If you doubt the arrogance [of the global warming crowd], you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue.
• The diversion of food to biofuel production has resulted in soaring food prices throughout the world. Among the hardest hit: Haitians have been forced to eat mud patties, which consist of dirt, oil and sugar.
That's why it's standard practice for Al Gore to ban the press during his (very expensive) appearances.Gore, who reportedly receives $100,000 for personal appearances, apparently has a standard contract that bans the fourth estate from all of his speeches. No one seems to know why, and we can’t ask — on account of we’re out here, and he’s in there.
Thanks, Al Gore.The world just had one of the coldest winters on record.
And the price of food has skyrocketed......thanks to your "global warming" -- oops, I meant "climate change" -- initiatives.Problem is, researchers, environmentalists and scientists of all political persuasions say that your "carbon offset" businesses are money-making scams and do absolutely nothing for the environment.And the current lack of sunspots likely indicates a solar cooling cycle beyond human control.We're hungry, Al Gore. Thanks for all of your help.
4.2 billion ...That's how many rooftops you'd have to cover with solar panels to displace a cubic mile of oil (CMO), a measure of energy consumption, according to Ripudaman Malhotra, who oversees research on fossil fuels at SRI International... [in other words,] we'd need to equip 250,000 roofs a day with solar panels for the next 50 years to have enough photovoltaic infrastructure to provide the world with a CMO's worth of solar-generated electricity for a year. We're nowhere close to that pace.
Many of these stats and a far lengthier discussion of the issue will be found in a book coming from Oxford University Press by Crane, Malhotra, and Ed Kinderman called A Cubic Meter of Oil... And judging by some of the stats Malhotra gave me, the book will alarm policy makers, environmentalists, and pretty much anyone else interested in weaning ourselves from fossil fuels...
One of the more compelling aspects of Malhotra's research is how it highlights the amount of energy, particularly in the form of fossil fuels, that the world consumes. Oil provided about one-third of worldwide energy (1.06 CMO) in 2006 followed by coal (0.81) and natural gas (0.61). Together, the three fossil fuels accounted for 2.48 CMOs of the 3 CMOs consumed that year.The figures drop quickly after that. The fourth largest source of energy is biomass, mostly in the form of burning wood. Biomass, however, only provide 0.19 CMOs, while hydroelectric and nuclear provided, respectively, 0.17 and .015 CMOs...
The minuscule size of renewables, unfortunately, also means progress will come slowly. Some more comparisons: A large hydroelectric dam can generate about 18 gigawatts of power a year. To get an annual CMO from new hydroelectric dams, you'd need to build the equivalent of 200 Three Gorges Dams. There aren't that many available rivers in the world left to dam up. Solar thermal? 7,700 plants, or 150 a year for 50 years, required for an annual CMO. One plant went up last year, and it was the first in over 15 years. In his calculations, Malhotra takes into account the fact that solar, wind, hydroelectric, and even nuclear plants don't operate at optimal conditions 24-7; in other words, he has baked in real-world assumptions.
If consumers worldwide could replace 1 billion incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents, it would save only 0.01 CMOs in a year...
"What is truly humbling is that we aren't going to make any impact on CO2 emission levels for the next 20 to 30 years," Malhotra said. Much of the growth for energy demand will come from emerging markets...
Is this the scariest climate photo ever?
What's the big deal you might ask? The sun: sans sunspots. Not a good sign.
No sunspots. Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh
THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.
Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.
All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.
There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.
It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.
This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.
It didn't happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.
Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon's Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.
That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern.
It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.
There is no doubt that the next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do. There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the US and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it.
Millions will starve if we do nothing to prepare for it (such as planning changes in agriculture to compensate), and millions more will die from cold-related diseases.There is also another possibility, remote but much more serious. The Greenland and Antarctic ice cores and other evidence show that for the past several million years, severe glaciation has almost always afflicted our planet.
The bleak truth is that, under normal conditions, most of North America and Europe are buried under about 1.5km of ice. This bitterly frigid climate is interrupted occasionally by brief warm interglacials, typically lasting less than 10,000 years.
The interglacial we have enjoyed throughout recorded human history, called the Holocene, began 11,000 years ago, so the ice is overdue. We also know that glaciation can occur quickly: the required decline in global temperature is about 12C and it can happen in 20 years.
The next descent into an ice age is inevitable but may not happen for another 1000 years. On the other hand, it must be noted that the cooling in 2007 was even faster than in typical glacial transitions. If it continued for 20 years, the temperature would be 14C cooler in 2027.
By then, most of the advanced nations would have ceased to exist, vanishing under the ice, and the rest of the world would be faced with a catastrophe beyond imagining.
Australia may escape total annihilation but would surely be overrun by millions of refugees. Once the glaciation starts, it will last 1000 centuries, an incomprehensible stretch of time.
If the ice age is coming, there is a small chance that we could prevent or at least delay the transition, if we are prepared to take action soon enough and on a large enough scale...
And they issue this challenge: "If you believe there is evidence of the CO2 driver theory in the available data please present a graph of it."The letter is signed by Hans Schreuder (Analytical Chemist), Piers Corbyn (Astrophysicist), and Dr Don Parkes Svend Hendriksen (1988 Nobel Laureate), and a copy is available at a website operated by the International Climate Science Association.
Evidence presented in the letter goes well beyond putting the “hockey stick” graph, made famous in Al Gore's movie, in doubt. The hockey stick presented exponentially increasing global temperature in the near future due to uncontrolled increases in CO2 – and got its name from the shape of the graph – an apparently long stable period with an upward increase in CO2 and temperature during the industrial age. The UN panel claimed that human activity was driving what Mr. Gore explained as a certain end to civilization as we know it, if extreme political and economic measures are not taken.
The scientists assembled a graph based on actual measurements and did not find evidence that CO2 was the main driving force behind temperature. In fact, temperature increases and decreases, showing little interest in CO2 level.
Given the economic devastation that is already happening and which is now widely recognised will continue to flow from this policy, what possible justification can there be for its retention?
Executive Summary: the UN has facilitated a "fraudulent" market worth tens of billions of dollars that was justified by a critical report; this report was authored by the very project developers and "auditors" who would profit from the report's publication. This appears to be a major UN scandal that could surpass the Oil-for-Food Program in terms of total economic impact.
[Companies] ...can pay for the right to pollute by buying "carbon credits," essentially permission slips to spew carbon dioxide. Sale of the credits is supposed to help fund clean-air projects in China and other developing countries that would otherwise be too costly to build...
...U.N. regulators are... concerned that some independent auditors of these projects, who are responsible for vetting their environmental legitimacy, have been letting project developers push through ventures of questionable environmental value.
...Developing-world projects like [wind farms and palm-oil plants] are part of the burgeoning global carbon trade [which] last year was worth 40.4 billion euros...
The carbon market was created by the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 global treaty underlying environmental rules...
A dozen or so project developers, most based in Europe, dominate the business. Among the largest is EcoSecurities...
Three auditors dominate the business... Det Norske Veritas, Tüv Süd AG, ...and SGS Group...
...some of the most polluting countries are trying to find ways out of their commitments, using potential loopholes in the Protocol which may allow them to plant millions of hectares of trees in Southern countries as a substitute for cutting emissions at [the] source...in order to assess the scientific validity of this approach, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) appointed a panel to put together a Special Report on Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry. The report, released in May, has disappointed many activists by giving a "scientific" stamp of approval to a carbon market which would generate profits for a small number of mostly Northern companies and consultants...
...one of the reason's for the report's failure is, sadly, surely quite simple: some of the authors (and the companies they work for) will benefit financially from having drawn the conclusions they drew... [just] a few examples:
Pedro Moura-Costa, another important author of Chapter 5, is a UK-based executive of Ecosecurities..
Gareth Philips..., another Lead Author of Chapter 5, works for Societe Generale de Surveillance (SGS) Forestry of Geneva...
These and many other authors and editors of the IPCC Special Report on Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry had vested interests in reaching unrealistically and unjustifiably optimistic conclusions about the possibility of compensating for emissions with trees. They should therefore have been automatically disqualified from serving on an intergovernmental panel charged with investigating impartially the feasibility and benefits of such "offset" projects...
In short, the very authors of the original UN climate report that justified the carbon market were themselves poised to profit from that market. And, now, the UN does business directly with firms like Ecosecurities and SGS, enriching the authors of the original report!
Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down...
Al Gore says that the Earth has got a fever and the only cure is more cowbell. Or maybe some carbon offsets, which will do about as much good as the cowbell.
As a contributor to the IPCC’s 2007 report, I share the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. Yet I and many of my peers in the British House of Lords - through our hereditary element the most independent-minded of lawmakers - profoundly disagree on fundamental scientific grounds with both the IPCC and my co-laureate’s alarmist movie An Inconvenient Truth, which won this year’s Oscar for Best Sci-Fi Comedy Horror.Two detailed investigations by Committees of the House confirm that the IPCC has deliberately, persistently and prodigiously exaggerated not only the effect of greenhouse gases on temperature but also the environmental consequences of warmer weather.
My contribution to the 2007 report illustrates the scientific problem. The report’s first table of figures - inserted by the IPCC’s bureaucrats after the scientists had finalized the draft, and without their consent - listed four contributions to sea-level rise. The bureaucrats had multiplied the effect of melting ice from the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets by 10.
The result of this dishonest political tampering with the science was that the sum of the four items in the offending table was more than twice the IPCC’s published total. Until I wrote to point out the error, no one had noticed. The IPCC, on receiving my letter, quietly corrected, moved and relabeled the erroneous table, posting the new version on the internet and earning me my Nobel prize.
The shore-dwellers of Bali need not fear for their homes. The IPCC now says the combined contribution of the two great ice-sheets to sea-level rise will be less than seven centimeters after 100 years, not seven meters imminently, and that the Greenland ice sheet (which thickened by 50 cm between 1995 and 2005) might only melt after several millennia, probably by natural causes, just as it last did 850,000 years ago. Gore, mendaciously assisted by the IPCC bureaucracy, had exaggerated a hundredfold.
Recently a High Court judge in the UK listed nine of the 35 major scientific errors in Gore’s movie, saying they must be corrected before innocent schoolchildren can be exposed to the movie. Gore’s exaggeration of sea-level rise was one.
Others being peddled at the Bali conference are that man-made “global warming” threatens polar bears and coral reefs, caused Hurricane Katrina, shrank Lake Chad, expanded the actually-shrinking Sahara, etc.
At the very heart of the IPCC’s calculations lurks an error more serious than any of these. The IPCC says: “The CO2 radiative forcing increased by 20 percent during the last 10 years (1995-2005).” Radiative forcing quantifies increases in radiant energy in the atmosphere, and hence in temperature. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 in 1995 was 360 parts per million. In 2005 it was just 5percent higher, at 378 ppm. But each additional molecule of CO2 in the air causes a smaller radiant-energy increase than its predecessor. So the true increase in radiative forcing was 1 percent, not 20 percent. The IPCC has exaggerated the CO2 effect 20-fold.
Why so large and crucial an exaggeration? Answer: the IPCC has repealed the fundamental physicalthe Stefan-Boltzmann equation - that converts radiant energy to temperature. Without this equation, no meaningful calculation of the effect of radiance on temperature can be done. Yet the 1,600 pages of the IPCC’s 2007 report do not mention it once.
The IPCC knows of the equation, of course. But it is inconvenient. It imposes a strict (and very low) limit on how much greenhouse gases can increase temperature. At the Earth’s surface, you can add as much greenhouse gas as you like (the “surface forcing”), and the temperature will scarcely respond.
That is why all of the IPCC’s computer models predict that 10km above Bali, in the tropical upper troposphere, temperature should be rising two or three times as fast as it does at the surface. Without that tropical upper-troposphere “hot-spot”, the Stefan-Boltzmann law ensures that surface temperature cannot change much.For half a century we have been measuring the temperature in the upper atmosphere - and it has been changing no faster than at the surface. The IPCC knows this, too. So it merely declares that its computer predictions are right and the real-world measurements are wrong. Next time you hear some scientifically-illiterate bureaucrat say, “The science is settled”, remember this vital failure of real-world observations to confirm the IPCC’s computer predictions. The IPCC’s entire case is built on a guess that the absent hot-spot might exist.
Even if the Gore/IPCC exaggerations were true, which they are not, the economic cost of trying to mitigate climate change by trying to cut our emissions through carbon trading and other costly market interferences would far outweigh any possible climatic benefit.
The international community has galloped lemming-like over the cliff twice before. Twenty years ago the UN decided not to regard AIDS as a fatal infection. Carriers of the disease were not identified and isolated. Result: 25 million deaths in poor countries.
Thirty-five years ago the world decided to ban DDT, the only effective agent against malaria. Result: 40 million deaths in poor countries. The World Health Organization lifted the DDT ban on Sept. 15 last year. It now recommends the use of DDT to control malaria. Dr. Arata Kochi of the WHO said that politics could no longer be allowed to stand in the way of the science and the data. Amen to that.
If we take the heroically stupid decisions now on the table at Bali, it will once again be the world’s poorest people who will die unheeded in their tens of millions, this time for lack of the heat and light and power and medical attention which we in the West have long been fortunate enough to take for granted.
If we deny them the fossil-fueled growth we have enjoyed, they will remain poor and, paradoxically, their populations will continue to increase, making the world’s carbon footprint very much larger in the long run.
As they die, and as global temperature continues to fail to rise in accordance with the IPCC’s laughably-exaggerated predictions, the self-congratulatory rhetoric that is the hallmark of the now-useless, costly, corrupt UN will again be near-unanimously parroted by lazy, unthinking politicians and journalists who ought to have done their duty by the poor but are now - for the third time in three decades - failing to speak up for those who are about to die.
My fellow-participants, there is no climate crisis. The correct policy response to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. Take courage! Do nothing, and save the world’s poor from yet another careless, UN-driven slaughter.
Even after the "hockey stick" graph was exposed, scientific papers apparently confirming its abolition of the medieval warm period appeared. The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found that the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of the scientists who had compiled it had written many of the papers supporting its conclusion.The UN, echoed by Stern, says the graph isn't important. It is. Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland: now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none.
The Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and nearly all its 160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years, reversing a 6,000-year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes worldwide show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than now. And the snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit temperature is rising (it isn't) but because post-colonial deforestation has dried the air. Al Gore please note.
In some places it was also warmer than now in the Bronze Age and in Roman times. It wasn't CO2 that caused those warm periods. It was the sun. So the UN adjusted the maths and all but extinguished the sun's role in today's warming.
ALL TEN of the propositions listed below must be proven true if the climate-change “consensus” is to be proven true. The first article considers the first six of the listed propositions and draws the conclusions shown. The second article will consider the remaining four propositions.Proposition and Conclusion
1. That the debate is over and all credible climate scientists are agreed. False
2. That temperature has risen above millennial variability and is exceptional. Very unlikely
3. That changes in solar irradiance are an insignificant forcing mechanism. False
4. That the last century’s increases in temperature are correctly measured. Unlikely
5. That greenhouse-gas increase is the main forcing agent of temperature. Not proven
6. That temperature will rise far enough to do more harm than good. Very unlikely
7. That continuing greenhouse-gas emissions will be very harmful to life. Unlikely
8. That proposed carbon-emission limits would make a definite difference. Very unlikely
9. That the environmental benefits of remediation will be cost-effective. Very unlikely
10. That taking precautions, just in case, would be the responsible course. False
By 2005, the following islands had exhibited no rise in sea levels at all for the periods shown (Khandekar et al., 2005):Johnston Island: no sea level rise for 50 years
Tuvalu: no sea level rise for 48 years
Tarawa, Kiribati: no sea level rise for 24 years
Kanton Island: no sea level rise for 28 years
Nauru: no sea level rise for 26 years
Honiara, Solomons: no sea level rise for 26 years
Saipan: no sea level rise for 22 years
