MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Prince­ton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” “an old coot riding into the sunset” and, perhaps inevitably, “a mad scientist.” Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Dyson’s son, George, a technology historian, says his father’s views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone - out of his beautiful mind.

But in the considered opinion of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, Dyson’s friend and fellow English expatriate, this is far from the case. “His mind is still so open and flexible,” Sacks says. Which makes Dyson something far more formidable than just the latest peevish right-wing climate-change denier. Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists - William Press, former deputy director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and now a professor of computer science at the University of Texas, calls him “infinitely smart.” Dyson - a mathematics prodigy who came to this country at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory - not only did path-breaking science of his own; he also witnessed the development of modern physics, thinking alongside most of the luminous figures of the age, including Einstein, Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Witten, the “high priest of string theory” whose office at the institute is just across the hall from Dyson’s. Yet instead of hewing to that fundamental field, Dyson chose to pursue broader and more unusual pursuits than most physicists - and has lived a more original life. Among Dyson’s gifts is interpretive clarity, a penetrating ability to grasp the method and significance of what many kinds of scientists do.

Dyson says he doesn’t want his legacy to be defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science. Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass. In “Infinite in All Directions,” he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as possible.” This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson’s own relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, “He’s a consistent reminder of another possibility.” When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by expressing concern about the “enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories,” these reservations come from a place of experience. Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.

IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.” Since then he has only heated up his misgivings, declaring in a 2007 interview with Salon.com that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books, the left-leaning publication that is to gravitas what the Beagle was to Darwin, that climate change has become an “obsession” - the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism. Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”
Read much more here.

The Environmental Protection Agency has submitted a “finding” to the White House Office of Management and Budget that will force the Obama administration to decide whether to limit greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. If adopted, new laws and regulations will likely follow that have the potential to change our lifestyles and limit our freedoms. None of these laws and regulations will be preceded by debate; they will be imposed on us by fundamentalist politicians and scientists who have swallowed the Kool-Aid and declared global warming as fact; end of discussion.

But there is a growing body of opinion that global warming is a fraud perpetrated by liberal politicians and their scientific acolytes who want more control over our lives. Whenever politicians declare a crisis, or an emergency, watch out. Chances are this means they want to impose something before the public discovers the truth. Any honest assessment of scientific opinion leads to the conclusion that there is significant disagreement on global warming among those with expertise in climatology and related fields. Yet many politicians want us to believe all of science is on board with man-made global warming and that we must act now to save the planet and ourselves from catastrophe (catastrophe is another word politicians like to use when imposing their agendas).

You know something is up when prominent apostles of global warming, especially former Vice President and Nobel laureate Al Gore, refuse to debate or discuss the issue with any scientist who takes a contrary view. Some religious fundamentalists impose various codes of behavior and dress on their adherents and threaten expulsion (if not death) for those who fail to acquiesce to their dictates. Is it not fundamentalist science to ignore any evidence that casts doubt on global warming? For a treasure trove of information that debunks the “science” of global warming go here.

For global warming fundamentalists, no amount of contradictory information will dilute their faith. Science makes mistakes, as did NASA when it published data on global warming trends in an effort to gauge the warmest years in U.S. history. Their temperature statistics were flawed. The year 1998 was not the hottest year on record, as NASA originally stated, it was 1934—the year Wiley Post discovered the jet stream.

In New York earlier this month, more than 600 scientists, economists, legislators and journalists met for the Heartland Institute’s second International Conference on Climate Change. Presentations debunked what was called the pseudoscience and dictatorial intentions promoted by the UN, the European Union and the Obama administration. The keynote speaker at the gathering was Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic and the European Union. Klaus described environmentalism as a new collectivist religion that doesn’t just want to change the climate, but us as well. Klaus rejected the executive summary published by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as all politics and environmental activism, “not science.”

An Australian newspaper recently reported on three senior Japanese scientists who separately engaged in climate-change research and “have strongly questioned the validity of the man-made global warming model that underpins the drive by the UN and most developed-nation governments to curb greenhouse gas emissions.” One of the scientists, Kanya Kusano, said “I believe the anthropogenic (man-made) effect for climate change is still only one of the hypotheses to explain the variability of climate.”

Shunichi Akasofu, founding director of the University of Alaska’s International Arctic Research Center added, “Before anyone noticed, this hypothesis has been substituted for truth.” Truth is sometimes inconvenient, as Al Gore likes to say. But that cuts both ways. Truth can also be inconvenient when it shines light on propaganda. Not to allow for a full-fledged debate on global warming is censorship, a popular practice in totalitarian societies and many fundamentalist religions and cults.

California’s Mojave Desert may seem ideally suited for solar energy production, but concern over what several proposed projects might do to the aesthetics of the region and its tortoise population is setting up a potential clash between conservationists and companies seeking to develop renewable energy.

Nineteen companies have submitted applications to build solar or wind facilities on a parcel of 500,000 desert acres, but Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Friday such development would violate the spirit of what conservationists had intended when they donated much of the land to the public. Feinstein said Friday she intends to push legislation that would turn the land into a national monument, which would allow for existing uses to continue while preventing future development.

The Wildlands Conservancy orchestrated the government’s purchase of the land between 1999-2004. It negotiated a discount sale from the real estate arm of the former Santa Fe and Southern Pacific Railroad and then contributed $40 million to help pay for the purchase. David Myers, the conservancy’s executive director, said the solar projects would do great harm to the region’s desert tortoise population. “It would destroy the entire Mojave Desert ecosystem,” said David Myers, executive director of The Wildlands Conservancy.

Feinstein said the lands in question were donated or purchased with the intent that they would be protected forever. But the Bureau of Land Management considers the land now open to all types of development, except mining. That policy led the state to consider large swaths of the land for future renewable energy production. “This is unacceptable,” Feinstein said in a letter to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. “I urge you to direct the BLM to suspend any further consideration of leases to develop former railroad lands for renewable energy or for any other purpose.”

In a speech last year, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger complained about environmental concerns slowing down the approval of solar plants in California. “If we cannot put solar power plants in the Mojave desert, I don’t know where the hell we can put it,” Schwarzenegger said at Yale University.

But Karen Douglas, chairman of the California Energy Commission, said Feinstein’s proposal could be a “win-win” for energy and conservation. The governor’s office said Douglas was speaking on the administration’s behalf. “The opportunity we see in the Feinstein bill is to jump-start our own efforts to find the best sites for development and to come up with a broader conservation plan that mitigates the impact of the development,” Douglas said.

Douglas said that if the national monument lines were drawn without consideration of renewable energy then a conflict was likely, but it’s early enough in the planning process that she’s confident the state will be able to get more solar and wind projects up and running without hurting the environment. “We think we can do both,” Douglas said. “We think this is an opportunity to accelerate both.” Greg Miller of the Bureau of Land Management said there are 14 solar energy and five wind energy projects that have submitted applications seeking to develop on what’s referred to as the former Catellus lands. None of the projects are close to being approved, he said.

The land lies in the southeast corner of California, between the existing Mojave National Preserve on the north and Joshua Tree National Park on the south. “They all have to go through a rigorous environmental analysis now,” Miller said. “It will be at best close to two years out before we get some of these grants approved.” Feinstein’s spokesman, Gil Duran, said the senator looks forward to working with the governor and the Interior Department on the issue.

“There’s plenty of room in America’s deserts for the bold expansion of renewable energy projects,” Duran said. Read more how the enviros and politicos giveth and then taketh away here.

If not there is always the moon

A meeting of over 700 mostly ‘climate realists’ took place in NY City on 8-10 March. This conference was called the ICCC (International Conference on Climate Change). It was sponsored by the private non-profit Heartland Institute of Chicago. It was Heartland’s 2nd annual climate conference and was (in my view) a great success, as was the first meeting the year before. Anyone attending with preconceived views that humans are a major influence on global warming, could not have left without entertaining strong doubts about their position. Anyone previously believing in the need for large reductions in future
CO2 emissions would have had to become skeptical of their prior position.

Many Europeans and a number of Asians were in attendance. Something like 30 countries were represented. It was a wonderful conference of - not ‘climate skeptics’ but rather ‘climate realists’. Everyone with an interest in AGW would have profited from attending this conference and hearing the many strong arguments about how many problems there are in accepting the conventional view (that of the IPCC) on climate change - the arguments that are never or seldom covered in the scientific journals or mainstream media.

There were a large number of very well known and talented people who attended and gave talks. These included President Vaclav Klaus (President of the Czech Republic and current President of the European Union), John Sununu (older Bush’s White House Chief-of-Staff), former US Senator and Astronaut Harrison Schmitt, John Theon (former Head of NASA’s Atmospheric Branch and James Hansen’s former boss), Congressman Tom McClintock, Lord Christopher Monckton of the UK, etc. Other well known and respected climate realists who attended were Fred Singer, Dick Lindzen, Arthur Robinson, Benny Peiser (UK - outstanding website director), Joe D’Aleo (IceCap website organizer), Anthony Watts (Watts-Up website founder), Roy Spencer, John Coleman, Craig Idso, Jim O’Brien, Don Easterbrook, Bob Ferguson, Howard Hayden, Fred Goldberg, Bill Kininmonth and many others. A number of private think tank scientists, economists, government specialists, etc. were also in attendance.

Former state climatologists; Pat Michaels, George Taylor and David Legates were there. Those authoring books on climate change and/or global warming who attended were; Pat Michaels, Chris Horner, Iain Murray, Richard Keen, Christopher Booker and Chris Essex. The two individuals who broke the hockey stick (Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick) were also there.

The Heartland Institute, particularly Joe Bast, Jay Lehr and James Taylor did a wonderful job of organizing this three day meeting. I have never enjoyed a scientific conference more than this one. The Heartland Institute is currently organizing a response to the IPCC 4th Report of 2007. This approximately 700 page report is in final review. It will be out in about 2 months from now and is titled the NIPCC (Non-Government International Panel on Climate Change).

President Vaclav Klaus gave the keynote address. To him, the issue is more than just science; it has to do with freedom and the ability of individuals to act without government coercion. The valedictory speech by Lord Monckton (UK) titled “Magna est veritas, et praevalet (great is truth, and mighty above all things)” brought the audience to its feet with thunderous applause. He emphasized how cap-and-trade laws would hurt 3rd world people. There were 16 conference keynote addresses and 36 sub-session speakers. Overall, it was a stronger conference than last year. Most of us in attendance had the feeling that human-induced global warming advocates are, in the end, going to lose this debate. CO2 emissions appear not to be the threat that the warming advocates and mainstream media have been portraying for the last 20 years. I surmise that most conference attendees feel that it would be unfortunate for the US Congress to pass a cap-and-trade (or cap-and-tax) law at this time.

Al Gore, James Hansen, and a few other well known global warming proponents were invited and promised large honorariums to speak, but they all refused to come and defend their points-of-view on the global warming question. I am sorry that most of you that entertain the idea that rising levels of CO2 may significantly affect hurricanes could not have been there to hear the many and persuasive arguments against CO2 having much influence on global climate. Any future influence from rising levels of CO2 on global tropical cyclone activity must be quite small. Any influence that may exist is buried deep within the observational noise level. We will never be able to objectively determine (whether either slight enhancement or slight suppression of TC activity) will occur due to rising CO2 levels. Stan Goldenberg made a good case along these lines at the meeting.

There is much more going on with the issue of CO2 induced global warming than many of you who only read scientific journals and newspapers and/or TV are likely aware of. I was very pleased to attend this very informative conference and I plan to attend the 3rd annual no matter where it is held - if I don’t get bumped off in the meantime!

This may come as bad news for Al Gore. The modest global warming trend has st opped - maybe even reversed itself. And it’s not just the record low temperatures experienced in much of the world this winter.

For at least the last five years, global temperatures have been falling, according to tracking performed by Roy Spencer, the climatologist formerly of NASA.
“Global warming” was going to bring more and more horrific hurricanes, climate change scientists and the politicians who subscribed to their theories said.
But since 2005, only one major hurricane has struck North America.

No need to get overheated. Read ”Global Warming or Global Governance? What the media refuse to tell you about so-called climate change” for just $4.95 today!

A new study by Florida State University researcher Ryan Maue shows worldwide cyclone activity - typhoons, as well as hurricanes - has reached at least a 30-year low.

Two more studies - one by the Leibniz Institute of Marine Science and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Germany and another by the University of Wisconsin - predict a slowing, or even a reversal of warming, for at least the next 10 to 30 years. The Arctic sea ice has grown more on a percentage basis this winter than it has since 1979.

The number of polar bears has risen 25 percent in the past decade. There are 15,000 of them in the Arctic now, where 10 years ago there were 12,000.
“The most recent global warming that began in 1977 is over, and the Earth has entered a new phase of global cooling,” says Don Easterbrook, professor of geology at Western Washington University in Bellingham, confidently. He maintains a switch in Pacific Ocean currents “assures about three decades of global cooling. New solar data showing unusual absence of sun spots and changes in the sun’s magnetic field suggest the present episode of global cooling may be more severe than the cooling of 1945 to 1977.”

Climatologist Joe D’Aleo of the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, says new data “show that in five of the last seven decades since World War II, including this one, US temperatures have cooled while carbon dioxide has continued to rise (and 42 of the last 70 globally).” “The data also suggests cooling not warming in Earth’s future,” he says. Read more and see comments here.

Back in 1500, we learn from a Princeton professor, the Aztecs figured the climate debate was over, and that if you wanted rain or sunshine, it was simple enough what you had to do - sacrifice 20,000 lives a year to the right gods. In 2009, it’s an equally sure thing in the minds of some that carbon in the air is going to fry us unless we put the welfare of millions on the line, and here is the latest on President Obama’ plan - it could cost industry $2 trillion over eight years.

That hefty sum to be paid out to a cap-and-trade carbon tax would snatch money from consumers far more than rising oil prices did, hinder economic growth and in still other ways generate human misery, and all in the name of what? Computer models that can’t get anything right, that’s what. Scientists feed tons of data into these simulating computers, and - given the doomsday theory animating the enterprise - it shouldn’t surprise anyone that catastrophic warming is a calculation that then emerges. The problem is that all kinds of stuff is left out because there is a lot we do not know. “Over the past 10 years there has been no global warming, and in fact a slight cooling,” physicist William Happer recently told the Senate. “This is not at all what was predicted by the IPCC models,” he said, referring to the conclusions of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Happer does not deny that the earth is warming, that increased amounts of carbon dioxide are being pumped into the atmosphere, that there is in fact something you can call a greenhouse effect or that the leveling temperatures of the past decade are still high. He doubts, however, that there’s a scientific consensus on a disastrous outcome or that carbon dioxide is the villain it’s made out to be. A professor at Princeton, Happer said “90 percent of greenhouse warming is due to water vapor,” and that the issue is whether the carbon dioxide will “substantially increase water’s contribution” to causing something awful.’

The evidence is that it won’t, said Happer, pointing out that “the current warming period began about 1800, at the end of the little ice age,” when there wasn’t a big increase in carbon dioxide. It wasn’t fossil fuels that did the warming deed - a good deed, by the way - and a war against these energy-producing, societal benefactors would therefore be as futile in controlling climate as slicing open bodies and ripping out hearts.

But what if skeptics like Happer are wrong? If there is a possibility of error, some argue, we should err on the side of safety, and that might be true if a carbon tax was not itself a peril and if it was not clear by now that we are putting global-warming garbage into computers, getting garbage out of them and that some are then treating that garbage like a god. Read full post here.

In a statistical study entitled “Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals,” published in Global Environmental Change by Murtaugh and Shlax of Oregon State University, and again published here, the authors propose that the potential savings from reduced reproduction rates among humans are some 20 times more effective than the savings wrought by life style changes.

It is clear that the authors follow the Liberal mantra of the ends justify the means.  If we can reduce carbon emissions by reducing the number of children, then we should do it, they gloat.  It appears that carbon reductions trump even “life” itself.  They summarize:

“Much attention has been paid to the ways that people’s home energy use, travel, food choices and other routine activities affect their emissions of carbon dioxide and, ultimately, their contributions to global warming. However, the reproductive choices of an individual are rarely incorporated into calculations of his personal impact on the environment. Here we estimate the extra emissions of fossil carbon dioxide that an average individual causes when he or she chooses to have children. The summed emissions of a person’s descendants, weighted by their relatedness to him, may far exceed the lifetime emissions produced by the original parent. Under current conditions in the United States, for example, each child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions. A person’s reproductive choices must be considered along with his day-to-day activities when assessing his ultimate impact on the global environment.”

By the authors’ desires, if we would limit every couple to having only one child, we would solve the Global Warming problem for every one.  Again, humanity itself is the cause of all the woe, and the best thing for us to do is just stop procreating—or just drop dead.  Living human beings are bad for the planet. Indeed, the authors purposely fail to mention that their proposal puts humanity on a fast-tack extinction curve, as reproduction rates fall below population replacement rates.  Surely, as statisticians they know this well.  Within a few generations, there wouldn’t be any one around to measure, least wise care, about carbon emissions.  We would all be dead. 

But golly, we would save the planet!  Just goes to show you, Liberals are all about death and destruction.  They absolutely live for it!  I’ve got a thought, why not have liberals first show us how it’s done. Go ahead liberals—take the lead in this thing.  Limit your own population first, and the rest of us might, “maybe,” consider what you have to say. Read more here.

Protest and direct action could be the only way to tackle soaring carbon emissions, a leading climate scientist has said. James Hansen, a climate modeller (actually an Astronomer) with NASA, told the Guardian today that corporate lobbying has undermined democratic attempts to curb carbon pollution. “The democratic process doesn’t quite seem to be working,” he said.

Speaking on the eve of joining a protest against the headquarters of power firm E.ON in Coventry, Hansen said: “The first action that people should take is to use the democratic process. What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash.

“The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes. So, I’m not surprised that people are getting frustrated. I think that peaceful demonstration is not out of order, because we’re running out of time.”

Hansen said he was taking part in the Coventry demonstration tomorrow because he wants a worldwide moratorium on new coal power stations. E.ON wants to build such a station at Kingsnorth in Kent, an application that energy and the climate change minister Ed Miliband recently delayed. “I think that peaceful actions that attempt to draw society’s attention to the issue are not inappropriate,” Hansen said.

He added that a scientific meeting in Copenhagen last week had made clear the “urgency of the science and the inaction taken by governments”. Officials will gather in Bonn later this month to continue talks on a new global climate treaty, which campaigners have called to be signed at a UN meeting in Copenhagen in December. Hansen warned that the new treaty is “guaranteed to fail” to bring down emissions.

Hansen said: “What’s being talked about for Copenhagen is a strenghening of Kyoto [protocol] approach, a cap and trade with offsets and escape hatches which will be gauranteed to fail in terms of getting the required rapid reduction in emissions. They talk about goals which sound impressive, but when you see the actions are such that it will be impossible to reach those goals, then I can understand the informed public getting frustrated.”

He said he was growing “concerned” over the stance taken by the new US adminstration on global warming. “It’s not clear what their intentions are yet, but if they are going to support cap and trade then unfortunately i think that will be another case of greenwash. It’s going to take stronger action than that.” See more here.