The scare: An article published in early February 2009 by Jonathan
Leake, the environment editor of The Times of London, said “The ice
caps are melting so fast that the world’s oceans are rising more than
twice as fast as they were in the 1970s.”
A scientific and socio-economic analysis of multiple errors of science, fact, and data in the “science” chapter of the final report of the Arkansas Governor’s Commission on “global warming”
Environmental-union-politico alliances use their clout to promote new
energy, economic vision. Will it create jobs, without impacting
existing jobs, living standards and economic opportunities?
The quest to be “green” has spawned countless proposals, programs, laws
and advertising campaigns. In Washington, DC a “Green Jobs Advisory
Council” is promoting policies for green buildings, energy efficiency,
renewable energy, city infrastructure, and lower carbon emissions.
In December of 2008, the environmental organization Environment Ohio
released its report “What’s at Stake: How Global Warming Threatens the
Buckeye State” in an effort to apply pressure on the government of Ohio
to enact legislation to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases from
the state. SPPI’s report rectifies a multitude of omissions by
performing the types of analyses that Environment Ohio should have
performed itself if its goal was to provide a complete picture of
climate change and the effects of actions to mollify it.
Carbon credits are a form of fiat currency, yet as calls for carbon trading grow, ironically, another fiat currency collapses—destroying life savings, wiping out jobs, and taking down historic institutions overnight. Fiat money has a long history of failure, corruption and fraud. The inevitable booms, busts and inflation act as an invisible tax, transferring wealth from people who work and save to speculators, middle men, and crooks. The US dollar—sovereign issue of a great capitalist, democratic nation—is on life support. So far at least eight hundred billion dollars has been created from thin air to stop the banking system from crashing.
Roger Pielke Sr. has graciously invited me to add my perspective to his discussion with Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate. If this were not such a serious matter, I would have been amused by Gavin’s lack of knowledge of the differences between weather models and climate models. As it stands, I am appalled. Back to graduate school, Gavin!
WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE) -- The growth in the area of the Southern Ocean covered by sea ice over the past 30 years disproves a new theory based on computer modelling of invented temperatures that suggests the Antarctic has been warming over the past 50 years, says a new paper published today by the Science and Public Policy Institute – a Washington, D.C. research organization.
A recent paper in Nature has suggested that the Antarctic had not been cooling for half a century, though temperature measurements taken by research stations on the ice-bound continent had long shown cooling.
In late January 2009, the once-respected “science” journal Nature published the results of a computer model apparently showing that nearly all of the Antarctic continent had not cooled over the past 50 years, as the real-world observational data showed, but had warmed instead. The newly-created “warming” was achieved not by direct observation, which has long produced inconvenient cooling, but by “statistical climate-field-reconstruction techniques to obtain a 50-year-long, spatially complete estimate of monthly Antarctic temperature anomalies.”
The climate of Alaska has changed considerably over the past 50-plus years. However, human emissions of greenhouse gases are not the primary reason.
Instead, the timing of the swings of a periodic, natural cycle-the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)-has made a strong imprint on the observed climate of Alaska since the mid-20th century. Despite its established existence and influence, this natural cycle is often overlooked or ignored in zealous attempts to paint the current climate of Alaska as being one primarily molded by the emissions from anthropogenic industrial activities. In truth, the climate of Alaska and the ecosystems influenced by it have been subject to the cycles of the PDO and other natural variations since the end of the last ice age (some 12,000 years ago) and likely for eons prior. It is primarily these natural cycles that are currently shaping Alaska's long-term climate and weather fluctuations.
Issues with the United States and especially the global data bases make them inadequate to use for trend analysis and thus any important policy decisions based on climate change. These issues include inadequate adjustments for urban data, bad instrument siting, use of instruments with proven biases that are not adjusted for, major global station dropout., an increase in missing monthly data and questionable adjustment practices.
WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE--1-23-09) -- Claims by Stephen Schneider, a biologist, that melting Greenland ice will drown today’s coastlines and trigger a worldwide belief in the need for action to combat imagined “catastrophic global warming” are scientifically-unjustified and unjustifiable, says the Science and Public Policy Institute – a Washington, D.C. research organization.
WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE) -- The Earth has shown an under-reported cooling trend for eight straight years, raising serious questions about the accuracy of the UN’s climate projections, since not one of the computer models on which it relies had predicted so long and steep a cooling, says a new review paper -- Temperature Change and CO2 Change – A Scientific Briefing --from the Science and Public Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank.
The scare: In late January 2009, Time magazine blamed the bird-strike that brought down an Airbus passenger aircraft in the Hudson River, New York, on “global warming”. This was the latest in a long series of articles in scientifically-unaware mainstream news media, blaming real or imagined climate events on “global warming”. Such alarmism defies Occam’s razor, the philosophical principle by which the simplest explanation of an event is nearly always the true explanation. The Time article said that “Wildlife mitigation” was the official term for avoiding bird strikes. A report published in June 2008 by the Federal Aviation Administration had found that since 1990 the number of bird strikes had quadrupled, from 1,759 in 1990 to a record 7,666 in 2007. According to Time, “Officials cite a number of possible causes for the increase”, including “habitat destruction and climate change”, which “have disrupted migratory patterns”. Time adds, “Al Gore should be very proud of himself.”
One of the long-recognized potential consequences of the ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content is CO2-induced global warming, which has been predicted to pose a number of problems for both natural and managed ecosystems in the years ahead. Of newer concern, in this regard, are the effects that the ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content may have on coral reefs. It has been suggested, for example, that CO2-induced global warming will do great damage to corals by magnifying the intensity, frequency, and duration of a number of environmental stresses to which they are exposed. The predicted consequences of such phenomena include ever more cases of coral disease, bleaching, and death.
The scare: In early January 2008, as part of an apparently-coordinated spate of stories in the international news media about “global warming” intended to distract public attention from the coldest start to a Northern-Hemisphere winter in at least 30 years and the end of the coldest year for almost a decade, Reuters ran a story saying that scientists at the Hadley Center for Forecasting in the UK had proclaimed that 2009 will be “the warmest year since 2005” and “one of the top-five warmest on record”, at “more than 0.4 °C above the long-term average”.
The scare: In early January 2008, Stephen Schneider, a biologist turned climatologist, put up a blog posting to say that “We cannot pin down whether sea levels will rise a few feet or a few meters in the next century or two”; that there is a “potential for up to 7 meters of sea-level rise stored as ice on Greenland”; that “Greenland is apparently melting at an unprecedented rate, and way faster than any of our theories or models predicted”; that “mounting evidence from ice cores says probably there is unprecedented melting going on right now”; that “another decade or two of such scientifically-documented acceleration of melting could indeed imply we will get ... meters of sea-level rise”; that “another 5 meters of potential sea level rise lurks ... in West Antarctica”; and that “this is a gamble with Laboratory Earth that we can’t afford to lose.”
How will earth's butterflies respond to the twin evils of the climate-alarmist crowd, i.e., atmospheric CO2 enrichment and global warming? We here explore what has been learned about the question over the past few years, beginning with a review of studies that focus on carbon dioxide and concluding with studies that focus on temperature.
THE CHIEF REASON for skepticism at the official position on “global warming” is the overwhelming weight of evidence that the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, prodigiously exaggerates both the supposed causes and the imagined consequences of anthropogenic “global warming”; that too many of the exaggerations can be demonstrated to have been deliberate; and that the IPCC and other official sources have continued to rely even upon those exaggerations that have been definitively demonstrated in the literature to have been deliberate.
The scare: At the December 2008 UN climate conference at Poznan, held during the coldest commencement of the European winter in 30 years, former vice-president Al Gore said that the human species had arrived at yet another “moment of fateful decision”, because “our home, Earth, is in danger”. He said he would state “a few facts, if only to underscore the urgency of our task”, and “we cannot negotiate with the facts”, the first of which was the “unrestrained dumping of 70 million tons of ‘global warming’ pollution into the thin shelf of atmosphere surrounding our planet every 24 hours”. Scientists had “for several years now warned us that we are moving dangerously close to several so-called tipping points that could within less than 10 years make it impossible to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet's habitability”.
