The auditorium of the Reichardt building was the setting last Thursday for a presentation by Alaska’s most respected skeptic on global warming, Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu, adding more ammunition to a current debate filled with propaganda and vitriol from both sides. In the presentation: a mixture of data sets, satellite images, and straight-forward examples to buttress his argument, the soft-spoken Akasofu picked apart many conclusions that have been brought forward by the scientific community regarding this politically-charged topic. The lecture began with various graphs showing that the Earth’s average surface temperature has been rising since the beginning of the industrial age, however, this information was put into perspective by historical climate data.

For example, an episode of climatic warming roughly one thousand years ago, known as the Medieval warm period, showed average global temperatures to be slightly higher than today, roughly seven-tenths of a degree Celsius. This difference between today’s global average and the temperature one thousand years previous is roughly the same difference in temperatures between the beginning of the industrial age and today. From this data comparison, it was Akasofu’s conclusion that the current warming trend falls within natural fluctuations. Before we fully understand the natural processes that are at work, it is difficult to make the assumption that human activities are responsible for the current warming, said Akasofu.

This lack of understanding of climatic processes has led to a dearth of conflicting information that has been released by the scientific community, often supplemented by computer models that show the Earth’s global temperature in a runaway mode exacerbated by human activities. These models often have the data inputs of rising carbon dioxide levels from the burning of fossil fuels in industrial activities and applications. This issue of using carbon dioxide levels tied to temperature as an input in the computer model skews the results of the computer model, stated Akasofu. This is a common problem with computer models, regardless of the application, because the computer does not understand the whole system involved, it can only model something based on the inputs given.  Read full details here.

Five Norwegians gave a prize to Al Gore, and all the world is supposed to heed his counsel henceforth. No, thanks.

Alfred Nobel felt horrible about the uses to which his invention—dynamite—was put. So he endowed the Nobel Peace Prize and instructed that it go “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Al Gore has done exactly none of those things.

Gore, however, did write a book and make a film about global warming. He has become the second environmental activist to win the peace prize in the past four years. Wangari Muta Maathai won it in 2004 for planting trees.

Thus we have indisputable confirmation that the Nobel Peace Prize is no longer a serious international award. In 1994 the five Norwegian politicians who award the prize gave it to the murdering thug Yasser Arafat. Two years before that they gave it to literary fraud Rigoberta Menchu, whose autobiography was largely fabricated. (An example: The brother she supposedly watched die of malnutrition was later found by a New York Times reporter to be very much alive and well.)

On Friday the prize was given to Al Gore and the International Panel on Climate Change. Two days before, a British judge ruled that Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” contained so many errors (read: lies) that it could be shown in British public schools only if accompanied by a fact sheet correcting the errors. Read more here.

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the UN’s top climate panel on Friday has prompted a fresh chorus of criticism from global warming sceptics—with one dubbing the award “a political gimmick”. The former vice-president has an Oscar for his film on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, and the Nobel prize proved a laurel too far for some of his detractors.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus cast doubt on Gore’s contribution to the cause of peace, the ostensible purpose of the Norwegian prize. In a statement, the climate change sceptic said he was “a bit surprised that Al Gore has received a peace prize because the connection between his activities and world peace are vague and not very clear”. In Norway, the main opposition party expressed its surprise at the decision. Gjermund Hagesaether, from the far-right Progress Party, said: “We believe it is strange to give the prize to Al Gore for having made a film on climate that is subjective, one-sided and full of one-sided assertions.”

In France, a sour note was sounded by a leading French climate sceptic, former Socialist education minister and award-winning geochemist Claude Allegre. He brushed off Friday’s announcement as “a political gimmick”, saying: “The amount of nonsense in Al Gore’s film! It’s all politics, it’s designed to intervene in American politics. It’s scandalous. There’s a presidential election upcoming in the United States, and it’s well known that Gore wants to run.”

And one of the world’s foremost meteorologists called the theory that helped Al Gore win a share of the Nobel prize the product of “people who don’t understand how the atmosphere works”. Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, spoke to a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina and said humans were not responsible for global warming.  “We’re brainwashing our children,” said Gray, 78, a longtime professor at Colorado State University. “They’re going to the Gore movie and being fed all this. It’s ridiculous.” Read more here.

Climate alarmist receives Nobel Peace Prize with conveniently red hot support from journalists.

The award he shared with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put Gore in the ranks of people like President Theodore Roosevelt, Mother Teresa, Lech Walesa and Martin Luther King. But none of them had the widespread media campaign Gore enjoyed – portraying him in almost messianic terms as an “evangelist,” a “preacher,” or a “prophet.”

The media put Gore front and center on a seemingly endless stream of shows and networks – “Larry King,” the morning news shows, the nightly news programs and even “Saturday Night Live” and the Sci-Fi Channel. In just three months of summer of 2006, Gore and his movie had spent more than five hours and 38 minutes on national television. In 2007, eight networks under the umbrella of NBC set aside an incredible 93 hours to his “Live Earth” concert, including three hours in primetime on NBC.

The Business & Media Institute has extensively analyzed the media’s coverage of global warming and showed Gore was just following a recent media tactic to claim the debate is over when the media have reported four separate changes in climate during the last 110 years in Fire & Ice. The report covers a hundred years of coverage of global warming. While journalists have warned of climate change for more than 100 years, the warnings switched from global cooling to warming to cooling and warming again.

Read full detailed story here.

It’s one thing for a group of elitists to develop questionable theories about environmental issues that escape proof or disproof in the near term; however, it is quite a different thing when their unproven theories find their way into the U.S. tax code.  Enough is enough!

A climate change tax bill designed to fight global warming will be introduced in the near future by Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., powerful chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. U.S. drivers will be forced to pay a 50-cent tax on every gallon they pump. Then, Dingell reasons that the increased cost will encourage drivers to use less fuel and therefore reduce greenhouse gases and make the planet safe for future generations.  To prove he really cares, Dingell’s proposal also will phase out the mortgage interest deduction from taxable income on loans for large houses more than 3,000 square feet and eliminate the property tax deduction benefit for all houses more than 4,200 square feet. This little gift, no doubt, will pay for the global warming damages caused by the fossil fuel energy used to light and heat your home.

A published study, “Fire and Ice” by R. Warren Anderson and Dan Gainor of the Business and Media Institute, exposes the hypocrisy of the envirocrat movements of the last century. The point of this discourse is to illustrate the unreliability of the promoters of present day global warming issues. These purveyors of untruth are creating fear within our society. They imply that Americans will face death due to environmental consequences such as tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and other forms of violent weather. These “environmental” consequences have been considered normal weather in the past.

The trailer from Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” claims ominously: “Our ability to live is what is at stake.” And now to give the envirocrat promoters of this unfounded and unproved global warming fantasy access to the U.S. tax code is unthinkable.  Read more of the story and about the published study here.

Remember him? Freeman Dyson, a prominent physicist and author who was the graduation speaker at the University’s winter commencement two years ago, said in an interview with Salon.com published last week that he thinks global warming has been blown out of proportion.

“The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm. It distracts people’s attention from much more serious problems,” he said. “It’s not so much to do about science. It’s really a political question.” If Dyson had made these remarks two years ago, would he have been chosen as a commencement speaker at the University? It’s hard to imagine his ideas about climate change being embraced.

The University was scored among the top ten colleges in the country with regard to environmental policies and research in rankings released earlier this year by the Sustainable Endowments Institute. The University got a B-plus overall and an A for climate change and energy research in the rankings.

Dyson, who researched climate change at Oak Ridge National Laboratory about 30 years ago, told Salon that he believes most of the global warming being seen in recent decades can be attributed to natural climate cycles. Although he admitted that humans do cause some changes to the climate, he said there’s no reason to worry.

“We have no reason to think that climate change is harmful if you look at the world as a whole. Most places, in fact, are better off being warmer than being colder,” Dyson said. “There’s no reason why one should be scared.” Why, then, are have many people joined the fight against global warming? Dyson said many scientists now studying climate change assume that global warming is urgent and reject opposing viewpoints regardless of their merit.  Read more here.

Not too long ago, a premier ad agency wouldn’t touch a campaign warning about the effects of global warming, fearing backlash from the automakers and oil companies that keep Madison Avenue’s lights on. But now one of the most hotly contended pitches out there is for the Alliance for Climate Protection, the organization formed last year by Al Gore. Four elite agencies—Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, the Martin Agency and Y&R—are squaring off for the business and are expected to present to the former vice president himself early next month, according to executives familiar with the review. The budget for the “historic, three-to-five-year, multimedia global campaign,” as the request for proposals puts it, is contingent on how much money the alliance raises. Media spending will likely be more than $100 million a year.

That elite shops aren’t scared off from crafting environmental messaging that could be tacitly critical of big business’s sometimes unsustainable ways is yet another sign of the mainstreaming of green thinking within the corporate world at large. And within the ad community it points to newfound willingness to embrace hot-button social causes. The alliance account, some are saying, could even lend some luster to the winner’s roster, given many major marketers’ recent embrace of sustainability throughout their value chains, from product development to manufacturing to marketing communications.

Many agencies do high-profile and often award-winning work for causes such as smoking cessation, drug-use prevention and disaster relief, but they typically steer clear of more divisive issues and political campaigns, making executives who want to work on them do so outside the auspices of the agency. Until very recently at least, global warming would have been seen as such an issue.

Go to Ad Age and see full story here.

Brant Boucher, in his letter “Scientific consensus” (The Hill Times, Aug. 6, 2007), seems to naively believe that the climate change science espoused in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC documents represents “scientific consensus.” Nothing could be further than the truth! 

As one of the invited expert reviewers for the 2007 IPCC documents, I have pointed out the flawed review process used by the IPCC scientists in one of my letters (The Hill Times, May 28, 2007). I have also pointed out in my letter that an increasing number of scientists are now questioning the hypothesis of GHG-induced warming of the earth’s surface and suggesting a stronger impact of solar variability and large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns on the observed temperature increase than previously believed. I would further politely ask Mr. Boucher to do a simple reality check regarding the earth’s temperature change. Since mid-1998, the earth’s mean temperature as a whole has not increased at all, despite billions of tonnes of human-added CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere.

In the Southern Hemisphere, the land-area mean temperature has slowly but surely declined in the last few years. The city of Buenos Aires in Argentina received several centimetres of snowfall in early July, and the last time it snowed in Buenos Aires was in 1918! Most of Australia experienced one of its coldest months of June this year. Several other locations in the Southern Hemisphere have experienced lower temperatures in the last few years. Further, the SSTs (sea surface temperatures) over world oceans are slowly declining since mid-1998, according to a recent world-wide analysis of ocean surface temperatures.

It is important to first develop an improved understanding of the earth’s temperature trends and changes before committing millions (billions!) of dollars to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs). Unfortunately, the IPCC climate change documents do not provide an objective assessment of the earth’s temperature trends and associated climate change.  Read more here.