Tag: AGW/CC

Save the planet, log the Amazon

ESR observes that if we want to end global warming, the most effective thing we can do is pave the rainforests:

For decades – and I do mean decades – I’ve been saying that any environmentalist who is really serious about reducing fossil-fuel use and CO2 emission should be agitating to switch the power infrastructure to using nuclear plants for the baseload as fast as possible.

But when the facts change, I change my mind. I was wrong. There is new, direct, observational evidence that the most effective thing we could do to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere is pave over the tropical rainforests.

Don’t believe me? Look at this map of CO2 emissions by region. It’s brand-new data from NASA’s just-lofted Orbiting Carbon Observatory.

It should be amusing to see how fast the green crowd spins around and declares that global warming is no longer an emergency requiring IMMEDIATE ACTION!

It’s a pity about the jaguars, but I never liked sloths and spider monkeys anyhow.

The economic imperative of Asteroid Wars

This sudden push for asteroid defenses seems a little out of left field:

Asteroids could wipe out humanity unless more effort is made to track and destroy them, a leading body of scientists and astronauts has warned. Lord Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, Brian Cox, and Richard Dawkins are among more than 100 experts calling for the creation of a huge asteroid detection system to prevent a doomsday scenario.

At an event at London’s science museum on Wednesday night, Lord Rees read out a declaration resolving to “solve humanity’s greatest challenges to safeguard our families and quality of life on Earth in the future.”

The dire threat of asteroids producing an urgent need for space-based defense systems. Now, where have I heard something like that before? As it happens, in the testimony of a woman who was an associate of Werner von Braun back in the 1970s, which dates back 14 years.

He said the strategy that was being used to educate the public and decision makers was to use scare tactics. That was how we identify an enemy. The strategy that Werner Von Braun taught me was that first the Russians are going to be considered the enemy. In fact, in 1974, they were the enemy, the identified enemy. We were told that they had “killer satellites”. We were told that they were coming to get us and control us—that they were the “Commies”.

Then terrorists would be identified, and that was soon to follow. We heard a lot about terrorism. Then we were going to identify third-world country “crazies”. We now call them Nations of Concern. But he said that would be the third enemy against whom we would build space-based weapons.

The next enemy was asteroids. Now, at this point he kind of chuckled the first time he said it, “Asteroids—against asteroids, we are going to build space-based weapons.”

And the funniest one of all was what he called aliens, extraterrestrials. That would be the final scare. And over and over during the four years that I knew him and was giving speeches for him, he would bring up that last card: “And remember Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens, and all of it is a lie.”

I think I was too naïve at that time to know the seriousness of the nature of the spin that was being put on the system. And now, the pieces are starting to fall into place. We are building a space-based weapons system on a premise that is a lie, a spin. Wernher Von Braun was trying to hint that to me back in the early 70’s and right up until the moment when he died in 1977.

Of course, since we know the military-industrial complex is going to manufacture wars in order to keep its system of income distribution running smoothly, I would think it is eminently desirable for the wars to be waged against space rocks and entirely imaginary. It makes for an interesting investment plan, anyhow.

And is there not an even darker possibility? What if the whistleblower who is warning about these manufactured wars is actually an agent for the aliens who wants to see Earth disarmed? Wheels within wheels, my friends. Wheels within wheels.

Anyhow, it’s nice to see that the AGW/CC alarmists have a new toy with which to play.

Nothing but a lie

The co-founder of the Weather Channel declares the obvious: there is no anthropogenic global climate change:

John Coleman, who co-founded the Weather Channel, shocked academics by insisting the theory of man-made climate change was no longer scientifically credible.

Instead, what ‘little evidence’ there is for rising global temperatures points to a ‘natural phenomenon’ within a developing eco-system.

In an open letter attacking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he wrote: “The ocean is not rising significantly. The polar ice is increasing, not melting away. Polar Bears are increasing in number. Heat waves have actually diminished, not increased. There is not an uptick in the number or strength of storms (in fact storms are diminishing).

“I have studied this topic seriously for years. It has become a political and environment agenda item, but the science is not valid.” He added: “There is no significant man-made global warming at this time, there has been none in the past and there is no reason to fear any in the future.

“Efforts to prove the theory that carbon dioxide is a significant greenhouse gas and pollutant causing significant warming or weather effects have failed. There has been no warming over 18 years.”

 Always keep AGW/CC in mind whenever you see someone appealing to “scientific consensus”. Scientific consensus is democracy. It is politics. It is collective opinion and it should not be confused with the actual scientific process (scientody) any more than the contents of the sewage system at a convention of scientists are.

Evidence of global warming

Or rather, the exact opposite. Again.

An early September winter storm in the Black Hills has dumped up to 8 inches of snow in the area, while Rapid City received its earliest snowfall in more than 120 years.

Jon Chamberlain, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Rapid City, said almost 1 inch of snow had fallen in downtown Rapid City by 8:30 a.m. while 2 inches was measured in higher elevations in town.

The snowfall in downtown Rapid City is the earliest in the city since 1888, the NWS said. The previous early snowfall mark was seven-tenths of an inch on Sept. 13, 1970.

The myth of the melting ice

Despite the science supposedly being “settled”, global warming still resolutely refuses to show its shy face anywhere on the planet:

Myth of arctic meltdown: Stunning satellite images show summer ice cap is thicker and covers 1.7million square kilometres MORE than 2 years ago…despite Al Gore’s prediction it would be ICE-FREE by now.

The most widely used measurements of Arctic ice extent are the daily satellite readings issued by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, which is co-funded by Nasa. These reveal that – while the long-term trend still shows a decline – last Monday, August 25, the area of the Arctic Ocean with at least 15 per cent ice cover was 5.62 million square kilometres.

This was the highest level recorded on that date since 2006 (see graph, right), and represents an increase of 1.71 million square kilometres over the past two years – an impressive 43 per cent.

Other figures from the Danish Meteorological Institute suggest that the growth has been even more dramatic. Using a different measure, the area with at least 30 per cent ice cover, these reveal a 63 per cent rise – from 2.7 million to 4.4 million square kilometres.

The polar bears are doing well too. “Computer model predictions of decline caused by ice melt have also failed to come true. In 2004, researchers claimed Hudson Bay bear numbers would fall from 900 to fewer than 700 by 2011. In fact, they have risen to over 1,000.”

The entire Anthropogenic Global Warming/Climate Change affair reminds me of the clever front-runner who makes a habit of making smart guesses while pretending that he actually knows the relevant material. Al Gore and company saw a short-term trend, guessed it would continue, and made a lot of money from selling people on the “settled science”. But it was never anything more than a simple logical extrapolation that had no basis in either fact or science, and is being continually exposed on an ongoing basis to be an erroneous and non-predictive model.

Eastasia has always been the hottest month

Anthony Watts busts The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fiddling the historical data again:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, criticized for manipulating temperature records to create a warming trend, has now been caught warming the past and cooling the present.

July 2012 became the hottest month on record in the U.S. during a summer that was declared “too hot to handle” by NASA scientists. That summer more than half the country was experiencing drought and wildfires had scorched more than 1.3 million acres of land, according to NASA.

According to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in 2012, the “average temperature for the contiguous U.S. during July was 77.6°F, 3.3°F above the 20th century average, marking the warmest July and all-time warmest month on record for the nation in a period of record that dates back to 1895.”

“The previous warmest July for the nation was July 1936, when the average U.S. temperature was 77.4°F,” NOAA said in 2012.

This statement by NOAA was still available on their website when checked by The Daily Caller News Foundation. But when meteorologist and climate blogger Anthony Watts went to check the NOAA data on Sunday he found that the science agency had quietly reinstated July 1936 as the hottest month on record in the U.S.

If you still buy into the “global warming” myth being pushed by these proven, documented, confirmed liars and self-interested charlatans, at this point, you’re just an idiot.

Notice how the Left always attempts to avoid owning up to its own history? Even when they’re blatantly caught out, they just quietly correct their misinformation and try to pretend it never happened.

80 years of climate cooling

The US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record

“When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

“Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.”

I note, again, that we global warming skeptics – deniers, if you prefer – have been consistently correct all along. And the more the charlatans’ Hot Earth models fail, going back to 1922, the more their frauds are uncovered and exposed, the more frantically they insist that this time, the Earth really is doomed.

The thing is, one didn’t, and doesn’t, have to know a single thing about climate or historical temperatures to recognize that they were lying. Because liars a) observably behave in a manner inconsistent with what they claim to believe, and b) are reliably wrong. We have not forgotten that we were told entire nations would be wiped off the face of Earth by rising sea levels
if the global-warming trend was not reversed by the year 2000.

What nation was that, Atlantis? Global warming is nothing more than a pseudoscience concocted to justify global government. Which means that it is only a matter of time before all the lies and the fictitious data used as its foundation are revealed to be fabricated and fraudulent.

Wobbling on Global Warming

The New York Times finally begins to recognize that scare tactics on global warming don’t work on anyone but children and the gullible:

[E]vidence that a fear-based approach backfires has grown stronger. A frequently cited 2009 study in the journal Science Communication summed up the scholarly consensus. “Although shocking, catastrophic, and large-scale representations of the impacts of climate change may well act as an initial hook for people’s attention and concern,” the researchers wrote, “they clearly do not motivate a sense of personal engagement with the issue and indeed may act to trigger barriers to engagement such as denial.” In a controlled laboratory experiment published in Psychological Science in 2010, researchers were able to use “dire messages” about global warming to increase skepticism about the problem.

Many climate advocates ignore these findings, arguing that they have an obligation to convey the alarming facts. But claims linking the latest blizzard, drought or hurricane to global warming simply can’t be supported by the science. Our warming world is, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, increasing heat waves and intense precipitation in some places, and is likely to bring more extreme weather in the future. But the panel also said there is little evidence that this warming is increasing the loss of life or the economic costs of natural disasters.

Another big factor in the mass refusal to buy into the AGW/CC propaganda is the observation that no one who claims to be worried about global warming is living in a sustainable manner in wind-powered tents far away from the sea.

The seeds of bad science

Rupert Darwell traces them in a book entitled The Age of Global Warming:

The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government. It involves a fondness for predicting that energy supplies won’t last much longer (as early as 1909, the US National Conservation Commission reported to Congress that America’s natural gas would be gone in 25 years and its oil by the middle of the century), protest movements which involve dressing up and disappearing into woods (the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the Mosleyite Blackshirts who believed in reafforestation) and a dislike of the human race (The Club of Rome’s work Mankind at the Turning-Point said: “The world has cancer and the cancer is man.”).

These beliefs began to take organised, international, political form in the 1970s. One of the greatest problems, however, was that the ecologists’ attacks on economic growth were unwelcome to the nations they most idolised – the poor ones. The eternal Green paradox is that the concept of the simple, natural life appeals only to countries with tons of money. By a brilliant stroke, the founding fathers developed the concept of “sustainable development”. This meant that poor countries would not have to restrain their own growth, but could force restraint upon the rich ones. This formula was propagated at the first global environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972….

Scientists, Rupert Darwall complains, have been too ready to embrace the
“subjectivity” of the future, and too often have a “cultural aversion to
learning from the past”. If they read this tremendous book they will see
those lessons set out with painful clarity.

If one wanted to understand the root of my contempt for scientists and scientistry, as opposed to my mere opposition to their pseudo-scientific policies, it can be summarized by Darwall’s statement about their “cultural aversion to
learning from the past”.

Scientody is a powerful tool. But history is an even more useful and reliable one with regards to humanity. Because, a few genetic alterations over time notwithstanding, Man remains Man and human nature remains human nature.

Lake-freeze denialism

It’s interesting to observe the difference between the science fetishists’ demands for evidence where the supernatural is concerned, and their ability to completely ignore it wherever their pet hypotheses are jeopardized by observation:

Lake Superior hasn’t completely frozen over in two decades. But an expert on Great Lakes ice says there’s a “very high likelihood” that the three-quadrillion-gallon lake will soon be totally covered with ice thanks to this winter’s record-breaking cold. The ice cover on the largest freshwater lake in the world hit a 20-year record of 91 percent on Feb. 5, 1994. Jay Austin, associate professor at the Large Lakes Observatory in Duluth, Minn., told CNSNews.com that he expects that record will be broken this winter when the most northern of the Great Lakes becomes totally shrouded in ice….

Austin attributes the large amount of ice on the lake to the “extraordinary cold winter we’ve had,” pointing out that Duluth recently experienced an all-time record of 23 straight days of below-zero temperatures. The previous record of 22 days was set in 1936 and tied in 1963, according to the National Weather Service.

Of course, if we observational rationalists were to operate like the global warmists, we would immediately take a poll of everyone to decide if they believed Lake Superior would freeze over or not, then trumpet our consensus as irrefutable scientific fact.

I suggest we wait a month to see if the lake actually freezes over or not. Even if doing so makes me a lake-freeze denialist.