By Art Horn, Icecap
1. Surface temperature records show that global temperature fell from 1875 to 1910. Temperature rose from 1911 to 1943. Temperature fell again from 1944 to 1976. Temperature rose from 1977 to 1998. There has been no warming since 1998. We are now in the 8th year of cooling. While all these changes were happening carbon dioxide levels did nothing but go up.
2.There are 5 major centers that collect global temperature data, The Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, Remote sensing systems, The University of Alabama Huntsville, The Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Nation Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. All of these centers show no warming since 1998 and all show cooling to varying degrees for the last 8 years.
3. Using surface temperature records to track global temperature change has numerous problems. The number of worldwide climate measuring sites has dropped from 6,000 in 1970 to under 2,000 today. Two thirds of the weather stations that were closed in this period were in the country. They had the colder night time temperatures. They are gone. What we are left with is a high percentage of urban weather stations with warmer night time readings due to pavement, buildings and general urban sprawl. This fact alone biases the temperature record warmer as the urban areas have grown around the world in the last 50 years. Several studies indicate that perhaps half the warming in the data base in the last 50 years is due to these land use changes. So while there has been warming the magnitude of it has been artificially magnified. That in itself is the real man made (made up) global warming.
4. NASA said that in the summer of 2009 the oceans were warmer than ever before. This was accomplished by subtracting the satellite measured ocean temperatures from the ocean temperature data base. NASA also does not use the 3307 ARGO buoys deployed in the world oceans because they show ocean heat content has been falling since the buoys were deployed in 2003.
5. There is no statistical relationship between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and temperature during the last 150 years. There is a strong statistical relationship between the cyclic Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and global temperature. The PDO is a 60 year cycle of warming and cooling of the Pacific Ocean. In every instance over the last 150 years when the PDO was in the cool phase the global temperature went down. When the PDO was in the warm phase the temperature went up. The PDO has shifted back to cool and the air temperature is falling again.
6. The total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 3.8 one hundredth of a percent. The total increase by volume of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the last 150 years is one hundredth of a percent. This increase has benefited agriculture, trees, flowers and other plants. They grow faster with more carbon dioxide and are more resistant to drought.
7. Carbon dioxide is not pollution. Everything that grows on earth needs it. The source is irrelevant. Remove all the carbon dioxide from the air and the earth dies.
8. There are many large organizations including but not limited to Governments, Wall Street brokerage houses, environmental groups, corporations, universities, media outlets and political parties that have a strong financial interest in having you believe carbon dioxide is pollution. The saying “follow the money”
9. Ice cores show that increases in carbon dioxide in the past were the result of warmer temperature, not the cause of it. The laws of nature have not changed. Most of the increases in carbon dioxide in the air are the result of nature. The human component is very small, on the order of 3 percent per year. Half the carbon dioxide emitted into the air by human activity each year is immediately absorbed into the biosphere. Carbon dioxide is 3.5 percent of the greenhouse effect. Water vapor is 95 percent. Since human activity only adds 3 percent a year and half of that is absorbed into the biosphere the total human contribution to the greenhouse effect each year is about one tenth of one percent. Reducing this amount by some fraction will have no effect on temperature.
10. There is a strong relationship between the strength of the solar wind and global temperature. Strong solar wind equals a warmer earth, weak solar wind equals a cooler earth. Variations in cosmogenic isotopes of carbon 14 and beryllium 10 in ice cores prove this. Right now the solar wind is weaker than anytime that NASA has been able to measure it, nearly 50 years and the earth is cooling. The solar magnetic index (AP) is the lowest since measurements began in 1932 and it’s continuing to go down. The Pacific Ocean is in it’s cool phase and will be for another 25 years. The Atlantic is showing signs of cooling. The sun is weak and will likely be so for the next two solar cycles. We are heading for colder temperatures, not warmer.
11. The cyclic downward trend in the amount of ice left in the Arctic at the end of the summer has ended. The ice data from polar orbiting satellites clearly shows the extent of arctic ice is increasing. There is today 25 percent more ice than 2 years ago.
12. In the 1960s there were an estimated 5,000 polar bears, today there are 25,000. In a typical biased story in April of this year TIME magazine reported there were “only” 25,000 left. Once again this story had major input from environmental groups.
13. Satellite measurements show there is more ice in Antarctic than 30 years ago. News media reports only talk about shrinking ice in the Arctic, never about growing ice in Antarctica. They are selling fear. The reporters and news anchors know nothing about climatology. I this because I worked with them for 25 years.
14. The melting of glaciers is not new. The “Little Ice Age” was from 1400 to 1850. The coldest temperatures were in the 1600s. Global temperature has been rising unevenly for 300 years. Glaciers have been retreating unevenly for at least 250 years.
15. Computer models say that there should be a rapid warming of the upper troposphere between 30 degrees north and south of the equator if global warming is proceeding as they predict. Measurements with weather balloons over the last 50 years so no such warming at all. This proves the computer models do not understand how the climate system works. These models can’t predict the climate 50 to 100 years in the future. Computer model forecasts of warming are not evidence of climate change. They are marketing tools for research institutions and universities to continue their funding from our government.
16. Data from the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite show outgoing longwave radiation (heat) increased by 4 watts per square meter in the 1980s and 1990s while the oceans were undergoing a cyclic warming. Computer models predicted outgoing longwave radiation would decrease as oceans warmed. All the models used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were wrong. This means the models make the wrong assumptions about how the climate works and are useless in making any climate policy.
17. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was formed in the late 1980s to prove human burning of fossil fuels causes global warming. From the beginning it was never a scientific organization. It was formed with a biased political agenda. Their true goal is to capture power through climate treaties partly to insure the institutions own survival. These treaties give the UN the legal power to redistribute the developed nations wealth as they see fit. They will use the concept of “climate debt” owed to third world countries as justification. The debt will be retribution for the industrialized nations sin of “polluting” the climate with carbon dioxide and using all the available carbon space in the air. It is the UN’s goal to use global warming to extract money from developed nations without having to work for it. Recently the chairman of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri announced “We’re at a stage where the warming is happening at a much faster rate.” Apparently he does not look at real world data.
18. Large environmental groups, political “leaders” and eco-activists believe the climate system is so simple that it behaves like a room in your house. Simply turn down the thermostat or in other words reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and we can regulate the world temperature. People who think this way are far more dangerous than any global warming because some of these people are in power.
19. As for Al Gore...He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. His message of fearing global warming has reached the third world. The nations of the third world are now demanding “climate reparations” for damage the western world has inflicted on the climate system over the last 150 years. They now say we owe them “climate Debt” because we have used up all the carbon space in the air. This is not promoting peace, it is causing more tension and anger in the developing countries towards the west. Gore’s “peace prize” is having the opposite effect. As for Gore’s financial investments in “green companies” I say “beware of the prophet seeking profits”. The urge to save the world is always a cover for the need to rule it.
20. The “climategate” emails prove that there is at best blind ambition among some of the worlds leading climate scientists and at worst criminal activity. The reaction of much of the mainstream media in the United States is proving to be very revealing. They either don’t report the story or they defend the actions of the climate scientists. Some of these leading scientists were caught intimidating scientific journals to keep skeptics prom publishing and altering data to make the case for man made global warming. The emails also reveal that these scientists have deleted data or refused freedom of information requests and have deleted emails relevant to those requests, a criminal offence. NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies has also been stonewalling freedom of information efforts. It is clear from the emails that a small but powerful group of leading climate scientists have used their lofty positions to pervert the science of climate change.
“CO2 for different people has different attractions. After all, what is it? - it’s not a pollutant, it’s a product of every living creature’s breathing, it’s the product of all plant respiration, it is essential for plant life and photosynthesis, it’s a product of all industrial burning, it’s a product of driving = I mean, if you ever wanted a leverage point to control everything from exhalation to driving, this would be a dream. So it has a kind of fundamental attractiveness to bureaucratic mentality.” - Richard S. Lindzen, Ph.D. Professor of Atmospheric Science, MIT
See PDF with partial list of references here.
By James Delingpole, UK Telegraph
Here is an amusing video of an actor named Ed Begley Jr getting weally, weally, WEALLY cross about the Climategate scandal. (hat tip Breitbart TV)
Well no wonder he’s cross. His world is falling apart. Ed Begley Jr - now probably better known as a climate activist than for his role TV medical soap St Elsewhere - bought in so heavily to Big Al Gore’s Man-Made-Global-Warming meme, he actually became a vegan and is engaged in a competition with some other actor you won’t have heard of to see who can get the lowest Carbon Footprint.
He was also captured in one of the more revealing scenes in Not Evil Just Wrong using his Team-America-style ACTING skills to make moving tears come from his eyes and sobbing sounds from his throat while addressing an audience about the horrors of ManBearPig. Afterwards, he admits these were, in fact, recreated using the amazing technique of acting.
Anyway, the reason I show you that first footage from Fox News - apart from the fact that it’s funny - is to show you an example of how obsessed Warmists are with the notion of “Peer review.” Note how Ed repeats it, mantra-like, to ward off any possible suggestion that the scientists supporting his bomb-the-global-economy-back-to-the-stone-age cause might be wrong. How can they be? They’re peer-reviewed-peer-reviewed-peer-reviewed.
Here’s what poor Ed doesn’t get. It’s perhaps the single most important fact to emerge from the Climategate scandal. Peer-review is dead. Meaningless. Utterly void of credibility. More irredeemably defunct than a Norwegian Blue.
Why? Let’s just remind ourselves what some of those hacked CRU emails said:
“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that - take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board. What do others think?”
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.” “It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”
What the CRU’s hacked emails convincingly demonstrate is that climate scientists in the AGW camp have corrupted the peer-review process. In true Gramscian style they marched on the institutions - capturing the magazines (Science, Scientific American, Nature, etc), the seats of learning (Climate Research Institute; Hadley Centre), the NGO’s (Greenpeace, WWF, etc), the political bases (especially the EU), the newspapers (pretty much the whole of the MSM I’m ashamed, as a print journalist, to say) - and made sure that the only point of view deemed academically and intellectually acceptable was their one.
Neutral observers in this war sometimes ask how it can be that the vast majority of the world’s scientists seem to be in favour of AGW theory. “Peer-review” is why. Only a handful of scientists - 53 to be precise, not the much-touted 2,500 were actually responsible for the doom-laden global-warming sections of the IPCC’s reports. They were all part of this cosy, self-selecting, peer-review cabal - and many of them, of course, are implicated in the Climategate emails.
Now peer-review is dead, so should be the IPCC, and Al Gore’s future as a carbon-trading billionaire. Will it happen? I shouldn’t hold your breath. See post here. See also here how Ed Begley Jr is an ‘advisor’ to the CCX (Chicago Climate Exchange) where carbon is traded. No conflict of interest here.
Comment by Eon on Pajamas Media Story by Dr. William Briggs
In the latest excellent post on Pajamas Media “What is and What Isn’t Evidence of Global Warming” by William Briggs here, a very good read, there was an comment I thought worth posting by Eon.
The latest riposte’ from the AGW believers is the terrified cry that “icebergs are falling off the Antarctic ice shelf and reaching New Zealand! Hundreds of them! AAAAUUUGGH!!” (As Charlie Brown would say.)
Ahem. A few facts about that.
1. Those who claim that this is evidence of “excessively high temperatures in the Antarctic in the winter” neglect to consider one small detail; the seasons in the Southern Hemisphere are the opposite of those up here in the Northern Hemisphere. When it’s the coldest part of winter here in the U.S. and in Europe (generally from December to February), it’s the hottest part of the summer in Australia, New Zealand, Tierra del Fuego, etc. If bergs are going to calve off any part of the Antarctic sheet, the summertime is when you’d expect it to happen. Those who don’t understand the difference between when which seasons occur where (due to Earth’s axial tilt as it orbits the Sun) are obviously not sufficiently conversant with the subject to venture an informed opinion.
2. As was explained to me by in college by my geology professor (who was a glaciologist by trade), berg “calving” off an ice sheet is as much a function of the thickness of the ice as temperature; the thicker the ice, the greater the mass per square meter of surface area. Sooner or later, the mass being supported exceeds the ability of the ice’s tensile strength to support that mass. Crack. Bang. Calving.
Also, ice sheets that form on land tend to calve heavily when their movement extends out over the water, because the ice no longer has the support of the ground under it to help hold the mass up. In terms of basic mechanics, a land-formed ice sheet that now extends over water is a “second class” lever, with the load (the weight of the ice) at one end (the outer end), and the fulcrum at the other end (the inner end that’s still on land). This equals a very long “load arm” between the two, with the effort (the ice trying to hold together) applied in the middle. Under such circumstances, the load arm breaking somewhere near the load itself is only to be expected.
A thicker ice sheet= more mass per square meter surface area + extended out over water where there is less support for the mass= Big Bergs.
The primary source of bergs in the South Atlantic area south of New Zealand is the Ross Ice Shelf, which is an ice sheet which forms in the foothills of Queen Maud Land and Victoria Land, and then is “squeezed downhill” and northward by the fact that those foothills are either side of the gigantic bay known as the Ross Sea. Which means that the ice sheet is (a) forming on land, and (b) being forced out onto water, where the sheet inevitably calves. If the resulting bergs are bigger than average, this is an indication of colder temperatures where the ice formed, not warmer temps.
People who don’t understand these factors are likewise insufficiently schooled in mechanics to be making claims about the causes.
3. Finally, the fact that “large bergs” are getting close to New Zealand is interesting, but not in the way the AGW crowd thinks. Normally, the currents that carry bergs north toward New Zealand are fairly warm water, because they are part of the southern “limb” of the South Pacific Current flow, the huge rotational current system that encompasses the southern half of the Pacific the same way the Japan Current does the northern half, or the Gulf Stream does the North Atlantic. The South Pacific current flows in a clockwise direction, opposite the flow of the two Northern Hemisphere currents, due to Coriolis force derived from Earth’s rotation on its axis every day.
This means that since the South Pacific current flows from the tropics, down the west coast of South America, and then west and north past New Zealand, it is a fairly warm water current even in the south latitudes “below” 50 degrees. (New Zealand lies between 47 and 34 degrees south latitude, BTW.)
Normally, icebergs rarely reach New Zealand in any great numbers, even in mid-summer (which is what is fast approaching down there right now- see [1] above). The fact that large bergs are doing so now tells me two things;
A. those bergs are the result of a thicker ice sheet with more mass (see [2]); and
B. The water in the currents carrying them north are colder than they usually are- otherwise, even the larger bergs would be melting before they got north of 50 degrees.
They are colder, much colder than normal, see larger image here.
While I studied geology in college (You have your idea of fun, I have mine) I’m not a specialist; my scientific specialty is determining which bullet came out of which gun with a comparison microscope, determining whether the bloodstains came from a human being or a rabbit, and suchlike things. But if even someone with no more than an intelligent layman’s knowledge of the way the Antarctic ice machine works can figure this out, what does this say about the relative knowledge base of the AGW crowd, who are (supposedly) experts on this sort of thing?
It indicates to me that either they don’t know as much as they claim, or else they’ll say anything to get their agenda through, relying on the relative ignorance of the average man in the street to enable them to put the con over.
But then, I’m used to chasing crooks for a living, so maybe it’s just my naturally nasty, suspicious mind that makes me draw such a conclusion about such fine, altruistic, and wonderful people.
Who, after all, just want to oppress us for the good of...Holy Mother Gaia.
clear ether
eon
Icecap Note: Thank you Eon for an excellent and on target summary. The Australian Antarctic Division authored that obviously agenda driven study/story. Like most alarmist stories they make claims that all these observed changes are driven by AGW without really looking at the data. They are instead driven by the recent record ice extent and increased calving and very cold water between New Zealand and Antarctica which reduced the melting. Another alarmist story trying to drive the alarmist agenda to Copenhagen had to do with model forecast rising sea levels was produced by the authors from the once great Scripps Oceanographic Center. Scripp’s Somerville is one of the IPCC’s most vocal alarmist modeler. See the real sea level story here. See another ridiculous BBC story on the threat of Antarctic melt here.
By Noel Sheppard
Has the emerging international ClimateGate scandal changed President Obama’s global warming strategy? After winning the Nobel Peace Prize last month, expectations were that Obama would not attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen due to it conflicting with the Nobel awards ceremony in Oslo.
This speculation was supported in the past couple of weeks when world leaders meeting in Singapore punted on reaching any firm agreements at the upcoming Copenhagen meeting, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (R-Nev.) delayed action on cap-and-trade legislation until next spring.
Yet, within days of the ClimateGate scandal breaking, Obama surprisingly announced that he’s going to Copenhagen with a pledge for serious carbon dioxide emissions cuts.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Chris Horner told FBN’s Charles Payne Wednesday that this is by no means a coincidence.
Is Horner right?
Well, let’s start with an October 24 article by Britain’s Times: “President Obama will almost certainly not travel to the Copenhagen climate change summit in December and may instead use his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech to set out US environmental goals, The Times has learnt. With healthcare reform clogging his domestic agenda and no prospect of a comprehensive climate treaty in Copenhagen, Mr Obama may disappoint campaigners and foreign leaders, including Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, who have urged him to attend to boost the hopes of a breakthrough. The White House would not comment on Mr Obama’s travel plans yesterday, but administration officials have said privately that “Oslo is plenty close” - a reference to the Nobel ceremony that falls on December 10, two days into the Copenhagen meeting.
The White House confirmed that the President would be in Oslo to accept the prize, but a source close to the Administration said it was “hard to see the benefit” of his going to Copenhagen if there was no comprehensive deal for him to close or sign. Another expert, who did not want to be named, said he would be “really, really shocked” if Mr Obama went to Copenhagen, adding that European hopes about the power of his Administration to transform the climate change debate in a matter of months bore little relation to reality.”
Three weeks later, the New York Times reported: “President Obama and other world leaders have decided to put off the difficult task of reaching a climate change agreement at a global climate conference scheduled for next month, agreeing instead to make it the mission of the Copenhagen conference to reach a less specific “politically binding” agreement that would punt the most difficult issues into the future.”
At a hastily arranged breakfast on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting on Sunday morning, the leaders, including Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark and the chairman of the climate conference, agreed that in order to salvage Copenhagen they would have to push a fully binding legal agreement down the road, possibly to a second summit meeting in Mexico City later on.
“There was an assessment by the leaders that it is unrealistic to expect a full internationally, legally binding agreement could be negotiated between now and Copenhagen, which starts in 22 days,” said Michael Froman, the deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs. “I don’t think the negotiations have proceeded in such a way that any of the leaders thought it was likely that we were going to achieve a final agreement in Copenhagen, and yet thought that it was important that Copenhagen be an important step forward, including with operational impact.”
Four days later, the Wall Street Journal reported: “Senate Democratic leaders said Tuesday they would put off debate on a big climate-change bill until spring, in a sign of weakening political will to tackle a long-term environmental issue at a time of high unemployment and economic uncertainty. Legislation on health care, overhauling financial markets and job creation will be considered before the Senate takes up a measure to cap emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases linked to climate change, Senate Democratic leaders said Tuesday. Climate legislation will be taken up “some time in the spring,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said Tuesday after a Democratic caucus meeting.”
That was November 18. Two days later, NewsBusters reported: “E-mail messages between high-ranking scientists appear to indicate a conspiracy by some of the world’s leading global warming alarmists to falsify temperature data in order to exaggerate global averages.”
Now, five days after the scandal rocked climate alarmists around the world, Obama seemed to shift gears as reported by Britain’s Financial Times: “Barack Obama has thrown his weight behind a deal on climate change by announcing he will attend the Copenhagen summit with a pledge for a 17 per cent cut in US emissions. The US president’s pledge removes one of the final obstacles to a deal, as other developed countries have already announced their targets to cut emissions by 2020.”
Adding to the drama, the Los Angeles Times reported moments ago: “Canada’s prime minister is reversing his position and will attend a United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen next month, Stephen Harper’s spokesman said Thursday. Dimitri Soudas announced Harper decided to attend one day after U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao announced their attendance at the U.N. talks. Soudas said Harper’s decision was based on the fact that now “a critical mass of world leaders will be attending.”
So, four weeks ago, for a variety of reasons, Obama was believed to be skipping the Copenhagen conference. World leaders then decided to postpone coming to any major agreements there, and Reid similarly postponed bringing cap-and-trade legislation to the floor of the Senate.
Along comes ClimateGate, and Obama quickly announced that he’s heading to Copenhagen with a fairly serious emissions cut pledge. Coincidence?
Not likely, for the White House either realizes that the current momentum against cap-and-trade legislation needs to be halted quickly if it’s ever going to get passed, or they felt they needed to divert attention on the subject of global warming away from the growing scandal. After all, as e-mail messages and documents obtained from the computers of Britain’s Climate Research Unit continue to be analyzed, it seems likely that more revelations damaging to scientists involved as well as to the global warming myth are going to surface. As NewsBusters reported Wednesday, the American Thinker’s Marc Sheppard has already uncovered source code in CRU documents clearly used to manipulate climate data. More such discoveries seem a metaphysical certitude.
With calls out for CRU director Phil Jones to resign or be fired, such occurring while the Copenhagen conference produces absolutely nothing could be close to a death knell for the entire climate alarmism movement. Read full post here.
Meanwhile, collateral damage grows - Pressure Mounts From Inside: Disband UN IPCC? Scientist from U. of East Anglia Suggests ‘UN IPCC has run its course...politicizes climate science...authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production’. ClimateGate reveals science has become ‘too partisan, too centralized...more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures’. See how Mike Hulme admits “It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course.
By Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun
Update: see a follow-up on Monbiot with agreement by Tom Yulsman in the Center of Environmental Journalism Journal “Monbiot: environmentalists in denial over CRU emails” here.
Even George Monbiot, one of the fiercest media propagandists of the warming faith, admits he should have been more sceptical and says the science now needs to be rechecked:
It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.
Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.
Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.
Sure, Monbiot claims the fudging of what he extremely optimistically puts as just “three or four” scientists doesn’t knock over the whole global warming edifice, yet…
If even Monbiot, an extremist, can say that much, why cannot the Liberals say far more? And will now the legion of warmist journalists in our own media dare say as Monbiot has so belatedly:
I apologise. I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed. I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely.
Scepticism is the essential disposition of our craft, yet too many journalists have abandoned it. Remember: the opposite of sceptical is gullible.
(Thanks to reader Tony.)
UPDATE
When a warming alarmist like Professor David Karoly can get such a flogging on even an ABC chat site, you know the tide is turning. Unless you’re a Turnbull Liberal, that is.
UPDATE 2
Glenn Beck largely agrees with Monbiot, but with more jokes here.
UPDATE 3
The funniest email yet from the global warming conspiracy. CRU chief Phil Jones now disputes the data on that shows colder weather on the desperate grounds that when he sticks his head out of his Norfolk home he does feel quite the chill he’s told:
Chris - I presume the Met Office continually monitor the weather forecasts. Maybe because I’m in my 50s, but the language used in the forecasts seems a bit over the top re the cold. Where I’ve been for the last 20 days (in Norfolk) it doesn’t seem to have been as cold as the forecasts.
Wow. That’s wild on so many levels. And whatever else it is, it sure isn’t science.
Ob, and read the rest of Power Line’s analysis, which notes another alarming hole in global warming theory that’s uncovered by these emails.
See post here.
By David Archibald, Geologist, Science Researcher
I grew up reading The Courier-Mail and, in those days, the religious column was somewhere in the second half of the paper - on the same page as the bridge notes if I remember correctly. Now I live in Perth and read The West Australian, in which the daily dose of religion is most often found on the news pages. State-sponsored religion it is, because the articles quote global warming predictions generated from government bodies such as the CSIRO.
Sometimes this results in hilarious juxtapositions, such as having an article predicting that our beloved wine industry will have to move to Tasmania to escape the coming heat, next to an article noting that a good proportion of the year’s grape crop was wiped out due to a severe frost. Among we sceptical scientists, there is argument as to whether the global-warming scientists believe the constant stream of apocalyptic visions they concoct or are bold-faced liars? But I think that is missing the point.
The global-warming religion was established without much of a written creed. The high priests of the religion, in the CSIRO and the universities, are still writing it, and it gets published daily in our newspapers.
Some of the lesser priests, or priestesses in the case of Sheryl Crow, tell their followers how to do menial things, like using only one sheet of toilet paper to wipe their bottom. Last week, it was an injunction not to wear socks.
Soon global warming will be an extremely difficult religion to adhere to properly. As a religion, it has borrowed heavily from medieval Christianity, with the sale of indulgences - by way of carbon offsets - and plenty of self-flagellation for imagined sins. Without global warming, the lives of many of its adherents would be shallow and meaningless. It also seems to make them blind to breathtaking hypocrisy.
No, I am not talking about Al Gore buying a property in San Francisco just above sea level. I am talking about restricting coal consumption in Australia while encouraging coal exports at an ever-increasing pace. I will leave it for someone else to explain away the intellectual contortions behind that one.
The warmers say that they will not debate the science because they say that the science is settled, which reminds me of the line from the Wizard of Oz: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”
They are well aware that they are peddling a monstrous fraud, hoping for a quick closure at Copenhagen before the public wakes up to the fact that they have been had. The world has been cooling for the past 11 years. It may not have even warmed in the first place. The whole global warming debate has serious consequences but not in the way imagined by the warmers.
To quote Winston Churchill: “The whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” I do believe that Churchill was very prescient, and the perverted science he was referring to is global warming alarmism. Read story here.
By Anthony J. Sadar and Susan T. Cammarata
A climate crisis of worldwide proportions is unfolding right before our eyes, and not even the most powerful world leaders can do anything to stop it. It looks like 2009 may very well turn out to be the fourth straight year of declining global temperatures at a time when carbon dioxide levels continue to rise - the opposite of what was predicted by vaunted climate models.
Something must be done immediately to either (1) rework the temperature data so it vindicates esteemed climate visionaries, (2) come up with some scientific-sounding mumbo-jumbo as to why long-term weather doesn’t conform to authoritative proclamations or (3) simply ignore or downplay the reality hoping people don’t finally catch on that they’ve been had. Perhaps it could at least be claimed that Mother Nature is giving us a reprieve to get our collective global act together before she really lowers the boom. After all, it has worked so well in the past to say that disaster is just around the corner.
Our guess is that the crafty climate chieftains will likely use a combination of the three smoke-and-mirror strategies listed (with a smattering of “denier” bashing thrown in just for fun).
But we wonder, when will ostensibly superintelligent people learn a simple fact that even a forecast is simply a guess at the future based on past and present information? Putting a lot of sincere confidence in your prognostication does not improve its predictive power.
The confidence just helps to make more people believe your forecast. More people buy into it. More people look to you for solutions, for salvation, and the whole thing takes on a life of its own. Knowing that you can in no way know the future for something as complicated as the Earth’s climate, at some point your confidence becomes inflated to the point of arrogance - it’s unavoidable. Soon you’re pushing a confidence game. And, since many in the general public and too many of the high and mighty can look with awe or advantage at the forecasts generated by sophisticated climate models, there will be no lack of sufficient players to keep the game moving. But, before we get into overtime, consider the reality of climate forecasting.
Everyone is aware of the folly of short-term weather forecasts. And, yes we know climate and weather are not the same! So, let’s consider short-term climate forecasts. A terrific example is the official U.S. prediction for the hurricane season of 2006. In May 2006, immediately preceding the onset of the Atlantic hurricane season (and again in August 2006), arguably the best hurricane forecasters on Earth couldn’t accurately predict even simply the total number of severe storm events.
The forecast was for another season of unusually numerous events (although not expected to be on par with the record-breaking 31 events of 2005, which included 15 hurricanes). But, the forecast was a bust, with only 10 events (five hurricanes and five tropical storms) recorded. Average was closer to at least 15 events ... so much for forecasting climatic conditions better than the weekend’s weather.
If we can’t accurately predict occurrences in a small portion of the globe in the short range, what then are we to make of the substantially more complicated art of long-range global climate forecasting? We see that the Earth’s temperatures don’t seem to be playing the game by the climate-wizard’s rules. Should we begin to admit that we’re not really as smart as we or others think we are; that the tremendous complexity of climate, although better understood than in decades past, is still a long way from being confidently forecasted in decades future? Or would that be too honest?
For now, continuous falling temperatures are truly a global crisis, coming at a time when some very powerful people will soon be meeting in Copenhagen to remedy increasing temperatures. World leaders should stay home and enjoy the weather. Unless, of course, they’re not as concerned about changing climate as they are about redistributing wealth. See post here.
Anthony J. Sadar is a certified consulting meteorologist and co-author of “Environmental Risk Communication: Principles and Practices for Industry” (CRC Press/Lewis Publishers, 2000). Susan T. Cammarata is an independent environmental lawyer practicing in Pittsburgh.
By Alan Caruba
For those of us “skeptics” and “deniers” who have been jumping up and down, pointing at the Sun, and saying, “See, it’s the Sun that determines how warm or cool the Earth is. See it? Up there in the sky?” The day when the truth about some of the scientists behind the global warming hoax has finally arrived.
The hoax has its roots in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an instrument of the United Nations Environmental Program, for whom global warming was the open sesame to achieving a one-world-government by scaring nations into signing a treaty that would control their use of energy, the means of producing it, and require vast billions to be sent to less developed nations in exchange for “emitting” greenhouse gases.
Energy is called “the master resource” because, if you have lots of it, you can call your own shots. If you don’t, you are condemned to live in the dark and keeping people in the dark about the global warming hoax was essential.
For years the IPCC has been controlled by a handful of the worst liars in the world, utterly devoted to taking actual climate data and twisting it to confirm the assertion that the Earth was not only warming dramatically, but that humanity was in peril of rising oceans, melting glaciers and polar ice caps, more hurricanes, the die-off of countless animal species, and every other calamity that could possibly be attributed to “global warming”, including acne.
So, around November 20, when some enterprising individual hacked into the computers of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), making off with thousands of emails and documents that demonstrate the level of collusion and deception being practiced by its scientists.
It’s a climate hoax expose that some are calling the revelations a “little blue dress” while others are comparing it to the Pentagon Papers. It has also been dubbed “climategate.”
As James Delingpole wrote in the Telegraph, one of England’s leading newspapers, “Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organized resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more” was revealed in the 61 megabites of confidential files released on the Internet for anyone to read.
The conspirators had a visceral hatred for scientists who challenged their phony statistics and climate data, but they also agonized over the difficulties of hiding a long established climate cycle such as the Medieval Warm Period. At one point it was left out of a graph that famously became known as “the hockey stick” because it depicted a ludicrous sudden rise in warming, ignoring the previous natural cycle.
At the heart of the revelations were the intense efforts to ensure that no legitimate scientist, particularly those dissenting from the various IPCC reports, would be allowed to participate in the peer review process. Peer review is an essential element in science as it permits other scientists to examine and test the data being put forth to substantiate a new interpretation or discovery.
The IPCC reports were the basis by which popular media such as National Geographic, Time and Newsweek magazines could spread the lies about a dramatic “global warming”, passing them off to an unsuspecting and scientifically illiterate general public. At the same time, the lies were integrated them into school curriculums and maintained by Hollywood celebrities, politicians and others, duped or deliberately ignorant.
To this day, otherwise legitimate news media outlets continue to trumpet and repeat absolute nonsense about “global warming” like brain-dead parrots.
Now that Hadley CRU and its conspirators have been exposed, there truly is no need to hold a December UN climate change conference in Copenhagen; one in which nations would be required to put limits on “greenhouse gas emissions” even though such gases, primarily carbon dioxide, have nothing to do with altering the Earth’s climate.
And that is why you are going to hear more about “climate change” and far less about “global warming.” Hidden in such discussions, intended to justify legislation and regulation, is that the Earth’s climate has always and will always change.
It is, for example, shameful and deceitful for the EPA to claim carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” that should be regulated. The same applies to “cap-and-trade” legislation with the same purpose.
Billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted on studies of global warming and poured into agencies such as NASA that have lent credence to the global warming hoax.
“The U.S. taxpayer has much exposure here in the joint projects and collaborations which operated in reliance upon what the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit was doing,” says Christopher C. Horner, a longtime global warming skeptic. “There are U.S. taxpayer-funded offices and individuals involved in the machinations addressed in the emails, and in the emails themselves.” Horner, the author of “Red Hot Lies”, said that the initial revelations “give the appearance of a conspiracy to defraud, by parties working in taxpayer funded agencies collaborating on ways to misrepresent material on which an awful lot of taxpayer money rides.”
The climate, defined as long term trends, and the weather has nothing whatever to do with human activity and suggesting it does reveals the depth of contempt that people like Al Gore and his ilk have for humanity and those fleeced by purchasing “carbon credits” or paying more for electricity when their utility does.
The East Anglia CRU charlatans have been exposed. Most certainly, the United Nations IPCC should be disbanded in disgrace. It belongs in a museum of hoaxes right beside the Piltdown Man and the Loch Ness Monster. See post here. See post on Global Warming Carnon Footprint Scam here.