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Tuesday, 30 December 2008 |
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It’s the most wonderful time of the year… well, it’s Christmas and all those wonderful holiday-season movies are back on the airwaves. One common feature is snow—we get the impression that every American lives in a place that guarantees a white Christmas. Truth be known, Americans experiencing a white Christmas are on a decline due entirely to migration patterns to the Sun Belt, not global warming. However, if you conduct a web search for “global warming and snow,” an incredible 4.8 million sites are found. |
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Tuesday, 23 December 2008 |
President-elect Obama has said that he would promote “wind farms” as one way to create more jobs. This idea is consistent with popular wisdom about wind energy and, therefore, sounded good while Mr. Obama was in the Senate and during his presidential campaign.
The problem for Mr. Obama now is that this popular wisdom is wrong. Contrary to reports issued by various wind energy advocates, “wind farms” provide few energy, environmental, or economic benefits and create very few jobs – far fewer than could be achieved if the money was used for other investments. Also, wind energy has adverse impacts that advocates like to ignore. |
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Saturday, 20 December 2008 |
(REVISED) Around the country, localities, states and multi-state regions are convening Climate Change Task Forces aimed at developing plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
As the name suggests, these groups have been created to develop Climate Action Plans that are intended to lessen the projected impacts of anthropogenic climate change around the world in general, but more particularly, in each state. |
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Thursday, 18 December 2008 |
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“Do you believe in Global Warming?” I have often been asked this question by people with little or no scientific background. It seems like a simple question that demands a “yes” or “no” answer. But in reality it is a complex question that cannot be reduced to an unqualified “yea” or “nay”. The intent of this paper is not to resolve this question by rallying evidence for or against Global Warming (as if that can be done in a few pages!), but rather to lay bare the complexity of the climate change issue. Those who come to appreciate this fact will likely agree that simple answers are not only bad education, but can lead to bad policies. |
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Monday, 15 December 2008 |
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Polar bears are recognized worldwide as living symbols of the Arctic, and have recently become prominent symbols in international campaigns to combat global climate change. On May 14, 2008 a slightly different symbolic association was presented to the world. Against a backdrop of American flags and large photos of polar bears, the US Secretary of the Interior announced his government’s decision to list polar bears worldwide as a threatened species due to declining Arctic sea ice. Explicit in the same announcement was the current US administration’s clear determination to prevent this listing under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) from being used to regulate greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) or obstruct energy developments deemed vital to US interests. |
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Thursday, 11 December 2008 |
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In another fable on Climate Progress, chief alarmist blogger Joseph Romm claims “The climate story of the decade is that the 2000s are on track to be nearly 0.2C warmer than the 1990s. And that temperature jump is especially worrisome since the 1990s were only 0.14C warmer than the 1980s (see datasets here). Global warming is accelerating, as predicted. |
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Thursday, 11 December 2008 |
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The scare: The Guardian, one of the two UK newspapers most prone to write unverified and scientifically-inaccurate stories about the consequences of “global warming”, published an article on 10 December 2008, intended to influence delegates at the UN’s Poznan conference on the climate. The article listed a series of alleged climate catastrophes all round the world, saying that “millions … are feeling the force of a changing climate. … |
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Thursday, 11 December 2008 |
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The scare: In early December 2008, The Guardian, a newspaper of the British Left and an unquestioning true-believer in the catastrophist version of climate alarm, quoted Professor Myles Allen, a physicist at Oxford University, as saying computer models such as one that he has developed can now ascribe individual extreme-weather events to anthropogenic “global warming”, allowing environmental pressure groups to sue the corporations they believe are to blame for the catastrophic heating of the planet. Professor Allen joked, “We are starting to get to the point that when an adverse weather event occurs we can quantify how much more likely it was made by human activity.” |
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Wednesday, 10 December 2008 |
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We address the three main issues raised by Stirling et al. [Stirling, I., Derocher, A.E., Gough, W.A., Rode, K., in press. Response to Dyck et al. (2007) on polar bears and climate change in western Hudson Bay. Ecol. Complexity]: (1) evidence of the role of climate warming in affecting the western Hudson Bay polar bear population, (2) responses to suggested importance of human–polar bear interactions, and (3) limitations on polar bear adaptation to projected climate change. We assert that our original paper did not provide any ‘‘alternative explanations [that] are largely unsupported by the data’’ or misrepresent the original claims by Stirling et al. [Stirling, I., Lunn, N.J., Iacozza, I., 1999. Long-term trends in the population ecology of polar bears in western Hudson Bay in relation to climate change. Arctic 52, 294– 306], Derocher et al. [Derocher, A.E., Lunn, N.J., Stirling, I., 2004. Polar bears in a warming climate. Integr. Comp. Biol. 44, 163–176], and other peer-approved papers authored by Stirling and colleagues. In sharp contrast, we show that the conclusion of Stirling et al. [Stirling, I., Derocher, A.E., Gough, W.A., Rode, K., in press. Response to Dyck et al. (2007) on polar bears and climate change in western Hudson Bay. Ecol. Complexity] – suggesting warming temperatures (and other related climatic changes) are the predominant determinant of polar bear population status, not only in western Hudson (WH) Bay but also for populations elsewhere in the Arctic – is unsupportable by the current scientific evidence. |
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Wednesday, 10 December 2008 |
Obama's World View on Energy and Climate
In a video shown at a costly, two-day "global warming" jamboree at the Beverly Hills Hotel, hosted by Governor Schwarzenegger of California in November 2008, Barack Obama said:
"Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We've seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season. Climate change and our dependence on foreign oil, if left unaddressed, will continue to weaken our economy and threaten our national security." |
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Wednesday, 10 December 2008 |
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Summary for Policy Makers
In February 2005, Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, citing concerns of global climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, issued an Executive Order creating the Arizona Climate Change Advisory Group (CCAG). The CCAG was tasked with:
• Establishing a baseline inventory and forecast of greenhouse gas emissions in Arizona, and,
• Producing a Climate Action Plan with recommendations for reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The Action Plan developed by the CCAG was accepted by Governor Napolitano and in
September 2006 another Executive Order was signed which established a statewide goal of reducing Arizona’s future greenhouse gas emissions to the 2000 emissions level by the year 2020, and to 50 percent below the 2000 level by 2040. A Climate Change Executive Committee was created to oversee implementation of the recommendations of the Climate Action Plan. |
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Tuesday, 09 December 2008 |
Indonesia’s National Agency for Meteorology & Geophysics plays host to the International Symposium on Climate and Weather of the Sun-Earth System in Jakarta on November 24th-26th 2008.
In this article Dr. Willie Soon, geo-scientist at the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, and Lord Christopher Monckton, chief policy adviser to the Science and Public Policy Institute in Washington DC., urge the assembled scientists to avoid the hysteria of global-warming alarmists, and instead study solar activity. |
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Sunday, 07 December 2008 |
The scare: Bank of America has issued a “Policy On Climate Change” that says –
The truth: Bank of America has no business taking sides on the political issue of climate change, and still less business taking the scientifically-baseless side. “Global climate change” has been occurring for billions of years. Life has thriven. The climate has been warming for 300 years for natural reasons. But, for the last 13 years, it has not been warming at all. Therefore there will be no “important impacts on present and future generations” – except the heavy and expensive impacts of the diversion of investors’ and taxpayers’ funds from solving the world’s real environmental problems to addressing the non-problem of “global warming”. For fully seven years before Bank of America issued its “Policy on Climate Change”, the planet had been cooling. |
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Sunday, 07 December 2008 |
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The scare: In early December 2008, The Guardian, the newspaper of Britain’s public-sector elite, finally admitted to its readers that “global warming” has been replaced by global cooling, saying that 2008 would be the “coolest year of the decade”, one-seventh of a degree Celsius below the average for the past ten years. However, the paper said, “Cooler temperature is not evidence that ‘global warming’ is slowing.” The paper quoted Dr. Peter Stott, the “manager of understanding and attributing climate change” at the Met Office, as saying... |
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Wednesday, 03 December 2008 |
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Read Dr. Craig Idso’s Public Comment submitted to the EPA on 24 November 2008 in Response to the Environmental Protection Agency's Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Regulating Greenhouse Gas Emissions Under the Clean Air Act, Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2008-0318.
Now serving as Chairman of the Board, CRAIG D. IDSO is the founder and former President of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.
Dr. Idso received his B.S. in Geography from Arizona State University,
his M.S. in Agronomy from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, and his
Ph.D. in Geography from Arizona State University, where he studied as
one of a small group of University Graduate Scholars.
Dr. Idso's current research focus is on carbon sequestration, but he
remains actively involved in several other aspects of global and
environmental change, including climatology and meteorology, along with
their impacts on agriculture. Dr. Idso has published scientific
articles on issues related to data quality, the growing season, the
seasonal cycle of atmospheric CO2, world food supplies, coral reefs,
and urban CO2 concentrations, the latter of which he investigated via a
National Science Foundation grant as a faculty researcher in the Office
of Climatology at Arizona State University. In addition, he has
lectured in Meteorology at Arizona State University, and in Physical
Geography at Mesa and Chandler-Gilbert Community Colleges.
Dr. Idso is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, American Geophysical Union, American Meteorological Society,
Arizona-Nevada Academy of Sciences, Association of American
Geographers, Ecological Society of America, and The Honor Society of
Phi Kappa Phi.
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Saturday, 22 November 2008 |
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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. |
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Saturday, 15 November 2008 |
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The scare: The Times of India reported in the autumn of 2008 that James H. Diaz, program director for environmental and occupational health at Louisiana State University, had said that as international travel increased and climate patterns changed the US was becoming a more stable ecosystem for malaria mosquitoes. Diaz said that warm, dry summers followed by heavy rain caused mosquitoes to rush their breeding and to seek out more blood meals, which in turn bred more mosquitoes in less time. He added that warmer climate in major US cities with heavy international air traffic, such as New York and Los Angeles, seemed to have created an environment in which infected mosquitoes could survive. |
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Monday, 10 November 2008 |
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Foreword – A Political Context
European and American statists, including activist NGOs like the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), assert that the moderate climate warming that is occurring today is a man-made catastrophe, and have embraced the dystopian fantasy that coercive policies for the elimination of fossil fuel production and usage can prevent or turn back the current warming cycle. They have, thus, made the “global warming planetary emergency” into the central plank of their ongoing campaigns for more centralized government. |
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Tuesday, 04 November 2008 |
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In October 2008, the Governor’s Action Team on Energy and Climate Change released a draft version of its 14-month effort of developing an Action Plan aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from Florida. The impetus behind the creation of the Action Team and the development of the Action Plan grew out of a summit on climate change (“Serve to Preserve: A Florida Summit on Global Climate Change”) hosted by Governor Crist in July of 2007. This event “gathered leaders of business, government, science, and advocacy to examine the unique risks of climate change to Florida and the nation, and to explore the economic development opportunities available through an aggressive response to climate change.” |
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Monday, 03 November 2008 |
Dear Senator McCain, Sir,
YOU CHOSE a visit to a wind-farm in early summer 2008 to devote an entire campaign speech to the reassertion of your belief in the apocalyptic vision of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change – a lurid and fanciful account of imagined future events that was always baseless, was briefly exciting among the less thoughtful species of news commentators and politicians, but is now scientifically discredited. |
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