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Old March 4th, 2008 #1
Alex Linder
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Default 'Global warming'


[What's the scam? Dressing up the same old tired judeo-commie agenda in science drag. Trying to get ordinary people to cede more power and money to the people who already have the most of it - the government. Tens of billions of dollars have already been disbursed to politically interested 'scientists' to study an imaginary problem that was never more than a socialist's computer model in the first place.]


The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change
Sponsored by The Heartland Institute

March 2 - March 4, 2008
Marriott New York Marquis Times Square Hotel
1535 Broadway
New York City, NY U.S.A.



Joseph L. Bast
Conference Host
President, The Heartland Institute

Opening Remarks delivered Sunday, March 2, 2008


Welcome to the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change.

This is a truly historic event, the first international conference devoted to answering questions overlooked by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We’re asking questions such as:

* how reliable are the data used to document the recent warming trend?

* how much of the modern warming is natural, and how much is likely the result of human activities?

* how reliable are the computer models used to forecast future climate conditions? and

* is reducing emissions the best or only response to possible climate change?

Obviously, these are important questions. Yet the IPCC pays little attention to them or hides the large amount of doubt and uncertainty surrounding them.

Are the scientists and economists who ask these questions just a fringe group, outside the scientific mainstream? Not at all. A 2003 survey of 530 climate scientists in 27 countries, conducted by Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch at the GKSS Institute of Coastal Research in Germany, found

* 82 percent said global warming is happening, but only

* 56 percent said it’s mostly the result of human causes, and only

* 35 percent said models can accurately predict future climate conditions.


Only 27 percent believed “the current state of scientific knowledge is able to provide reasonable predictions of climate variability on time scales of 100 years.”

That’s a long ways from “consensus.” It’s actually pretty close to what the American public told pollsters for the Pew Trust in 2006:

* 70 percent thought global warming is happening,

* only 41 percent thought it was due to human causes,

* and only 19 percent thought it was a high-priority issue.


The alarmists think it’s a “paradox” that the more people learn about climate change, the less likely they are to consider it a serious problem. But as John Tierney with The New York Times points out in a blog posted just a day ago, maybe, just maybe, it’s because people are smart rather than stupid.

And incidentally, 70 percent of the public oppose raising gasoline prices by $1 to fight global warming, and 80 percent oppose a $2/gallon tax increase, according to a 2007 poll by The New York Times and CBS News.

I’ve got news for them: Reducing emissions by 60 to 80 percent, which is what the alarmists claim is necessary to “stop global warming,” would cost a lot more than $1 a gallon.

Al Gore, the United Nations, environmental groups, and too often the reporters who cover the climate change debate are the ones who are out of step with the real “consensus.” They claim to be certain that global warming is occurring, convinced it is due to human causes, and 100 percent confident we can predict future climates.

Who’s on the fringe of scientific consensus? The alarmists, or the skeptics?

These questions go to the heart of the issue: Is global warming a crisis, as we are so often told by media, politicians, and environmental activists? Or is it moderate, mostly natural, and unstoppable, as we are told by many distinguished scientists?

Former Vice President Al Gore has said repeatedly that there is a “consensus” in favor of his alarmist views on global warming. And of course, he’s not alone.

Two weeks ago, Jim Martin, executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, when told of our conference, said, “You could have a convention of all the scientists who dispute climate change in a relatively small phone booth.” (Denver Post, February 12, 2008).

RealClimate.org predicted that no real scientists would show up at this conference.

Well ...

We have with us, tonight and tomorrow, more than 200 scientists and other experts on climate change, from Australia, Canada, England, France, Hungary, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Sweden, and of course the United States.

They come from the University of Alabama, Arizona State, Carleton, Central Queensland, Delaware, Durham, and Florida State University.

From George Mason, Harvard, The Institute Pasteur in Paris, James Cook, John Moores, Johns Hopkins, and the London School of Economics.

From The University of Mississippi, Monash, Nottingham, Ohio State, Oregon State, Oslo, Ottawa, Rochester, Rockefeller, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

And from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Suffolk University, the University of Virginia, Westminster School of Business (in London), and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

And I apologize if I left anyone out.

These scientists and economists have been published thousands of times in the world’s leading scientific journals and have written hundreds of books. If you call this the fringe, where’s the center?

Hey Jim Martin, does this look like a phone booth to you?

Hey RealClimate, can you hear us now?

These scientists and economists deserve to be heard. They have stood up to political correctness and defended the scientific method at a time when doing so threatens their research grants, tenure, and ability to get published. Some of them have even faced death threats for daring to speak out against what can only be called the mass delusion of our time.

And they must be heard, because the stakes are enormous.

George Will, in an October Newsweek column commenting on Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize, wrote that if nations impose the reductions in energy use that Al Gore and the folks at RealClimate call for, they will cause “more preventable death and suffering than was caused in the last century by Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot combined.”

It takes more than four Norwegian socialists to win a Pulitzer Prize, so I’ll put George Will’s Pulitzer Prize and his recent Bradley Prize up against Gore’s Nobel any day.

You’ve probably read some of the attacks that have appeared in the blogosphere and in print directed against this conference, and against The Heartland Institute. Let me repeat for the record here tonight what appears prominently on our Web site:

* No corporate dollars were used to help finance this conference.

* The Heartland Institute has 2,700 donors, and gets about 16 percent of its income from corporations.

* Heartland gets less than 5 percent of its income from all energy-producing companies combined. We are 95 percent carbon free.

And let me further add to the record:

* The honoraria paid to all of the speakers appearing at this conference add up to less than the honorarium Al Gore gets paid for making a single speech, and less than what his company makes selling fake carbon “off-sets” in a week.

* It is no crime for a think tank or advocacy group to accept corporate funding. In fact, corporations that fail to step forward and assure that sensible voices are heard in this debate are doing their shareholders, and their countries, a grave disservice.


We’re not doing this for the money, obviously. The Heartland Institute is in the “skeptics” camp because we know alarmism is a tool that has been used by opponents of individual freedom and free enterprise since as early as 1798, when Thomas Malthus predicted that food supply would fail to keep up with population growth.

We opposed global warming alarmism before we received any contributions from energy corporations and we’ll continue to address it after many of them have found ways to make a fast buck off the public hysteria.

We know which organizations are raking in millions of dollars a year in government and foundation grants to spread fear and false information about climate change. It’s not The Heartland Institute, and it’s not any of the 50-plus cosponsoring organizations that helped make this conference possible.

The alarmists in the global warming debate have had their say--over and over again, in every newspaper in the country practically every day and in countless news reports and documentary films. They have dominated the media’s coverage of this issue. They have swayed the views of many people. Some of them have even grown very rich in the process, and others still hope to.

But they have lost the debate.

Winners don’t exaggerate. Winners don’t lie. Winners don’t appeal to fear or resort to ad hominem attacks.

As George Will also wrote, “people only insist that a debate stop when they are afraid of what might be learned if it continues.”

We invited Al Gore to speak to us tonight, and even agreed to pay his $200,000 honorarium. He refused. We invited some of the well-known scientists associated with the alarmist camp, and they refused.

All we got are a few professional hecklers registered from Lyndon LaRouche, DeSmogBlog, and some other left-wing conspiracy groups. If you run into them over the course of the next two days, please be kind to them ... and call security if they aren’t kind to you.

Skeptics are the winners of EVERY scientific debate, always, everywhere. Because skepticism, as T.H. Huxley said, is the highest calling of a true scientist.

No scientific theory is true because a majority of scientists say it to be true. Scientific theories are only provisionally true until they are falsified by data that can be better explained by a different theory. And it is by falsifying current theories that scientific knowledge advances, not by consensus.

The claim that global warming is a “crisis” is itself a theory. It can be falsified by scientific fact, just as the claim that there is a “consensus” that global warming is man-made and will be a catastrophe has been dis-proven by the fact that this conference is taking place.

Which reminds me ... the true believers at RealClimate are now praising an article posted on salon.com by Joseph Romm--a guy who sells solar panels for a living, by the way--saying “‘consensus’? We never claimed there was a ‘consensus’!”

And notorious alarmist John Holdren a couple weeks ago said “‘global warming’? We never meant ‘global warming.’ We meant “‘global climate disruption’!”

I’d say this was a sign of victory, but that would suggest their words and opinions matter. It’s too late to move the goal posts, guys. You’ve already lost.

It is my hope, and the reason The Heartland Institute organized this conference, that public policies that impose enormous costs on millions of people, in the U.S. and also around the world, will not be passed into law before the fake “consensus” on global warming collapses.

Once passed, taxes and regulations are often hard to repeal. Once lost, freedoms are often very difficult to retrieve.

http://www.heartland.org/NewYork08/newyork08.cfm
 
Old March 5th, 2008 #2
Alex Linder
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GM exec stands by calling global warming a "crock"

Feb 22, 2008

DETROIT (Reuters) - General Motors Corp Vice Chairman Bob Lutz has defended remarks he made dismissing global warming as a "total crock of s---," saying his views had no bearing on GM's commitment to build environmentally friendly vehicles.

Lutz, GM's outspoken product development chief, has been under fire from Internet bloggers since last month when he was quoted as making the remark to reporters in Texas.

In a posting on his GM blog on Thursday, Lutz said those "spewing virtual vitriol" at him for minimizing the threat of climate change were "missing the big picture."

"What they should be doing in earnest is forming opinions, not about me but about GM and what this company is doing that is ... hugely beneficial to the causes they so enthusiastically claim to support," he said in a posting titled, "Talk About a Crock."

GM, the largest U.S. automaker by sales and market share, has been trying to change its image after taking years of heat for relying too much on sales of large sport-utility vehicles like the Hummer and not moving faster on fuel-saving hybrid technology.

"My thoughts on what has or hasn't been the cause of climate change have nothing to do with the decisions I make to advance the cause of General Motors," he wrote.

Lutz said GM was continuing development of the battery-powered, plug-in Chevy Volt and other alternatives to traditional internal combustion engines.

GM is racing against Toyota Motor Corp to be first to market a plug-in hybrid car that can be recharged at a standard electric outlet.

Lutz has previously said GM made a mistake by allowing Toyota to seize "the mantle of green respectability and technology leadership" with its market-leading Prius hybrid.

A 40-year auto industry veteran who joined GM earlier in the decade with a mandate to shake up its vehicle line-up, Lutz is no stranger to controversy.

As part of a campaign against higher fuel economy standards, Lutz wrote in a 2006 blog posting that forcing automakers to sell smaller cars would be "like trying to address the obesity problem in this country by forcing clothing manufacturers to sell smaller, tighter sizes."

Automakers ended their opposition to higher fuel standards in 2007 when it became clear that proposed changes would become law with or without their support.

In December, President George W. Bush signed a law mandating a 40 percent increase in fleetwide fuel economy by 2020, the first substantial change in three decades.

http://www.reuters.com/article/envir...rpc=22&sp=true
 
Old March 5th, 2008 #3
Alex Linder
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No Global Warming Crisis

by John R. Lott, Jr.

John McCain, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton all promise massive new regulations that will cost trillions of dollars to combat global warming. John McCain says that it will be his first task if he wins the presidency. After consulting with Al Gore, Barack Obama feels that the problem is so imminent that it is not even really possible to wait until he becomes president.

Ironically, this political unanimity is occurring as global temperatures have been cooling dramatically over the last decade. Global temperatures have now largely eliminated most of the one degree Celsius warming that had previously occurred over the last 100 years. Hundreds of climate scientists have warned that there is not significant man-made global warming.

A conference in New York on Monday and Tuesday this week will bring 100 scientists together to warn that the there is no man-made global warming crisis.

Yet, we just keep on piling on more and more regulations without asking hard questions about whether they are justified.

New mileage per gallon regulations were signed into law last year that will mandate that cars get 35 MPG. The rules will make us poorer, forcing people to buy products that aren’t otherwise the best suited for them. More people will die because lighter cars are less safe, but we are told this is all worth it largely because of global warming.

But much of what gets passed is arbitrary. Was there anything scientific about picking 35 MPG instead of, say, 30 MPG other than the desire to do more? And how do these regulations fit in with all the gasoline taxes we have that are already reducing gas use?

To see if all this makes any sense there are really four questions that all have to be answered "yes."

1) Are global temperatures rising? Surely, they were rising from the late 1970s to 1998, but "there has been no net global warming since 1998." Indeed, the more recent numbers show that there is now evidence of significant cooling.

2) But supposing that the answer to the first question is "yes," is mankind responsible for a significant and noticeable portion of an increase in temperatures? Mankind is responsible for just a few percent of greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gases are not responsible for most of what causes warming (e.g., the Sun).

Over 100 leading climate scientists from around the world signed a letter in December stating: "significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming." In December a list was also released of another 400 scientists who questioned the general notion of significant manmade global warming.

3) If the answer to both preceding questions is "yes," is an increase temperature changes "bad"? That answer is hardly obvious. Higher temperatures could increase ocean levels by between seven inches and two feet over the next 100 years.

Although some blame global warming for seemingly everything, according to others higher temperatures will increase the amount of land that we can use to grow food, it will improve people's health, and increase biological diversity. Even the UN says that a mild increase in temperature would be good for many regions of the globe.

4) Finally, let's assume that the answer to all three previous questions is "yes." Does that mean we need more regulations and taxes? No, that is still not clear.

If we believe that man-made global warming is “bad,” we still don’t want to eliminate all carbon emissions. Having no cars, no air conditioning, or no electricity would presumably be much worse than anything people are claiming from global warming.

You want to pick a tax that just discourages carbon emissions to the point where the cost of global warming is greater than that of cutting emissions.

Too little of a tax can be “bad” because we would produce greenhouse gases when their costs were greater than the benefits. But too much of a tax also makes us poorer because we won’t be getting the benefits from cars or electricity even when the benefits exceed the costs that they would produce from global warming.

What is often ignored in the debate over global warming is that we already have very substantial taxes on gasoline, averaging 46 cents per gallon in the US. Even if one believes that gasoline use should be restricted to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the question is whether our taxes are already restricting use "too much" or "not enough.” But simply saying that carbon dioxide emissions are bad isn’t enough.

In fact, William Nordhaus, an economics professor at Yale and former member of President Carter’s Council of Economic Advisors, puts the “right” level of gasoline taxes at around 10 cents a gallon today, reaching 16 cents per gallon in 2015. Nordhaus’ analysis assumes that the answers to the first three questions are “yes.” If anything, while gasoline taxes are partially used for such things as building roads, it seems quite plausible that, even accepting Nordhaus’ assumptions, current gasoline taxes are much too high to deal with the harm from global warming.

However good the intentions, the debate over global warming is much more complicated than simply saying that the world is getting warmer. It is too bad that these questions won’t be getting a real debate this election. The irony is that those who sell themselves as being so caring aren't careful enough to investigate the impact of their regulations.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/lott/lott59.html
 
Old March 5th, 2008 #4
Alex Linder
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Global warming bottom line = same old judeo-commie liars dressing up their mephitic socialism as science. They try to turn a partial-degree rise in temperatures -- over 100 years...taken from helpfully placed thermometers -- into a massive threat to our way of life requring immediate life-altering action.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken

Global warming is exactly what he's talking about: a crisis manufactured by interested politicians and grant-sniffing scientists promoted and insulated from criticism by media whores to take money and power from ordinary Whites and turn them over to government.
 
Old March 5th, 2008 #5
Alex Linder
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Carbon credits = modern form of selling indugences.
 
Old March 5th, 2008 #6
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Weather Channel Founder: Global Warming ‘Greatest Scam in History’

By Noel Sheppard | November 7, 2007 - 17:58 ET

If the founder of The Weather Channel spoke out strongly against the manmade global warming myth, might media members notice?

We're going to find out the answer to that question soon, for John Coleman wrote an article published at ICECAP Wednesday that should certainly garner attention from press members -- assuming journalism hasn't been completely replaced by propagandist activism, that is.

Coleman marvelously began: It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create in [sic] allusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the "research" to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus.

Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them, then teamed up with movie, media and other liberal, environmentalist journalists to create this wild "scientific" scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda. Now their ridiculous manipulated science has been accepted as fact and become a cornerstone issue for CNN, CBS, NBC, the Democratic Political Party, the Governor of California, school teachers and, in many cases, well informed but very gullible environmental conscientious citizens. Only one reporter at ABC has been allowed to counter the Global Warming frenzy with one 15 minutes documentary segment.

[...]

I have read dozens of scientific papers. I have talked with numerous scientists. I have studied. I have thought about it. I know I am correct. There is no run away climate change. The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril. I am incensed by the incredible media glamour, the politically correct silliness and rude dismissal of counter arguments by the high priest of Global Warming.

In time, a decade or two, the outrageous scam will be obvious.

http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/noe...t-scam-history
 
Old March 5th, 2008 #7
Alex Linder
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Crichton on global warming (on Charlie Rose):

http://vnnforum.com/showpost.php?p=729939&postcount=19
 
Old March 5th, 2008 #8
Alex Linder
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The leftist anti-corporate idiots don't even realize that Gore and his family were raised to prominence and riches by the commie jew Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum, who did business with the USSR for decades, all through the 'Cold War," which itself was a scam. Jew Hammer used to brag about having Gore Sr. in his pocket. Before Hammer, the Gores were nothing but Tennessee dirt eaters and school teachers.
 
Old March 5th, 2008 #9
Alex Linder
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[From Brian Stone]

I think that the Powers That Be (PTB) created this whole Global Warming Crock of Shit because they needed a crisis to scare the leftwingers into compliance with the New World Order. The Righties got the "War on Terror," the Lefties got "Global Warming."

The original Global Warming Crock of Shit was pushed on the basis of James Hansen's (Goddard Space Flight Center) five climate models that claimed doom and gloom climate scariness with "even the most optimistic scenario." What wasn't widely reported at the time was that Hansen's models neglected to include the single most important climate modulator, after the Sun, on the Earth eco-system: Oceans (no i'm not kidding).

Hansen later repudiated his 1980's models but still retains his enthusiasm for the Old Time Religion, Global Warming Crock of Shit.

As for the Europeans, I think their attitude on this come from two issue they have. One is their socialistic mindsets and their immediate reverence for authority. If their government tells them that "X is so," then they will damn well believe X so and look upon anyone who says differently as demented. This is the nature of people who have an inordinate respect for authority.

The other issue they have is a sort of inferiority complex vis a' vis America. As a result of this they spend a great deal of time reporting on our crime, our crises, and our international political depredations in order to convince themselves that they really are better than us.

They love to imagine themselves as the "wiser elder statemen" bringing their foolish, errant, bumptious American brethern along to a more enlightened path.

The Global Warming Crock of Shit allows them to put on airs and make world weary sighs as they imagine that, ONCE AGAIN, they are having to save the world from the slow American doofuses.
 
Old March 5th, 2008 #10
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The Virtues Of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide

Dear Professor Robinson: Bravo! Thank you most heartily for this excellent article. Most of those who should read it won't. I urge you - a refreshing voice of reason - to write more pieces on subjects of general interest.

Mel Fowler


THE VIRTUES OF ATMOSPHERIC CARBON DIOXIDE


by Arthur Robinson
February 25, 2008
NewsWithViews.com

Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, includes some very remarkable revelations including:

1. A “computer calculated” temperature prediction curve with predictions beginning in 1938 – when neither Al Gore nor the computer had yet been invented.
2. Photos of South Sea islanders being washed from their islands by rising seas – sea level having risen 3 inches during the past 50 years.
3. Drawings of species driven to extinction by human use of hydrocarbons – including the Wooly Mammoth, which has been gone from the Earth for thousands of years.
4. A little girl’s ice cream cone melting before she can eat it – as a result of the current 0.5 degree centigrade per century increase in temperature.
5. 650,000 years of Earth temperature fluctuations, including 6 ice ages – all caused, according to Al Gore, by carbon dioxide fluctuations of entirely unknown origins.

Al Gore’s other popular offering is his book appropriately entitled The Assault on Reason – a subject for which he obviously has readily demonstrated expertise.

George Washington was at Valley Forge during the coldest period in 1,500 years, with Earth average temperatures dipping as low as 1 degree centigrade below the 3,000-year average. Since then, temperatures have gradually recovered. If the current rate of increase continues, about 2 centuries from now the temperature of the Earth will be back to that of the medieval period 1,000 years ago – when Greenland was green and warmer weather brought increased growing seasons and general rises in comfort and prosperity in many cooler climates.

Meanwhile, in the United States, rainfall is increasing, tornados are becoming less frequent, glaciers have been receding for 200 years – back to their more normal average lengths, and hurricane frequency and severity has been unchanged for the past century.

Standing timber in U.S. forests has, however, increased by 40% since 1950; 2,000-year-old pine trees are growing faster; and animal and plant quantity and diversity are sharply increasing. This is truly alarming! If current trends continue, we will be overrun by squirrels, deer, and foxes and fighting for our lives against aggressively growing orange and apple trees. A dire prediction was even published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – I am not making this up – warning that poison ivy is also growing faster.

The three most important substances that make life possible are water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. The primary structural and functional element in all living things is carbon. All carbon in protein, fat, carbohydrate, and the other organic molecules in living things is derived from atmospheric carbon dioxide. Without atmospheric carbon dioxide, life as we know it would not be possible. Plants inhale carbon dioxide and are thereby fertilized. When atmospheric carbon dioxide increases – as it has by about 30% during the past century, plant life and the animal life that thrives upon it are also increased.

The annual increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide attributable to human activities – primarily the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas – is about 1 part in 10,000 of that contained in the oceans and biosphere – a contribution of ultimately negligible consequence. Since, however, this human-released carbon must travel through the atmosphere to reach the ocean and biotic reservoirs, human use, while it continues, has caused a transient rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide from about 0.03% to about 0.04% of atmospheric molecules. The primary environmental result of this rise is plant fertilization. We are moving carbon from below ground into the atmosphere, where it is available to produce more plants and animals – a wonderful and unexpected gift from the industrial revolution.

The Earth’s atmosphere and surface are warmed by solar radiation; the greenhouse effect – primarily caused by atmospheric water vapor; and other less-understood phenomena. Carbon dioxide and methane are also greenhouse gases, but their physical properties render their greenhouse effects very weak. Neither warms the Earth significantly, and no greenhouse warming caused by these two substances has ever been unequivocally observed. The warming and cooling of the Earth is correlated most closely with fluctuations in solar activity and is entirely uncorrelated with human hydrocarbon use.

This has not, however, troubled Al Gore, the United Nations, and their enviro retainers, who are regaling the body politic with unverified computer projections that purport to predict the weather centuries in the future. These computer models cannot predict the weather next week, nor can they even “predict” the weather last year. In order to make the models conform at least somewhat to past temperature trends, their handlers have introduced 6 and even 7 adjustable parameters into their calculations. As Enrico Fermi famously remarked when quoting his friend, the great mathematician and computer pioneer John von Neumann, “with 3 parameters I can fit an elephant and with 4, I can make him wiggle his trunk.”

Why are these people doing this? Why has Al Gore positioned himself to become a historical laughing stock, and why have a few hundred United Nations climate change-funded “scientists” joined them? The reason surely is not global warming. If they truly were alarmed as they say about imminent climatic peril, they would be clamoring for the Penner-Teller solution. These scientists have shown that slight injections of sun-blocking particulates into the upper atmosphere would immediately erase all Earth warming of the past 200 years. Teller estimated the cost to achieve this cooler temperature at about $1 billion. A similar additional amount would probably be required annually to maintain the cooling.

If Al Gore were truly alarmed about hydrocarbon use, he would be clamoring for nuclear power plants. The construction of just 50 nuclear installations similar to that partially completed at Palo Verde near Phoenix would erase most of the U.S. carbon dioxide output – and would also erase most of the U.S. trade deficit at the same time. Yet, while The Wall Street Journal recently counted 381 nuclear power plants in various stages of planning or construction around the world – but none being constructed in the United States, Al Gore and his retainers actually oppose nuclear power.

So, why are they doing this? In the words of Indiana Jones – “fortune and glory, kid, fortune and glory” – paraphrase that “money and power, madam, money and power.” Al Gore, himself, has already accumulated astonishing personal wealth during his campaign against world energy technology and is now a principal in a new corporation being formed to profit from public fear of global warming. Meanwhile, United Nations bureaucrats are mesmerized by the prospect of taxing and rationing world energy supplies – a position of virtually unlimited wealth and power that would give them life-and-death control over both world technology and the human race.

And, why do we prefer that Al Gore and his friends not succeed? One reason is that, in the poorer countries of the world, billions of people are using technology to lift themselves from poverty and to gain some of the technological blessings that Americans now enjoy. These people need inexpensive, relatively low technology energy that can, with current methods, only be practically derived from hydrocarbons. World hydrocarbon rationing would deprive them of this energy, destroy their dreams, and cause them to slip backwards into suffering, poverty, and death.

Simultaneously, Americans can only maintain and extend their own technology and prosperity with inexpensive energy – available now in practical quantities only from hydrocarbon and nuclear sources. Moreover, only people who are prosperous can afford the cost of true environmentalism.

Most people agree that increased quality, quantity, and length of human life and decreased human suffering are worthwhile goals. These goals are best reached by technological advance, and inexpensive energy is the currency of technological progress. The myth of human-caused global warming currently threatens these goals and that technological advance. This is the truth – inconvenient as it may be to the self-centered aspirations of Al Gore and his United Nations friends.

Complete peer-reviewed scientific references to the facts in this article can be found in the peer-reviewed article, Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide by A. B. Robinson, N. E. Robinson, and W. Soon – available at www.oism.org/pproject.
 
Old March 5th, 2008 #11
Alex Linder
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Alexander Cockburn


Intellectual blasphemy

Alexander Cockburn tells spiked that when he dared to question the climate change consensus he was met by a tsunami of self-righteous fury.

While the world’s climate is on a warming trend, there is zero evidence that the rise in CO2 levels has anthropogenic origins. For daring to say this I have been treated as if I have committed intellectual blasphemy.

In magazine articles and essays I have described in fairly considerable detail, with input from the scientist Martin Hertzberg, that you can account for the current warming by a number of well-known factors - to do with the elliptical course of the Earth in its relationship to the sun, the axis of the Earth in the current period, and possibly the influence of solar flares. There have been similar warming cycles in the past, such as the medieval warming period, when the warming levels were considerably higher than they are now.

Yet from left to right, the warming that is occurring today is taken as being man-made, and many have made it into the central plank of their political campaigns. For reasons I find very hard to fathom, the environmental left movement has bought very heavily into the fantasy about anthropogenic global warming and the fantasy that humans can prevent or turn back the warming cycle.

This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political programme. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice.

This is a fantasy. In truth, environmental catastrophism will, in fact it already has, play into the hands of sinister-as-always corporate interests. The nuclear industry is benefiting immeasurably from the current catastrophism. Last year, for example, the American nuclear regulatory commission speeded up its process of licensing; there is an imminent wave of nuclear plant building. Many in the nuclear industry see in the story about CO2 causing climate change an opportunity to recover from the adverse publicity of Chernobyl.

More generally, climate catastrophism is leading to a re-emphasis of the powers of the advanced industrial world, through its various trade mechanisms, to penalise Third World countries. For example, the Indians have just produced an extremely cheap car called the Tata Nano, which will enable poorer Indians to get about more easily without having to load their entire family on to a bicycle. Greens have already attacked the car, and it won’t take long for the WTO and the advanced powers to start punishing India with a lot of missionary-style nonsense about its carbon emissions and so on.

The politics of climate change also has potential impacts on farmers. Third World farmers who don’t use seed strains or agricultural procedures that are sanctioned by the international AG corporations and major multilateral institutions and banks controlled by the Western powers will be sabotaged by attacks on their ‘excessive carbon footprint’. The environmental catastrophism peddled by many who claim to be progressive is strengthening the hand of corporate interests over ordinary people.

Here in the West, the so-called ‘war on global warming’ is reminiscent of medieval madness. You can now buy Indulgences to offset your carbon guilt. If you fly, you give an extra 10 quid to British Airways; BA hands it on to some non-profit carbon-offsetting company which sticks the money in its pocket and goes off for lunch. This kind of behaviour is demented.

What is sinister about environmental catastrophism is that it diverts attention from hundreds and hundreds of serious environmental concerns that can be dealt with - starting, perhaps, with the emission of nitrous oxides from power plants. Here, in California, if you drive upstate you can see the pollution all up the Central Valley from Los Angeles, a lot of it caused, ironically, by the sulphuric acid droplets from catalytic converters! The problem is that 20 or 30 years ago, the politicians didn’t want to take on the power companies, so they fixed their sights on penalising motorists who are less able to fight back. Decade after decade, power plants have been given a pass on the emissions from their smoke stacks while measures to force citizens to change their behaviour are brought in.

Emissions from power plants are something that could be dealt with now. You don’t need to have a world programme called ‘Kyoto’ to fix something like that. The Kyoto Accord must be one of the most reactionary political manifestos in the history of the world; it represents a horrible privileging of the advanced industrial powers over developing nations.

The marriage of environmental catastrophism and corporate interests is best captured in the figure of Al Gore. As a politician, he came to public light as a shill for two immense power schemes in the state of Tennessee: the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oak Ridge Nuclear Laboratory. Gore is not, as he claims, a non-partisan green; he is influenced very much by his background. His arguments, many of which are based on grotesque science and shrill predictions, seem to me to be part of a political and corporate outlook.

In today’s political climate, it has become fairly dangerous for a young scientist or professor to step up and say: ‘This is all nonsense.’ It is increasingly difficult to challenge the global warming consensus, on either a scientific or a political level. Academies can be incredibly cowardly institutions, and if one of their employees was to question the discussion of climate change he or she would be pulled to one side and told: ‘You’re threatening our funding and reputation - do you really want to do that?’ I don’t think we should underestimate the impact that kind of informal pressure can have on people’s willingness to think thoroughly and speak openly.

One way in which critics are silenced is through the accusation that they are ignoring ‘peer-reviewed science’. Yet oftentimes, peer review is a nonsense. As anyone who has ever put his nose inside a university will know, peer review is usually a mode of excluding the unexpected, the unpredictable and the unrespectable, and forming a mutually back-scratching circle. The history of peer review and how it developed is not a pretty sight. Through the process of peer review, of certain papers being nodded through by experts and other papers being given a red cross, the controllers of the major scientific journals can include what they like and exclude what they don’t like. Peer review is frequently a way of controlling debate, even curtailing it. Many people who fall back on peer-reviewed science seem afraid to have out the intellectual argument.

Since I started writing essays challenging the global warming consensus, and seeking to put forward critical alternative arguments, I have felt almost witch-hunted. There has been an hysterical reaction. One individual, who was once on the board of the Sierra Club, has suggested I should be criminally prosecuted. I wrote a series of articles on climate change issues for the Nation, which elicited a level of hysterical outrage and affront that I found to be astounding - and I have a fairly thick skin, having been in the business of making unpopular arguments for many, many years.

There was a shocking intensity to their self-righteous fury, as if I had transgressed a moral as well as an intellectual boundary and committed blasphemy. I sometimes think to myself, ‘Boy, I’m glad I didn’t live in the 1450s’, because I would be out in the main square with a pile of wood around my ankles. I really feel that; it is remarkable how quickly the hysterical reaction takes hold and rains down upon those who question the consensus.

This experience has given me an understanding of what it must have been like in darker periods to be accused of being a blasphemer; of the summary and unpleasant consequences that can bring. There is a witch-hunting element in climate catastrophism. That is clear in the use of the word ‘denier’ to label those who question claims about anthropogenic climate change. ‘Climate change denier’ is, of course, meant to evoke the figure of the Holocaust denier. This was contrived to demonise sceptics. The past few years show clearly how mass moral panics and intellectual panics become engendered.

In my forthcoming book, A Short History of Fear, I explore the link between fearmongering and climate catastrophism. For example, alarmism about population explosion is being revisited through the climate issue. Population alarmism goes back as far as Malthus, of course; and in the environmental movement there has always been a very sinister strain of Malthusianism. This is particularly the case in the US where there has never been as great a socialist challenge as there was in Europe. I suspect, however, that even in Europe, what remains of socialism has itself turned into a degraded Malthusian outlook. It seems clear to me that climate catastrophism represents a new form of the politics of fear.

I think people have had enough of peer-reviewed science and experts telling them what they can and cannot think and say about climate change. Climate catastrophism, the impact it is having on people’s lives and on debate, can only really be challenged through rigorous open discussion and through a ‘battle of ideas’, as the conference I spoke at in London last year described it. I hope my book is a salvo in that battle.

Alexander Cockburn was talking to Brendan O’Neill. Cockburn is co-editor of Counterpunch and a syndicated national columnist whose work appears regularly in the Nation, the New York Free Press, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. He spoke at the Battle of Ideas conference in London in October 2007. His new book, A Short History of Fear, will be published in March. The publisher has provided the following taster:

The idea that things are always getting worse, that Armageddon - in one form or another - is just around the corner, has been a common refrain since the very beginnings of Western culture. And, more often than not, the forces allegedly sending us to hell in a proverbial hand basket are shadowy conspiracies whose features are as murky as their nefarious power is supposedly all-encompassing.

Enter renegade journalist Alexander Cockburn to illuminate the darkest corners of our collective cultural unconscious. In his usual, take-no-prisoners-style, he battles an impressive collection of fearmongers and the irrationalities they espouse.

Likening the soul-saving Indulgences sold by the medieval Catholic Church to today’s carbon credits, Cockburn traces his subject through the ages, showing how fear is used to distract us from real problems and real solutions. Skewering doomsters on both the left and right, A Short History of Fear tackles: 9/11 conspiracy theories; the twentieth-century witch craze of ‘satanic abuse’; eugenics; the Kennedy assassination, Pearl Harbor, and other ‘inside jobs’; terrorism; the ‘Great Fear’ of the eighteenth century; today’s eleventh-hour predictions of planetary decline; and much more. Scathing, often hilarious, and always insightful, this is Cockburn at the top of his controversial game.

A Short History of Fear, by Alexander Cockburn is published by AK Press. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK)).

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.p.../article/4624/
 
Old July 5th, 2008 #13
Leshrac
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Before someone jumps on me because i link to glenn beck stuff, watch the video
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Old July 17th, 2008 #14
Alex Linder
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Here's a new site on climate change. Divides it into pro and con, left and right.

http://climatedebatedaily.com/
 
Old July 17th, 2008 #15
William Robert
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Default Lest we forget...

Huge underwater Volcanoes spewing hot burning lava

under the Arctic Circle

have absolutely nothing to do with global warming

or glaciers melting.

Volcanoes Erupt Beneath Arctic Ice
http://www.livescience.com/environme...volcanoes.html

Can we tax the Volcanoes?

The Lemmings are starting to wise up!

Last edited by William Robert; July 17th, 2008 at 01:30 AM.
 
Old July 17th, 2008 #16
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sir William Robert View Post
The Lemmings are starting to wise up!
If the lemmings are ever going to realize it's complete bullshit, they'll ALL instantly turn around and say "oh but we knew it all along" then hang themselves to the next "end of the world" scam.

The same people who are screaming about global warming are the same who screamed about the "ozone hole" (early 80's paranoia), "space debris of doom" (mid 80's) and the "killer bees" (end 80's, early 90's paranoia).
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Old July 28th, 2008 #17
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World ignores good news on climate change

Last week one of the world's leading climate experts announced new research that could change our understanding of global warming and suggests we can stop worrying about climate change. Strangely, this wonderful development has been ignored by the media. Here are the details.

Roy W Spencer made the announcement when he gave testimony before the US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on 22 July 2008. He has a PhD in Meteorology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has been involved in global warming research for close to twenty years. He has numerous peer-reviewed scientific articles dealing with the measurement and interpretation of climate variability and climate change. He is Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the U.S. Science Team Leader for the AMSR-E instrument flying on NASA's Aqua satellite. Data obtained from Aqua is the basis for much of the following.

Here are excerpts from his full testimony.

"Regarding the currently popular theory that mankind is responsible for global warming, I am very pleased to deliver good news from the front lines of climate change research. Our latest research results, which I am about to describe, could have an enormous impact on policy decisions regarding greenhouse gas emissions. ... we now have new satellite evidence which strongly suggests that the climate system is much less sensitive than is claimed by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)."

"Another way of saying this is that the real climate system appears to be dominated by "negative feedbacks" -- instead of the "positive feedbacks" which are displayed by all twenty computerized climate models utilized by the IPCC. ...If true, an insensitive climate system would mean that we have little to worry about in the way of manmade global warming and associated climate change. And, ... it would also mean that the warming we have experienced in the last 100 years is mostly natural. Of course, if climate change is mostly natural then it is largely out of our control, and is likely to end -- if it has not ended already, since satellite-measured global temperatures have not warmed for at least seven years now."

"The support for my claim of low climate sensitivity (net negative feedback) for our climate system is two-fold. First, we have a new research article in-press in the Journal of Climate which uses a simple climate model to show that previous estimates of the sensitivity of the climate system from satellite data were biased toward the high side by the neglect of natural cloud variability. It turns out that the failure to account for natural, chaotic cloud variability generated internal to the climate system will always lead to the illusion of a climate system which appears more sensitive than it really is. ..."

"The second line of evidence in support of an insensitive climate system comes from the satellite data themselves. While our work in-press established the existence of an observational bias in estimates of climate sensitivity, it did not address just how large that bias might be. But in the last several weeks, we have stumbled upon clear and convincing observational evidence of particularly strong negative feedback (low climate sensitivity) from our latest and best satellite instruments. That evidence includes our development of two new methods for extracting the feedback signal from either observational or climate model data, a goal which has been called the "holy grail" of climate research. ..."

"Based upon global oceanic climate variations measured by a variety of NASA and NOAA satellites during the period 2000 through 2005 we have found a signature of climate sensitivity so low that it would reduce future global warming projections to
below 1 deg. C by the year 2100."

"One necessary result of low climate sensitivity is that the radiative forcing from greenhouse gas emissions in the last century is not nearly enough to explain the upward trend of 0.7 deg. C in the last 100 years. This raises the question of whether there are natural processes at work which have caused most of that warming.

"On this issue, it can be shown with a simple climate model that small cloud fluctuations ... can explain 70% of the warming trend since 1900, as well as the nature of that trend: warming until the 1940s, no warming until the 1970s, and resumed warming since then."

"I predict that in the coming years, there will be a growing realization among the global warming research community that most of the climate change we have observed is natural, and that mankind's role is relatively minor. ... given that virtually no research into possible natural explanations for global warming has been performed, it is time for scientific objectivity and integrity to be restored to the field of global warming research."

http://blogs.smh.com.au/urbanjungle/...ignores_g.html
 
Old October 15th, 2008 #18
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Alaska glaciers grew this year, thanks to colder weather
By Craig Medred | Anchorage Daily News

Two hundred years of glacial shrinkage in Alaska, and then came the winter and summer of 2007-2008.

Unusually large amounts of winter snow were followed by unusually chill temperatures in June, July and August.

"In mid-June, I was surprised to see snow still at sea level in Prince William Sound," said U.S. Geological Survey glaciologist Bruce Molnia. "On the Juneau Icefield, there was still 20 feet of new snow on the surface of the Taku Glacier in late July. At Bering Glacier, a landslide I am studying, located at about 1,500 feet elevation, did not become snow free until early August.

"In general, the weather this summer was the worst I have seen in at least 20 years."

Never before in the history of a research project dating back to 1946 had the Juneau Icefield witnessed the kind of snow buildup that came this year. It was similar on a lot of other glaciers too.

"It's been a long time on most glaciers where they've actually had positive mass balance," Molnia said.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/53884.html
 
Old October 15th, 2008 #19
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Weekend cold set new record lows
Pendleton breaks 118-year-old record

The East Oregonian

Monday, October 13, 2008


Cold temperatures set several new record lows this weekend, including a low of 22 Saturday in downtown Pendleton that broke a 118 year-old record of 24.


http://www.eastoregonian.info/print....85&TM=29612.53
 
Old October 15th, 2008 #20
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Parts of California see coldest temps since 1893...

By GLENDA ANDERSON
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Published: Tuesday, October 14, 2008 at 4:41 a.m.
Last Modified: Tuesday, October 14, 2008 at 5:26 a.m.

A record cold snap in Mendocino County over the weekend caused little damage to wine grapes but chilled the hearts of farmers who already have suffered huge losses this year.

"It's just one more thing on top of one more thing. You kind of hold your breath," said Potter Valley wine grape grower Bill Pauli.

Temperatures dropped to 31 degrees in the Ukiah Valley on Saturday night and early Sunday morning, the coldest Oct. 12 morning since record keeping began in Ukiah in 1893, said Troy Nicolini, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Eureka. The previous record was 34 degrees in 1916.

Temperatures were milder in Sonoma County, and there were no reports of frost-related problems, county officials said.

Farmers in Redwood Valley and other cooler regions in Mendocino County reported temperatures as low as 27 degrees.


http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article..._grape_growers
 
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