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Wednesday, 03 February 2010 |
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Speculations on the potential impact of climate change on human health frequently focus on malaria. Predictions are common that in the coming decades, tens – even hundreds – of millions more cases will occur in regions where the disease is already present, and that transmission will extend to higher latitudes and altitudes. Such predictions, sometimes supported by simple models, are persuasive because they are intuitive, but they sidestep factors that are key to the transmission and epidemiology of the disease: the ecology and behaviour of both humans and vectors, and the immunity of the human population. A holistic view of the natural history of the disease, in the context of these factors and in the precise setting where it is transmitted, is the only valid starting point for assessing the likely significance of future changes in climate.
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Tuesday, 02 February 2010 |
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Submission by Stephen McIntyre, Climate Audit, regarding the USA EPA endangerment finding for greenhouse gases.
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Saturday, 23 January 2010 |
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Authors veteran meteorologists Joe D’Aleo and Anthony Watts analyzed temperature records from all around the world for a major SPPI paper, Surface Temperature Records – Policy-driven Deception? The startling conclusion that we cannot tell whether there was any significant “global warming” at all in the 20th century is based on numerous astonishing examples of manipulation and exaggeration of the true level and rate of “global warming”.
That is to say, leading meteorological institutions in the USA and around the world have so systematically tampered with instrumental temperature data that it cannot be safely said that there has been any significant net “global warming” in the 20th century.
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Saturday, 23 January 2010 |
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The authoritative Monthly CO2 Report for freezing December 2009 warns those skeptical of extremist claims about the climate not to crow too soon: the faction profiting from the scare will not give up. Editorial Comment: Page 3.
Professor Bill Gray demonstrates that hurricanes have grown less intense as the world has warmed. Pages 4-6.
IPCC assumes CO2 concentration will reach 836 ppmv by 2100, but, for nine years, CO2 concentration has headed straight for only 570 ppmv by 2100. This factor alone almost halves all of the IPCC’s temperature projections. Pages 8-9.
Since 1980 global temperature has risen at only 2.5 °F (1.4 °C)/century, not 7 F° (3.9 C°) as IPCC predicts. Pages 10-12.
Sea level rose just 8 inches in the 20th century, and has scarcely risen since 2006. The oceans are not warming. Pages 13-14.
Arctic sea-ice extent is now beyond its summer low, but there was more summer ice than there was in 2007 or 2008. In the Antarctic, sea ice extent reached a record high in 2007. Global sea ice extent shows little trend for 30 years. Pages 15-18.
Hurricane and tropical-cyclone activity is almost at its lowest since satellite measurement began. Page 19.
A cold start to winter set snow and ice records across the US and Eurasia. Pages 20-21.
Sunspot activity is back to normal: but, looking back it was a long – and cool – solar minimum. Page 22.
The (very few) benefits and the (very large) costs of the Waxman/Markey Bill are illustrated at Pages 23-26.
The Solar Ap Index of geomagnetic activity hits a new low: the graphs are in this month’s Science Focus. Pages 27-28.
As always, there’s our “global warming” ready reckoner, and our monthly selection of scientific papers. Pages 29-35.
The medieval warm period was real, global, and warmer than the present, as our global map shows. Page 36.
And finally ... a cartoon that celebrates the extreme cold and snow that marked the end of the Copenhagan affair. Page 37.
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Tuesday, 19 January 2010 |
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Climategate: ANALYSIS—INCLUDING EXCERPTS FROM, AND LINKS TO, RELEVANT CRU EMAILS
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Friday, 15 January 2010 |
This past summer the United States introduced its "cash for clunkers"
program in an attempt to rejuvenate the failing auto sector. Originally
slated to cost US taxpayers $1 billion, the program soon ballooned to
$3 billion in payouts and administrative costs. The idea was simple;
bring in your older vehicle and receive a cash injection towards the
purchase of a new automobile.
But it's not all roses in this socialist auto-utopia. Following the end
of the program, car sales in the US crashed by 27% in September 2009
(reported by AFP), and buyer's remorse is now setting-in as new car
owners are faced with making payments during an economic downturn.
Remember, the "clunkers" may have been older vehicles, but they were
paid for. But it's not only car buyers who will have to make payments.
Just like other government handouts, the actual cost will be carried
forward and remain on the books for years to come – another burden to
the nation's taxpayer.
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Wednesday, 13 January 2010 |
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ABSTRACT:
The pressure to prove that anthropogenic global warming is real, and happening now
has become so strong, that in spite of major and irresolvable uncertainties in climate
models, there is a daily renewal and re-inforcement of the idea of scientific certainty
in the mainstream media. Whilst uncertainties are often acknowledged in the body
of scientific reports, they are rarely seen in press releases and executive summaries.
This paper examines how an almost mass acceptance of imminent and
potentially catastrophic global warming by politicians, the media and the public,
has come about and highlights the role of various UK agencies such as the Tyndall
Centre for Climate Change Research and the Met Office in producing this result.
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Wednesday, 13 January 2010 |
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December 28, 2009 was the final day to submit comments on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) proposed Prevention of Significant Deterioration and Title V Greenhouse Gas Tailoring Rule. This is the rulemaking in which EPA proposes to “tailor” the Clean Air Act’s (CAA or Act’s) Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) pre-construction permitting program and Title V operating permits program so that they can be applied to carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) without spawning an economically-chilling administrative morass.
The Tailoring Rule is an eye opener, because it reveals, or rather confirms in spades, that the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA has created an almost bottomless well of “absurd results” — disastrous consequences that EPA can avoid only by poaching legislative power and amending the Act.
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Wednesday, 06 January 2010 |
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First, they called it “global warming”. Then they noticed there had been no warming for 15 years, and cooling for 9, so they hastily renamed it “climate change”. Then they noticed the climate was changing no more than it ever had, so they tried “energy security”, and even named a Congressional Bill after it. Then they noticed that most Western nations already had bountiful energy security, in the form of vast, untapped domestic supplies of oil, gas, coal, or all three, so they switched to “ocean acidification”.
This is the new phantasmagoric for the tired, old scare whipped up by the NRDC and the environmental extremist movement for their own profit at our expense. The world’s corals, they tell us, will be eaten away by the acidified ocean within not more than ten years hence. Shellfish will be no more, their calcified carapaces and exoskeletons dissolved by the carbonic acid caused by our burning of fossil fuels. The oceans will die. Sound familiar?
Yet, as the indefatigable Craig Idso here demonstrates, the scientific consensus – if science were done by consensus at all, which it is not – is that the rising “ocean acidification” scare is just more piffle.
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Tuesday, 05 January 2010 |
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Human migration in the past plays a key role for the spread of cultures
across the Indian Ocean. The Maldives occupy an interesting position at the
cross-route of ocean trading and exploratory expeditions. Natural phenomena
like rapid changes in sea level and tsunami events may pose an extra
stress on coastal habitation providing the ultimate push for a migration overseas.
Records from Sri Lanka and the Maldives are analyzed in this paper.
Recently, a new threat and stress factor for low-lying coastal areas has
emerged in the global warming scenario predicting a general flooding due to
a rapidly rising sea level. In this scenario, the Maldives would have become
flooded in 50 to 100 years.
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Tuesday, 05 January 2010 |
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Is it really the case that the burning of fossil fuels is
responsible for the dire straits in which the world's coral reefs
currently find themselves?
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Monday, 04 January 2010 |
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Shortly before the Copenhagen Climate Conference, the Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, delivered a canting, 45-minute rant about the “Denialists”, “Climate Change Deniers”, and “Skeptics” who, he said, were entirely funded by special interests and who were now so dangerous that they were putting Our Planet’s Future And The Future Of Our Children And Our Grandchildren in jeopardy. Kevin Rudd seems not to like me very much: he mentioned me by name six times in the speech, in generally uncomplimentary terms. I was too busy to reply to him before Jokenhagen, but, since I shall be travelling to Australia in a couple of weeks for a barnstorming three-week lecture-tour (watch this space for dates and venues), I thought it was time to reply to Mr. Rudd. On New Year’s Day I sent him the following letter, but I am not holding my breath for a reply. The unanswerable is seldom answered.
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Tuesday, 29 December 2009 |
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And still the scare stories keep coming. A paper in Nature Geoscience, published “coincidentally” just before the collapsed Copenhagen climate change conference, suggests that long-term temperature feedbacks in response to warming induced by anthropogenic CO2 emissions will be 30-50% higher than the already enormous estimates of the UN’s climate panel.
The British authors said the “more-than-expected” warming would unfold over a matter of hundreds of years, rather than this century. The findings do not mean that the predictions for temperature rise by 2100, established notably by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), should be rewritten, they said.
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Tuesday, 29 December 2009 |
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In December 2009, Scientific American, once a respected popular-science journal and now pulp science-fiction picture comic, viciously attacked US Senator James Inhofe because had proclaimed 2009 to be the Year of the Skeptic. By skepticism, he meant “standing and exposing the science, the costs and the hysteria behind global warming alarmism”.
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Wednesday, 23 December 2009 |
In 1971, the United States abandoned the gold standard, effectively ending the ability to convert dollars into gold. Now another gold standard has taken its place, i.e., the science produced by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). According to NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, the IPCC is "the gold standard for authoritative scientific information on climate change because of the rigorous way in which they are prepared, reviewed, and approved." Unfortunately for some, the "gold standard" is at the heart of Climategate.
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Wednesday, 23 December 2009 |
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How is it that anyone, even for an instant, can seriously imagine that the doubling of today’s CO2 concentration that the IPCC predicts for this century will have a major and potentially catastrophic influence over the climate? Humankind is too insignificant to make any real difference to global temperature, as anyone with a sense of due proportion can see at once.
The ancient Greeks had a nifty aphorism – panta metrios. This means, “All things in due proportion”. Every great civilization has a sense of due proportion: every failing civilization loses it. Our classe politique, worldwide, has lost it big-time
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Tuesday, 22 December 2009 |
The mountains shall labor, and what will be born? A stupid little mouse. Thanks to hundreds of thousands of US citizens who contacted their elected representatives to protest about the unelected, communistic world government with near-infinite powers of taxation, regulation and intervention that was proposed in early drafts of the Copenhagen Treaty, there is no Copenhagen Treaty. There is not even a Copenhagen Agreement. There is a “Copenhagen Accord”.
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Tuesday, 22 December 2009 |
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Few people understand the real significance of Climategate, the now-famous hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Most see the contents as demonstrating some arbitrary manipulating of various climate data sources in order to fit preconceived hypotheses (true), or as stonewalling and requesting colleagues to destroy emails to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the face of potential or actual Freedom of Information requests (also true).
But there's something much, much worse going on—a silencing of climate scientists, akin to filtering what goes in the bible, that will have consequences for public policy, including the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recent categorization of carbon dioxide as a "pollutant."
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Tuesday, 22 December 2009 |
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Is the summit of world leaders in Copenhagen (from December 7 to December 18) on the adoption of measures to counter the adverse effects of climate change humanistic/ pragmatic action of world’s politicians or is it just another fraud? Summit During the past few days, the term “Climategate” has been frequently appearing on the Internet since many alternative sites published hacked documents from the research unit of the University of East Anglia. They indicate that the information on temperature change and its consequences promoted throughout the world is a hoax, in fact an outright lie and deception of a narrow circle of people with dire consequences for all of mankind.
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Tuesday, 22 December 2009 |
Al Gore’s claim last week that the Climategate emails were insignificant relied on two main defences. Both are so flagrantly wrong that it’s not enough to say Gore is simply mistaken.
No, Al Gore is a liar.
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