By Alan Caruba
The most obnoxious and hypocritical people are those who are always preaching a “greener” way of life, insisting that anything that constitutes our modern lifestyles are destroying the Earth and depleting its natural resources. Never mind that we depend upon oil, natural gas, coal, and a host of minerals and chemicals for that lifestyle, the absence of which caused people in earlier eras to live shorter, far more unpleasant lives.
Oil, other than ust an energy source is also a component in countless products, starting with plastic, and is so vital to modern life that its value goes far beyond just being able to drive our cars to visit grandma.
Greener than thou has replaced holier than thou ever since Rachel Carson penned her pernicious and seriously flawed attack on DDT and other chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides in 1962. The result has been the needless deaths of millions from malaria in Africa and subtropical nations after the U.S. banned DDT and other nations followed suit. If there was a comparable pesticide available today, the U.S. would not be suffering a biblical plague of bed bugs.
A bone fide environmentalist, David Owen, has written a book that quite literally filets environmentalism, “The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse.” ($14.00, Riverhead Press, softcover).
Owen, who has authored 14 previous books, examines the way environmentalism frequently makes no sense at all. This is not to be confused with conservation, the earlier movement that led to the preservation of some of the nation’s natural wonders.
To live an environmentally acceptable way of life is the same as striving to be a saint, avoiding “sin” in order to secure a place in heaven. It is not only virtually impossible, but to be human is to consume what Nature provides. If you think about, all of Earth’s creatures are consumers, depending on where they are on the food chain.
For example, when environmentalists convinced Congress to reduce the amount of water in toilet tanks, the only thing they accomplished was to require that the newer, smaller tanks had be flushed twice to rid he toilet of feces and urine, i.e., more use of water, not less. The EPA has just issued a ruling they claim is necessary to reduce mercury emissions despite the fact that your average volcanic eruption puts more into the atmosphere than any human imposed restrictions could ever achieve. Congress, however, passed a law banning 100-watt incandescent light bulbs, thus requiring people to purchase mercury-filled ones that, if broken, require a hazmat team to clean up after.
Environmentalism is essentially irrational.
It believes that humans actually have anything to do with “saving the Earth” when the natural forces of the Earth are so far beyond any “control” that it routinely reminds us of this fact. We have zero impact on the climate and, as for carbon dioxide, the villain of all “global warming” claims, humans exhale about six pounds of it every day. And there are seven billion of us. Even so, it constitutes barely 0.033 percent of the atmosphere.
Owen begins by posing the question, “How do we truly begin to think about less - less fossil fuel, less carbon, less water, less waste, less habitat destruction, less population stress - when our sense of economic, cultural, and personal well-being is based on more?”
The real question at the heart of all environmentalism is what do we do when there are seven billion humans using the resources of the Earth and the real answer for environmentalists is how do we reduce the Earth’s population and how do they grow rich in the process? That is what lies at the heart of all the “solutions” put forth by the United Nations environmental program; an enemy of the human race if there ever was one.
What environmentalists want is “a vast, unprecedented transformation of human behavior in our relationship with energy and consumption.” The next time you hear anyone call for a “transformation” know also that they are a charlatan seeking control over your life.
The environmental assumption is that the Earth is running out of the sources of energy and that consumption is bad. Both are equally wrong because the Earth is not running out of the sources of energy and consumption is what humans and all other species on Earth do every day.
Owen believes that humans are “the world’s main emitter of manmade greenhouse gases” and this is utterly false. The so-called greenhouse gases are the ones in the atmosphere that not only keep the Sun from turning the Earth into a desiccated version of Mars or the Moon, but in the case of carbon dioxide, it is responsible for every single element of vegetation upon which all life depends.
Owen and many environmentalists would prefer that all of humanity live packed side-by-side in crowded cities, using mass transit or bicycling to work to save the Earth, but anyone who gives two thoughts to the amount of energy consumed to maintain a city knows this too is yet another idiotic environmental conceit.
Indeed, Owen notes that “There are many downsides to density, including the fact that squeezing people and their destinations close together makes diseases, wars, and natural disasters more efficient, too.”
That, says Owen, is a conundrum. Indeed, his book is filled with environmental conundrums that he tries to resolve while overtly and inadvertently exposing the idiocy of environmentalism.
Simply put, farmers are the world’s natural environmentalists, relying on the weather - which they cannot control - and the stewardship of their land to feed themselves and others. They must, however, have a means to move their crops to places where other humans can acquire them and that requires a massive system of transportation which, in turn, requires the affordable use of energy.
Environmentalism’s goals, clean air and water, are laudable, but a massive governmental bureaucracy to require that people use less energy and consume less is not.
Time and time again we see examples of environmentalism that only manage to kill people, whether it is the banning of beneficial chemicals or the use of the least efficient forms of electrical power, wind and solar energy.
The least reported story out of Europe these days is the extreme cold that is literally killing people because it puts the lie to all the environmental “solutions” advanced since the 1960s. Environmentalism has been decried as a religion and, for those who want to deny a greater power, Nature or God, it remains their holy grail.
Posted by Jeff Condon on February 16, 2012
I suppose I’m old enough not to be surprised by the behavior of the media anymore, but this garbage coverage of the Heartland scandal has done it again. The media has flatly ignored that the point of the funding for SKEPTICS was to put the temperature data on line. That’s it!! Put it up where people without a computer background can plot it, see it and understand it. How is that nefarious or anti-science in any way?
I’ll answer - it isn’t!
You don’t have to wonder why blogs exist and why Fox News is taking over the news market. People want information, not distortions. Every article I run across has the same tone, the same ‘gotcha’ punch lines about skeptics and the poor naive scientists who were misrepresented in Climategate. They feed this garbage to the public in droves and wonder why their ad revenues drop like stones. It isn’t the paper or internet which is killing the media, it is what they put on it.
So when it is shown that the ‘primary’ leaked Heartland document with the main message is a complete forgery, where are the media reporters now? Where are the retractions? How about a simple investigation of the headers?
In the same place that the nefarious act of publishing the NOAA temperature data is. In the circular bin or the janitorial closet of the New York Times where it won’t see the light of day. There is no need to apologize to conservative goups after all, only to groups that push the correct politics like Media Matters or GreenPeace.
Even though I am regularly disappointed with the biased media coverage of things like Climategate, this time the unprofessional behavior is pretty special. They are only attacking the report because a small amount of money is being donated to a climate skeptic blogger who just happens to be a weather professional!! There is no attempt by the media to recognize that the money was to be put to use to place the primary data, the temperature data so central to the AGW message, on line. Any motivation on the part of the individual after that should be moot. The media and propaganda blogs like DeSmog should be proud to have the dataset on line and pleased that Heartland would invest that money for the common good.
We all should recognize that putting the information on line in a usable fashion, is a strongly pro-science endeavor.
When we read media articles about skeptics, they typically paint us as though we are non-technical, uninformed and motivated by our politics over our minds. “Skeptics need to get real, and do something about climate”, they say. This is despite the in-your-face reality that the IPCC represents exactly those political qualities. The truth is that most of us are technical people from other fields who like to discuss the details of the data and many have realized that there just isn’t much to be alarmed about! Climate Science has failed to alarm us. We are chemists, engineers, programmers, physicists, astronomers, medical professionals, meteorologists, statisticians and even climate scientists. We are not the ones who are uninformed in the debate, we are the ones who are qualified to read the science and where appropriate - disagree. Since we are unfunded by the government for climate and often better statisticians, I would even say we are more qualified to judge the science than those embroiled in the highly funded political morass of “getting the world to do something”. See Real Climate blog for a perfect example of the politics behind climate science.
We read articles from advocate media every day. They are very consistent, and very wrong about people like Anthony Watts. Not much exposes the bias of Climate Science than the media-wide unabashed smear campaign against him for doing the right thing with data.
I guess I’m still not so jaded that I cannot be surprised. They keep working on it though.
By Paul Driessen and Willie Soon
In December 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency released new Clean Air Act “National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants.” Once again, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson touted the supposedly huge benefits of controlling emissions of mercury (Hg) and other air toxics from U.S. coal- and oil-fired power plants (or electric generating units, EGUs).
The people of Idaho may welcome this new rule, since EPA’s miraculous modeling machine has promised to prevent “six premature deaths” and create “up to $54 million” in health benefits by 2016 - even though not one coal-fired EGU in Idaho fits the EPA’s final rules. Even the District of Columbia, which has only one oil-fired unit, will somehow, magically realize “up to $120 million” in health benefits, presumably from new restrictions on coal-fired units in Maryland or Virginia.
The average U.S. citizen, however, can be excused for no longer being willing to be penalized by EPA - the Extreme Punishment Authority - for such minimal, imaginary and manufactured benefits.
In fact, the final rule may be the most expensive one ever devised by EPA. And yet, even EPA admits, the alleged “hazards to public health” from mercury and non-mercury emissions from American EGUs are “anticipated to remain after imposition” of the new regulations.
As to benefits, EPA computer models claim Hg emission cuts will reduce average per person “avoided IQ loss” by an undetectable “0.00209 IQ points,” with estimated “total nationwide benefits” of $500,000 to $6.1 million by 2016. For the electric utility sector, says EPA, net job creation from the rules will be “not statistically different from zero” and could be between minus 15,000 and plus 30,000 jobs.
In fact, the new regulations will likely eliminate tens of thousands of jobs annually, especially in energy-intensive industries that rely on low-cost electricity to survive and face growing competition from foreign companies that pay far less for energy, labor and raw materials. Small businesses will also get hammered.
“EPA cannot certify that there will be no SISNOSE from this rule,” the agency admits. “SISNOSE” is EPA-speak for “significant impacts on a substantial number of small entities.” In other words, the rules are likely to inflict significant economic harm on small businesses, and thus on the health and welfare of numerous (former) small business owners, employees and families. The agency failed to explain why it has once again ignored the adverse impacts on human health and welfare caused by its rules.
EPA also confessed that U.S. power plants actually contribute a mere 3% of the total mercury deposited in computer-modeled American watersheds, and thus in fish tissue. Citizens will justifiably wonder where the other 97% comes from, and why we should spend so much money for so little benefit. (The “missing” mercury comes from foreign sources and from volcanoes, subsea vents and other natural sources.)
To see how extreme EPA’s scenarios are, consider five more egregious errors in the final regulations. First, EPA admitted it could “calculate risk” for only 3,100 (4%) of the continental USA’s 88,000 watersheds.
Second, for over 60% of the 3,100 watersheds it did model, EPA took only one or two fish mercury measurements - making it virtually impossible to adopt even valid 75th-percentile fish mercury values. There is a breaking point where extremely poor statistical sampling renders EPA’s pretentious number crunching, conclusions and rules invalid. That breaking point has clearly been reached.
Third, the agency’s estimates for mercury exposure risks are solely for “hypothetical female subsistence consumers” who daily eat almost a pound of fish that they themselves catch in U.S. streams, rivers, and lakes over a 70-year lifetime. That’s less than 1% of U.S. women. For the rest of American women (who eat mostly ocean fish, purchased at a grocery, on a far less regular basis), EPA’s rules are irrelevant.
Fourth, EPA admits that only 22 to 29% of its computer-modeled watersheds are “at risk” from EGU mercury, even when it erroneously assumed that at least 5% of total Hg deposition into the watersheds came from U.S. power plants. If the modeling criteria were tweaked only slightly - to reflect average freshwater fish consumption rates for American women, and require that at least 15% of total mercury deposition be attributable to EGUs - not one U.S. watershed would be at risk.
Finally, EPA ignores the presence of selenium in nearly all fish. Its strong attraction to mercury molecules protects fish and people against buildups of methylmercury (MeHg), mercury’s biologically active and more toxic form.
Combining any series of small probability scenarios results in a near-zero likelihood that the events will actually happen. If each of five scenarios has only a 20% chance of happening, the likelihood that all five will happen is 0.032 percent.
As the preceding analysis suggests, the probability that all the EPA’s improbable scenarios will actually happen is virtually zero; the likelihood that its new regulations will benefit human health is also zero.
However, EPA still stubbornly “disagrees that [mercury] exposure levels in the U.S. are lower than those in the Faroe Islands.” Exposure to MeHg in the U.S. is “the same” as in the Faroe Islands, EPA insists.
The agency is simply wrong.
Extensive medical and scientific studies demonstrate that average Americans are exposed to at least 5 to 10 times less MeHg than average Faroe Islanders. The islanders consume large quantities of pilot whale meat and blubber - which is high in methylmercury, high in PCBs and low in selenium. As a result, their blood mercury concentrations can be up to 350 times higher than the mean blood mercury levels measured by the Centers for Disease Control for average American women.
The Faroe Islands study is irrelevant to mercury exposure risk for average Americans. EPA’s use of that study is deceptive. American women and children are safe from any likely threats from mercury.
To top it off, EPA itself proclaims: “The emissions limits in today’s rule are technology-based...and do not need to be justified based on their ability to protect public health.”
In other words, if the technology exists to eliminate these pollutants, the agency will impose the new regulations - regardless of their cost, their effect on electricity prices and reliability, their impact on factory and other jobs, and whether the rules actually do little or nothing to improve human health.
It has become increasingly obvious that EPA’s real goal is to assert its authority over ever-increasing segments of our economy; reinterpret medical and scientific studies to fit its regulatory agenda; and replace as many coal-fired power plants as possible with costly, unreliable renewable energy systems.
American voters, elected officials and courts need to challenge these radical, unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, demand an end to EPA’s distortion of science and reality - and reverse these flawed rules.
By Matt Patterson
Special to the Examiner.
Earth is not warming. According to Big Green enviros, only Luddites and lunatics would believe such a ludicrous statement.
Hadley 15 year global temperature pliot Enlarged
And this from Dr. Roy Spencer:
The global average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly for January, 2012 took a precipitous plunge, not totally unexpected for a La Nina January (click here for the full-size version):
The 3rd order polynomial fit to the data (courtesy of Excel) is for entertainment purposes only, and should not be construed as having any predictive value whatsoever.
Here are the monthly stats:
YR MON GLOBAL NH SH TROPICS
2011 1 -0.010 -0.055 +0.036 -0.372
2011 2 -0.020 -0.042 +0.002 -0.348
2011 3 -0.101 -0.073 -0.128 -0.342
2011 4 +0.117 +0.195 +0.039 -0.229
2011 5 +0.133 +0.145 +0.121 -0.043
2011 6 +0.315 +0.379 +0.250 +0.233
2011 7 +0.374 +0.344 +0.404 +0.204
2011 8 +0.327 +0.321 +0.332 +0.155
2011 9 +0.289 +0.304 +0.274 +0.178
2011 10 +0.116 +0.169 +0.062 -0.054
2011 11 +0.123 +0.075 +0.170 +0.024
2011 12 +0.126 +0.197 +0.055 +0.041
2012 01 -0.093 -0.059 -0.127 -0.138
Progress continues on Version 6 of our global temperature dataset. You can anticipate a little cooler anomalies than recently reported, maybe by a few hundredths of a degree, due to a small warming drift we have identified in one of the satellites carrying the AMSU instruments.
Well, now government scientists must be added to the long list of the so addled. Here it is, straight from the (high tech) horse’s mouth, a new report from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies titled “Global Temperature in 2011, Trends, and Prospects:”
“Global temperature in 2011 was lower than in 1998.”
But don’t worry. Even as climate scientists—and an ever-gullible media—are forced by new data to admit that the Earth is not warming, they take pains to assure us that the Earth is still warming.
The Associated Press was typical in its contortions, as in this Jan. 20 statement: “The world last year wasn’t quite as warm as it has been for most of the past decade, government scientists said Thursday, but it continues a general trend of rising temperatures.”
Not as warm, but still a “general trend” of rising temperatures. Got that? No? Well, don’t worry. The high priests of warming have apparently assumed a plane far above our mere mortal logic.
Besides, it all depends on how you define “trend,” doesn’t it? If you go far enough back, you can prove any trend you like about global temperatures. If you start at about 650 million years ago, when the Earth was covered pole to pole in ice, you can say current data show we are in a “general trend” of rising temperatures. If you go back to 1998, not so much.
It is cute, in a pathetic kind of way, to watch the global warming cult try and fudge and spin this fact like nobody’s business. Here’s another hilarious example, from the same AP story:
“‘It would be premature to make any conclusion that we would see any hiatus of the longer-term warming trend,’ said Tom Karl, director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center. ‘Global temperatures are continuing to increase.’”
Yes, it would be premature to draw a conclusion (that global warming is not happening) based on current data (that global temps are lower today than in 1998). That’s what we foolish mortals do.
Government scientists, and the functionaries and bureaucrats they serve, however, know better. Aren’t we lucky?
In another sickening example, NASA scientists admit that while the new data is “suggestive of a slowdown in global warming, this apparent slowdown may largely disappear as a few more years of data are added.”
An apparent slowdown that may disappear. Talk about covering your bases. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.
One can understand this disappointment. Lucrative climate-scaremongering careers are at stake. So it is no surprise that many cling to the hope that maybe we will burn up after all, that maybe this new data is just a fluke, a blip, a natural respite from man’s descent into an unnatural global conflagration.
The truth is this: There is no such thing as an “average” global temperature. The history of our planet is a history of wildly fluctuating temperatures, locally and globally, from season to season, century to century, epoch to epoch.
Only a generation as narcissistic as the baby boomers would assume that the temperature they were accustomed to as they came of age in the mid-20th century is the “correct” or “average” global temperature, which must be maintained in perpetuity no matter the costs.
Again, from NASA: “Global temperature in 2011 was lower than in 1998.” Now there’s an inconvenient truth for you.
Matt Patterson is the Warren Brookes fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and senior editor at the Capital Research Center.
By Michael A Lewis
Some one or some organization is attempting to influence the upcoming annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society (AMS).
According to Urging American Meteorological Society to Get Tougher on Climate Change, a program called Forecast the Facts is attempting to lobby the AMS to change their 5-year policy on climate change to a new policy “drafted by a panel of [unidentified] experts” (emphasis added). The “Campaign Director” is identified as Daniel Souweine.
The Forecast the Facts web site turns out to be a product of “Citizen Engagement Laboratory (CEL).”
And who is the Chief of Staff of CEL? You guessed it: Daniel Souweine.
The web site describes CEL as: “a non-profit, non-partisan organization that uses digital media and technology to amplify the voices of underrepresented constituencies. We seek to empower individuals to take collective action on the issues that concern them, promoting a world of greater equality and justice in the process.”
The CEL web site lists 350.org as a “Partner,” which describes itself as: “building a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis. Our online campaigns, grassroots organizing, and mass public actions are led from the bottom up by thousands of volunteer organizers in over 188 countries.”
Sounds like birds of a feather, even though they are both attempting to lobby a major national organization to change a policy that affects all of its members… from the top down. Hardly grass roots organization. And hardly on behalf of “underrepresented constituencies.”
Evidently, grassroots meteorologists are insufficiently toeing the line when it comes to laying weather patterns at the feet of “global warming.” Someone unnamed wants them to publicly join the global warming bandwagon in blaming human CO2 emissions for observed climate change, ignoring the uncertainty of climate science, ignoring all evidence to the contrary, insisting on one single simplistic explanation for climate change.
TeeVee weather presenters, even those who are qualified meteorologists, are the most visible source of public information about weather and climate. They appear daily to billions of people, and whether or not it is a good idea, their “opinions” about climate change carry a lot of weight in popular culture. It’s no wonder that those whose interests are served by spreading fear of climate change in support of a predetermined economic outcome are after these “grass roots” who fail to tremble in fear of natural climate phenomena.
This is not grass roots, this is Big Money come to the service of shadowy figures in the background of international politics and economics. Who profits from fear of climate change? Who is funding this program to gag independent meteorologists and TeeVee weather presenters?
This is part of a concerted behind-the-scenes program funded by monied interests to subvert all elements of environmental awareness and activism to the cause of money and power, political and economic influence. Global warming hyperbole has been used to discredit free-thinking, independent scientific research, free expression, free thought and free action. The individuals and corporations funding this movement are laying the ground work for society controlled by corporate-government-military oligarchies to maintain the economic and political status quo.
Follow the money…
Jean Chemnick, E&E reporter
A campaign starting this weekend will urge meteorologists to cite man-made climate change when they report on strong storms and flooding.
“Forecast the Facts” - a campaign by the League of Conservation Voters, 350.org and Citizen Engagement Lab—aims to persuade the American Meteorological Society to adopt an official position linking higher instance of extreme weather events to emissions of heat-trapping gases.
The groups will deliver petitions to the society next week during its annual meeting in New Orleans.
The campaign ultimately hopes to persuade weather forecasters to discuss climate change when they report on the weather, campaign director Daniel Souweine said.
“The aim of the campaign is really to shift how TV meteorologists report on climate change,” he said.
Meteorologists usually don’t mention man-made climate change in reports on extreme weather, the activists say, even though many scientists say human emissions are making those events more common.
Souweine said many TV weather forecasters doubt climate change is occurring or that it’s linked to human activities.
A survey by George Mason University found 26 percent of meteorologists believe man-made climate change is “a scam.” Seventy-eight percent of respondents said reporters should provide “balance” when discussing climate change, treating it as a political issue, and two-thirds said weather broadcasts are not an appropriate place to discuss the issue.
Souweine said meteorologists should begin reporting that climate change is a scientific consensus, even though he acknowledges that no individual storm or drought can be linked to the phenomenon.
“We think it’s important to tell their viewers what is behind those phenomenon,” he said. “We think that is actually their professional responsibility.”
AMS did not immediately return calls for comment. PDF with comments.
And SEPP reports: New Tactics: Global warming alarmists have taken a new tactic in their efforts to brand global warming skeptics as anti-science. Skeptics, such as SEPP, insist that climate change is natural and normal and that the UN IPCC has failed to produce rigorous scientific research demonstrating that carbon dioxide emissions are causing unprecedented and dangerous global warming. The models used failed to predict current temperature trends, thus the results are nothing but speculation.
In an effort to distort issues, organizations such as the self-styled National Center for Science Education (NCSE) are attempting to lump skepticism about global warming with skepticism about evolution. The subjects are separate and distinct, and any rational discussion needs to separate them. To SEPP, this is but one more example how desperate the global warming alarmists have become over their failure to conduct the necessary research.
The web site of NCSE states: “To ensure the accuracy of the models at projecting future climate trends, the models are often run backwards in time to “retrodict” past climate changes, and then compared with paleoclimate observations. The models through this process have become remarkably accurate and give the climate research community confidence that the future projections are robust.” [Boldface added.] The climate models are failing the most critical test - the ability to predict the current temperature trend of no increase. Please see links under ”Expanding the Orthodoxy.”
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False Positives: No matter how scrupulously conducted, sometimes studies will produce a false positive by sheer random chance. There is no way of knowing when this will occur. As reader Tom Sheahen pointed out, Judith Curry had an interesting post on false positives on her web site, linked in TWTW last week and this week.
To help assure that false positives do not enter into government policy requires demanding repetitive, rigorous, transparent studies. Of course, this is of little use when agencies, such as the EPA in its new mercury rules, pick and choose the studies they wish to use and discard the rest without written justification. Please see link under “Seeking a Common Ground.”
James Taylor, Forbes
As 2011 comes to a close, climate science celebrates an important landmark. It has now been 33 years, or a third of a century, since sensors aboard NASA and NOAA satellites began measuring temperatures throughout the earth’s lower atmosphere.
For 33 years, we have had precise, objective temperature data that do not require guesswork corrections to compensate for uneven thermometer placement and non-climate surface temperature biases such as expanding urban heat islands and land-use changes. The satellite data, moreover, tell us the earth is warming at a more modest, gradual, and reassuring pace than was foretold by United Nations computer models.
The satellite sensors became operational at a time that is very convenient for those who believe humans are causing a global warming crisis. Global temperatures declined from the mid-1940s through the late 1970s. As a result, the sensors coincidentally began measuring global temperatures at the very beginning of our most recent global warming trend. Had the sensors been in place 33 years earlier, during the 1940s, the overall pace of warming shown by the satellite sensors would be less than half what is shown by the post-1978 temperature data.
Even so, the measured temperature trend is quite modest. John Christy, who along with Roy Spencer oversees the NASA satellite sensor program, reports temperatures have warmed at an average pace of 0.14 degrees Celsius per decade since the satellite sensors became operational. This is merely half the pace predicted by computer models utilized by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Christy appears to be making a generous concession regarding the warming that has occurred. The temperature data seem to show warming closer to 0.3 degrees over the 33 year period, or 0.09 degrees Celsius per decade. But why quibble over the difference? A warming of 0.14 degrees per decade, or 1.4 degrees per century, is still significantly less than predicted by UN climate models and far from an impending global warming crisis.
Importantly, the satellite sensors show less warming in the lower troposphere (approximately 10,000 feet above the earth’s surface) than is reported by surface temperature readings. Global warming theory holds that one of the fingerprints of human-induced global warming is more rapid warming in the lower troposphere than at the surface. The reason for this is carbon dioxide molecules reside in the lower troposphere and have their greatest heat-trapping effect there.
As a result, if global temperatures are rising as a result of human carbon dioxide emissions, the satellite sensors should report more warming in the lower troposphere than is actually occurring at the surface. In essence the satellite sensors should report a warming trend somewhat more severe than is actually occurring at the surface of the earth.
Surface temperature measurements, however, indicate more rapid warming at the surface of the earth than in the lower troposphere. According to James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute, temperatures at the surface of the earth rose twice as fast during the past 33 years as the satellite data show. Surface temperatures compiled by the UK’s University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit reflect a similar warming trend.
With temperature data indicating more warming at the earth’s surface than in the earth’s lower troposphere, one of the following must be true: (1) the surface temperature data is more corrupted by heat biases such as expanding urban heat islands and localized land-use changes than the IPCC admits, (2) the warming of the past 33 years is primarily the result of factors other than greenhouse gas emissions, or (3) longstanding, widely believed assumptions about greenhouse gas theory are wrong.
Regardless of which one or more of the three options are true, the satellite sensors have contributed greatly to our scientific understanding of the earth’s ever-changing climate. Thirty-three years and counting, we rightly celebrate the scientific advances provided by satellite temperature sensors.
Terence Corcoran, Financial Post
Never before has a Canadian politician challenged the hitherto saintly protectors of the environment in such direct language
Through most of 2011, Canadian energy officials in politics and industry watched with bewildered helplessness and some shock as Washington allowed environmentalists to seize control of TransCanada’s $7-billion Keystone XL pipeline issue. They stood by aghast as President Barack Obama, a captive of U.S. green activists and Hollywood movie stars, caved in to political pressure and postponed a decision to approve the project, a potential economic bonanza that promised to deliver thousands of jobs to Americans and billions of barrels of Canadian oil sands production to Texas.
No such green hijacking is going to take place in Canada, at least not without an official fight. On the eve of hearings, which begin Tuesday in Kitimat, B.C., into the $5.5-billion Northern Gateway pipeline - to carry the same oil sands production from Alberta to the West Coast and on to China - the Harper government clearly aims to do what Barack Obama cannot or will not do in America, namely stand up to the growth-killing professional green movement. See more here.
Wind Power: Unreliable, Costly & Ineffective
Europe’s focus on wind power is crippling British energy users with additional costs as it is not a cost-effective way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, a report has found.
The EU has directed governments to generate 15 per cent of energy from renewable sources by 2020, leading many to focus on wind. But wind power is unreliable and requires back-up gas power stations to maintain a consistent electricity supply, the Civitas think-tank study found.
It means energy users pay twice - once for the ‘window-dressing’ of renewables and again for fossil fuels the energy sector continues to rely on. The study, written by economist Ruth Lea, uses Government-commissioned estimates of the cost of electricity generation to calculate the most cost-effective technologies.
Gas-fired power is the most cost-effective in the short term, while nuclear power stations become the most cost-efficient in the medium term, more than twice as cost-effective as wind. The report concludes: ‘Wind power is expensive and yet is not effective in cutting CO2 emissions.
‘If it were not for the renewables targets, wind power would not even be entertained as a cost-effective way of generating electricity or cutting emissions. The renewables target should be renegotiated with the EU.’
The study attacks Government claims that wind power is one of the more cost-effective means of generating power. In fact, it says, it is ‘unreliable and requires conventional back-up capacity’.
The report also says wind power, backed by conventional gas-fired generation, can emit more CO2 than the most effective gas turbines running alone.