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Old August 30th, 2011 #221
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http://www.smh.com.au/environment/me...828-1jger.html

Mental illness rise linked to climate
Erik Jensen Health
August 29, 2011

RATES of mental illnesses including depression and post-traumatic stress will increase as a result of climate change, a report to be released today says.

The paper, prepared for the Climate Institute, says loss of social cohesion in the wake of severe weather events related to climate change could be linked to increased rates of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress and substance abuse.

As many as one in five people reported ''emotional injury, stress and despair'' in the wake of these events.

The report, A Climate of Suffering: The Real Cost of Living with Inaction on Climate Change, called the past 15 years a ''preview of life under unrestrained global warming''.

''While cyclones, drought, bushfires and floods are all a normal part of Australian life, there is no doubt our climate is changing,'' the report says.

''For instance, the intensity and frequency of bushfires is greater. This is a 'new normal', for which the past provides little guidance …

''Moreover, recent conditions are entirely consistent with the best scientific predictions: as the world warms so the weather becomes wilder, with big consequences for people's health and well-being.''

The paper suggests a possible link between Australia's recent decade-long drought and climate change. It points to a breakdown of social cohesion caused by loss of work and associated stability, adding that the suicide rate in rural communities rose by 8 per cent.

The report also looks at mental health in the aftermath of major weather events possibly linked to climate change.

It shows that one in 10 primary school children reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in the wake of cyclone Larry in 2006. More than one in 10 reported symptoms more than three months after the cyclone.

''There's really clear evidence around severe weather events,'' the executive director of the Brain and Mind Research Institute, Professor Ian Hickie, said.

''We're now more sophisticated in understanding the mental health effects and these effects are one of the major factors.

''What we have seriously underestimated is the effects on social cohesion. That is very hard to rebuild and they are critical to the mental health of an individual.''

Professor Hickie, who is launching the report today, said climate change and particularly severe weather events were likely to be a major factor influencing mental health in the future.

''When we talk about the next 50 years and what are going to be the big drivers at the community level of mental health costs, one we need to factor in are severe weather events, catastrophic weather events,'' he said.
 
Old September 17th, 2011 #222
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http://globegazette.com/news/local/r...cc4c03286.html

Record low temperatures expected Wednesday night
By LAURA BIRD
Posted: Tuesday, September 13, 2011 8:09 pm

MASON CITY - North Iowans will want to cover up their flowers, vegetables and other plants Wednesday night as possible record low temperatures sweep through the area.

"It wouldn't hurt to if you want to prolong their life a little bit," said Gary Hall, Iowa State University Extension regional education director.

Cerro Gordo, Worth, Hancock, Winnebago and Kossuth counties are all in a freeze watch late Wednesday night through Thursday morning.

Low temperatures overnight Wednesday are expected to be in the low 30s and will create patchy frost by Thursday morning, said Tyler Roney, meteorologist at KIMT-TV. Some of the temperatures could be record lows.

"It's very much so an early taste of fall," he said.

Some plants, however, might not be quite ready for fall yet.

Many flowering plants are starting to slow down, but for those that are still going Hall suggests covering them Wednesday night.

"What we cover them for is to get a little more enjoyment out of those flowers," Hall said.

Certain vegetables should also be covered for similar reasons.

"The tomatoes you might want to consider covering if you'd still like some more tomatoes," Hall said. "and that goes for other crops that are still producing."

As for corn and soybeans, most are far enough along that it shouldn't hurt the crops.

After the cold blast overnight low temperatures should rebound into the 50s and daytime highs should be in the upper 60s to lower 70s by the weekend.
 
Old September 17th, 2011 #223
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http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/...tcmp=obnetwork

Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Resigns Over Global Warming
Published September 14, 2011
FoxNews.com

The global warming theory left him out in the cold.

Dr. Ivar Giaever, a former professor with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, abruptly announced his resignation Tuesday, Sept. 13, from the premier physics society in disgust over its officially stated policy that "global warming is occurring."

The official position of the American Physical Society (APS) supports the theory that man's actions have inexorably led to the warming of the planet, through increased emissions of carbon dioxide.

Giaever does not agree -- and put it bluntly and succinctly in the subject line of his email, reprinted at Climate Depot, a website devoted to debunking the theory of man-made climate change.

"I resign from APS," Giaever wrote.

Giaever was cooled to the statement on warming theory by a line claiming that "the evidence is incontrovertible."

"In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?" he wrote in an email to Kate Kirby, executive officer of the physics society.

"The claim … is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this 'warming' period," his email message said.

A spokesman for the APS confirmed to FoxNews.com that the Nobel Laureate had declined to pay his annual dues in the society and had resigned. He also noted that the society had no plans to revise its statement.

The use of the word "incontrovertible" had already caused debate within the group, so much so that an addendum was added to the statement discussing its use in April, 2010.

"The word 'incontrovertible' ... is rarely used in science because by its very nature, science questions prevailing ideas. The observational data indicate a global surface warming of 0.74 °C (+/- 0.18 °C) since the late 19th century."

Giaever earned his Nobel for his experimental discoveries regarding tunneling phenomena in superconductors. He has since become a vocal dissenter from the alleged “consensus” regarding man-made climate fears, Climate Depot reported, noting that he was one of more than 100 co-signers of a 2009 letter to President Obama critical of his position on climate change.

Public perception of climate change has steadily fallen since late 2009. A Rasmussen Reports public opinion poll from August noted that 57 percent of adults believe there is significant disagreement within the scientific community on global warming, up five points from late 2009.

The same study showed that 69 percent of those polled believe it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data in order to support their own theories and beliefs. Just 6 percent felt confident enough to report that such falsification was "not at all likely."
 
Old September 17th, 2011 #224
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If it was truly obvious that climate change was anthropogenic, then scientific bodies and organizations wouldn't need a "position" on it.
 
Old September 21st, 2011 #225
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http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ef1e9...#axzz1YMDyiA6H

BA faces €50m bill for carbon emissions
By Pilita Clark, Environment Correspondent

British Airways faces a bill of nearly €50m, the highest of any airline, when carriers around the world are brought into the European Union’s carbon emissions trading scheme next year, a new study estimates.

But BA and other large European carriers will face a relatively smaller burden than their rivals in the US and China, because they should get an average of 81 per cent of the carbon allowances needed under the scheme for free. The Chinese and American carriers will only get an average of up to 64 per cent, says the report by Thomson Reuters Point Carbon, the energy research firm.

The airline industry’s total bill is expected to be €1.1bn ($1.5bn) at today’s carbon prices, the study says. The whole sector may only make a $4bn profit this year, the International Air Transport Association has forecast.

“Compared to airlines’ annual fuel bills, these additional costs are minor, but compared to profits they are considerable,” said Andreas Arvanitakis, Thomson Reuters Point Carbon associate director. “The question is how much of the cost can be passed to passengers and cargo clients.”

The findings come amid a fierce row over the EU’s move to make any airline flying into and within the bloc pay for pollution.

US airlines have taken legal action against what they say is an “astonishing” step, and Chinese complaints have prompted warnings of a trade war from European aircraft-maker Airbus.

Airlines have been exempt from Europe’s six-year-old cap and trade scheme, the world’s largest, which forces big polluters to pay for their carbon emissions above certain limits.

Carriers will now have to surrender allowances, each equal to one tonne of carbon dioxide, to cover their annual emissions. A portion will be allocated for free but heavy polluters will have to buy more allowances, now trading for about €12 each.

The exact number of free allowances each airline will get will not be known until official figures are published this month. But Point Carbon’s calculations, based on the latest public data, offer an early picture of how airlines’ competitive positions may be affected.

The €50m bill BA faces amounts to €1.66 per passenger, much more than the €0.14 expected for Delta, its US rival on the lucrative London-New York route, says Peter Hind of the RDC Aviation consultancy, whose data are used in the Point Carbon study.

BA said: “Any estimates of the shortfall in our carbon allowances are just that – an estimate. Our own analyses of the costs of the EU ETS to our business are commercially confidential and we would not speculate as to the costs to other airlines.”

Italy’s Alitalia faced a bigger bill than Air France, because “its fleet is not as efficient as Air France’s and their planes are not as full, either of passengers or freight”, Mr Hind said.

Overall, Europe’s big international airlines should get an average of 81 per cent of the allowances they will need for free, slightly more than budget rivals, Ryanair and Easyjet.

But the top six Chinese airlines, including Air China and China Airlines, will get an average of 63 per cent, while the bigger US airlines will get an average of 64 per cent.
 
Old September 21st, 2011 #226
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http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...78I4UG20110919

World Atlas ice loss claim exaggerated: scientists
By Nina Chestney
LONDON | Mon Sep 19, 2011 3:27pm EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - The Times Atlas of the World exaggerated the rate of Greenland's ice loss in its thirteenth edition last week, scientists said on Monday.

The atlas, published by HarperCollins, showed that Greenland lost 15 percent of its ice cover over the past 12 years, based on information from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado in the United States.

The Greenland ice sheet is the second biggest in the world and significant shrinking could lead to a global rise in sea levels.

"While global warming has played a role in this reduction, it is also as a result of the much more accurate data and in-depth research that is now available," HarperCollins said on its website on Monday.

However, a number of scientists disputed the claim.

"We believe that the figure of a 15 percent decrease in permanent ice cover since the publication of the previous atlas 12 years (ago) is both incorrect and misleading," said Poul Christoffersen, glaciologist at the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) at the University of Cambridge.

"We concluded that a sizable portion of the area mapped as ice-free in the Atlas is clearly still ice-covered."

Other scientists agreed.

"These new maps are ridiculously off base, way exaggerated relative to the reality of rapid change in Greenland," said Jeffrey S. Kargel, senior research scientist at the University of Arizona.

The Times Atlas suggested the Greenland ice sheet has lost 300,000 square kilometers in the past 12 years, at a rate of 1.5 percent per year.

However, measurements suggest this rate is at least 10 times faster than in reality, added J. Graham Cogley, Professor of Geography at Trent University, Ontario, Canada.

"It could easily be 20 times too fast and might well be 50 times too fast," he added.

Last year, a U.N. committee of climate scientists came under fire for bungling a forecast of when Himalayan glaciers would thaw.

The panel's 2007 report, the main guide for governments in fighting climate change, included an incorrect projection that all Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035, hundreds of years earlier than scientists' projections.
 
Old September 21st, 2011 #227
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http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/ja...manhattan-etc/

Times Atlas To Print New World Map Without Tuvalu, Maldives, Manhattan etc
By James Delingpole
Last updated: September 20th, 2011

Following its controversial decision to produce a map suggesting that Greenland has lost 15 per cent of its ice cover in the last twelve years – a loss rate disputed by most credible scientists: and even, amazingly, the Guardian agrees on this – the Times Comprehensive Atlas Of The World has decided to take its new role as cheerleader for Climate Change alarmism a step further. In its upcoming 14th edition, unconfirmed rumours suggest, it will completely omit Tuvalu, the Maldives and major parts of Bangladesh in order to convey the "emotional truth" about "man made climate change."

"All right, it may not be strictly geographically accurate to say the Maldives and Tuvalu will definitely have disappeared in about ten years time when our next edition appears," said Times Atlas spokesman David Rose. "But did you see that picture of the Maldives cabinet holding a meeting underwater?

If the Maldives government says the Maldives are drowning, they must be drowning. And frankly I think it's despicable, all those deniers who are saying it was just a publicity stunt, cooked up by green activist Mark Lynas, to blackmail the international community into giving the Maldives more aid money while simultaneously trying to lure green Trustafarians to come and spend £1500 a night in houses on stilts with gold-plated organic recyclable eco-toilets made of rare earth minerals from China. Why would a government lie about something as serious as climate change?"

David Rose added. "I hold a doctorate in Cambridge in Climate Change and Sinking Islands Studies so I know what I'm talking about. And if you don't believe me, ask my friend Johann Hari who taught me everything I know about the primacy of emotional truth over actual truth. I'm pleased to say that this is a view of the world shared by my colleagues at Times Comprehensive Atlas Of The World. They understand that maps based on accurately recorded geographical features belong in the Victorian age of child chimney sweeps. What we need now is maps that change the world, transforming into something which it isn't actually yet but might be one day if we don't act NOW!"
 
Old September 21st, 2011 #228
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http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-20-19-46-51

Ex-President Clinton: Green movement needs money
By MEGHAN BARR
Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) -- Former President Bill Clinton said Tuesday that the success of the alternative energy movement is hampered by a lack of financing. His comments came as world leaders attending his annual philanthropic conference expressed fears about rising seas.

The ex-president's three-day Clinton Global Initiative for VIPs with deep pockets began Tuesday with a frank discussion about addressing global climate challenges, co-hosted by Mexican President Felipe Calderon and South African President Jacob Zuma.

There was a sense of frustration among the world leaders over the failure to create a legally binding world agreement on carbon emissions.

"We have seen much less progress than we hoped for," said Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg.

Pointing to Germany's successful creation of solar energy jobs as a model for other nations to emulate, Clinton said the main issue with green energy is a lack of proper funding.

"This has to work economically," he said. "You have to come up with the money on the front end."

Clinton's talk of renewable energy financing comes as Republicans are criticizing the Obama administration for awarding billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies for such projects, including a $528 million loan to a now-bankrupt California solar panel maker.

Fremont, Calif.-based Solyndra filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this month and laid off its 1,100 employees. It was the first renewable energy company to receive a loan guarantee under a stimulus law program to encourage green energy and was frequently touted by the Obama administration as a model.

Rising seas are a matter of life and death for small island nations, Zuma said.

"Not theoretical, not in the future, now," he said. "And they can't understand why we're failing to realize that."

Noting that the Kyoto Protocol on climate change is set to expire next year, Calderon said progress must be made toward establishing new rules at the United Nations convention on climate change in Durban, South Africa, in November.

Calderon said he is concerned that the world's economic problems are overshadowing the need for action on climate change.

"Last year we had the worst rains ever in Mexico, and this year we are living with the worst drought ever in Mexico," he said. "I know that the world has a lot of troubles, but we are still facing the most challenging problem for human kind in the future, and that is climate change."

Sheikh Hasina, prime minister of Bangladesh, said rising seas would submerge one-fifth of her country, displacing more than 30 million people. Clinton said the next countries most likely to be affected by climate change are places that are inland and hot - such as Mali, a landlocked nation in western Africa.

"A few years ago, after the south Asian tsunami, I spent a lot of time in the Maldives," Clinton said. "I think it's quite possible that the Maldives won't be here in 30 or 40 years."

Clinton said Caribbean nations are microcosms of the problems associated with combating climate change. Every Caribbean nation should be energy-independent, he said, by generating solar, wind and geothermal energy.

"But only Trinidad has natural gas," Clinton said. "Everybody else imports heavy oil to burn old-fashioned generators at high cost."

Other leaders who participated in Tuesday's panel included European Commission President Jose Barroso, Slovenian President Danilo Turk, Tillman Thomas, the prime minister of Grenada, and Cisse Mariam Kaidama Sidibe, the prime minister of Mali.

Last year's GCI conference generated nearly 300 new commitments valued at $6 billion to tackle major global issues from poverty and disease to climate change.

This year, the conference is happening during an especially rancorous debate in Washington over government spending. Earlier this month, President Barack Obama scrubbed a clean-air regulation that aimed to reduce health-threatening smog, yielding to bitterly protesting businesses and congressional Republicans who complained the rule would kill jobs in America's ailing economy.

"We've got to somehow involve the imagination of ordinary people," Clinton said. "They have to understand that this is not a burden, it's an opportunity."

Other panels on the first day of the conference touched on subjects ranging from women and jobs in technology fields to the challenges and opportunities facing the world's increasingly urbanized population living in a growing number of cities.

In a discussion on disaster preparedness, speakers emphasized the needs for preventative action such as improved building standards to mitigate the impact of hurricanes and earthquakes. They also spoke about how to best help when a disaster does occur, in terms of the public outpouring of donations and goodwill that usually follows.

It's important for people to realize what can really help, like cash donations, and what isn't as useful, like medications that end up not being usable or clothes that victims of disasters don't want or can't use, said Valerie Amos, Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator for the United Nations. When well-meaning people send things that aren't usable, aid agencies can waste precious time and money disposing of them.

"Let's really check what's needed and make sure we're helping rather than being part of the problem," she said.
 
Old October 27th, 2011 #229
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http://lewrockwell.com/orig9/deming6.1.1.html

Why I Deny Global Warming
by David Deming

I'm a denier for several reasons. There is no substantive evidence that the planet has warmed significantly or that any significant warming will occur in the future. If any warming does occur, it likely will be concentrated at higher latitudes and therefore be beneficial. Climate research has largely degenerated into pathological science, and the coverage of global warming in the media is tendentious to the point of being fraudulent. Anyone who is an honest and competent scientist must be a denier.

Have you ever considered how difficult it is to take the temperature of the planet Earth? What temperature will you measure? The air? The surface of the Earth absorbs more than twice as much incident heat from the Sun than the air. But if you measure the temperature of the surface, what surface are you going to measure? The solid Earth or the oceans? There is twice as much water as land on Earth. If you decide to measure water temperature, at what depth will you take the measurements? How will the time scale on which the deep ocean mixes with the shallow affect your measurements? And how, pray tell, will you determine what the average water temperature was for the South Pacific Ocean a hundred years ago? How will you combine air, land, and sea temperature measurements? Even if you use only meteorological measurements of air temperature, how will you compensate for changes in latitude, elevation, and land use?

Determining a mean planetary temperature is not straightforward, but an extremely complicated problem. Even the best data are suspect. Anthony Watts and his colleagues have surveyed 82.5 percent of stations in the U.S. Historical Climatology Network. They have found – shockingly – that over 70 percent of these stations are likely to be contaminated by errors greater than 2 deg C [3.6 deg F]. Of the remaining stations, 21.5 percent have inherent errors greater than 1 deg C. The alleged degree of global warming over the past 150 years is less than 1 deg C. Yet even in a technologically advanced country like the US, the inherent error in over 90 percent of the surveyed meteorological stations is greater than the putative signal. And these errors are not random, but systematically reflect a warming bias related to urbanization. Watts has documented countless instances of air temperature sensors located next to air conditioning vents or in the middle of asphalt parking lots. A typical scenario is that a temperature sensor that was in the middle of a pasture a hundred years ago is now surrounded by a concrete jungle. Urbanization has been a unidirectional process. It is entirely plausible – even likely – that all of the temperature rise that has been inferred from the data is an artifact that reflects the growth of urban heat islands.

The "denier" is portrayed as a person who refuses to accept the plain evidence of his senses. But in fact it is the alarmist who doesn't know what they are talking about. The temperature of the Earth and how it has varied over the past 150 years is poorly constrained. The person who thinks otherwise does so largely because they have no comprehension of the science. Most of these people have never done science or thought about the inherent difficulties and uncertainties involved.

And what is "global warming" anyway? As long ago as the fifth century BC, Socrates pointed out that intelligible definitions are a necessary precursor to meaningful discussions. The definition of the term "global warming" shifts with the context of the discussion. If you deny global warming, then you have denied the existence of the greenhouse effect, a reproducible phenomenon that can be studied analytically in the laboratory. But if you oppose political action, then global warming metamorphoses into a nightmarish and speculative planetary catastrophe. Coastal cities sink beneath a rising sea, species suffer from wholesale extinctions, and green pastures are turned into deserts of choking hot sand.

In fact, so-called "deniers" are not "deniers" but skeptics. Skeptics do not deny the existence of the greenhouse effect. Holding all other factors constant, the mean planetary air temperature ought to rise as the atmosphere accumulates more anthropogenic CO2. Christopher Monckton recently reviewed the pertinent science and concluded that a doubling of CO2 should result in a temperature increase of about 1 deg C. If this temperature increase mirrors those in the geologic past, most of it will occur at high latitudes. These areas will become more habitable for man, plants, and other animals. Biodiversity will increase. Growing seasons will lengthen. Why is this a bad thing?

Any temperature increase over 1 deg C for a doubling of CO2 must come from a positive feedback from water vapor. Water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas in Earth's atmosphere, and warm air holds more water than cold air. The theory is that an increased concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere will lead to a positive feedback that amplifies the warming from CO2 by as much as a factor of three to five. But this is nothing more that speculation. Water vapor also leads to cloud formation. Clouds have a cooling effect. At the current time, no one knows if the feedback from water vapor will be positive or negative.

Global warming predictions cannot be tested with mathematical models. It is impossible to validate computer models of complex natural systems. The only way to corroborate such models is to compare model predictions with what will happen in a hundred years. And one such result by itself won't be significant because of the possible compounding effects of other variables in the climate system. The experiment will have to repeated over several one-hundred year cycles. In other words, the theory of catastrophic global warming cannot be tested or empirically corroborated in a human time frame.

It is hardly conclusive to argue that models are correct because they have reproduced past temperatures. I'm sure they have. General circulation models have so many degrees of freedom that it is possible to endlessly tweak them until the desired result is obtained. Hindsight is always 20-20. This tells us exactly nothing about a model's ability to accurately predict what will happen in the future.

The entire field of climate science and its coverage in the media is tendentious to the point of being outright fraudulent. Why is it that every media report on CO2 – an invisible gas – is invariably accompanied by a photograph of a smokestack emitting particulate matter? Even the cover of Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, shows a smokestack. Could it be that its difficult to get people worked up about an invisible, odorless gas that is an integral component of the photosynthetic cycle? A gas that is essential to most animal and plant life on Earth? A gas that is emitted by their own bodies through respiration? So you have to deliberately mislead people by showing pictures of smoke to them. Showing one thing when you're talking about another is fraud. If the case for global warming alarmism is so settled, so conclusive, so irrefutable...why is it necessary to repeatedly resort to fraud?

A few years ago it was widely reported that the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would cause poison ivy to grow faster. But of course carbon dioxide causes almost all plants to grow faster. And nearly all of these plants have beneficial human uses. Carbon dioxide fertilizes hundreds or thousands of human food sources. More CO2 means trees grow faster. So carbon dioxide promotes reforestation and biodiversity. Its good for the environment. But none of this was reported. Instead, the media only reported that global warming makes poison ivy grow faster. And this is but one example of hundreds or thousands of such misleading reports. If sea ice in the Arctic diminishes, it is cited as irrefutable proof of global warming. But if sea ice in the Antarctic increases, it is ignored. Even cold weather events are commonly invoked as evidence for global warming. People living in the future will look back and wonder how we could have been so delusional.


For the past few years I have remained silent concerning the Climategate emails. But what they revealed is what many of us already knew was going on: global warming research has largely degenerated into what is known as pathological science, a "process of wishful data interpretation." When I testified before the US Senate in 2006, I stated that a major climate researcher told me in 1995 that "we have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period." The existence and global nature of the Medieval Warm Period had been substantiated by literally hundreds of research articles published over decades. But it had to be erased from history for ideological reasons. A few years later the infamous "hockey stick" appeared. The "hockey stick" was a revisionist attempt to rewrite the temperature history of the last thousand years. It has been discredited as being deeply flawed.

In one Climategate email, a supposed climate scientist admitted to "hiding the decline." In other words, hiding data that tended to disprove his ideological agenda. Another email described how alarmists would try to keep critical manuscripts from being published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. One of them wrote, we'll "keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Gee. If the climate science that validates global warming is so unequivocal, why is it necessary to work behind the scenes to suppress dissent? You "doth protest too much."

As described in my book, Science and Technology in World History: The Ancient World and Classical Civilization, systematic science began with the invocation of naturalism by Greek philosophers and Hippocratic physicians c. 600-400 BC. But the critical attitude adopted by the Greeks was as important as naturalism. Students were not only allowed to criticize their teachers, but were encouraged to do so. From its beginnings in Greek natural philosophy, science has been an idealistic and dispassionate search for truth. As Plato explained, anyone who could point out a mistake "shall carry off the palm, not as an enemy, but as a friend." This is one reason that scientists enjoy so much respect. The public assumes that a scientist's pursuit of truth is unencumbered by political agendas.


But science does not come easy to men. "Science," George Sarton reminded us, "is a joykiller." The proper conduct of science requires a high degree of intellectual discipline and rigor. Scientists are supposed to use multiple working hypotheses and sort through these by the processes of corroboration and falsification. The most valuable evidence is that which tends to falsify or disprove a theory. A scientist, by the very definition of his activity, must be skeptical. A scientist engaged in a dispassionate search for truth elevates the critical – he does not suppress it. Knowledge begins with skepticism and ends with conceit.

Finally, I'm happy to be known as a "denier" because the label of "denier" says nothing about me, but everything about the person making the charge. Scientific theories are never denied or believed, they are only corroborated or falsified. Scientific knowledge, by its very nature, is provisional and subject to revision. The provisional nature of scientific knowledge is a necessary consequence of the epistemological basis of science. Science is based on observation. We never have all the data. As our body of data grows, our theories and ideas must necessarily evolve. Anyone who thinks scientific knowledge is final and complete must necessarily endorse as a corollary the absurd proposition that the process of history has stopped.

A scientific theory cannot be "denied." Only a belief can be denied. The person who uses the word "denier" thus reveals that they hold global warming as a belief, not a scientific theory. Beliefs are the basis of revealed religion. Revelations cannot be corroborated or studied in the laboratory, so religions are based on dogmatic beliefs conservatively held. Religions tend to be closed systems of belief that reject criticism. But the sciences are open systems of knowledge that welcome criticism. I'm a scientist, and therefore I must happily confess to being a denier.
 
Old October 31st, 2011 #230
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...colleague.html

Scientist who said climate change sceptics had been proved wrong accused of hiding truth by colleague
By David Rose

Last updated at 6:11 PM on 30th October 2011

It was hailed as the scientific study that ended the global warming debate once and for all – the research that, in the words of its director, ‘proved you should not be a sceptic, at least not any longer’.

Professor Richard Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and his colleagues from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (BEST) claimed to have shown that the planet has warmed by almost a degree centigrade since 1950 and is warming continually.

Published last week ahead of a major United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa, next month, their work was cited around the world as irrefutable evidence that only the most stringent measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can save civilisation as we know it.

It was cited uncritically by, among others, reporters and commentators from the BBC, The Independent, The Guardian, The Economist and numerous media outlets in America.

The Washington Post said the BEST study had ‘settled the climate change debate’ and showed that anyone who remained a sceptic was committing a ‘cynical fraud’.

But today The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a leading member of Prof Muller’s team has accused him of trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.

Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis.

Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers.

Her comments, in an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, seem certain to ignite a furious academic row. She said this affair had to be compared to the notorious ‘Climategate’ scandal two years ago.

Like the scientists exposed then by leaked emails from East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit, her colleagues from the BEST project seem to be trying to ‘hide the decline’ in rates of global warming.

In fact, Prof Curry said, the project’s research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties – a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained.

‘There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’

However, Prof Muller denied warming was at a standstill.

‘We see no evidence of it [global warming] having slowed down,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. There was, he added, ‘no levelling off’.

A graph issued by the BEST project also suggests a continuing steep increase.



But a report to be published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation includes a graph of world average temperatures over the past ten years, drawn from the BEST project’s data and revealed on its website.

This graph shows that the trend of the last decade is absolutely flat, with no increase at all – though the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have carried on rising relentlessly.

‘This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting,’ Prof Curry said. ‘Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.’

Prof Muller also wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal. It was here, under the headline ‘The case against global warming scepticism’, that he proclaimed ‘there were good reasons for doubt until now’.

This, too, went around the world, with The Economist, among many others, stating there was now ‘little room for doubt’.

Such claims left Prof Curry horrified.

‘Of course this isn’t the end of scepticism,’ she said. ‘To say that is the biggest mistake he [Prof Muller] has made. When I saw he was saying that I just thought, “Oh my God”.’

In fact, she added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.

They were finally addressing questions such as the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation – as they should have done, she said, a long time ago.

Yesterday Prof Muller insisted that neither his claims that there has not been a standstill, nor the graph, were misleading because the project had made its raw data available on its website, enabling others to draw their own graphs.

However, he admitted it was true that the BEST data suggested that world temperatures have not risen for about 13 years. But in his view, this might not be ‘statistically significant’, although, he added, it was equally possible that it was – a statement which left other scientists mystified.

‘I am baffled as to what he’s trying to do,’ Prof Curry said.
Prof Ross McKittrick, a climate statistics expert from Guelph University in Ontario, added: ‘You don’t look for statistically significant evidence of a standstill.

‘You look for statistically significant evidence of change.’

The BEST project, which has been lavishly funded, brings together experts from different fields from top American universities.

It was set up 18 months ago in an effort to devise a new and more accurate way of computing changes in world temperatures by using readings from some 39,000 weather stations on land, instead of adding sea temperatures as well.

Some scientists, Prof Muller included, believe that this should provide a more accurate indication of how the world is responding to carbon dioxide.

The oceans, they argue, warm more slowly and this is why earlier global measurements which also cover the sea – such as those from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University – have found no evidence of warming since the Nineties.

The usual way a high-profile project such as BEST would publish its results would be in a scientific journal, following a rigorous ‘peer review’ by other experts in the field.

The more eminent journals that publish climate research, such as Nature And Science, insist there must be no leaks to the media until this review is complete and if such leaks occur, they will automatically reject the research.

Earlier this year, the project completed four research papers.

As well as trends in world temperatures, they looked at the extent to which temperature readings can be distorted by urban ‘heat islands’ and the influence of long-term temperature cycles in the oceans. The papers were submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research.

But although Prof Curry is the second named author of all four papers, Prof Muller failed to consult her before deciding to put them on the internet earlier this month, when the peer review process had barely started, and to issue a detailed press release at the same time.

He also briefed selected journalists individually. ‘It is not how I would have played it,’ Prof Curry said. ‘I was informed only when I got a group email. I think they have made errors and I distance myself from what they did.

‘It would have been smart to consult me.’ She said it was unfortunate that although the Journal of Geophysical Research had allowed Prof Muller to issue the papers, the reviewers were, under the journal’s policy, forbidden from public comment.

Prof McKittrick added: ‘The fact is that many of the people who are in a position to provide informed criticism of this work are currently bound by confidentiality agreements.

‘For the Berkeley team to have chosen this particular moment to launch a major international publicity blitz is a highly unethical sabotage of the peer review process.’

In Prof Curry’s view, two of the papers were not ready to be published, in part because they did not properly address the arguments of climate sceptics.

As for the graph disseminated to the media, she said: ‘This is “hide the decline” stuff. Our data show the pause, just as the other sets of data do. Muller is hiding the decline.

‘To say this is the end of scepticism is misleading, as is the statement that warming hasn’t paused. It is also misleading to say, as he has, that the issue of heat islands has been settled.’

Prof Muller said she was ‘out of the loop’. He added: ‘I wasn’t even sent the press release before it was issued.’

Prof Muller defended his behaviour yesterday, saying that all he was doing was ‘returning to traditional peer review’, issuing draft papers to give the whole ‘climate community’ a chance to comment.

As for the press release, he claimed he was ‘not seeking publicity’, adding: ‘This is simply a way of getting the media to report this more accurately.’

He said his decision to publish was completely unrelated to the forthcoming United Nations climate conference.

This, he said, was ‘irrelevant’, insisting that nothing could have been further from his mind than trying to influence it.
 
Old November 2nd, 2011 #231
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http://www.express.co.uk/features/vi...-warming-over-

GLOBAL WARMING IS OVER, SAYS EXPERT
Wednesday November 2,2011
By Julie Carpenter

IT'S one of the hottest feuds in science - climate chance zealots insist that we're still destroying the planet but now another scientist has warned the cast-iron evidence just isn't there.

FOR a minute there it seemed the global warming debate had finally been resolved.

While for years scientists and sceptics have raged against each other on the crucial topic, new research hailed “the most definitive study into temperature data gathered by weather stations over the past half-century” seemed to come to an authoritative conclusion.

Global warming IS real it said, strengthening the need for us all to reduce carbon emissions and boost efforts to try to save the planet.

And this research was headed by a physicist who had previously been a sceptic of global warming and an outspoken critic of the science underpinning it, lending the results even greater credibility.

Prof Richard Muller had spent two years trying to discover if the mainstream scientists were wrong but concluded they were right. Temperatures are rising and his results, he concluded, “proved you should not be a sceptic, at least not any longer”. Case closed.

But is it? Not according to Prof Judith Curry, a member of Prof Muller’s team, who claims the same findings have shown that global warming has stopped – plunging the rest of us into a quandary of what and who to believe.

When Prof Curry heard that Prof Muller was saying that the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) findings would put an end to climate change scepticism for good she was horrified. “This isn’t the end of scepticism,” she exclaimed.

“To say that is the biggest mistake he has made. When I saw he was saying that I just thought, ‘Oh my God.’”

Prof Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and Prof Curry, who chairs the Department Of Earth And Atmospheric Sciences at America’s Georgia Institute of Technology, were part of the BEST project that carried
out analysis of more than 1.6 billion temperature recordings collected from more than 39,000 weather stations around the world.

Prof Muller appeared on Radio 4’s Today Programme last Friday where he described how BEST’s findings showed that since the Fifties global temperatures had risen by about 1 degree Celsius, a figure which is in line with estimates from Nasa and the Met Office.

When asked whether the rate had stopped over the last 10 years he said they had not. “We see no evidence of it having slowed down,” he replied and a graph issued by the BEST project suggests a continuing and steep increase.

But this last point is one which Prof Curry has furiously rebuttted. In a serious clash of scientific experts Prof Curry has accused Prof Muller of trying to “hide the decline in rates of global warming”.

She says that BEST’s research actually shows that there has been no increase in world temperatures for 13 years.

She has called Prof Muller’s comments “a huge mistake” and has said that she now plans to discuss her future on the project with him. “There is no scientific basis for saying that global warming hasn’t stopped,” she says.

“To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.” New research also seems to back up Prof Curry rather than Prof Muller.

A report published by the Global Warming Foundation, which is based on BEST’s findings, includes a graph of world average temperatures over the past 10 years and it is absolutely flat, suggesting that temperatures have remained constant.

This issue is crucial because the levels of carbon dioxide in the air have continued to rise rapidly over the last decade and if temperatures have remained constant during that period it would suggest there is no direct link between carbon gas emissions and global warming.

Previously carbon dioxide emissions – from the burning of fossil fuels and from deforestation – have been considered one of the biggest causes of climate change, the most damaging effects of which are thought to be the melting of the polar ice caps and the rise in sea levels as well as an increase in extreme weather events such as floods and droughts.

“Whatever it is that is going on here it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by carbon dioxide,” says Prof Curry.

Prof Muller has made it clear that the BEST study was not conducted in order to gauge the causes of global warming, saying the study “made no assessment on how much of this is due to humans and how much is natural”.

He and his scientists – who also included this year’s physics Nobel winner Saul Perlmutter – set out purely to determine once and for all whether climate change had occurred.

The group had been suspicious of previous results which confirmed a rise in global temperatures , believing that their work may have been skewed by the “urban heat island effect” where increasing urbanisation around weather stations was causing the temperature increases recorded over the past 50 years.

But their exhaustive research discovered that the urban heat effect could not explain the global temperature increase of about one degree Celsius since 1950.

IT IS well to point out that Prof Curry is not disputing the one degree Celsius increase. She is disputing Prof Muller’s suggestion that temperatures haven’t levelled off in the last decade.

Indeed she says this global warming standstill since the end of the Nineties – which has been completely unexpected – has wide-reaching consequences for the causes of climate change and has already led many climate scientists to start looking at alternative factors that may have contributed to global warming, other than carbon gas emissions. In particular she has mentioned the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation.

What she also seems furious about is the way that Prof Muller went about publishing BEST’s results without consulting her and before a proper peer review could be carried out. “It is not how I would have played it,” she has said. “I was informed only when I got a group email. I think they have made errors and I distance myself from what they did. It would have been smart to consult me.”

This is, you can be sure, not the last we will hear on the debate.
 
Old November 26th, 2011 #232
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestay...arming-debate/

Climategate 2.0: New E-Mails Rock The Global Warming Debate

A new batch of 5,000 emails among scientists central to the assertion that humans are causing a global warming crisis were anonymously released to the public yesterday, igniting a new firestorm of controversy nearly two years to the day after similar emails ignited the Climategate scandal.

Three themes are emerging from the newly released emails: (1) prominent scientists central to the global warming debate are taking measures to conceal rather than disseminate underlying data and discussions; (2) these scientists view global warming as a political “cause” rather than a balanced scientific inquiry and (3) many of these scientists frankly admit to each other that much of the science is weak and dependent on deliberate manipulation of facts and data.

Regarding scientific transparency, a defining characteristic of science is the open sharing of scientific data, theories and procedures so that independent parties, and especially skeptics of a particular theory or hypothesis, can replicate and validate asserted experiments or observations. Emails between Climategate scientists, however, show a concerted effort to hide rather than disseminate underlying evidence and procedures.

“I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI [Freedom of Information] Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process,”writes Phil Jones, a scientist working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in a newly released email.

“Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden,” Jones writes in another newly released email. “I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.”

The original Climategate emails contained similar evidence of destroying information and data that the public would naturally assume would be available according to freedom of information principles. “Mike, can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4 [UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4th Assessment]?” Jones wrote to Penn State University scientist Michael Mann in an email released in Climategate 1.0. “Keith will do likewise. … We will be getting Caspar [Ammann] to do likewise. I see that CA [the Climate Audit Web site] claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!”

The new emails also reveal the scientists’ attempts to politicize the debate and advance predetermined outcomes.

“The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s included and what is left out” of IPCC reports, writes Jonathan Overpeck, coordinating lead author for the IPCC’s most recent climate assessment.

“I gave up on [Georgia Institute of Technology climate professor] Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but its not helping the cause,” wrote Mann in another newly released email.
 
Old December 3rd, 2011 #233
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http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commenta...ming-orthodoxy

New Round of “Climategate” Leaks Deal Another Blow to Global Warming Orthodoxy
By Timothy H. Lee
Thursday, December 01 2011

“Climategate, Part II” has arrived.

Back in 2009, “Climategate” dealt a crippling blow to the global warming syndicate’s credibility.

And now, just in time for the latest annual climate charade in Durban, South Africa, environmental alarmists face a new round of embarrassing emails leaked anonymously over the Internet.

The term “Climategate” gained popular currency in November 2009, when sources leaked over 3,000 emails and documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University in Britain. The exchanges among global-warming advocates betrayed a long-term, explicit campaign to hide evidence, to shamelessly blacklist “denier” scientists who dared question climate orthodoxy and even to “redefine what the peer-review literature is” to squelch opposition. Here is a sampling of some of the messages leaked:

“The fact is we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty we can’t.”

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

“If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone… We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.”

“Try and change the received date! Don’t give those skeptics something to amuse themselves with.”

“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Since those disclosures, public skepticism toward global warming doctrine has increased significantly in America as well as Europe. Even within the subcategory of environmental concerns, a March 2011 survey reveals that Americans rank global warming lowest among their worries, far below such real or hypothetical threats as drinking water, soil contamination, species extinction and even urban sprawl (what housing bust?).

Of course, the Climategate disclosures aren’t the only basis for increased skepticism toward global warming alarmism. Accumulated atmospheric data shows that temperatures actually declined after 1998, even though economic growth and energy use exploded around that time in developing countries like China and India, as well as in Europe and the United States. That hardly squares with anthropomorphic global warming dogma.

Additionally, as Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal observed this week, “On Sunday, 2,232 days will have passed since a category 3 hurricane made landfall in the U.S., the longest period in more than a century that the U.S. has been spared a devastating storm.” Recall that global warming zealots claimed in 2005 that Hurricane Katrina portended a new era of increased hurricane catastrophe.

Global warming activists dismissed the Climategate leaks as trivial distractions that did nothing to negate global warming theory generally. The broader public, however, wasn’t buying it. If scientific fact squarely showed man-made global warming, after all, why the furious campaign to lie about it?

Now, we have yet another round of Climategate releases.

Instead of the 3,000 documents released in 2009, a person using the name “FOIA” has now released 5,000 more communications between climate change alarmists. The latest round involves many of the same players, including the infamous Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia and Michael Mann of Penn State University. It also involves the same type of efforts to distort climate data, intimidate scientists offering contrary opinions and malign them publicly.

Mr. Mann, for example, describes in one email his efforts to slur global warming skeptics Steve McIntyre and Doug Keenan:

“I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thus far unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests. Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy.”

So instead of offering facts, global warming hysterics sought to manipulate evidence and attack opponents.

And just as the original Climategate occurred on the eve of the failed 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, the latest disclosures come as representatives of 192 nations congregate in Durban to consider a replacement for the failed Kyoto Protocol that expires next year. Despite fiscal crises in Europe and the U.S., negotiators seek to wring $100 billion in pledges, as well as mandatory energy restrictions.

Thankfully, real-world climate data and the latest round of Climategate revelations make such destructive actions unlikely. As the anonymous “FOIA” stated in his latest release, “Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on hiding the decline.”

Now it’s just a matter of political leaders waking up to that same reality.
 
Old December 25th, 2011 #234
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http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/ja...greed-brigade/

More bad news for the anti-energy, green greed brigade
By James Delingpole
Last updated: December 22nd, 2011

Dum dum dum. Another one bites the dust.....

What do solar energy companies have in common with Second Lieutenants on the first day of the Somme? Yes, that's right. (H/T GWPF)

In Germany, especially, the attrition rate has been amazing. According to Reuters, no fewer than 5,000 German solar companies have gone bust in the last year, shedding around 20,000 jobs.

Workers in Germany's once booming solar energy industry face a shakeout of major proportions following declines in the price of solar panels over the past year.

Cuts in subsidies for solar energy, weaker demand for panels and fierce competition from cheaper Asian rivals are eating into what was once the world's biggest hub for the production of solar cells, taking the shine off an industry that was effectively born in Germany.

Well boo hoo. That's the price you pay for building an industry which should never have existed in the first place – and certainly wouldn't have done had it not been for the heavy subsidy programme launched a decade ago by the Schroeder-led Green/Social Democrat coalition.

Whenever I make this point, the menagerie of trolls who congregate below this blog go into paroxysms of self-righteous rage, accusing me of heartlessness. No, trolls: heartless is when governments confiscate money from taxpayers and squander it on creating fake (aka "green") jobs in fake industries which go bust the second the exchequer realises it no longer has enough money to keep them on the life support machine.

And though, as I've said before, I have a certain degree of sympathy for the workers who joined the solar industry in good faith, imagining it had – ho ho – a bright future and would provide them with a lasting career, I have none whatsoever for those at management/investment level. If people like Tom Singh, brother of Britain's third most-famous celebrity mathematician Simon Singh, end up getting their fingers badly burned by solar, well, caveat emptor. Presumably they must have done their due diligence. And if they did, it would have been perfectly clear that solar power is little more than a rent-seeker's charter: it does not – and quite possibly never will – create real value; it is obviously unsuited to northern climes; it is, like most renewable energy, yet another pernicious scheme by which wealth is transferred compulsorily from the poor into the pockets of the rich and cynical.

Something similar is happening to the European carbon trading industry. In November last year, you'll gleefully recall, the US Chicago Carbon Trading Exchange (CCX) collapsed when, in the space of two years, the carbon dioxide price fell from $7 a tonne to 7 cents a tonne. And where the US leads, Europe follows.

In early January, investors in the continent's cap-and-trade system still had to pay some euro14 ($18.30) for the right to emit one ton of carbon dioxide into the air. By last week, the price of one emission allowance had tumbled to a meager euro6.41 — making it much cheaper to pollute and slashing the financial incentives for companies to invest in low-carbon technologies.

Analysts warn that the prospect of another recession in the debt-ridden continent, and the accompanying decline in emissions, could push prices below euro2 by the end of next month.

Meanwhile, up in the skies, the Indians, Americans and the Chinese have formed an unlikely alliance against the carbon taxes being imposed by the EU on air travel. A trade war is threatened:

China has warned the European Union to abandon its controversial carbon tax on airlines or risk provoking a global trade war. Adding weight to the warning, an industry insider told the Financial Times that the Chinese government was seriously considering measures to hit back at the EU if it insists on charging international airlines for their carbon emissions.

and:

The US has threatened to take retaliatory action against the European Union unless Brussels drops its plan imminently to start charging any airline flying into the bloc for its carbon pollution. In a sharp escalation of tensions over Brussels’ move to bring aviation into its emissions trading system from January 1, Hilary Clinton, US Secretary of State, has written to her European Commission counterpart, Catherine Ashton, and other top commissioners, to “strongly urge” the EU to halt or suspend its plan.

Finally here's Matt Ridley with some perspective on the great green jobs boondoggle:

WHEN is a job not a job? Answer: when it is a green job. Jobs in an industry that raises the price of energy effectively destroy jobs elsewhere; jobs in an industry that cuts the cost of energy create extra jobs elsewhere.

The entire argument for green jobs is a version of Frederic Bastiat’s broken-window fallacy. The great nineteenth century French economist pointed out that breaking a window may provide work for the glazier, but takes work from the tailor, because the window owner has to postpone ordering a new suit because he has to pay for the window.

You will hear claims from Chris Huhne, the anti-energy secretary, and the green-greed brigade that trousers his subsidies for their wind and solar farms, about how many jobs they are creating in renewable energy. But since every one of these jobs is subsidised by higher electricity bills and extra taxes, the creation of those jobs is a cost to the rest of us. The anti-carbon and renewable agenda is not only killing jobs by closing steel mills, aluminium smelters and power stations, but preventing the creation of new jobs at hairdressers, restaurants and electricians by putting up their costs and taking money from their customers’ pockets.

We now have an estimate, from meticulous work in a new report by the Renewable Energy Foundation, of just how costly those subsidies are going to get in a few years’ time: £15bn a year, or 1 per cent of GDP. Ouch. That’s more than this year’s growth.

Contrast that with news from the United States that, according to a report from IHS Global Insight, the cheap shale gas revolution now in full flow has created 148,000 jobs directly within the gas industry and – by making energy cheaper – has created at least another 450,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy. By 2015, the total impact of shale gas will be 870,000 new jobs, says the report.

One of these days I'd love it, no really I would, if one of the trolls who lurk below this blog hissing their ad homs and their straw men and their appeals to authority could actually respond lucidly to the points raised in posts like this. Let me explain, once more for their benefit, in very simple language why I have a problem with the man-made global warming industry: on the basis of little hard scientific evidence (only computer projections), trillions of pounds, dollars and euros are being pumped into projects which make energy needlessly more expensive, cause tremendous environmental damage, slow down economic growth, stifle liberty and destroy jobs. If just one of the trolls can prove me wrong, I promise never to broach the subject again. But if the best they can come up with is the usual malicious chuntering, then here's a suggestion: bog off and hang out with the other eco-loons at Komment Macht Frei. The way the Guardian's going, it will need all the help it can get if it hopes to survive another year.
 
Old December 25th, 2011 #235
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http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/49ab6...#axzz1hanSONYJ

China warns EU of carbon tax ‘trade war’
By Simon Rabinovitch in Beijing

China has warned the European Union to abandon its controversial carbon tax on airlines or risk provoking a global trade war.

Adding weight to the warning, an industry insider told the Financial Times that the Chinese government was seriously considering measures to hit back at the EU if it insists on charging international airlines for their carbon emissions.

In a case initiated by US airlines, the European Court of Justice ruled on Wednesday that the EU’s carbon emissions trading scheme did not infringe on the sovereignty of other nations, and that it was compatible with international law. The change is set to go into effect from January 1.

Chinese airlines have also been preparing an legal challenge in Europe and they still plan to proceed with it, but Chai Haibo, deputy secretary general of the China Air Transport Association, conceded that the European ruling complicated matters as it means they will need to find an alternative reason to challenge the law.

Even if court action fails, Mr Chai was optimistic that concerted global pressure could yet persuade the EU to repeal its law. In the short term, he called on Brussels to delay implementation in light of the intense international outcry that it has provoked.

“Except for the EU, no countries support this,” he said.

He added that several Chinese government departments in Beijing were in the midst of researching possible counter-measures. Chinese airline officials have said before that they might refuse to pay the carbon tax, raising the prospect of a drawn-out legal fight.

The Chinese government has largely stayed on the sidelines of the spat, letting the airlines speak for themselves. In a sign that the industry dispute is escalating to a diplomatic concern, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman on Thursday called the EU plan “unilateral” and said it should be consulting other countries including China.

Xinhua, the state-owned news agency often used by the government to deliver blunter messages, was more direct.

“This is a trade barrier in the name of environmental protection, and it constitutes an attack on the interests of travellers and the international aviation industry,” it said in an editorial. “It will be difficult to avoid a trade war focused on a ‘carbon tax’ for airlines.”

Connie Hedegaard, Europe’s climate commissioner, said on Wednesday that she was “very satisfied” with the ECJ’s ruling and added that she expected global airlines to respect European law.

She has argued that the extra cost of complying with the policy would amount to a ticket price increase of up to $16.30 for a transatlantic flight. But Chinese airlines estimate the EU tax would cost them up to $2.8bn by 2020, adding roughly $47.50 to a ticket for flights between China and Europe.
 
Old January 27th, 2012 #236
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http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/50482

Scientists: Chill on global warming
January 27, 2012 by Don Surber

16 actual scientists have joined 1973 Nobel-winning physicist Ivar Giaever in calling global warming concerns overblown. In a letter published in the Wall Street Journal today, the scientists called for everyone to remain calm — and mocked the alarmism by UN bureaucrats over global warming and carbon dioxide.

They recommended that the world do nothing about global warming for the next 50 years.

“The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant,” the scientists wrote in their letter, which the Wall Street Journal headlined: “No Need to Panic About Global Warming. There’s no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy.”

The letter went on to explain that warming may actually benefit life on Earth: “CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere’s life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.”

The scientists did not dismiss entirely the idea that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases may be increasing temperatures. The scientists simply said there is no proof that the globe is warming.

“The lack of warming for more than a decade — indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections — suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause,” the scientists wrote. “Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.”

The scientists made many of the same points skeptics such as Anthony Watts and cynics like me have made: Global warming alarmism is an industry that has enriched many, many people.

The 16 scientists made a grand suggestion: Do nothing.

“A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls,” the 16 scientists wrote.” This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.”

The scientists who signed the letter are: Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.

As Ivar Giaever said in his letter resigning from the American Physical Society, “I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: ‘The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.’ In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?”
 
Old February 1st, 2012 #237
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http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/3...aw-intervenes/

Bitter cold records broken in Alaska – all time coldest record nearly broken, but Murphy’s Law intervenes
Posted on January 30, 2012 by Anthony Watts

Jim River, AK closed in on the all time record coldest temperature of -80°F set in 1971, which is not only the Alaska all-time record, but the record for the entire United States. Unfortunately, it seems the battery died in the weather station just at the critical moment.


Image from hamweather.com


While the continental USA has a mild winter and has set a number of high temperature records in the last week and pundits ponder whether they will be blaming the dreaded “global warming” for those temperatures, Alaska and Canada have been suffering through some of the coldest temperatures on record during the last week.

For example in Circle Hot Springs, AK on Sunday, 29 Jan 2012 the HIGH temperature was a blistering -49°F, breaking the -44°F record which has stood since 1917. It gets better.

That same day in Circle Hot Springs the low temperature was -58°F breaking the old record of -52°F set in 1941 by six degrees.

Here’s a list of temperature records in Alaska from the past week:



Brrr!

While all that was happening, the weather station in Jim River, AK closed in on the all time record coldest temperature of -80°F set in 1971. That’s not only the Alaska all-time record, but the record for the entire United States. Unfortunately, the weather station stopped reporting at -79°F.
 
Old February 1st, 2012 #238
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http://news.yahoo.com/japan-snowstor...-abc-news.html

Japan Snowstorm Kills 52, Crushes Steel Bridge
By Akiko Fujita | ABC News – 1 hr 11 mins ago

Heavy snowfall has crippled much of Japan's western coast, killing more than 50 people and injuring nearly 600. The worst snowstorm in six years has dumped more than 10 feet of snow in the hardest-hit regions, causing at least one bridge to collapse and forcing school closures across the region.


An avalanche today buried three people for more than an hour near a hot springs in Akita Prefecture in northwest Japan. The women were later found unconscious but survived.

Western Japan has been battered by one snowstorm after another since the beginning of the year, overwhelming cash-strapped cities struggling to keep up with cleanup efforts. In the Niigata Prefecture, officials said nearly half of their 30 cities had run out of funds set aside snow removal. Further north in the Aomori Prefecture, the government had already applied for additional funds from Tokyo, after draining its budget.

Residents, frustrated by the slow response, have taken it upon themselves to clean up the winter mess, resulting in deadly consequences. Nearly all the storm-related deaths have been a direct result of snow removal.

Meanwhile, in Nagano, the weight of all the snow proved to be too much for a 310-foot steel bridge. It collapsed early this week, although no one was injured.

The Japan Meteorological Agency forecasts more snowfall in the next 24 hours.
 
Old February 1st, 2012 #239
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...ing-again.html

Forget global warming - it's Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again)Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years
By David Rose

Last updated at 5:38 AM on 29th January 2012

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.


A painting, dated 1684, by Abraham Hondius depicts one of many frost fairs on the River Thames during the mini ice age


Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.

We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’ – which is why last week’s solar storm resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis further south than usual. But sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.

Analysis by experts at NASA and the University of Arizona – derived from magnetic-field measurements 120,000 miles beneath the sun’s surface – suggest that Cycle 25, whose peak is due in 2022, will be a great deal weaker still.

According to a paper issued last week by the Met Office, there is a 92 per cent chance that both Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as, or weaker than, the ‘Dalton minimum’ of 1790 to 1830. In this period, named after the meteorologist John Dalton, average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2C.

However, it is also possible that the new solar energy slump could be as deep as the ‘Maunder minimum’ (after astronomer Edward Maunder), between 1645 and 1715 in the coldest part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ when, as well as the Thames frost fairs, the canals of Holland froze solid.



Yet, in its paper, the Met Office claimed that the consequences now would be negligible – because the impact of the sun on climate is far less than man-made carbon dioxide. Although the sun’s output is likely to decrease until 2100, ‘This would only cause a reduction in global temperatures of 0.08C.’ Peter Stott, one of the authors, said: ‘Our findings suggest a reduction of solar activity to levels not seen in hundreds of years would be insufficient to offset the dominant influence of greenhouse gases.’

These findings are fiercely disputed by other solar experts.

‘World temperatures may end up a lot cooler than now for 50 years or more,’ said Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at Denmark’s National Space Institute. ‘It will take a long battle to convince some climate scientists that the sun is important. It may well be that the sun is going to demonstrate this on its own, without the need for their help.’

He pointed out that, in claiming the effect of the solar minimum would be small, the Met Office was relying on the same computer models that are being undermined by the current pause in global-warming.

CO2 levels have continued to rise without interruption and, in 2007, the Met Office claimed that global warming was about to ‘come roaring back’. It said that between 2004 and 2014 there would be an overall increase of 0.3C. In 2009, it predicted that at least three of the years 2009 to 2014 would break the previous temperature record set in 1998.



So far there is no sign of any of this happening. But yesterday a Met Office spokesman insisted its models were still valid.

‘The ten-year projection remains groundbreaking science. The period for the original projection is not over yet,’ he said.

Dr Nicola Scafetta, of Duke University in North Carolina, is the author of several papers that argue the Met Office climate models show there should have been ‘steady warming from 2000 until now’.

‘If temperatures continue to stay flat or start to cool again, the divergence between the models and recorded data will eventually become so great that the whole scientific community will question the current theories,’ he said.

He believes that as the Met Office model attaches much greater significance to CO2 than to the sun, it was bound to conclude that there would not be cooling. ‘The real issue is whether the model itself is accurate,’ Dr Scafetta said. Meanwhile, one of America’s most eminent climate experts, Professor Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, said she found the Met Office’s confident prediction of a ‘negligible’ impact difficult to understand.

‘The responsible thing to do would be to accept the fact that the models may have severe shortcomings when it comes to the influence of the sun,’ said Professor Curry. As for the warming pause, she said that many scientists ‘are not surprised’.



She argued it is becoming evident that factors other than CO2 play an important role in rising or falling warmth, such as the 60-year water temperature cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

‘They have insufficiently been appreciated in terms of global climate,’ said Prof Curry. When both oceans were cold in the past, such as from 1940 to 1970, the climate cooled. The Pacific cycle ‘flipped’ back from warm to cold mode in 2008 and the Atlantic is also thought likely to flip in the next few years .

Pal Brekke, senior adviser at the Norwegian Space Centre, said some scientists found the importance of water cycles difficult to accept, because doing so means admitting that the oceans – not CO2 – caused much of the global warming between 1970 and 1997.

The same goes for the impact of the sun – which was highly active for much of the 20th Century.

‘Nature is about to carry out a very interesting experiment,’ he said. ‘Ten or 15 years from now, we will be able to determine much better whether the warming of the late 20th Century really was caused by man-made CO2, or by natural variability.’

Meanwhile, since the end of last year, world temperatures have fallen by more than half a degree, as the cold ‘La Nina’ effect has re-emerged in the South Pacific.

‘We’re now well into the second decade of the pause,’ said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. ‘If we don’t see convincing evidence of global warming by 2015, it will start to become clear whether the models are bunk. And, if they are, the implications for some scientists could be very serious.’
 
Old February 14th, 2012 #240
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...vel-plans.html

Britain faces a month of weather chaos as snow wrecks travel plans
Britain is facing a month of snow, ice and freezing temperatures after the first Big Freeze of the winter led to cancelled flights at Heathrow and treacherous conditions on the roads.


Forecasters have warned the biting temperatures, snow showers and overnight frosts could last until the end of February as the country returned to work amid expected school closures.

Parts of the UK woke up to lying snow of up to five inches (14cm) this morning while the coldest temperature of -8.6C (16.5F) was recorded overnight in Church Fenton in North Yorkshire.

Heathrow Airport faced questions last night as to why half of all flights were cancelled hours after it stopped snowing.

BAA, the Spanish-owned airport operator, incurred the wrath of passengers after 600 flights were grounded at Heathrow despite just three inches of snowfall, disrupting the plans of as many as 18,000 travellers.

This morning, the airport was operating its normal flight schedule but warned of a backlog of cancellations.

The Met Office said the rest of the week would be cold for most parts of the country.

"Most of England and Wales will be staying relatively settled but cold. The biggest risk is hard overnight frost and freezing fog," said Steven Keates, Met Office forecaster.

"It looks as if this cold snap will last two or three weeks and this weather system looks as though it will erode from the west in the second half of February."

The disruption was in stark contrast to airports across Europe where, despite record low temperatures, flights took off as normal.

In Germany, no airport had to shut even though Munich saw temperatures plunge to -27C. In Stockholm only six of 350 flights were cancelled. Copenhagen had four inches of snow but no disruption.

In contrast, by Saturday afternoon BAA had already cancelled a third of flights nine hours before any snow had fallen in a pre-emptive plan to avoid the chaos of previous winters.

Yet even as the snow began to melt from 6am on Sunday and passengers reported clear runways, more than half of flights remained grounded.

It comes less than 14 months after the airport was crippled for five days because there were not enough snow clearance vehicles to keep runways open.

Despite an inquiry and promises by BAA that it had increased its snowplough fleet by 68 to 185 at a cost of £32.4 million, the airport was only able to handle just one in two flights.

“It’s unbelievable. The runways seemed clear and they have cancelled the flights,” said Philippa Britton, of Kendal, Cumbria.

Those flying in from Moscow voiced their disbelief that they were stranded, despite flying out from Russia in -20C snow storms. Miriam Walters, 62, a teacher, said: “The runways at Moscow were covered with snow and still we managed to leave.”

Although the bad weather caught airport operators unaware in 2010, The Met Office had predicted the weekend snowfall days in advance.

Gatwick, Stansted and London Luton had no disruption as did Manchester, Prestwick and Edinburgh. The number of planes stuck on the tarmac at Heathrow meant incoming flights were forced to divert elsewhere.

Hundreds of passengers were last night stranded in Ireland as six flights were sent to Shannon Airport. British Airways was badly affected, with two thirds of its flights between 9.15am and 2.15pm cancelled.

Stranded passengers said the airport refused to put them up in hotels, forcing them to sleep on yoga mats in terminals.

Elin Mabbutt, a mother of three from Aberystwyth, was due to fly to Mumbai on Saturday but her flight was cancelled. “It is frustrating especially as there is no sign of snow on the ground,” said Mrs Mabbutt, 33.

Lengthy delays meant many crew had exceeded their working hours and could not fly.

In December 2010 4,000 flights were cancelled over a week as cold weather and snow hit Britain. The economy lost an estimated £1.2 billion a day, and BAA some £20 million.

A report by Prof David Begg, an independent adviser, criticised the lack of preparedness and equipment. Transport experts said Heathrow struggles because the airport is stretched to the limit.

“Heathrow operates at full capacity all of the time so anytime there are adverse conditions, such as snow, some leeway has to be given, such as closing runways and parking stations,” said Mike Carrivick, the chief executive of the Board of Airlines, which promotes the business interests of airlines.

He said a review would now be carried out to establish whether changes to procedures, introduced after the weather problems in 2010, had worked and if “things went right and what went wrong”.

A spokesman for London First, a business group that represents 200 major companies, said employers would be concerned how the airport would cope on Monday.

"We think the important thing is how quickly things get back to normal," he said.

"Employers will be thinking 'yes it snowed over the weekend and we got through it' but they will ask how are is the airport going to cope today and will staff be able to travel and get into work."

A spokesman for ABTA, the travel association, said: “The disruption once again raises the issue of capacity constraints at the busiest airports and highlights the need for a robust long term strategy for UK aviation.”
 
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