Leading British scientist James Lovelock said in a recent radio interview in New Zealand that New Zealand is wasting its time trying to pass an Emissions Trading Scheme, or ETS for short. He said on the Radio New Zealand program during a 4-minute interview from his home in Cornwall, England that New Zealanders should put their sights on thinking of their island nation as a lifeboat for survivors of global waming events in the distant future.

“I think the role of New Zealand, similar to that of the UK and other island nations, is to be a lifeboat, because the world may get almost intolerable during the coming century,” Lovelock said. “And you see that happening already in Australia - the desert is spreading and things just won’t grow. And island nations like New Zealand will be spared that kind of damage.”

“New Zealand could lead the world by being the perfect ‘lifeboat’ and taking that just right number of people that you can support and feed and the rest of it, and doing it building proper cities,” Lovelock added. “That’s going to take the money and the effort. Trying to stop global warming is almost a certain waste of time.”

Lovelock, of course, is one of those scientists who believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a “lifeboat” for refugees from mainland Europe. He has repeated this warning to reporters on several continents and now he brings the same message to New Zealanders. Read more here.

Forget pretty much any news reporting you see that attributes disastrous phenomena to global warming, because it’s all designed to create a fog surrounding the core issue: is climate change human-caused or not?

A most recent example is from Monday’s Washington Post, in which alarmist reporter Kari Lydersen (who has a long record of such journalism, in addition to work she does for leftist publications such as In These Times and the Progressive, on topics including “environmental racism") told about how waterborne diseases are expected to multiply due to future climate devastation: “Now, scientists say, it is a near-certainty that global warming will drive significant increases in waterborne diseases around the world.”

This kind of distractive reporting buttresses the lucrative industry that is global warming alarmism. “It’s going to cause sea levels to rise!” cry the coastal scientists and fisheries experts. “It will massively displace wildlife!” scream the biological scientists. “It will prolong droughts and intensify rainfalls,” warn the geologists and agricultural scientists. Their wailing fills up their applications for billions of dollars in grants from governments and sympathetic nonprofit foundations.

But these outcries miss the point, because they do not address the core issue of whether the temperature uptick (of one degree Celsius) over the last century is attributable chiefly to man’s influence and thus mitigable, or to natural fluctuations and that nothing can be done about it. In other words, the vast majority of research (80 percent? 90 percent? more?) tied to climate change has nothing to do with its cause.

Therefore we have a whole derivative economic sector constructed on the foundation of a single premise: that increasing greenhouse gas emissions are having a greater impact on global climate than are other phenomena such as solar activity, cloud cover, ocean temperatures, El Niño/La Niña, etc. If that single thesis is deemed false, then all these offshoot opportunities for researchers, government, universities, nonprofits, rent seekers, and media goes into a deep chill. Goodbye grants. Adios agency positions. Ciao, charitable contributions. So long, subsidies. And where hast thou gone, writing awards?

Just think—if it’s shown beyond the mainstream media’s reach that carbon dioxide and its gaseous sisters (methane and a few others) do not jack up the atmospheric temps, we would no longer have to live under the environoia of this collaborative claptrap. Read more here.

A national civil rights leader says that a new national political movement is building to demand more supply of affordable energy—from clean coal, oil and gas and nuclear energy—because supply constraints that raise energy costs discriminate against the poor more than any other segment of society.

Niger Innis, National Spokesman for the 60-year-old Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), said that politicians and environmental groups that oppose expansion of U.S. fossil and nuclear energy production are waging an “immoral war on the poor” and “are fueling a rapidly growing consumer backlash against extremist environmental policies that threaten to choke off America’s ability to produce enough affordable energy to meet demand.”

“Access to affordable and reliable energy is not a convenience to Americans,” Innis told a meeting of the MidContinent Oil and Gas Association.  “It is a fundamental civil right. Without access to affordable energy, Americans on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder cannot afford to climb that ladder to success.  They cannot afford to enjoy the fundamental civil rights that organizations like mine helped to win for them.”

“The growing lack of access to affordable energy is the new civil rights battle of the century,” Innis said. “Americans need access to more energy supply from all resources ... clean coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear energy, renewables as well as better energy conservation,” he said. “We need it all. The good news is that America has it all, in bountiful supply.”

“As we organize grassroots citizens groups in state after state to call for more energy supply, we are finding overwhelming support at the grassroots level,” Innis said. “This is clearly the start of a major political movement, much like we saw in the early days of the civil rights struggle.” “In spite of this, there are politicians who say that we must stop drilling, stop building baseload power plants, stop building transmission lines and new pipelines, and rely solely on less reliable and more expensive forms of energy,” he said. “That is a recipe for economic disaster, especially for the tens of millions of American families now struggling to make ends meet each month.”

Innis noted that Roy Innis, Chairman of CORE, recently a book called “Energy Keepers, Energy Killers” that calls on civil rights leaders and advocates for the poor to “fight those who want to turn off the spigot of American energy.” That book made the Washington Post’s top 10 non-fiction sales list recently.

“Those who are preventing Americans from accessing affordable energy are waging an immoral war on the poor,” Innis charged.  He explained that as energy costs rise, the poor are saddled with a disproportionately higher burden for those costs. “The average median-income family in the U.S. today has to spend about a nickel of every dollar of their income on energy.  The average low-income family has to spend 20 cents on the dollar to buy their energy.  The average poor family has to devote 50 cents or more of each dollar on energy,” he explained.  “For poor families, that is 50 cents they can’t spend on food, on education, on health care, on the bare necessities of life.  As energy prices go up because of policies that restrict supply, the poor suffer the most.”

Innis said that “extremist environmental groups” are leading efforts to stop virtually any new energy sources. “They seem to think that allowing America’s lights to go off is an acceptable outcome. I cannot for the life of me imagine how some of these people can sleep at night given that they are driving America right to edge of disaster with our energy policies.”

Innis said the CORE has been fighting extremist environmental organizations for decades. Innis said many of those same environmental groups “are now working to constrict energy supply in America because they want to see prices rise on the consumer. They believe that higher prices will blackmail consumers into using less energy and adopt a lower standard of living. That is their ultimate goal. And that goal is immoral.”

Read more here.

Meltdown watch, continued. Capital is quickly drying up for new clean-energy projects, and what is available costs more, throwing a wrench into companies’ plans to expand renewable energy.

General Electric is the latest to throw in the towel, after the abrupt departure of Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley. The conglomerate, which makes energy gear like wind and gas turbines as well as underwriting renewable-energy projects, says it is bailing out of the clean-tech investment game for now, once it finishes with existing projects. From Dow Jones Clean Tech Insight:

“Right now we can’t price a deal,” said [GE Financial Services managing director Timothy] Howell in an interview with Clean Technology Insight on the sidelines of the Solar Power International conference in San Diego, Calif. “We can’t go out and borrow. So we can’t commit to a deal today.”

GE Financial Services, like GE’s energy-infrastructure unit, was very bullish on the sector’s prospects just a few months ago. Most clean-energy projects like wind and solar power depend on investments by companies like GE or big banks, which put up development capital to get their mitts on years of tax breaks. That’s the main way that tax credits help fuel the growth of alternative energy.

But while the financial bailout bill extended tax credits for clean energy, the bill hasn’t yet goosed the credit markets into lending freely. That-not uncertainty over federal subsidies-has now become clean-energy’s -bogeyman. See story here.

Funny how economic concerns pull the mind away from foolishness such as global warming. But weather goes on, and in many places it doesn’t happen the way fear mongers predict. Start with Alaska, a place in the news of late. The state’s glaciers, after two centuries of shrinkage (a trend that began before the advent of the internal combustion engine and smokestack economy), actually grew during the winter of 2007-08.

“In general,” Bruce Molnia, a U.S. Geological Survey glaciologist, told the Anchorage Daily News, “the weather this summer was the worst I have seen in at least 20 years.” Translation: It was so cold that the snow that causes glaciers to expand didn’t melt until later than usual. Meanwhile, the International Arctic Research Center reports 29% more Arctic sea ice this year than last. This doesn’t exactly square with overheated predictions earlier in the year that the North Pole would be entirely free of ice over the summer for the first time in recorded history.

Farther south, midmonth temperatures in Oregon hit record lows, and on Oct. 10 Boise, Idaho, got its earliest snow ever — 1.7 inches that beat the old record by one day and 7/10 of an inch. Much farther south, Durban, South Africa, had its coldest September night in history a month ago, and parts of the country had an unusual late-winter snow. A month earlier in New Zealand, officials at Mount Ruapehu reported the largest snow base ever.

These last four developments, taken together or separately, don’t disprove the global warming theory. But unlike climate projection models, which are often wrong but endlessly thrown in our faces as examples of hard science, they are real world events wholly contrary to the story the alarmists have been spreading.

Global warm mongers are rapidly losing credibility. Mainstream journalists will still believe them because climate change fits the narrative they’ve so carefully nurtured. But eventually the error will have to admitted. It won’t happen publicly, though, because by the time they come to their senses, the issue will have been long forgotten by the public. See more here.

The next commodity to collapse will be mass-marketed environmentalism, which will come to be disdained - stock market indexes have plummeted from their inflated peaks. Oil and other commodities have likewise plummeted. The next commodity to tumble from unsustainable peak levels: environmentalism. In part, I am making this prediction because, in my 30 years as an environmentalist, I have never seen so many governments and so many corporations so profusely espousing so many environmental causes. Where promoting environmentalism was once seen as daring and counter-cultural, today it has become banal, no longer the exclusive preserve of a Body Shop chain, but of every retailer down to Wal-Mart. For the same reason that clothes go out of fashion after the masses embrace them, mass-marketed environmentalism will come to be disdained. Another reason for my prediction that environmentalism has peaked is the instinct for self-preservation among the political leadership. Thinking they could raise revenues while appearing green, opportunistic politicians have been promoting environmental taxes without having a credible case to make. The result, increasingly, is political ruin.

Environmentalism has peaked is the instinct for self-preservation among the political leadership. Thinking they could raise revenues while appearing green, opportunistic politicians have been promoting environmental taxes without having a credible case to make. The result, increasingly, is political ruin. The federal election results this week are, in good part, a testament to Liberal leader Stéphan Dion’s failure to sell his Green Shift - the Liberals obtained the lowest share of the vote since Confederation. In England, where citizens face the world’s highest burden of green taxes, the ruling Labour Party received a miserable 3% of the vote in by-elections earlier this year and London’s mayor, the greenest in Europe, was thrown out of office. Across Europe, once-green politicians are now backing away from their earlier commitments to push green agendas. In stock and commodity markets, when values fall from unrealistically high levels, they often fall further than justified. When environmentalism falls from its high values on the realization that many concerns have been oversold, it too will likely fall further than justified. Environmentalism will then need to reestablish public trust before real environmental gains can be made.As history shows, after being burned in the stock market, investors often stay away for years, fearful of being burned again. The lack of trust harms the greater economy. We have no history of what happens when citizens feel taken in by false environmental claims. But we may soon find out. See more here.

If the End of Days were going to be portrayed in a museum exhibition, it might look like the array of natural disasters, both real and imagined, that can be found at “Climate Change,” which opens Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History. There is something almost biblical about these worst-case scenarios, apocalyptically suggested even in the subtitle: “The Threat to Life and a New Energy Future.”

And if the plagues promised with global warming don’t include an onslaught of frogs, there is more than enough to worry about: the exhibition predicts proliferation of malaria and desperate foraging of wildlife. Emerging from this ambitious and, at times, overwrought show, you almost expect to see a new set of dioramas and fossilized skeletons showing how Homo sapiens once dwelt on this planet in arrogant mastery before the species burned its way to oblivion. The main impression, instead, is of an almost religious urgency. “Repent!” these displays seem to call out, “Repent! Before it’s too late!” And perhaps the religious overtones are no accident.

Recently the physicist Freeman Dyson wrote in The New York Review of Books that environmentalism has become a “worldwide secular religion” in which the “path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible.” Only here the urgency is not otherworldly. And if there are counterarguments to be made about aspects of global warming, why can’t they be addressed here? Take a look at the two sides of the Web site climatedebatedaily.com to see how much disagreement there can be. This exhibition, in other words, made me feel like an agnostic attending church and listening to sermons about damnation. It may all be true - some of it assuredly is - but from a museum, particularly one devoted to natural science, it is reasonable to seek more revelation.

And while there is a scientific consensus about global warming, there is also a significant minority of skeptics about one portion or another of the theory, and the issues are notoriously complex. Mr. Dyson said the minority of scientific skeptics and the majority of scientific believers now engage in a passionate “dialogue of the deaf,” in which very little debate or convincing goes on. Apocalypse is too easy a prediction when there is so much still uncertain; no one has succeeded in completely modeling climate’s past, let alone its future. “Many experts think,” we are told, that warmer ocean waters will make hurricanes more powerful. But “it is difficult to predict how much more intense hurricanes could become.” That makes it seem as if this is some rough guess, when the claims being made for climate change are in the precision of the observations and conclusions. And are the “many experts” even correct about hurricanes? The scientist (and global-warming skeptic) Roy W. Spencer has pointed out that experts at the National Hurricane Center have been warning for decades that there had been a lull in hurricane activity and that a natural 30-to-40-year cycle would bring on a resurgence, something having no connection at all to global warming. Read more of this story on this shameful exhibition from a museum that has “natural” history in its name here.

McClatchy Newspaper story Paper claims Arctic Temps Peak in November - Claims Arctic offers ‘early warning signs’. Temperatures in the Arctic last fall (2007) hit an all-time high - more than 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Centigrade) above normal - and remain almost as high this year, an international team of scientists reported Thursday. “The year 2007 was the warmest year on record in the Arctic,” said Jackie Richter-Menge, a climate expert at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H, and editor of the latest annual Arctic Report Card. “These are dynamic and dramatic times in the Arctic,” she said. “The outlook isn’t good.” Arctic temperatures naturally peak in October and November, after sea ice shrinks during the summer. Scientists say these changes in the Arctic are early warning signs of what may be coming for the rest of the world’s climate.

Arctic Reality Check: Why isn’t the cooling Antarctic considered ‘an indicator of what might happen to the rest of the world?’ asks Climate Scientist Dr. Ben Herman, past director of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics and former Head of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona is a member of both the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth’s Executive Committee and the Committee on Global Change. “First of all, the Arctic sea ice is at its minimum in September, not October or November as the scientists in the McClatchy article states. As Arctic ice experts, they certainly should have known this. Another point is that the Arctic temperatures do not “naturally peak in October or November”. They peak in mid August generally. Also the article states that since the world’s climates are interconnected, what happens in the Arctic may be an indicator of what will happen in the rest of the world. How about what happens in the Antarctic then? Since its ice area has been increasing, is this also an indicator of what might happen in the rest of the world? The vast majority of Antarctica has cooled over the past 50 years and ice coverage has grown to record levels.

Reality Check # 2: German scientist Ernst-Georg Beck, a biologist Rebuts Arctic Reports calling it psuedoscience. “The annual report issued by researchers at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other experts is the latest to paint a dire picture of the impact of climate change in the Arctic.The real averaged temperatures of the whole Arctic circle (70-90 N) can be found in the same data base used by NOAA (CRU, Phil Jones): The graph shows a strong Arctic warming during 1918 and 1960, stronger than today with a rise of about + 4C up to 1938. Referencing only a rise since 1960 we got the illusion of a dramatic rise in modern times.

See full size image here

See this very comprehensive summary of the dozens of arctic stories questioning man’s role over the past year.