegraph.co.uk/reasonmclucus/reasonmclucus/15835660/professor-emiritus-hal-lewis-resigns-from-american-physical-society/

2010-07-28T23:59:00.002+01:00

2010-07-01T10:08:00.000+01:00

Sinking 'Climate Change'

By: Cal Thomas
Examiner Columnist
June 3, 2010

Three modern myths have been sold to the American people: the promise of a transparent administration (President Obama); the promise of a more ethical Congress (Speaker Pelosi); and the myth of "global warming," or climate change.

The first two are daily proving suspect and now the third is sinking with greater force than melting icebergs -- if they were melting, which many believe they are not.

After spending years promoting "global warming," the media are beginning to turn in the face of growing evidence that they have been wrong. The London Times recently reported: "Britain's premier scientific institution is being forced to review its statements on climate change after a rebellion by members who question mankind's contribution to rising temperatures."

It gets worse, or better, depending on your perspective. Newsweek magazine, which more than 30 years ago promoted global cooling and a new ice age -- and more recently has been drinking the global warming Kool-Aid -- headlined a story, "Uncertain Science: Bickering and Defensive, Climate Researchers Have Lost the Public's Trust." Newsweek does its best to cling to its increasingly discredited doctrine, but the growing body of contrary evidence only adds to the public's disbelief.

In Canada, the polar bear -- which has been used by global warming promoters to put a cuddly face on the issue -- is in danger of not being endangered any longer. CBC News reported that the polar bear's designation as a "species of special concern" has been suspended "while the government reviews the polar bear's status and decides whether to renew the classification or change it."

The New York Times recently lamented "global warmism's loss of credibility" in a story about hundreds of "environmental activists who met to ponder this question: "If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?"

The "consensus" never was a consensus. Most of us may not have gotten an "A" in science, but we can sense when we are being bamboozled.

The German online news magazine Focus recently carried a story, "Warm Times Will Soon Be Over!" Commenting on the "new NASA high temperature record," which may be set, the magazine blames it on El Nino.

Meteorologists, like Joe D'Aleo of the Weather Channel, are publicly distancing themselves from the false doctrine of global warming. D'Aleo says, "We'll have La Nina conditions before the summer is over, and it will intensify further through the fall and winter. Thus we'll have cooler temperatures for the next couple of years."

Remember the scare ignited in 2007 by supposed melting Arctic ice caps? The Star Canada says a new analysis shows that the apparent change was the result of "shifting winds," while an expedition last year to the North Pole discovered the ice "100 percent thicker than expected."

Much of this information -- and more -- is available at the useful Web site www.climatedepot.com.

It is a given that America needs new sources of energy. Environmentalists have inhibited efforts at exploration by supporting policies that have forced some domestic exploration too far offshore (thus increasing chances of an ecological disaster as is occurring in the Gulf of Mexico).

Instead of trying to sell us a dubious doctrine at an estimated cost of $100 billion a year worldwide (so far), environmentalists would have done themselves and the world more good had they chosen a different strategy, such as not sending oil money to countries that want to destroy us. This would have increased our patriotic spirit and had the additional benefit of not only diversifying our energy supply, but also depriving our enemies of money they use to underwrite terrorism.

Watch for the hard-core "global warming" cultists to continue clinging to their beliefs; but also watch increasing numbers of scientists and eventually politicians to abandon this once "certain" faith and to look for other ways to control our lives. In that pursuit, the left never quits.Rather than acknowledge their error, they will go on to make new mistakes, knowing they will never be held accountable.

2010-07-01T07:04:00.000+01:00

Call For Tighter Review Of IPCC Data

Natasha Bita

From:The Australian

June 28, 2010 12:00AM

THE Australian scientist who compiled a disputed UN report on climate change is pushing for a more rigorous review of data.

Professor Jean Palutikof, who spent five years at the British Met Office preparing the UN report, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, admitted yesterday the existing system was flawed because "quite a lot" of information had not been peer-reviewed by independent scientists before publication.
She said the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which underpins international decision-making by governments, "needs to remain very credible".
"It would be a shame if the IPCC became suspect," Professor Palutikof told The Australian yesterday.
The UN has asked the Academy of Sciences to review the IPCC's processes, after widespread criticism of its Fourth Assessment Report, which Professor Palutikof managed. Flaws included a statement that most Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, based on a report by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
Professor Palutikof said that the authors of the next IPCC report would need to be "very, very, very careful about writing things down every step of the way".
"For the Fifth Assessment, it will have to be different," she said. "There's a widely held view among the scientific community that much greater scrutiny as you go through the assessment will be required.
"The Fourth Assessment has been very carefully reviewed by people other than the authorities, subsequent to being completed. But it would be very nice if we didn't have to spend all of the time going back over stuff to check it."
Professor Palutikof said the Fourth Assessment report was being "picked over by people" because it had been based on "quite a lot" of information that had come from governmental, conservation group or UN reports, without having been peer-reviewed and published in scientific journals such as Science or Nature.
source:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/call-for-tighter-review-of-ipcc-data/story-e6frg6xf-1225884945036

2010-07-01T06:40:00.002+01:00

Gingrich slams Obama on Gulf gusher and sounds off on climate

BY Amanda Little

30 JUN 2010 5:00 AM

In his new book To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine, Gingrich pushes a strikingly different view, decrying "the doomsday theory of climate change," which he attributes to the "high-tax, big-bureaucracy, job-killing, and government-centralizing environmentalism of the Left."

A vehement critic of the Obama administration -- opposing its approach to the Gulf oil spill, energy and climate legislation, and much else -- Gingrich calls for a "green conservatism -- a new pathway to environmental stewardship." He characterizes this philosophy as "optimistic, positive ... entrepreneurial, market-based, and incentive-led." He calls the Tea Party movement "a good way to spread green conservatism."

Gingrich is busy these days promoting his book -- and himself. He’s mulling a 2012 presidential bid, planning to make a decision on whether to run by spring of next year. I spoke with Gingrich recently by phone about BP, global warming, green conservatism, and Rwandan gorillas.

Q. What is your position on climate change? How much of a threat do you think it poses?

A. It's an act of egotism for humans to think we're a primary source of climate change. Look at what happened recently with the Icelandic volcano. The natural systems are so much bigger than manmade systems. I am very dubious about claims that we know precisely what's going to happen. And I'm very suspicious of the use of those claims to create much larger governments with much greater bureaucratic controls over our life.

source:
http://www.grist.org/article/2010-06-30-gingrich-slams-obama-on-bp-gulspill-and-sounds-off-on-climate/

2010-07-01T05:52:00.001+01:00

The Blatant Propagandist Lies on

‘Climate Change’ Insult to Irish Intelligence!

By Neil Foster, 30^th June 2010.

Duncan Stewart – Climate Change Pimp

Last night I was compelled to watch the much advertised and hyped Duncan Stewart Scary Story Spoof ‘A Burning Question’. This was the worst hour of television I’ve forced myself to watch since Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Lie’ global warming mockumentary.

To say this was biased in favour of the global warming lobby would be an understatement akin to saying that Josef Stalin was a naughty little boy.

As one lie followed another, I found this extremely hard viewing. In a conflict of emotions between outrage and hysterical laughter at the absurdity of the propaganda being pushed, I found myself at the end utterly disgusted as the rant of Stewart, his lackey pseudo scientists and imbecilic journalists such as John Gibbons ex of The Irish Times made me totally disgusted by these people.

The slur of Deniers was used of course as it had been on RTE the previous Saturday in a lengthy interview on the Marian Finucan Show where Duncan Stewart, an architect, insulted acclaimed botanic scientist, David Bellamy, who with many peer reviewed scientific articles to his name spanning decades, is in fact a recognised expert in his field of science as opposed to an architect who has fallen out of a tree trying to film a documentary, who is as much a scientist as Al Gore, the aforementioned idiot John Gibbons or for that matter Mickey Mouse.

The radio interview in many ways was much worse although it does show the real motivation of Stewart and his cronies and was obvious for all to hear when he stated openly that the science was fact and for anyone to read books to the contrary was not just a Holocaust Denier but a misinformed if not disinformed person in his opinion because they were obviously reading the wrong books. He went on to say that nobody should be reading these books because they were fooling and confusing people on the dangers of climate change and even the existence of manmade global warming. So we’re now being told by our ‘experts’ that we shouldn’t be reading books they don’t agree with. Sounds like totalitarianism to me.

We were warned of the impending move towards ‘zero energy’ homes without any explanation as to how this was to be achieved. One slip up in the TV program however was the admission that we had to stop using energy and that if we did ‘everything would stop’.

EXACTLY!

What is clear to anyone with the intelligence to think for themselves and listen to what was said in both programs is that these lunatics are panicking! The promotion of the utterly discredited IPCC by Stewart and his cronies and the fact that they are still using their 4^th Assessment Report as factual scientific data is laughable. Stewart, in a moment of utter idiocy, proclaimed that independent reviews of the ‘climategate’ emails leak last November revealed that no wrongdoing had occurred and that the IPCC had been fully vindicated and were the still the premier source of ‘factual scientific study’ to back the claim that man is responsible, through CO2 emmisions, including breathing folks, for destroying the planet.

More idiotic remarks included the imminent catastrophe of the ‘projected’ 6 degree rise in global temperatures, using bogus data entered into computer modelling programs, despite no evidence to back this up in any way. Sea levels are of course to rise dramatically. Maybe Duncan should have reminded his slave master Gore before he bought his beach house in New York State.

And what about Gore’s mansions that use 20 times more power than the average American? Oh I forgot, that’s ok because Gore pays for ‘carbon credits’ which he buys from his own carbon trading corporation, Generation Investment Management’ and he’s already a ‘carbon’ billionaire due to the scam he’s been pushing for two decades.

The likes of Stewart and Gibbons or the other ‘gods of climate change’ they worship like Michael Mann of ‘hockey stick’ infamy or James Hansen of NASA who was also caught faking data to give higher temperatures, should understand that when their Communist masters have attained their goal that they will then be dispensable. A bullet in the back of the head is the usual Soviet way. I for one won’t shed a tear for these maniacs pushing the eugenicist agenda they care so much about. When that day comes I’m sure they’ll still believe the utter nonsense they’ve been promoting all of their pathetic adult lives.

More disturbing I suppose is that the radio interview and the TV documentary were both broadcast on the state television channel RTE which the taxpayer funds. It should also be noted that the government minister responsible for communications Eamon Ryan, is a Green Party member of parliament and has a vested interest in this type of propaganda being pushed to a gullible public. I personally object to paying for propaganda, regardless of whose side it comes down on by a media network who are supposed to give a fair and balanced view on any subject to the public it is supposed to serve.

It is not supposed to be the mouthpiece of fanatical fringe groups who just happen to be in power at this time even although only 2% of the electorate in Ireland voted for them and who’s ‘leader’ John Gormley was indoctrinated, sorry educated, at the East German Freiberg University, when it was still controlled by the Soviet Union. How does an Irishman who went to a St. Munchin’s College in Limerick find himself in the Soviet Union in a university famous for producing National Socialists (Nazis) and Communists? It was even run by Martin Heidegger amongst others, who was a famous admirer of Adolf Hitler!

I think it would be in the public interest to know what Mr. Gormley studied in Freiberg but it appears he doesn’t want to talk about that as he doesn’t include any qualifications on the Green Party website although he does admit he went to Freiberg. Incidentally, this was the same town where fluoride was successfully prosecuted on a number of occasions. I wonder if Mr. Gormley would care to explain how he has no idea of the damage to human health of the effects of fluoride? Perhaps not.

In another outburst of total imbecility from Stewart he criticised the media for apparently championing the ‘sceptical’ side of the nonexistent ‘debate’ on climate change. Apparently the media are reporting that it’s all a scam. I wish he’d pointed me towards a few articles in the Irish media holding that editorial position because for the life of me I haven’t read, heard or seen one mainstream media outlet who hasn’t gone full throttle into the climate change scaremonger’s camp.

If you read this Duncan, please leave a comment with a few links to these media magnates who are on my side. In return I’ll send you thousands who believe the lies and pseudo science you and the cretins who you hang around with are promoting. The FACT is Duncan that you’ve made it so obvious by the tone of this propaganda piece that you and your ilk are desperate because people are finally waking up to the scam of manmade global warming. But hey, what do I know, I’m a ‘denier!’

Regrdless, I’d love to hear from you!

Source:http://www.sovereignindependent.com/?p=5486

2010-06-12T06:16:00.001+01:00

Meet the green who doubts ‘The Science’

The author of Chill explains why he’s sceptical about manmade global warming — and why greens are so intolerant.
Peter Taylor 9 June 2010

The science around climate change is not as settled as it’s presented as being. I used to think it was, until about 2003 – and then, feeling that the remedies being proposed for climate change would be more damaging to the environment than climate change itself, I took it upon myself to look at the science.

In my book on biodiversity, Beyond Conservation, I had mentioned in one of the chapters that perhaps the man-made global warming theory was not all it was being cracked up to be. The changes we are seeing now, I wrote, suggested that some other processes were at work. I then took time out, visited the science libraries, and checked the original science upon which today’s models are based.

I was shocked by what I found. Firstly, there’s no real consensus among the scientists in the UN working groups, especially around oceanography and atmospheric physics. The atmospheric physics of carbon dioxide for example is presented as being pretty straightforward: it is a greenhouse gas, therefore it warms up the planet. But even that isn’t settled. There’s a huge amount of scientific disagreement on how much extra heating in the atmosphere you will get from carbon dioxide. It is even broadly accepted that carbon dioxide on its own is not a problem. So, you can double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and get half to one degree warming, which is within the natural variability range over a period of 50 years from now at the current rate of emissions.

The role of water vapour in planetary warming is also open to questioning. While it is presented as being a heat amplifier, in fact because it can turn into cloud it could actually regulate temperature instead. As it turned out, at the very beginning of the UN discussions, Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, and a leading expert appointed to the committee because of his meteorological expertise, was saying precisely that: the amplification effect asserted cannot be relied upon to increase warming because the vapour could turn into cloud. This needed to be proved before basing assumptions on it. But Lindzen was overruled. Despite still being a key part of the IPPC process, he is now vilified by the press and by the environmental movement. So even on the most basic science of the atmospherics, there is doubt.

Or take oceanography. Most of the heat of the planet is not contained in the atmosphere; it is in the oceans. And what happens in the oceans is absolutely vital to the dynamics of heat moving around the planet. So while of course it is possible to warm up the planet to an additional extent as a result of human activity, if the planet then lets more heat out than it would normally do, then it will balance out. That is to say, you have only to produce less cloud over the oceans and the oceans will release heat to space. Like CO2 itself, the atmosphere doesn’t actually hold heat – it simply delays its transmission to space.

The real dynamic of the planet is to do with clouds, yet this area of science – oceanography and cloud cover – is incredibly uncertain. When I first looked at the basic science, the findings were surprising. Over the global warming period – which I limit to the past 50 or so years – the globe didn’t warm at all between 1950 and 1980, even though carbon dioxide emissions were going through the roof due to the postwar expansion of industry; global temperatures stayed pretty much flat.

The real global warming took off in the 1980s and 90s, through to about 2005. (In the last 10 years it’s actually plateaued.) That period of 25 years, from around 1980 to 2005, coincided with changes in the ocean and cloud cover – that is, there was less cloud and more sunlight getting through to the ocean. And this can be seen in the satellite data on the kind of energy that’s coming through (short-wave energy, which is the only energy that heats water – infra-red energy coming from CO2 cannot heat water). So when you look at the real-world data, the warming of that entire period seems to be due to additional sunlight reaching the oceans.

In 2007, I put out a report on this, in the hope of getting feedback before I published my book, Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory. Since then, top scientists at NASA have agreed that this period of warming over the past 25 years is entirely due to the short-wave radiation from sunlight, with the ocean transferring that heat to the land.

So the crucial question is: has the cloud thinning been due to carbon dioxide? Or is it part of a cycle? If you ask some of the top people at NASA – that is, the people who interpret all the satellite data – they will say it’s 50-50. So you could say the greenhouse effect has warmed the oceans and the warmer oceans have thinned the clouds. But that is still just a hypothesis, it is not a proven scientific fact. That means you could assert with equal validity that thinning clouds have warmed the oceans, which has led to global warming – meaning the effect of carbon dioxide is minimal.

There is a fairly easy way of deciding between the two viewpoints: you look at the history of climate to find out whether there has been warming and cooling in the past, before carbon dioxide became such an issue. And of course there have been cycles of warming and cooling, with the longest of the cycles lasting about a thousand years and the shortest cycle – El Nino – about four-to-eight years.

So, right now, we are at the peak of a thousand-year cycle. We also had a peak for all the other cycles between 1995 and 2005. Given that these cycles have peaked, temperature-wise, before, one can look at what happened back then. A thousand years ago, for instance, the Vikings were growing crops on Greenland, which assumes that the summer ice would have been more limited than it is now. The Arctic melted down a thousand years ago, just as it did 2,000 years ago. What’s astonishing is that you can see all of that in the ice-core record in Greenland. And in each cycle of a thousand years, the peak is getting lower. So overall the planet is actually cooling, from a peak about 8,000 years ago.

Now the only way in which you can get cycles of warming and cooling on such a scale is through the oceans. And the only way that can happen is in relation to cloud cover. So the crucial question then is, how do the oceans vary their cloud cover? What creates these cycles? There is a major scientific controversy over how the sun’s magnetic field influences the different types of energy that reach the planet, and how they, in turn, influence cloud cover. There are several different scientific teams working on it, including one from the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). What this shows is that it is still an unresolved question. Nobody knows what the mechanisms are.

So why is the UN saying what it is saying? Well, if you actually look at the wording of what this so-called consensus of scientists has produced, then you will see that they believe that ‘global warming is not due to known natural causes acting alone’. This is clever wording. It means that the door is open to an unknown mechanism driving the warming. So although it is well known that the warming is naturally driven, the mechanism is not.
Why would the UN suppress all of this debate happening within its working groups? The problem is that the secretariat within the UN tasked with processing this debate is already committed – financially – to focusing upon carbon dioxide as the climate-change driver. It is very hard for them to backtrack.

It is only recently that the scientific world has bought into this consensus. In 2001, America, Russia and China did not accept the UN’s analysis. But by 2004, America had signed up to it. And this was all down to a certain team in the US which produced an analysis that ironed out the past cycles of warming and cooling. Although it has since been discredited, this report had a tremendous effect in bringing scientific institutions around to the idea of man-made global warming.

So behind the appearance of consensus and settled science, there is now this tremendous battle going on. The dissenting scientists are described by certain journalists and environmentalists as ‘denialists’ and ‘sceptics’ funded by the oil industry. This is simply not the case. There are top-level atmospheric physicists, oceanographers and solar scientists who do not agree that the case is proven for global warming. Nobody is seriously saying that carbon dioxide has no effect whatsoever, but the defenders of the faith, as it were, set up a straw man. ‘These people’, they say, ‘think carbon dioxide has no effect’. Only a lunatic fringe thinks that.

The critical scientists are simply saying that carbon dioxide’s effect is small, at most 20 per cent. This means that even a 50 per cent reduction by 2050 in manmade greenhouse gas emissions would only reduce the driving force of climate change by 10 per cent. That’s because the natural driving force will determine the climate. As I argue in Chill, if you look at all the past cycles, the temperature declines after a peak. And this decline will bring with it wholly different problems – ones which, so far, we are woefully underprepared for.

What’s really disconcerting for me is that I am a longstanding environmentalist. As part of environmental groups I’ve helped to prevent nuclear waste from being dumped in the ocean, I’ve helped change emergency planning for nuclear reactors, and I’ve also helped develop biodiversity strategy. I’m as green as you can get. But what I am faced with now is environmental groups and major NGOs – Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF, even the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds – which have allied themselves with the state. They talk about so-called denialists allying themselves with ‘Big Oil’, but they have fallen into the arms of big government. They’ve allied with disreputable prime ministers; they’ve allied with chief policy advisers who have never got anything right in their lives; they’ve allied themselves with scientific institutions that have never led on any of these environmental issues.
If you write something, as I have done with Chill, which is a rational, critical appraisal of the whole situation, you would at least expect to have some dialogue. But there has been nothing. I haven’t had a single invitation to speak to any of these groups. Even universities have been reticent. I have been invited to speak at Leeds University, which has quite a strong climate community, and the Energy Institute. But the environmental community has been absolutely silent towards me. I would challenge them to bring all of their experts to the table and hammer it out.
We’re seeing the dangerous development here of a very intolerant political ideology. It is a very strange political and scientific situation, in which vast sums of money are underwriting a bureaucracy of climate accountants and auditors, and in which academic funding is easier to obtain if you put man-made climate change at the top of your research proposal. I have never seen anything like it in the 40 years of my scientific and environmental career.
Peter Taylor was talking to Tim Black.

Peter Taylor is author of Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/debates/copenhagen_article/8979

2010-05-15T01:45:00.001+01:00

'WE ARE CHANGE' IRELAND

DEMAND ANSWERS FROM ECO-FASCISTS

In 2005, John Gormley, head of the Green Party proposed a bill to the Irish Government. Supposedly,“the purpose of this Bill is to repeal the Health (Fluoridation of Water Supplies) Act 1960. There is now a scientific consensus that fluoride works topically and does not need to be ingested to protect teeth. All the evidence shows that too much fluoride in the body gives rise to fluorosis, which is on the increase and to other health effects.”
Five years later, most of which John Gorm-less has been in power, and nothing has been done. Gormley and the rest of our pathetic “government” have sold their values down the river. They are poisoning our water with Sodium Flouride and nobdy’s doing a damn thing about it. On top of that, this month, they’ve brought in Water Charges and Carbon Taxes, not on the distributor, but on the consumer. They have us paying extra charges on our home heating fuel, in an engineered recession.

On the 21st of this month, Gormley is opening the Green Economy Expo in Croke Park, a conference about Ireland’s contribution to “the green economy”, and speaking about Climate Change and Green Energy Projects. This whole conference is based on the premise that man-made CO2 levels are responsible for the Climate Change we are experiencing. However, at this stage, we allknow otherwise and we intend to make sure they know the same. All the real facts on these issues are in full public view, and regardless of what the media say, there is no consensus in the scientific community on any of them. The scientists who promote the idea of Anthropogenic Global Warming and Flouridation are bought and paid for by the same interests that control the media and world governments.

Members of We are Change, The Sovereign Independent and Freeman Ireland are going to attend this event, spread ourselves amongst the crowd and bombard these fascists with a few of our own “Green” questions on Climate Change, Flouride, Chemtrails and other issues! Everyone is invited to come along, tickets, unfortunately are €5, but we are filming so it should be worth it!
Contact Alan [at] wearechange.ie to be added to the discussion thread. Let’s get organised!
Beach party at the hippie hole in Howth the day after for anyone interested!

http://www.wearechange.ie/?p=391

2 June – “Stop Climate Chaos” anti-protest

When: Wednesday 2 June , 11am to 7pm
Where: Buswells Hotel, 26 Molesworth Street, Dublin 2 – Across from the Dáil.
Description:
An organisation called Stop Climate Chaos (http://stopclimatechaos.ie) is planning to lobby near the Dail to INCREASE the legislation towards climate change.
This is how these guys are trying to reel people in:
“Climate change hasn’t gone away and this year the Irish Government will make crucial decisions about how it will tackle climate change, now and into the future. Our Government has committed to a passing a Climate Change Bill by the end of 2010, including binding targets for reducing our carbon emissions.
As the Government negotiates the text of this Bill, we must send them a clear message that we expect the bill to be strong, with real enforceable targets that ensure Ireland plays its part in delivering climate justice and a fair and safe future for all.”
These carbon footprint concerned folks are either oblivious to the real results concerning anthropogenic global warming, or they just don’t care. Either way, they’re spreading the wrong message, and their intentions are certainly directed at increasing the power of the governments freedom-killing legislations.
We Are Change shall therefore be hijacking this event. With our knowledge, and a very eagre megaphone (she’s been neglected for long enough at this stage and wants some action), we can promote a message which supercedes theirs, exposing the truth about this criminally abused subject, and quite possibly wake up some of their following in the process.
Open Event – Anyone May Attend And Invite Others To Attend

http://www.wearechange.ie/?page_id=196