The Nobel Prize (for propaganda)

BUSINESS WORLD
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.

Warming to McCain
WSJ, May 14, 2008

It's good to see a politician rewarded for a courageous and unpopular stand, as John McCain has been over Iraq. History will show he was as central to the battle of Washington as Gen. David Petraeus has been to the battle of Baghdad. Our enemies strategized that America lacks staying power. Mr. McCain's role deprived them of their plan for victory.

But honor, the value that underlined Mr. McCain's stand, is no use on an issue like global warming. Here, he could use a little more Mitt Romney, his vanquished nemesis whose name has now resurfaced in the veep sweepstakes.

Mr. Romney was tagged as a wonk because he "immerses himself in data." But one thing immersion can do that casual "gut" proceedings can't is let you know when the data don't provide an answer, even if people are telling you it does.

If the warming of the 1980s and 1990s were shown to be extraordinary, that would at least indicate something extraordinary is going on. If the pace of warming or the scale were correlated in some sensible fashion with the rise in atmospheric CO2, that might suggest cause – but such correlation is lacking.

It perhaps takes somebody steeped like Mr. Romney in real-world analytics to find a footing against the media tide. But the fact remains: The push toward warming that CO2 provides in theory is no reason to presume in confidence that CO2 is actually responsible for any observed warming in a system as complex and chaotic as our atmosphere.

In his climate speech on Monday, Mr. McCain exhibited (as the press usually does) a complete lack of consciousness of the fact that evidence of warming is not evidence of what causes warming. Yet policy must be a matter of costs and benefits, adjusted for the uncertainties involved. Which brings us to today's irony: He who finds a six-figure earmark an affront to humanity is prepared to wave through a trillion-dollar climate bill without, as far as anyone can tell, a single systematic thought about costs and benefits.

He who sees "corruption" behind every campaign check goes all compliant when GE, DuPont and Ford chant that climate policy "will create more economic opportunities than risks for the U.S. economy."

Mr. McCain argues that green energy mandates will leave us better off whether or not man-made global warming is real. This is an error that Mr. Romney wouldn't make – and one Al Gore makes all the time. Yes, hole-digging can be profitable if government subsidizes hole-digging. For society, however, there is only cost – measured in the labor and resources diverted to hole-digging from activities that actually fulfill the wants and needs of people.

Let's see: An estimate by the International Energy Agency holds that, to ward off the worst of climate change, the world by 2030 must build 34 hydroelectric dams the size of China's Three Gorges Dam, 510 nuclear plants, 289,000 wind turbines, 6,800 biomass plants and 714 fossil fuel plants equipped with unproven CO2 capture technology.

None of this will happen; if it did, it would merely slow progress toward a more carbon-rich atmosphere; and (of course) any impact on climate would be purely speculative.

Then what, as a practical matter, would be the aim of global warming policy? Our political system permits only one answer: to please the special interests that even now are gathering at the trough for subsidies in the name of climate change.

Politics is often a business of adaptive dishonesty, and never more so than when dealing with an issue like climate change. Real solutions are lacking so politicians can only devote themselves to telling voters what they want to hear while dishing out favors to whatever lobbyists are handy (and Mr. McCain picked a venue to do both on Monday, a wind turbine factory in Oregon). But let's also concede: Nobody who seriously wants to be president in 2008 is going to question the "consensus" on global warming.

And yet every journalistic tendril senses that the fuss over warming is about to cool. Global mean temperatures have been flat for a decade. The biofuel folly has chased away any easy belief that we can centrally plan our way out of reliance on fossil fuels. Voters seem more concerned with high gas prices. Even the town criers of global warming acknowledge that we will be stuck adapting to whatever climate comes along.

Mr. McCain's virtues are many, but he's a politician. Yet, happily, the spheres are moving and whatever energy boondoggles are coming, they are likely to be less costly than the boondoggles that might have been enacted even a year or two ago when Al Gore was riding high. For this, we will be able to thank the climate gods and no one else.
 
Freeman Dyson, Ph.D.—
Anthropogenic Global Warming is far from settled science.


(Fair Use Excerpt)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/31/b...em&ex=1212379200&en=e7ec49a8dd8b2562&ei=5087
By JOE NOCERA
There were storms around New York on Tuesday evening, and we sat on the runway for hours. I was heading to Dallas...

...Waiting for my plane to go wheels up, I pulled out The New York Review of Books; an article by the great physicist Freeman Dyson had caught my eye. It was a review of two books about global warming. Mr. Dyson argued that while there is clear scientific evidence showing that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen steadily, it does not necessarily mean that the end is nigh. Mr. Dyson talked soberly about the economic trade-offs involved in various solutions to cut carbon emissions, and agreed with the Yale economist William Nordhaus, author of one of the books under review, that some of the most radical solutions (especially some from Al Gore) would be “disastrously expensive,” and would damage the global economy.

Even more striking was his view that the science surrounding the havoc global warming would one day wreak on the planet was far from settled... He concluded that environmentalism had become “a worldwide secular religion...

“Unfortunately,” Mr. Dyson added, “some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of the planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment.”
 
I find this one interesting because it asks us to believe that they had no idea we'd be facing 8 years of cooling (after a decade of no temp rise), but are confident that they know exactly what will happen after that 8 years. I'm not saying they're wrong, just that it's a really interesting way to look at the situation.

From Telegraph.UK.CO

Global warming may 'stop', scientists predict

By Charles Clover, Environment Editor

Global warming will stop until at least 2015 because of natural variations in the climate, scientists have said.
# Have your say: Do you believe in global warming?
# Arctic ice melting 'faster than predicted'
# Weather Channel boss calls global warming 'the greatest scam in history'

Researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a "lull" for up to a decade while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

Global warming may stop, scientists predict The study predicts the IPCC's 0.3ºC temperature rise for the next decade may not happen
Melting icebergs: The study predicts the IPCC's 0.3ºC temperature rise for the next decade may not happen

The average temperature of the sea around Europe and North America is expected to cool slightly over the decade while the tropical Pacific remains unchanged.

This would mean that the 0.3°C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature.
 
i hate to find myself on the same side of the fence as amicus, truly i do, but i just don't find myself convinced by global warming. I mean, the earth went through major climate change before humans were rubbing sticks together, maybe we're destroying the earth, but i'm just not convinced. Do i think we should move away from fossil fuels? sure i do, i'm poor and gas is expensive. Do i think pouring toxic waste into the water is bad? absolutely, i rather like a swim or two, not to mention that my city's harbor looks nasty as hell. But i'm not convinced that we're on the verge of extinction
 
An Address to the San Diego Chamber of Commerce
by John Coleman (professional meteorologist and founder of the Weather Channel)

You may want to give credit where credit is due to Al Gore and his global warming campaign the next time you fill your car with gasoline, because there is a direct connection between Global Warming and four dollar a gallon gas. It is shocking, but true, to learn that the entire Global Warming frenzy is based on the environmentalist’s attack on fossil fuels, particularly gasoline. All this big time science, international meetings, thick research papers, dire threats for the future; all of it, comes down to their claim that the carbon dioxide in the exhaust from your car and in the smoke stacks from our power plants is destroying the climate of planet Earth. What an amazing fraud; what a scam.

The future of our civilization lies in the balance.

That’s the battle cry of the High Priest of Global Warming Al Gore and his fellow, agenda driven disciples as they predict a calamitous outcome from anthropogenic global warming. According to Mr. Gore the polar ice caps will collapse and melt and sea levels will rise 20 feet inundating the coastal cities making 100 million of us refugees. Vice President Gore tells us numerous Pacific islands will be totally submerged and uninhabitable. He tells us global warming will disrupt the circulation of the ocean waters, dramatically changing climates, throwing the world food supply into chaos. He tells us global warming will turn hurricanes into super storms, produce droughts, wipe out the polar bears and result in bleaching of coral reefs. He tells us tropical diseases will spread to mid latitudes and heat waves will kill tens of thousands. He preaches to us that we must change our lives and eliminate fossil fuels or face the dire consequences. The future of our civilization is in the balance.

With a preacher’s zeal, Mr. Gore sets out to strike terror into us and our children and make us feel we are all complicit in the potential demise of the planet.

Here is my rebuttal.

There is no significant man made global warming. There has not been any in the past, there is none now and there is no reason to fear any in the future. The climate of Earth is changing. It has always changed. But mankind’s activities have not overwhelmed or significantly modified the natural forces.

Through all history, Earth has shifted between two basic climate regimes: ice ages and what paleoclimatologists call “Interglacial periods”. For the past 10 thousand years the Earth has been in an interglacial period. That might well be called nature’s global warming because what happens during an interglacial period is the Earth warms up, the glaciers melt and life flourishes. Clearly from our point of view, an interglacial period is greatly preferred to the deadly rigors of an ice age. Mr. Gore and his crowd would have us believe that the activities of man have overwhelmed nature during this interglacial period and are producing an unprecedented, out of control warming.

Well, it is simply not happening. Worldwide there was a significant natural warming trend in the 1980’s and 1990’s as a Solar cycle peaked with lots of sunspots and solar flares. That ended in 1998 and now the Sun has gone quiet with fewer and fewer Sun spots, and the global temperatures have gone into decline. Earth has cooled for almost ten straight years. So, I ask Al Gore, where’s the global warming?

The cooling trend is so strong that recently the head of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had to acknowledge it. He speculated that nature has temporarily overwhelmed mankind’s warming and it may be ten years or so before the warming returns. Oh, really. We are supposed to be in a panic about man-made global warming and the whole thing takes a ten year break because of the lack of Sun spots. If this weren’t so serious, it would be laughable.

Now allow me to talk a little about the science behind the global warming frenzy. I have dug through thousands of pages of research papers, including the voluminous documents published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I have worked my way through complicated math and complex theories. Here’s the bottom line: the entire global warming scientific case is based on the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the use of fossil fuels. They don’t have any other issue. Carbon Dioxide, that’s it.

Hello Al Gore; Hello UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Your science is flawed; your hypothesis is wrong; your data is manipulated. And, may I add, your scare tactics are deplorable. The Earth does not have a fever. Carbon dioxide does not cause significant global warming.

The focus on atmospheric carbon dioxide grew out a study by Roger Revelle who was an esteemed scientist at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute. He took his research with him when he moved to Harvard and allowed his students to help him process the data for his paper. One of those students was Al Gore. That is where Gore got caught up in this global warming frenzy. Revelle’s paper linked the increases in carbon dioxide, CO2, in the atmosphere with warming. It labeled CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

Charles Keeling, another researcher at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, set up a system to make continuous CO2 measurements. His graph of these increases has now become known as the Keeling Curve. When Charles Keeling died in 2005, his son David, also at Scripps, took over the measurements. Here is what the Keeling curve shows: an increase in CO2 from 315 parts per million in 1958 to 385 parts per million today, an increase of 70 parts per million or about 20 percent.

All the computer models, all of the other findings, all of the other angles of study, all come back to and are based on CO2 as a significant greenhouse gas. It is not.

Here is the deal about CO2, carbon dioxide. It is a natural component of our atmosphere. It has been there since time began. It is absorbed and emitted by the oceans. It is used by every living plant to trigger photosynthesis. Nothing would be green without it. And we humans; we create it. Every time we breathe out, we emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is not a pollutant. It is not smog. It is a naturally occurring invisible gas.

Let me illustrate. I estimate that this square in front of my face contains 100,000 molecules of atmosphere. Of those 100,000 only 38 are CO2; 38 out of a hundred thousand. That makes it a trace component. Let me ask a key question: how can this tiny trace upset the entire balance of the climate of Earth? It can’t. That’s all there is to it; it can’t.

The UN IPCC has attracted billions of dollars for the research to try to make the case that CO2 is the culprit of run-away, man-made global warming. The scientists have come up with very complex creative theories and done elaborate calculations and run computer models they say prove those theories. They present us with a concept they call radiative forcing. The research organizations and scientists who are making a career out of this theory, keep cranking out the research papers. Then the IPCC puts on big conferences at exotic places, such as the recent conference in Bali. The scientists endorse each other’s papers, they are summarized and voted on, and viola, we are told global warming is going to kill us all unless we stop burning fossil fuels.

May I stop here for a few historical notes? First, the internal combustion engine and gasoline were awful polluters when they were first invented. And, both gasoline and automobile engines continued to leave a layer of smog behind right up through the 1960’s. Then science and engineering came to the environmental rescue. Better exhaust and ignition systems, catalytic converters, fuel injectors, better engineering throughout the engine and reformulated gasoline have all contributed to a huge reduction in the exhaust emissions from today’s cars. Their goal then was to only exhaust carbon dioxide and water vapor, two gases widely accepted as natural and totally harmless. Anyone old enough to remember the pall of smog that used to hang over all our cities knows how much improvement there has been. So the environmentalists, in their battle against fossil fuels and automobiles had a very good point forty years ago, but now they have to focus almost entirely on the once harmless carbon dioxide. And, that is the rub. Carbon dioxide is not an environmental problem; they just want you now to think it is.

Numerous independent research projects have been done about the greenhouse impact from increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. These studies have proven to my total satisfaction that CO2 is not creating a major greenhouse effect and is not causing an increase in temperatures. By the way, before his death, Roger Revelle coauthored a paper cautioning that CO2 and its greenhouse effect did not warrant extreme countermeasures.

So now it has come down to an intense campaign, orchestrated by environmentalists claiming that the burning of fossil fuels dooms the planet to run-away global warming. Ladies and Gentlemen, that is a myth.

So how has the entire global warming frenzy with all its predictions of dire consequences, become so widely believed, accepted and regarded as a real threat to planet Earth? That is the most amazing part of the story.

To start with global warming has the backing of the United Nations, a major world force. Second, it has the backing of a former Vice President and very popular political figure. Third it has the endorsement of Hollywood, and that’s enough for millions. And, fourth, the environmentalists love global warming. It is their tool to combat fossil fuels. So with the environmentalists, the UN, Gore and Hollywood touting Global Warming and predictions of doom and gloom, the media has scrambled with excitement to climb aboard. After all the media loves a crisis. From YK2 to killer bees the media just loves to tell us our lives are threatened. And the media is biased toward liberal, so it’s pre-programmed to support Al Gore and UN. CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The LA Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press and here in San Diego The Union Tribune are all constantly promoting the global warming crisis.

So who is going to go against all of that power? Not the politicians. So now the President of the United States, just about every Governor, most Senators and most Congress people, both of the major current candidates for President, most other elected officials on all levels of government are all riding the Al Gore Global Warming express. That is one crowded bus.

I suspect you haven’t heard it because the mass media did not report it, but I am not alone on the no man-made warming side of this issue. On May 20th, a list of the names of over thirty-one thousand scientists who refute global warming was released. Thirty-one thousand of which 9,000 are Ph.ds. Think about that. Thirty-one thousand. That dwarfs the supposed 2,500 scientists on the UN panel. In the past year, five hundred of scientists have issued public statements challenging global warming. A few more join the chorus every week. There are about 100 defectors from the UN IPCC. There was an International Conference of Climate Change Skeptics in New York in March of this year. One hundred of us gave presentations. Attendance was limited to six hundred people. Every seat was taken. There are a half dozen excellent internet sites that debunk global warming. And, thank goodness for KUSI and Michael McKinnon, its owner. He allows me to post my comments on global warming on the website KUSI.com. Following the publicity of my position form Fox News, Glen Beck on CNN, Rush Limbaugh and a host of other interviews, thousands of people come to the website and read my comments. I get hundreds of supportive emails from them. No I am not alone and the debate is not over.

In my remarks in New York I speculated that perhaps we should sue Al Gore for fraud because of his carbon credits trading scheme. That remark has caused a stir in the fringe media and on the internet. The concept is that if the media won’t give us a hearing and the other side will not debate us, perhaps we could use a Court of law to present our papers and our research and if the Judge is unbiased and understands science, we win. The media couldn’t ignore that. That idea has become the basis for legal research by notable attorneys and discussion among global warming debunkers, but it’s a long way from the Court room.

I am very serious about this issue. I think stamping out the global warming scam is vital to saving our wonderful way of life.

The battle against fossil fuels has controlled policy in this country for decades. It was the environmentalist’s prime force in blocking any drilling for oil in this country and the blocking the building of any new refineries, as well. So now the shortage they created has sent gasoline prices soaring. And, it has lead to the folly of ethanol, which is also partly behind the fuel price increases; that and our restricted oil policy. The ethanol folly is also creating a food crisis throughput the world – it is behind the food price rises for all the grains, for cereals, bread, everything that relies on corn or soy or wheat, including animals that are fed corn, most processed foods that use corn oil or soybean oil or corn syrup. Food shortages or high costs have led to food riots in some third world countries and made the cost of eating out or at home budget busting for many.

So now the global warming myth actually has lead to the chaos we are now enduring with energy and food prices. We pay for it every time we fill our gas tanks. Not only is it running up gasoline prices, it has changed government policy impacting our taxes, our utility bills and the entire focus of government funding. And, now the Congress is considering a cap and trade carbon credits policy. We the citizens will pay for that, too. It all ends up in our taxes and the price of goods and services.

So the Global warming frenzy is, indeed, threatening our civilization. Not because global warming is real; it is not. But because of the all the horrible side effects of the global warming scam.

I love this civilization. I want to do my part to protect it.

If Al Gore and his global warming scare dictates the future policy of our governments, the current economic downturn could indeed become a recession, drift into a depression and our modern civilization could fall into an abyss. And it would largely be a direct result of the global warming frenzy.

My mission, in what is left of a long and exciting lifetime, is to stamp out this Global Warming silliness and let all of us get on with enjoying our lives and loving our planet, Earth.

http://www.kusi.com/weather/colemanscorner/19842304.html
 
HANSEN_AND_CONGRESS.jpg
 
Ah-HA! Evidence for my contention that GW is just a ploy by those whose real motivation is hatred of industrial civilization, and whose goal is to detroy it. And if that destroys 5 or 6 billion humans in the process, well, broken eggs and ommelettes, ya know? (So long as the enviro elitists aren't among the broken eggs, right, greenies?)
RA

No Sun Intended
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, June 30, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Alternative Energy: Washington has placed a moratorium on solar power projects on federal land. Is this the work of evil oil companies? No, it's the fault of environmentalists.

The Bureau of Land Management quietly decided in May that the development of solar plants in 119 million sun-soaked, federally owned acres in the western states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah would have to wait at least two years while bureaucrats sorted out their environmental impact.

For decades environmental groups have been pushing the government and private sector to develop more alternative sources of energy. But that campaign is beginning to look like a sham to cover the groups' BANANA — Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything — activism.

To be fair, it appears the BLM acted without being forced by an environmentalist-filed lawsuit or activist pressure. And so far, the media are reporting that only a single group — the Wilderness Society — has expressed support for the moratorium.

Make no mistake, though. The environmental groups are the reason the BLM made its decision. Had they not spent the past 30 years rabidly crusading against development, reflexively defending wildlife habitats from minor and imaginary threats and demonizing economic progress, the solar projects would not have been interrupted.

Washington has become so overly sensitive to the possibility of vocal opposition on anything that has an environmental impact that it feels it must inoculate itself from the radicals — even when the project is one they should support without reservation.

Environmental groups at one time served a noble purpose. We are a cleaner nation and world now than we were in the groups' formative years because they helped the West understand that it needed to clean up the mess from the Industrial Revolution.

But now they have become BANANA's and CAVE — Citizens Against Virtually Everything — people. They are more interested in choking capitalism and imposing on the world a future without energy than they are with a clean planet.

Though a great deal of land has been set aside, it would take only about 1% of the total area now off-limits to generate through solar plants enough energy to power more than 20 million homes.

We have no particular affinity for solar power, but blocking an energy source for 20 million homes seems significant to us, especially when the price of our primary source continues to climb.

What's more, we don't like to see business opportunities shut down by government decree. There are companies that have sunk capital into solar power projects on federal land that will now have to wait at least two years, perhaps more, before they can begin to recoup their investments. Turning a profit will take even longer.

The moratorium conceivably could kill businesses and the jobs that go with them. It will have the same economic effect as the Kyoto Treaty on global warming but on a smaller scale.

Some on the left, Democratic Rep. John Hall being a prominent example, are attacking the moratorium as the Bush administration's favoritism toward the president's oil buddies. This sort of obfuscation is to be expected. The environmentalists' political partners can't afford to let the groups' real objective — wounding our free market system — be revealed.
 
Has anyone seen the new book, 'Deniers' yet? It's looks into the skepticism on GW, and discloses many of the scientists and intellectuals who usually get attacked or dismissed by the zealots. It also has a chapter on the damage being done by carbon offset credits. Turns out that much of the "offset" is fast growing trees being planted in third world countries....land obtained by expelling the poor farmers who currently use it. On the bright side, it will make a handful of people very rich(er) (including one certain doughy GW proponent who refuses to debate anyone about GW or any of the consequences behind his movement).

Funny thing about the book....it's written by an environmentalist. :cool:
 
Has anyone seen the new book, 'Deniers' yet? It's looks into the skepticism on GW, and discloses many of the scientists and intellectuals who usually get attacked or dismissed by the zealots. It also has a chapter on the damage being done by carbon offset credits. Turns out that much of the "offset" is fast growing trees being planted in third world countries....land obtained by expelling the poor farmers who currently use it. On the bright side, it will make a handful of people very rich(er) (including one certain doughy GW proponent who refuses to debate anyone about GW or any of the consequences behind his movement).

Funny thing about the book....it's written by an environmentalist. :cool:

S-Des,
That sounds like an interesting book. Who is the author?

You're not the first who's noticed or reported that a not insubstantial portion of the so-called carbon offset gambits are nothing but ginormous scams (e.g., trees that never get planted).

I suspect that a fairly large portion of the crowd promoting both the "cap and trade" and carbon offset schemes are folk who stand to make a pretty penny.


 

I am beginning to believe that half of these lunatics actually want the lights to go out.

__________________________________

(Fair Use Excerpt)

Coal Fires Up Dreadlocked `Climate Camp' Protesting E.ON Plant
By Alex Morales

Aug. 8 (Bloomberg) -- In a sloping field near the village of Hoo, 30 miles east of London, environmentalists with dreadlocks, lawmakers and academics are protesting plans to build the U.K.'s first new coal-fired power plant in 30 years.

E.ON AG, Germany's largest utility, proposed replacing the existing Kingsnorth station at the site in Kent with a more efficient, $2.9 billion model. The new plant may be equipped with experimental technology to reduce carbon dioxide emissions blamed for global warming.

Business Secretary John Hutton said on June 30 that ``coal is and will continue to be a feature of the U.K.'s electricity mix'' so the country can meet its energy needs. Protesters gathered at a tent city near the station have joined James Hansen, NASA's top climate scientist, demanding the plant be scuttled. They want expanded wind and solar power to help meet U.K.'s target for cutting emissions 60 percent by 2050.

``Given everything we know about climate change and the need to reduce emissions, this flies in the face of it,'' Simon Lewis, an University of Leeds Earth-science researcher who wears a nose-ring, said in an interview at the week-long camp. ``It's not just a thousand people in a field: this is a really important message to the world that we should stop using unabated coal.''

If the Kingsnorth plan is approved, it will open the way for six more coal-fired stations, committing the U.K. to a ``high-carbon future,'' Caroline Lucas, who represents the U.K. Green Party in the European Parliament, said yesterday in an interview from her office in Brussels...

***​

`Climate Chaos'
``Kingsnorth is absolutely on the frontline of whether or not we manage to avoid the worst of climate chaos,'' said Lucas, who attended the camp on Aug. 4 and plans to go again tomorrow. ``If Britain, one of the richest countries in the world, can't deal with climate change without resorting to coal, it undermines our message to any other countries to try to do differently.''

The new plant would be 20 percent more efficient than the existing one, which burns coal and oil and will be decommissioned by 2015, E.ON says. The project has been short- listed in a competition for government funding to test whether so-called carbon capture and storage technology can reduce coal- fired plant emissions.

``A third of U.K. power stations are closing in the next 10 to 15 years,'' Emily Highmore, spokeswoman for Dusseldorf-based E.ON, said in an interview in Hoo. ``That's a very urgent deadline we are facing. If we don't fill that gap, the lights are going to go out.''

Queen Elizabeth II
All energy sources, including coal and renewable power, will be needed, Highmore said. Coal prices are more stable than those for oil and natural gas, and renewables such as wind and solar can be unreliable, she said.

The new plant's two 800-megawatt burners will cost about 1.5 billion pounds ($2.9 billion) and carbon capture and storage could add up to 400 million pounds more, said Highmore. Competition for government funding to test the approach is pitting E.ON against BP Plc, Peel Power Ltd. and Iberdrola SA's Scottish Power Plc, with a decision due next year.

In a Dec. 19 letter to Prime Minister Gordon Brown that he copied to Queen Elizabeth II, Hansen, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration's top climate scientist, said using more coal without the emission-reducing technology may accelerate floods, droughts and heat waves.

``If we continue to build coal-fired power plants without carbon capture, we will lock in future climate disasters,'' Hansen wrote.

The E.ON plans were approved on Jan. 2 by Medway District Council. The national government must make the final decision, and no firm deadline has been set by the Department for Energy, Business and Regulatory Reform. For some residents, approval is vital.

`We Want Coal'
``The power station generates not just work for this area but finance: all the retail outlets rely on it,'' Gill Hannah, 56, a Hoo resident of 40 years, said in an interview at her house, which overlooks Kingsnorth station. Hannah, whose partner Terence Wheeldon works for E.ON, posted a sign in her window saying ``We want coal.''

The protesters say the new plant will emit at least 6 million tons of CO2 a year. They plan tomorrow to try to shut down Kingsnorth's existing power station by entering the premises by land, sea and air. Lucas, the lawmaker, said she hasn't decided whether to participate.

At the camp on Aug. 6, a boat made of plywood and plastic bottles was used to advertise the planned sea invasion, which calls for a flotilla of rafts to follow the tide down the River Thames. Protesters were also shown how to vault fences.

``A lot of us are ready to break the law, because sometimes that's necessary to make change happen,'' Isabelle Michel, a spokeswoman for the camp, said in an interview. ``This is how the domino effect starts: by saying this is not going to happen here.''
 
I am about positive that you wouldn't care if we roasted alive, as long as you had the lights on while it happened. :rolleyes:
 
JMGISSPLOT.gif


http://www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm

____________________
Roy W. Spencer received his Ph.D. in meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981. Before becoming a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2001, he was a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, where he and Dr. John Christy received NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites. Dr. Spencer is the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA's Aqua satellite. His research has been entirely supported by U.S. government agencies: NASA, NOAA, and DOE.
 

Last evening's broadcast of PBS' "Nova Science Now" carried an interesting piece on the Permian Extinction. As everybody knows, the Cretaceous Extinction (you know— goodbye, dinosaurs) occurred as a result of the impact of an asteroid near the Yucatan peninsula. 'til now, almost every instance of biological extinction has been attributed to asteroid collisions with Earth.

Now we've got a scientist theorizing that the Permian Extinction was caused by (you guessed it): Global Warming!

This particular theory of the Permian Extinction is based on global warming created by volcanic eruption in the Siberian Trap.

For a scientist in search of tenure and funding, what could possibly be sexier than proving an extinction caused by that demon recognized by every brainwashed third grader: Global Warming?

The only problem, of course, is that if evidence is found to support this theory explaining the Permian Extinction, it'll be mighty hard for the faithful to swallow the indisputable fact that Permian Global Warming wasn't anthropogenic— merely part of the perfectly natural, age-old cycling of Earth's climate.


 
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...

The only problem, of course, is that if evidence is found to support this theory explaining the Permian Extinction, it'll be mighty hard for the faithful to swallow the indisputable fact that Permian Global Warming wasn't anthropogenic— merely part of the perfectly natural, age-old cycling of Earth's climate.

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Evidently you draw the conclusion that this warming cycle can't possibly be anthropogenic because previous cycles had other causes.

That's poor logic, isn't it?
 
Evidently you draw the conclusion that this warming cycle can't possibly be anthropogenic because previous cycles had other causes.

That's poor logic, isn't it?
Stella,
I don't think it is poor logic at all— in fact, quite the opposite. It is (thus far) an undisputed fact that every single previous instance of warming was anything BUT anthropogenic. If every previous episode has had a natural cause it would seem eminently logical to start with the presumption that the following episode is also natural. When the facts change, so will my opinion. Until then...

In fact, I posit that what is actually irrational is a conclusion that a comparatively brief period of warming is anthropogenic in origin.

As Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D., has pointed out (nothwithstanding James Hansen's, Al Gore's, the media's and the public's rush to judgment) there has not been a single peer-reviewed paper published that rules out a natural cause for the warming that occurred from ~1975 through 1998 (and which, by the way, has not manifested itself for the last ten years)— not one single paper.

http://forum.literotica.com/showpost.php?p=26558611&postcount=102

Milankovitch_Variations.png


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovic_cycle
http://forum.literotica.com/showpost.php?p=27439307&postcount=127

 
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"Aliens Cause Global Warming," a speech by the late Michael Crichton:

http://www.michaelcrichton.com/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html

"...There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period...
...I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough... "



 
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/16/do1610.xml

The world has never seen such freezing heat
By Christopher Booker

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others...

***​

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)

Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising "very much faster" than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.

Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.
 
The Scientific Consensus
on Climate Change

Naomi Oreskes

Policy-makers and the media, particularly
in the United States, frequently assert
that climate science is highly uncertain.
Some have used this as an argument against
adopting strong measures to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions. For example, while discussing
a major U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency report on the risks of climate
change, then–EPA administrator Christine
Whitman argued, “As [the report] went
through review, there
was less consensus on
the science and conclusions
on climate change”
(1). Some corporations
whose revenues might
be adversely affected by controls on carbon
dioxide emissions have also alleged major
uncertainties in the science (2). Such statements
suggest that there might be substantive
disagreement in the scientific community
about the reality of anthropogenic climate
change. This is not the case.
The scientific consensus is clearly expressed
in the reports of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC). Created in 1988 by the World
Meteorological Organization and the United
Nations Environmental Programme, IPCC’s
purpose is to evaluate the state of climate science
as a basis for informed policy action,
primarily on the basis of peer-reviewed and
published scientific literature (3). In its most
recent assessment, IPCC states unequivocally
that the consensus of scientific opinion is
that Earth’s climate is being affected by human
activities: “Human activities … are
modifying the concentration of atmospheric
constituents … that absorb or scatter radiant
energy. … [M]ost of the observed warming
over the last 50 years is likely to have been
due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations”
[p. 21 in (4)].
IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In
recent years, all major scientific bodies in
the United States whose members’ expertise
bears directly on the matter have issued similar
statements. For example, the National
Academy of Sciences report, Climate
Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key
Questions, begins: “Greenhouse gases are
accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result
of human activities, causing surface air
temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures
to rise” [p. 1 in (5)]. The report explicitly
asks whether the IPCC assessment is
a fair summary of professional scientific
thinking, and answers yes: “The IPCC’s
conclusion that most of the
observed warming of the
last 50 years is likely to
have been due to the increase
in greenhouse gas
concentrations accurately
reflects the current thinking of the scientific
community on this issue” [p. 3 in (5)].
Others agree. The American Meteorological
Society (6), the American Geophysical
Union (7), and the American
Association for the Advancement of Science
(AAAS) all have issued statements in recent
years concluding that the evidence for human
modification of climate is compelling (8).
The drafting of such reports and statements
involves many opportunities for
comment, criticism, and revision, and it is
not likely that they would diverge greatly
from the opinions of the societies’ members.
Nevertheless, they might downplay
legitimate dissenting opinions. That hypothesis
was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts,
published in refereed scientific
journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed
in the ISI database with the keywords
“climate change” (9).
The 928 papers were divided into six categories:
explicit endorsement of the consensus
position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation
proposals, methods, paleoclimate
analysis, and rejection of the consensus position.
Of all the papers, 75% fell into the
first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly
accepting the consensus view; 25%
dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking
no position on current anthropogenic climate
change. Remarkably, none of the papers
disagreed with the consensus position.
Admittedly, authors evaluating impacts,
developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic
change might believe that current
climate change is natural. However, none
of these papers argued that point.
This analysis shows that scientists publishing
in the peer-reviewed literature agree with
IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and
the public statements of their professional societies.
Politicians, economists, journalists,
and others may have the impression of confusion,
disagreement, or discord among climate
scientists, but that impression is incorrect.
The scientific consensus might, of
course, be wrong. If the history of science
teaches anything, it is humility, and no one
can be faulted for failing to act on what is
not known. But our grandchildren will
surely blame us if they find that we understood
the reality of anthropogenic climate
change and failed to do anything about it.
Many details about climate interactions
are not well understood, and there are ample
grounds for continued research to provide
a better basis for understanding climate
dynamics. The question of what to do
about climate change is also still open. But
there is a scientific consensus on the reality
of anthropogenic climate change. Climate
scientists have repeatedly tried to make this
clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.


References and Notes
1. A. C. Revkin, K. Q. Seelye, New York Times, 19 June
2003, A1.
2. S. van den Hove, M. Le Menestrel, H.-C. de Bettignies,
Climate Policy 2 (1), 3 (2003).
3. See www.ipcc.ch/about/about.htm.
4. J. J. McCarthy et al., Eds., Climate Change 2001:
Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (Cambridge
Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2001).
5. National Academy of Sciences Committee on the
Science of Climate Change, Climate Change Science:
An Analysis of Some Key Questions (National
Academy Press,Washington, DC, 2001).
6. American Meteorological Society, Bull. Am. Meteorol.
Soc. 84, 508 (2003).
7. American Geophysical Union, Eos 84 (51), 574 (2003).
8. See www.ourplanet.com/aaas/pages/atmos02.html.
9. The first year for which the database consistently
published abstracts was 1993. Some abstracts were
deleted from our analysis because, although the authors
had put “climate change” in their key words, the
paper was not about climate change.
10. This essay is excerpted from the 2004 George Sarton
Memorial Lecture, “Consensus in science: How do we
know we’re not wrong,” presented at the AAAS meeting
on 13 February 2004. I am grateful to AAAS and
the History of Science Society for their support of
this lectureship; to my research assistants S. Luis and
G. Law; and to D. C. Agnew, K. Belitz, J. R. Fleming, M.
T. Greene, H.
 
So if we are not warming the planet is it ok to drive?

Is the climate hystaria not deflecting our attention from the fact that we need to develop altenitive fules to replace the dwindling oil resource?

And coal is going to be a large contributor to our electricity needs for many years. SO we are stuck people with CO2 production for a long time.

Oil prices go up and down with demand and supply changes with price, but in 50 years we will be short of oil so doesn't it make sense to develop renewable sources?

We are all shifting to ethenol because the corn producers got the government to help then raise the price of corn. Perhaps we need to find a less expensive crop than corn which needs lots of fertilizers which take oil to produce, so ethenol is marginal in effeciency.

Vegetatable oils and desiel engins may be a more effecient alternitive to ethenol. We use ethenol because our cars are designed for gasoline and maybe we need to shift to desiel designs to be able to use waste oils for fuel as well as vegatable sources?

Maybe the argument over GW is distracting us from developing an alternitive for petro based motor fuel which is 30% of our oil usage. If we cut the consumption of oil by 15-20% it will drive the price down a good deal and we can afford to have WalMarts?

Yeah we don't know if GW is entirly man made but we know the Soudi firlds are drying up and new fields are not replacing them as fast as oil is being consumend by the emerging countries.

There are lots of reasons to argue GW but replacing oil for motor fuels is important if we want to keep just part of our current life style.
 

For your consideration and reflection ( remember, I didn't write it! ):

Nov 21, 2008
Global Warming? Bring it On!
By Gregory Young

The argument propounded by the dubious United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on Anthropogenic (human-induced) Global Warming (AGW) is willfully fraudulent. The report has been vigorously and critically undermined, scientifically denounced and found wanting from both notable scientists here and abroad.

In spite of this fact, it is likely that the new U.S. Democratic Congress and Administration will once again proclaim that they know better than we do about such things. Get ready for them to move surreptitiously under the guise of Global Climate Control in an effort to enhance their own legacies and pocketbooks. To be sure, the Left hears nothing but their own incestuous voices, despite the voices of clarity and reason that abound around them. And there are many, many distinguished dissenters against the charade of AGW.

Let me assure you that we’re not in good humor, nor take it kindly to be slurred and ridiculed by taking the other side in this debate. And our numbers are still growing. Indeed, we’re angry that the vast majority of American Scientists will not be heard by the media. We’re dismayed over the fact that the Global Warming fiasco has become politically popular and expedient to those left-wing politicians and power-brokers whose sole aim is to literally tax everything with a carbon footprint and give them control over all life, hidden within their PC guileful pretence to save the planet. They wish to save no one but themselves.

And the tide turns further. Of the 2500 originally aligned scientists and putative authors of the UN’s IPCC report some 500 are no longer faithful to Big Al’s errand. Many of these scientists discovered that their individual findings and comments were willfully misrepresented. All participant conclusions were unilaterally changed to adhere strictly to the United Nations objective of building support for world taxation and rationing of industrially useful energy. Since the original IPCC report (and there have been some 4 others now formally issued), the defecting 500 scientists have issued public statements challenging global warming. Approximately 100 of these scientists are now open defectors. Others are currently suing the UN for the misuse of their good names and research. It is difficult to see why a thinking person would even consider the IPCC report as legitimate.

The entire IPCC process is but obfuscation by the secular and atheist Left. It has allowed the Left to conflate the vanity of secular opinion with scientific and/or moral truth. There is an easy and immediate remedy for their debacle. Will Rogers stated it simply: “When you are in a hole ... stop digging.... Please!” Read full post here: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/11/global_warming_bring_it_on.html

Dr. Gregory Young is a neuroscientist and physicist, a doctoral graduate of the University of Oxford, Oxford, England. He is currently involved with a privately funded think-tank engaged in experimental biophysical research.
 
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