How else can they buy their way into Green heaven?

The idea of public protests has a very long pedigree, and in my life time I have seen and taken part in protests and street marches against the excesses of the Bjelke-Petersen government here in Queensland.

I was by no means obsessed with the issues but it was the thing to do and at the time I take some pride in having “done my bit”. But then we were taking a stand against a government who wanted to deny ordinary people the right to protest in the streets. In retrospect I tend to think that “banning” street marches was a very clever way to deflect attention from all of the other ways that Joh’s government was very sub standard indeed.

I have long maintained a gut feeling that the people publicly showing their displeasure has a valued place in a free and democratic society, however it seems to me that once a protest turns violent or has the intention to disrupt and destroy public and private property then that destruction invalidates the cause that inspires it.

Police clash with demonstrators as they pull down a fence during a climate change protest at Ratcliffe Power Station

Earlier the force arrested seven men and three women on suspicion of conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass at the power station.

Nine of the arrested were from Manchester and one came from West Yorkshire.

Camp for Climate Action said the arrests were “outrageous”.

The 2,000MW power station, owned by the energy company E.ON, is one of the largest producers of carbon dioxide in Britain.

The activists, under the banner the Great Climate Swoop, chose to target Ratcliffe in an online vote following the Climate Camp held in London in August.

They want all coal-powered power stations decommissioned.

Around 500 protesters were at the site this morning.

E.ON was granted a High Court injunction giving police the power to arrest anyone trying to enter the site.

A company spokesman said: ‘Ratcliffe power station plays a key role in ensuring we keep the lights on for millions of homes across the region and has undergone major investments that make Ratcliffe one of the cleanest power stations of its kind.

I have little doubt that these sort of protests are going to continue to escalate and that it won’t be too long before the we see the more extreme religious zealots of the Warminista Faith take up the gun or the bomb just like their friends from extreme Islam have done . There is of course another similarity between these two faiths and that is the fact that the extremist minority doesn’t hold sway of the majority of either but the many will have to wear the opprobrium for the actions of the few. This puts the well meaning and the devout in the difficult position of having to try to argue that the zealots do not speak for them while at the same time they, to a greater or lesser extent, desire similar end results.

I can’t help thinking that an appropriate response to these protesters (in particular) should be to disconnect them from the grid permanently. If nothing else it will give them the opportunity to avoid the hypocrisy of using the energy from the coal-fired power stations that they so fear and despise. At least then they might possibly understand that they are being extreme and unreasonable to want to shut down stations like Ratcliffe before there is any viable alternative. One British winter without heat should really test their faith or see them die of the cold just as many of the poor will if they got their way. I think that they will appreciate exactly what they are chanting for and how stupid their demands are.

Which brings us to the fate of an ETS scheme for this country and the machinations within the federal opposition. Malcolm Turnbull has finally sorted out his position and got the support of his colleges to argue the toss with the government over this contentious piece of legislation.

After a meeting lasting more than four hours, Mr Turnbull emerged exhausted last night but confirmed the partyroom had endorsed his strategy, backing “commonsense amendments” which, if agreed to, would save thousands of Australian jobs.

“We are putting the ball back into Kevin Rudd’s court,” Mr Turnbull said.

“Now is the time for the Rudd government to get real about its emissions trading scheme.

“If they want our support, they are going to have to give some ground.”

The way that the mainstream media goes on you could be forgiven for thinking that the opposition is entirely responsible for this dogs breakfast of an ETS scheme being cooked up by the government. It has become increasingly clear to anyone who goes to first principles that the whole ETS notion is flawed and bound to achieve absolutely NOTHING to alter the climate. That said I really think that when push comes to shove that there will be no deal at the end of all of this posturing from all points of the political compass. The Government will be inwardly happy with such a result (except for the minions in treasury who dream of the river of tax money that would be churned through their hands) because they will claim a moral victory for fighting the “good fight”, Malcolm will be happy for much the same reason and he will spin the dissenting voices in his own party as an expression of the tolerance of differing views within the conservatives. There will be protests from the Enviro-fascists much like the protest at Ratcliffe and there will be much collectivist wringing of hands and wailing to the effect that the sky will fall. It won’t of course and that is the point because like the penitents that used to scourge themselves silly, for whom self inflicted suffering becomes an end in itself, Enviro-fascists just want to share the unnecessary pain around because they really believe in the power of suffering.
How else can they buy their way into Green heaven?

Cheers Comrades

Environment in a D cup

Gisele Bundchen (click for the story)

Nice looking woman, but I find the consciously beautiful people some what tragic, especially when they trade on that beauty for their livelihoods, But the idea that perfectly filling a D cup qualifies you to comment on the environment really funny. I also can’t help wondering if the lady in question will be embarking on a personal reforestation program though, you know just to be entirely consistent with here save the jungle message

Cheers Comrades

Hat tip to the bloke in the left hand seat

The Gore effect, a joke that just keeps giving.

Humour and just what is funny really depends upon where you stand and what it is that rocks your boat. But nothing makes something more unfunny than being the butt of the joke. Which surely explains just why the Warministas are so incensed by any evocation of the “Gore Effect”. There are two ways to deal with this sort of mockery, In the first instance you could just get with the program and accept the irony of advocates for a theory of rampant global warming being repeatedly frozen in their attempts at activism is innately funny. Or you could try to find a pseudo scholarly reason that explains just why making jokes about this is very bad indeed.

The “Gore effect” in action (photo from Tim Blair)

THERE were two storms in the US capital yesterday, and one blew away the other.

Global warming activists had stormed Washington for what was billed as the nation’s largest act of civil disobedience to fight climate change, only to see the city almost shut down by a major winter storm.

As Washington was blasted with its heaviest snowfall of the winter, politicians cancelled appearances and schools and businesses were closed.

The storm also buried under 15cm of snow any hope of global warming activism.

Reports said the activists had hoped to swarm Washington in an effort to force the Government to close the Capitol Power Plant, which heats and cools government buildings, including the Supreme Court and the Capitol.

Fox News said the scene was reminiscent of a day in January 2004, when Al Gore made an address on global warming in New York — on one of the coldest days in the city’s history.

In a press release supporting the protest against the coal-fired plant, Greenpeace wrote that “coal was the country’s biggest source of global warming pollution” and “burning coal cuts short at least 24,000 lives in the US annually”. But Fox News said it might be worth noting the US Government’s own stark numbers: pneumonia kills twice as many each year.

The storm was more serious elsewhere, paralysing most of the east coast yesterday.

For the first time in five years New York City cancelled school for its 1.1 million students.

The thing is, I have never come a cross a single sceptic (about the AGW theory) who sees the ” Gore effect” as being anything more than a delightfully humorous irony and a great way to undermine the “sky is falling” rhetoric of the Waministas. Not with science but with well deserved mockery. Although the AGW enthusiasts dress their faith in scientific vestments it is in essence a religion that seeks to do with activism what it just can’t achieve with actual evidence. That the forces of nature can be seen to smite their efforts not just once, but repeatedly, makes their claims to be acting for Gaia look as ridiculous as any other millenarian cult who have to explain, the morning after their predicted demise of humanity, why we are still here.
Finally I shall explain for the benefit of those wilfully ignorant Waministas that if you hear anyone talking about “the Gore effect” in any context it is a joke, always a joke, and you and your fellows are the butt of that joke. By all means pretend that it is cited with anything other than a comedic purpose because that gives we sceptics even more reason to enjoy the catharsis of laughter.

Until next time comrades

Open mind sees climate clearly

I had this article sent to me by Brent Chapman and I liked it enough to post it here.

Dr Reid Bryson

Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post Published: Friday, June 29, 2007

He’s the world’s most cited climatologist, according to an analysis in the journal of the British Institute of Geographers. He’s also the fifth-most-cited physical geographer in the world, and the 11th most cited among all geographers.

He has written some 230 articles and five books, including in such fields as geology, limnology, meteorology and archeology.

He has twice seen his papers in Environmental Conservation awarded prizes for being “best paper of the year,” and he’s a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honour, created to recognize “outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment.”

He’s Dr. Reid Bryson, considered by many the “father of scientific climatology,” and he’s also pronounced on the most consequential climate issue of the day — man-made global warming. His verdict: “That is a theory for which there is no credible proof.”

Dr. Bryson, aged 87 and still professionally active, has become anathema to many environmentalists for his views on global warming. But those with long histories will remember him as an inspirational figure in the 1970s who challenged the wasteful ways of our consumer society, and warned of a dire need for lifestyle changes. Mother Earth News, a bible of the environmental movement, in the preamble to an extensive 1976 interview, described him as “an environmentalist in the broadest sense and his thoughts on the planet, its human population, and that population’s activities range as widely and carry all the force of such acknowledged environmental spokesmen as Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich, and Dave Brower.”

Dr. Bryson believed then, as he believes now, that humans affect the climate, in ways that both warm and cool the atmosphere. “Dozens of scientific papers, in fact, have been published about industry’s consumption of fossil fuels, its creation of carbon dioxide, and how the resultant “greenhouse effect” will cause a rise in the temperature of the atmosphere,” he told Mother Earth News.

“I find it interesting, however, that the same people who write those papers generally seem to overlook the even greater amounts of particulate matter which those same factories and foundries pump into the air, [cooling the atmosphere]. Not to mention the tremendous quantities of particulates now kicked into the atmosphere by poor farmers in primitive agricultural and marginal semi-arid regions all over the world.”

Humans change the climate in other ways, too, chiefly because “the Industrial Revolution, by making the modern megalopolis possible, has certainly concentrated the release of heat into the atmosphere.? Take New York City, for example. The heat produced by human activity in New York during the winter is greater than the amount of heat the city receives from the sun.”

“BBC SHUNNED ME FOR DENYING CLIMATE CHANGE “

Find below an interview piece about the woe full way that the BBC has treated well known Naturalist and Botanist David Bellamy, what he says makes a great deal of sense and it highlights the way that religious Zealots, in the name of Gaia have worked diligently to ensure that only the voices who are going to chant the approved liturgy are to be heard on the BBC.

SHUNNED: Naturalist David Bellamy

FOR YEARS David Bellamy was one of the best known faces on TV.

A respected botanist and the author of 35 books, he had presented around 400 programmes over the years and was appreciated by audiences for his boundless enthusiasm.

Yet for more than 10 years he has been out of the limelight, shunned by bosses at the BBC where he made his name, as well as fellow scientists and environmentalists.

His crime? Bellamy says he doesn’t believe in man-made global warming.

Here he reveals why – and the price he has paid for not toeing the orthodox line on climate change.

CLANGER: Bellamy says Al Gore has ‘no proof’ that millions will die due to global warming

“When I first stuck my head above the parapet to say I didn’t believe what we were being told about global warming I had no idea what the consequences would be.

I am a scientist and I have to ­follow the directions of science but when I see that the truth is being covered up I have to voice my ­opinions.

According to official data, in every year since 1998 world temperatures have been getting colder, and in 2002 Arctic ice actually increased. Why, then, do we not hear about that?

*The sad fact is that since I said I didn’t believe human beings caused global warming I’ve not been allowed to make a TV programme.

My absence has been noticed, because wherever I go I meet people who say: “I grew up with you on the television, where are you now?”

It was in 1996 that I criticised wind farms while appearing on Blue Peter and I also had an article published in which I described global warming as poppycock.

The truth is, I didn’t think wind farms were an effective means of alternative energy so I said so. Back then, at the BBC you had to toe the line and I wasn’t doing that.

At that point I was still making loads of television programmes and I was enjoying it greatly. Then I suddenly found I was sending in ideas for TV shows and they weren’t getting taken up. I’ve asked around about why I’ve been ignored but I found that people didn’t get back to me.

CAMPAIGNER: Bellamy says we must stop destroying tropical rainforests

At the beginning of this year there was a BBC show with four experts saying: “This is going to be the end of all the ice in the Arctic,” and hypothesising that it was going to be the hottest summer ever. Was it hell! It was very cold and very wet and now we’ve seen evidence that the glaciers in Alaska have started growing rapidly – and they’ve not grown for a long time.

I’ve seen evidence, which I believe, that says there has not been a rise in global temperature since 1998, despite the increase in carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere. This makes me think the global warmers are telling lies – carbon dioxide is not the driver.

*The idiot fringe have accused me of being like a Holocaust denier, which is ludicrous. Climate change is all about cycles, it’s a natural thing and has always happened. When the Romans lived in Britain they were growing very good red grapes and making wine on the borders of Scotland. It was evidently a lot warmer.

If you were sitting next to me 10,000 years ago we’d be under ice. So thank God for global warming for ending that ice age; we wouldn’t be here otherwise.

People such as former American Vice-President Al Gore say that millions of us will die because of global warming – which I think is a pretty stupid thing to say if you’ve got no proof.

And my opinion is that there is absolutely no proof that carbon dioxide is anything to do with any impending catastrophe. The ­science has, quite simply, gone awry. In fact, it’s not even science any more, it’s anti-science.

There’s no proof, it’s just projections and if you look at the models people such as Gore use, you can see they cherry pick the ones that support their beliefs.

To date, the way the so-called Greens and the BBC, the Royal Society and even our political parties have handled this smacks of McCarthyism at its worst.

*Global warming is part of a natural cycle and there’s nothing we can actually do to stop these cycles. The world is now facing spending a vast amount of money in tax to try to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist.

And how were we convinced that this problem exists, even though all the evidence from measurements goes against the fact? God knows. Yes, the lakes in Africa are drying up. But that’s not global warming. They’re drying up for the very ­simple reason that most of them have dams around them.

So the water that used to be used by local people is now used in the production of cut flowers and veget­ables for the supermarkets of Europe.

One of Al Gore’s biggest clangers was saying that the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan was drying up because of global warming. Well, everyone knows, because it was all over the news 20 years ago, that the Russians were growing cotton there at the time and that for every ton of cotton you produce you use a vast amount of water.

*The thing that annoys me most is that there are genuine environmental problems that desperately require attention. I’m still an environmentalist, I’m still a Green and I’m still campaigning to stop the destruction of the biodiversity of the world. But money will be wasted on trying to solve this global warming “problem” that I would much rather was used for looking after the people of the world.

Being ignored by the likes of the BBC does not really bother me, not when there are much bigger problems at stake.
I might not be on TV any more but I still go around the world campaigning about these important issues. For example, we must stop the dest­ruc­tion of trop­ical rainforests, something I’ve been saying for 35 years.

Mother nature will balance things out but not if we interfere by destroying rainforests and overfishing the seas.
That is where the real environmental catastrophe could occur.

INTERVIEW BY HELEN DOWD

Cheers Comrades

*My Bold

Take the greenhouse gasbags with a grain of salt

HAVE you noticed how environmental campaigners almost inevitably say that not only is global warming happening and bad, but also that what we are seeing is even worse than expected?

This is odd, because any reasonable understanding of how science proceeds would expect that, as we refine our knowledge, we find that things are sometimes worse and sometimes better than we expected, and that the most likely distribution would be about 50-50. Environmental campaigners, however, almost invariably see it as 100-0.

If we are regularly being surprised in just one direction, if our models get blindsided by an ever-worsening reality, that does not bode well for our scientific approach.

Indeed, one can argue that if the models constantly get something wrong, it is probably because the models are wrong. And if we cannot trust our models, we cannot know what policy action to take if we want to make a difference.

Yet if new facts constantly show us that the consequences of climate change are getting worse and worse, high-minded arguments about the scientific method might not carry much weight. Certainly, this seems to be the prevailing bet in the spin on global warming. It is, again, worse than we thought and, despite our failing models, we will gamble on knowing just what to do: cut CO2 emissions dramatically.

But it is simply not correct that climate data are systematically worse than expected; in many respects, they are spot on, or even better than expected. That we hear otherwise is an indication of the media’s addiction to worst-case stories, but that makes a poor foundation for smart policies.

The most obvious point about global warming is that the planet is heating up. It has warmed about 1C over the past century and is predicted by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to warm between 1.6C and 3.8C this century, mainly owing to increased CO2.

An average of all 38 available standard runs from the IPCC shows that models expect a temperature increase in this decade of about 0.2C.

But this is not at all what we have seen. And this is true for all surface temperature measures and even more so for both satellite measures. Temperatures in this decade have not been worse than expected; in fact, they have not even been increasing. They have actually decreased by between 0.01C and 0.1C a year.

On the most important indicator of global warming, temperature development, we ought to hear that the data are actually much better than expected.

Likewise, and arguably much more significantly, the heat content of the world’s oceans has been dropping for the past four years where we have measurements. Whereas energy in terms of temperature can disappear relatively easily from the light atmosphere, it is unclear where the heat from global warming should have gone, and certainly this is again much better than expected.

We hear constantly about how the Arctic sea ice is disappearing faster than expected, and this is true. But most serious scientists also allow that global warming is only part of the explanation. Another part is that the so-called Arctic oscillation of wind patterns over the Arctic Ocean is in a state that it does not allow build-up of old ice but immediately flushes most ice into the North Atlantic.

More important, we rarely hear that the Antarctic sea ice is not only not declining but is above average for the past year. IPCC models would expect declining sea ice in both hemispheres but, whereas the Arctic is doing worse than expected, Antarctica is doing better.

Ironically, the Associated Press, along with many other news outlets, told us in 2007 that the “Arctic is screaming” and that the Northwest Passage was open “for the first time in recorded history”. Yet the BBC reported in 2000 that the fabled Northwest Passage was already without ice.

We are constantly inundated with stories of how sea levels will rise, and how one study after another finds that it will be much worse than what the IPCC predicts. But most models find results within the IPCC range of a sea-level increase of 18cm to 59cm this century. This is, of course, why the thousands of IPCC scientists projected that range. Yet studies claiming 1m or more obviously make for better headlines.

Since 1992, we have had satellites measuring the rise in global sea levels and they have shown a stable increase of 3.2mm a year: spot on compared with the IPCC projection. Moreover, over the past two years, sea levels have not increased at all; actually, they show a slight drop. Should we not be told that this is much better than expected?

Hurricanes were the stock image of former US vice-president Al Gore’s famous film on climate change, and certainly the US was battered in 2004 and 2005, leading to wild claims of ever stronger and costlier storms in the future. But in the two years since, the costs have been well below average, virtually disappearing in 2006. That is definitely better than expected.

Gore quoted Massachusetts Institute of Technology hurricane researcher Kerry Emanuel to support an alleged scientific consensus that global warming is making hurricanes much more damaging. But Emanuel has published a new study showing that even in a dramatically warming world, hurricane frequency and intensity may not substantially rise during the next two centuries. That conclusion did not get much exposure in the media.

Of course, not all things are less bad than we thought. But one-sided exaggeration is not the way forward. We urgently need balance if we are to make sensible choices.

Bjorn Lomborg is adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School.

Good sense from Bjorn and I bet the Warministas carry on regardless

Cheers Comrades

Ups and Downs

Had this sent to me by a reader and I thought it interesting enough to share with my readers of the Warminista faith (and for Craigy as well ) because it suggests that the current warming that we have seen is in fact just part of the natural variation in the planet’s climate.

IMPLICATIONS OF PDO, NAO, GLACIAL FLUCTUATIONS, AND SUN SPOT CYCLES FOR GLOBAL CLIMATE IN THE COMING DECADES

In a Geological Society of America abstract, Dr. Don Easterbrook, Professor of Geology at Western Washington University, presents data showing that the global warming cycle from 1977 to 1998 is now over and we have entered into a new global cooling period that should last for the next three decades. He also suggests that since the IPCC climate models are now so far off from what is actually happening that their projections for both this decade and century must be considered highly unreliable.

The Pacific Ocean has a warm temperature mode and a cool temperature mode and in the past century has switched back forth between these two modes every 25-30 years (known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation or PDO). In 1977 the Pacific abruptly shifted from its cool mode (where it had been since about 1945) into its warm mode, and this initiated global warming from 1977 to 1998. The correlation between the PDO and global climate is well established. The announcement by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) had shifted to its cool phase is right on schedule as predicted by past climate and PDO changes (Easterbrook, 2001, 2006, 2007). The PDO typically lasts 25-30 years and assures North America of cool, wetter climates during its cool phases and warmer, drier climates during its warm phases. The establishment of the cool PDO, together with similar cooling of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), virtually assures several decades of global cooling and the end of the past 30-year warm phase. It also means that the IPCC predictions of catastrophic global warming this century were highly inaccurate.

Switch of PDO cool mode to warm mode in 1977 initiated several decades of global warming. The PDO has now switched from its warm mode (where it had been since 1977) into its cool mode. As shown on the graph above, each time this had happened in the past century, global temperature has followed.

The upper map shows cool ocean temperatures in blue (note the North American west coast). The lower diagram shows how the PDO has switched back and forth from warm to cool modes in the past century, each time causing global temperature to follow. Projection of the past pattern (right end of graph) assures 30 yrs of global cooling Comparisons of historic global climate warming and cooling over the past century with PDO and NAO oscillations, glacial fluctuations, and sun spot activity show strong correlations and provide a solid data base for future climate change projections. As shown by the historic pattern of PDOs over the past century and by corresponding global warming and cooling, the pattern is part of ongoing warm/cool cycles that last 25-30 years. The global cooling phase from 1880 to 1910, characterized by advance of glaciers worldwide, was followed by a shift to the warm-phase PDO for 30 years, global warming and rapid glacier recession. The cool-phase PDO returned in ~1945 accompanied by global cooling and glacial advance for 30 years. Shift to the warm-phase PDO in 1977 initiated global warming and recession of glaciers that persisted until 1998. Recent establishment of the PDO cool phase appeared right on target and assuming that its effect will be similar to past history, global climates can be expected to cool over the next 25-30 years. The IPCC prediction of global temperatures 1° F warmer by 2011 and 2° F by 2038 stand little chance of being correct.

The global warming of this century is exactly in phase with the normal climatic pattern of cyclic warming and cooling and we have now switched from a warm phase to a cool phase right at the predicted time (see graph below)

Source (PDF)

I would certainly be a very big fly in the Warminista ointment if this turns out to be the case, Perhaps they would have to turn back to the old Marxist notions of class and privilege as a means of denouncing modern life if it is

Cheers Comrades

Greenwashing a jury

A great piece on the stupidity of the recent decision to acquit the Greenpeace vandals in the UK follows:-

Britain’s astounding retreat from reason is now legitimising anarchy. A jury has solemnly decided that it is ok to break the law and cause more than £35,000 criminal damage to a coal-fired power station because of the threat of man-made global warming. The Independent reports:

In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage. Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a ‘lawful excuse’ to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate change.

Apparently they reached this decision having sat through a propaganda barrage by militant mmgw fanatics, including the pioneer evangelist James Hansen and the activist (and Tory party green guru) Zac Goldsmith. The story does not record whether the jury also heard the opposite case; if it was subjected only to mmgw indoctrination, then this was truly a mind-bending trial.

Even if mmgw was well-founded, that should not be used to excuse and legitimise criminal behaviour. But it isn’t. One of the defendants, Emily Hall, said:

The jury heard from the most distinguished climate scientist in the world. How could they ignore his warnings and reject his leading scientific arguments?

Because he is totally wrong, and is being spectacularly shown to be wrong. The jury seemed totally unaware that the mmgw theory has collapsed. The world is getting colder, not warmer, and has been for the past decade – even while carbon dioxide levels have continued to rise. The computer-generated projections and forecasts on which the entire theory depend never projected or forecast what has now happened. Arctic melt has happened before, the polar bears are increasing not dying out and the Antarctic ice is expanding. This year is set to be the coolest globally this century, as even the BBC has acknowledged.

The mmgw industry is in disarray. More and more climate-related scientists are coming out and saying the whole mmgw theory is wrong or fraudulent, with many reversing previously held views in the light of the evidence in front of their eyes. Here’s just one of them — Dr. William J.R. Alexander, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and a former member of the United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters — who writes:

I believe that global warming is the biggest scientific scam ever. There is no evidence to prove that the current climate variations are not a natural cycle

and that the outcome of such anti-scientific alarmism is environmental terrorism (as now legitimised by the jury at Maidstone Crown Court). Here’s another: meteorologist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who writes:

Not all scientists agree that the warming we’ve seen is necessarily anthropogenic.  It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.

Here’s Professor Kunihiko Takeda, Vice-Chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University, who says:

Fear is a very efficient weapon: It produces the desired effect without much waste. Global warming has nothing to do with how much CO2 is produced or what we do here on Earth. For millions of years, solar activity has been controlling temperatures on Earth and even now, the sun controls how high the mercury goes. CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another. Soon it will cool down anyhow, once again, regardless of what we do. Every scientist knows this, but it doesn’t pay to say so. What makes a whole lot of economic and political sense is to blame global warming on humans and create laws that keep the status quo and prevent up-and-coming nations from developing. Global warming, as a political vehicle, keeps Europeans in the driver’s seat and developing nations walking barefoot.

Here’s the Space and Science Research Center which said last July that the warming that has occurred since the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850 was completely natural, i.e., had nothing to do with human or industrial activity.

‘After an exhaustive review of a substantial body of climate research, and in conjunction with the obvious and compelling new evidence that exists, it is time that the world community acknowledges that the Earth has begun the next climate change.’ The current warming period is=2 0 not only at an end, but a distinct cooling cycle has begun and will bring ‘predominantly colder global temperatures for many years into the future.’

There are many, many more such scientists making such points, some of whom I have reported on in earlier posts. While we must guard against falling into the opposite trap and panicking that a new ice age is upon us, it is now beyond doubt that mmgw theory – which has been clear to some of us ever since it first got going at the end of the 1980s that it was a giant scam rooted in  unsavoury anti-capitalist and anti-human ideology – is now deader than the Monty Python parrot.

And yet a British jury thinks it justifies criminal damage and suspending the rule of law. Such is the power of brain washing. Terrifying.

Melanie Phillips

Cheers Comrades

Bjorn Lomborg makes perfect sense on the cost of doing nothing.

Bjorn Lomborg

ONE commonly repeated argument for doing something about climate change sounds compelling, but turns out to be almost fraudulent. It is based on comparing the cost of action with the cost of inaction, and almost every major politician in the world uses it.

European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, for example, used this argument when he presented the European Union’s proposal to tackle climate change earlier this year. The EU promised to cut its CO2 emissions by 20 per cent by 2020, at a cost the EC’s own estimates put at about 0.5 per cent of gross domestic product, or roughly €60 billion ($100 billion) per year. This is obviously a hefty price tag – at least a 50 per cent increase in the total cost of the EU – and it will likely be much higher (the EC has previously estimated the cost to be double its present estimate).

But Barroso’s punchline was that “the cost is low compared to the high price of inaction”. In fact, he forecast the price of doing nothing “could even approach 20 per cent of GDP”. (Never mind that this cost estimate is probably wildly overestimated; most models show about 3 per cent damages.)

So there you have it. Of course, politicians should be willing to spend 0.5 per cent of GDP to avoid a 20 per cent cost of GDP. This sounds eminently sensible, until you realise that Barroso is comparing two entirely different issues.

The 0.5-per-cent-of-GDP expense will reduce emissions ever so slightly (if everyone in the EU actually fulfills their requirements for the rest of the century, global emissions will fall by about 4 per cent). This would reduce the temperature increase expected by the end of the century by just 0.05C. Thus, the EU’s immensely ambitious program will not stop or even have a significant impact on global warming.

In other words, if Barroso fears costs of 20 per cent of GDP in the year 2100, the 0.5 per cent payment every year of this century will do virtually nothing to change that cost. We would still have to pay by the end of the century, only now we would also have made ourselves poorer in the 90 years preceding it.

The sleight of hand works because we assume that the action will cancel all the effects of inaction, whereas of course, nothing like that is true. This becomes much clearer if we substitute much smaller action than Barroso envisions.

For example, say that the EU decides to put up a diamond-studded wind turbine at the Berlaymont headquarters, which will save 1 tonne of CO2 each year. The cost will be $1 billion, but the EU says that this is incredibly cheap when compared to the cost of inaction on climate change, which will run into the trillions. It should be obvious that the $1 billion windmill doesn’t negate the trillions of dollars of damage from climate change that we still have to pay by the end of the century.

The EU’s argument is similar to advising a man with a gangrenous leg that paying $50,000 for an aspirin is a good deal because the cost compares favourably to the cost of inaction, which is losing the leg. Of course, the aspirin doesn’t prevent that outcome.

The inaction argument is really terribly negligent, because it causes us to recommend aspirin and lose sight of smarter actions that may actually save the leg.

Likewise, it is negligent to focus on inefficiently cutting CO2 now because of costs in the distant future that in reality will not be avoided. It stops us from focusing on long-term strategies like investment in energy research and development that would actually solve climate change and at a much lower cost.

If Barroso were alone, perhaps we could let his statement go, but the same argument is used again and again by influential politicians. Germany’s Angela Merkel says it “makes economic sense” to cut CO2, because the “the economic consequences of inaction will be dramatic for us all”. Australia’s Kevin Rudd agrees that “the cost of inaction will be far greater than the cost of action”. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has gone on record with the exact same words. In the US, both John McCain and Barack Obama use the cost of inaction as a pivotal reason to support carbon cuts.

Californian senator Diane Feinstein argues that we should curb carbon emissions because the Sierra snowpack, which accounts for much of California’s drinking water, will be reduced by 40 per cent by 2050 due to global warming. What she fails to tell us is that even a substantial reduction in emissions – at a high cost – will have an immeasurable effect on snowmelt by 2050. Instead, we should perhaps invest in water storage facilities.

Likewise, when politicians fret that we will lose a significant proportion of polar bears by 2050, they use it as an argument for cutting carbon, but forget to tell us that doing so will have no measurable effect on polar bear populations. Instead, we should perhaps stop shooting the 300 polar bears we hunt each year.

The inaction argument makes us spend vast resources on policies that will do virtually nothing to deal with climate change, thereby diverting those resources from policies that could actually make animpact.

We would never accept medical practitioners advising ultra-expensive and ineffective aspirins for gangrene because the cost of aspirin outweighs the cost of losing the leg. Why, then, should we tolerate such fallacious arguments when debating the costliest public policy decision in the history of mankind?

Bjorn Lomborg is adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School.

“Emissions not making rivers run dry”

Find below a good explanation of just why  “climate change” should not be cited as the cause of the plight of all of those communities that rely upon the water that flows down the Murray Darling river system .Saw this yesterday an thought it most worthwhile to add to CCA
Enjoy Comrades

Stewart Franks | September 12, 2008

IS the ongoing drought in the Murray-Darling Basin affected by climate change? The simple answer is that there is no evidence that CO2 has had any significant role. Like it or not, that is the science.

In fact, the drought was caused by an entirely natural phenomenon: the 2002 El Nino event. This led to particularly low rainfalls across eastern Australia. The subsequent years were either neutral or weak El Nino conditions. Significantly, neutral conditions are not sufficient to break a drought. In 2006, we had a return to El Nino conditions which further exacerbated the drought. What we didn’t have was a strong La Nina.

Last year finally brought a La Nina event but it was relatively weak. It produced a number of major storm events in coastal areas and some useful rainfall in the Murray-Darling basin and elsewhere. Approximately half of NSW drought-declared areas were lifted out of drought (albeit into “marginal” status) and Sydney’s water supply doubled in the space of a few months.

This was the first rain-bearing La Nina since 1999 but proved insufficient to break the drought. In short, the drought was initiated by El Nino, protracted by further El Nino events and perhaps more importantly, the absence of substantial La Nina events.

Despite the known causes of the drought, many have claimed that CO2 emissions are to blame. There have been arguments put forward to justify this claim, all eagerly adopted by various groups, but none of which have serious merit.

A key claim is that the multiple occurrence of El Nino is a sign of climate change. This is speculative at best. Recent analysis showed the nine-year absence of La Nina was not unusual. In fact long-term records demonstrate alternating periods of 20-40 years where El Nino is dominant, followed by similarly extended periods where La Nina dominates. Ominously, the data demonstrates that it is possible to go 14-15 years without any La Nina events. The consequent drought would be devastating but entirely natural.

The observation that El Nino and La Nina events cluster on 20-40 year, multi-decadal timescales is an important one. It demonstrates that Australia should always expect major changes in climate as a function of natural variability. When viewed in this light, the drought is most likely a recurring feature of the Australian climate.

A more recent claim is that higher temperatures are leading to increased evaporation of moisture. The weather bureau acknowledges that rainfall from September 2001 until now has not been the lowest recorded, however much has been made of the fact that consequent inflows have been the lowest. It has been claimed increased evaporation, driven by climate change, can make up this discrepancy. Indeed, Wendy Craik, the chief executive of the Murray Darling Basin Commission has stated that temperatures were warmer, leading to more evaporation and drier catchments.

This is disturbing to hear from the head of the MDBC, as it is completely at odds with the known physics of evaporation. While it sounds intuitively correct, it is wrong.

When soil contains high moisture content, much of the sun’s energy is used in evaporation. Consequently, there is limited heating of the surface. When soil moisture content is low (as occurs during drought) nearly all of that energy is converted into heating the surface, and air temperatures rise significantly. Consequently, higher temperatures are due to the lack of evaporation, not a cause of significantly higher evaporation.

Cloud cover also provides a major control on air temperatures. El Nino delivers less rainfall but also less cloud cover. This has a major impact on the amount of the sun’s energy reaching land; far greater than the trivial increase in radiant energy caused by increased CO2. Again, in the absence of soil moisture, air temperatures increase.

These are known and accepted processes of environmental physics and are not contentious. They are ignored because they detract from the simple message that we should sign up to the concept of “dangerous climate change” and an emissions trading scheme. After all, who would pay for carbon emissions if they were not proven to be detrimental? Who would provide extra funds for climate change science if it wasn’t a proven significant factor compared to natural climatic variability?

None of the above is to say that CO2 is not having some effect; the atmospheric CO2 concentration has risen and this is largely attributable to anthropogenic emissions. CO2 is a radiatively-active gas and leads to a minor increase in downward radiation. However, there is no evidence that this is in any way significant, especially when compared to the naturally varying processes that dominate rainfall variability and evaporation.

We do know why inflows are so low and why various ecosystems of the Murray-Darling are in crisis: the system is over-allocated and has experienced a growth in groundwater extraction and in the number of farm dams preventing rainfall from becoming run-off. This is due to a failure of planning, management and leadership from the relevant authorities. Under these conditions, when a prolonged drought strikes, the system collapses.

This is a man-made problem but not one that is attributable to CO2.

Craik is not alone in her desire to view CO2-induced climate change as proven and affecting the drought. Numerous politicians, environmentalists and especially scientists have made spectacular leaps of faith in their adherence to the doctrine of climate change over recent years, too many to document here. However, the most literally fantastic claim on climate change must go to Kevin Rudd, who has guaranteed that rainfall will decline over coming decades; one can only assume he’s based his view on deficient climate models and bad advice.

Perhaps our leading climate authorities who have played such a prominent role in fomenting speculation about climate change, and who apparently adhere to the notion that climate is amenable to prediction, should also point out that these models cannot reproduce the observed multi-decadal variability of El Nino and La Nina in anything like a realistic manner.

Given the uncertainty of El Nino and La Nina behaviour, one clearly cannot predict the future.

There is no direct evidence of CO2 impacts on the drought, nor is there any rational basis for predicting rainfall in 30 years time. One just hopes that sensible and sustainable management from our leaders will enable struggling rural communities to weather the vagaries of climatic and political extremes.

Stewart Franks is a hydroclimatologist and an associate professor at the University of Newcastle School of Engineering. He is president-elect of the International Commission on the Coupled Land – Atmosphere System.