The first time Li Gengxuan saw the dump trucks from the nearby factory pull into his village, he couldn’t believe what happened. Stopping between the cornfields and the primary school playground, the workers dumped buckets of bubbling white liquid onto the ground. Then they turned around and drove right back through the gates of their compound without a word. This ritual has been going on almost every day for nine months, Li and other villagers said.

In China, a country buckling with the breakneck pace of its industrial growth, such stories of environmental pollution are not uncommon. But the Luoyang Zhonggui High-Technology Co., here in the central plains of Henan Province near the Yellow River, stands out for one reason: It’s a green energy company, producing polysilicon destined for solar energy panels sold around the world. But the byproduct of polysilicon production—silicon tetrachloride—is a highly toxic substance that poses environmental hazards. “The land where you dump or bury it will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in the place. . . . It is like dynamite—it is poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it,” said Ren Bingyan, a professor at the School of Material Sciences at Hebei Industrial University.

The situation in Li’s village points to the environmental trade-offs the world is making as it races to head off a dwindling supply of fossil fuels. Forests are being cleared to grow biofuels like palm oil, but scientists argue that the disappearance of such huge swaths of forests is contributing to climate change. Hydropower dams are being constructed to replace coal-fired power plants, but they are submerging whole ecosystems under water.

The latest impact piece you’ll never read or view in the suffocating liberal media is the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change that just concluded in New York City. On Feb. 12 noted doomsayer Jim Martin, executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, told the Denver Post, “You could have a convention of all scientists who dispute climate change in a relatively small phone booth.” Jim’s prediction was about as close as the coming ice age his cronies forecasted in the 1970s. More than 200 climate and environmental scientists from Australia, Canada, England, Poland, France, Hungary, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden and the United States attended the three-day conference in New York. They were joined by environmental authorities from Harvard, The Institute Pasteur in Paris, Johns Hopkins, the Universities of Virginia, Alabama, Arizona State and many other fine universities. “The alarmists in the global warming debate have had their say over and over again in every newspaper in the country every day,” said conference host Joseph Bast of the Heartland Institute. “They’ve been seen in countless news reports and documentary films. They have totally dominated the media’s coverage of this issue. They have swayed the view of many people, and many of them have gotten very rich in the process.” Bast pointed out many scientists appeared, despite the potential loss of research grants, tenure, and the ability to get published in the future. Many even dared to speak out vehemently against what they consider “the mass delusion of our time.” “We are not in this for money,” he continued. “The scientists with us today have been published thousands of times in the world’s leading scientific journals. They deserve to be heard.”

Nobel Prize, Emmy and Academy Awards winner Al Gore was asked to participate, and he declined. Likely he was jetting off somewhere to tell followers they need to be riding bikes to work. Incidentally, isn’t it interesting that a group of Norwegian socialists select the Peace Prize winner each year, and past nominees included Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini? “The claim that global warming is a ‘crisis’ is itself a theory,” said Bast. “It can be falsified by scientific fact just as the claim that there is a ‘consensus’ that global warming is man-made has been disproved by the fact that this conference is being held.” Is global warming a crisis, as we’ve been told so often by media, politicians and environmental activists? Or is it moderate, mostly natural and unstoppable, as we are told by distinguished scientists who are not looking to make billions peddling carbon offsets? Doesn’t it seem logical that both sides have a right to be heard? Read more here.

One of the biggest concerns of media analysts and press watchers is the brainwashing effect bad reporting has on the public. No finer example of this propagandist power exists than with the liberal bogeyman known as global warming, for the constant climate alarmism being spewed 24 yours a day, seven days a week has tremendously and demonstrably impacted the views of the citizenry. Of course, that’s the goal.

Consider the following e-mail message I received this morning from someone that appears to work for the government of Ontario, Canada: What are you, retarded? Global warming = MORE snowfall. Not less.
Meaning snowfall records will be broken. What set this man off to send such an e-mail message to a perfect stranger? This article from last Thursday addressing the record snowfall around the country.

Photo courtesy of Ric Werme, Penacook, NH

Sadly, what this angry reader clearly missed was that the piece was a response to all those hysterical press proclamations last year that global warming would significantly reduce snowfall around the world resulting in huge financial losses to ski resorts and winter vacation homeowners.

Alas, poor reading comprehension on the part of the citizenry—even those in neighboring countries—might be our least concern in this situation. What should scare us all much more is the idea that the propaganda attack regarding this issue is so effective that folks will blame every weather-related event—even record snowfall!—on global warming. The fear-mongering is working, ladies and gentlemen. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Read more here.

When Christopher Monckton, who served as a special adviser to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, ponders the current political push to curb greenhouse gases linked to climate change, he thinks of King Canute. According to Monckton, Canute—the Viking who ruled England along with much of Scandinavia nearly a thousand years ago—took his courtiers to the ocean’s edge one day, set down his throne and ordered the tide not to come in. The tide, of course, came in, and the king got his feet wet. The lesson? The king taught his advisers “humility,” Monckton said, by showing them that even he, a king, could not control nature. In the same way, he argued, modern-day politicians should not fool themselves into thinking that humanity is having a big impact on climate.

Monckton, along with other high-profile global warming skeptics such as University of Virginia professor emeritus S. Fred Singer and Virginia state climatologist Patrick J. Michaels, are gathered in New York this week for a conference aimed at challenging the idea that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank funded by energy and health-care corporations as well as conservative foundations and individuals, the 2 1/2 -day session poses a stark contrast to the near-unanimous chorus of concern expressed by top U.S. politicians and most of the scientific mainstream.

Several climate scientists and environmental advocates poked fun at the meeting. Frank O’Donnell, who heads the watchdog group Clean Air Watch, said the conference “looks like the climate equivalent of Custer’s last stand. They seem to have tried to find every last skeptic on Earth and put them in one hotel off Broadway.” Read more here

Icecap Note: the ad hominem attacks by the environmental groups and alarmist professors like Michael Oppenheimer (formerly with the Environmental Defense Fund) in this story about this gathering were predictable as they have the most to lose from their hoax being exposed. You will never see them argue the science because the science is not on their side. I can say with certainty that this group is just the tip of the iceberg of what I believe is really a silent majority of scientists in this and allied fields, and teachers and politicians who don’t buy into the alarmist hype but who can’t speak out because their jobs will be threatened. I get hundreds of emails from these people expressing great frustration and thanking ICECAP and for other internet sites you see often referenced and linked to here for providing a beacon to the truth on this issue. We will not be right on every point and in fact not everyone at the conference, which by the way included numerous IPCC reviewers, agrees on every point. That is what standard practice should be in science. Now it is polluted by greed and power. The grant toting alarmists and environmental groups raking in billions of dollars have hijacked the science. Let us hope if the natural cyclical cooling that we believe is more likely than a resumption of warming takes place in the next few decades, that these people are held accountable for their action and the harm they might do to the economy and the good and hard working people of this nation and the world.

Hundreds of skeptics in the global-warming debate are convening in New York today and tomorrow. The meeting, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, is an assortment of climate scientists, economists and free-market think-tankers - some who have impressive credentials, some of whom are listed in the conference program simply as “Scientist” or “Meteorologist.” Sorting out the wheat from the chaff will not be easy, but here’s one way to start: Check out this report being presented at the conference today.

It’s a critique of the report last year from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This new report, which accuses the I.P.C.C. of “errors and misstatements,” is from a group of scientists calling itself the N.I.P.C.C. - the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. The report was edited by S. Fred Singer, a professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. It comes with an introduction from Frederick Seitz, a physicist and past president of the National Academy of Sciences and of Rockefeller University, who writes that the report shows “we do not currently have any convincing evidence or observations of significant climate change from other than natural causes.”

That conclusion, of course, is hardly the majority view among scientists who study this issue. But what, specifically, is wrong in this new report? What’s right in it? I welcome substantive comments - by which I don’t mean denunciations of “deniers” or “ecoNazis,” or lazy ad hominem attacks and conspiracy theories about who’s being paid off by whom. Let’s stick to the science, or lack thereof, in this particular critique. There are plenty of specific claims and charts to analyze. Have the authors identified genuine problems in the I.P.C.C. report, or are they cherry-picking data? See story here.

Once again, for the umpteenth time this month, I arrive at work soaking wet. Just getting from the car to the front door of the Mises Institute is like going through the rinse cycle - and umbrellas just aren’t my thing. What’s striking is how this weather pattern follows a year of dire warnings from government officials about the deadly drought that is destroying the region, as you can easily see from the government’s own US Drought Assessment maps. Actually, these are interesting maps. They give the impression that the whole of the nation is a parched land that vacillates between persistent drought and improving droughts. Nowhere is listed as “soaked” or “just the right amount of rain.” And if you reflect on government announcements of these things, all places seem to fall into one of three categories: catastrophic flooding, catastrophic drought, or forgettable.

Some years ago, the head of the local bureaucracy in charge of the distribution of water was quoted in the newspaper along these lines: “If these conditions persist, rationing will certainly become necessary.” If these conditions persist? That’s quite the assumption. We could say during the next rainfall: “If these conditions persist, it will become necessary for everyone to build an ark.” Conditions never persist. They change. Bureaucrats really hate that. One suspects that these same people love droughts. Droughts give them power, not just over the aggregate use of water. They enjoy pressing people on the smallest details of life. They get to tell you that you must take short showers. They tell you that you must flush less. They impose a profound sense of guilt on your for watering the basil growing in your window box.

Droughts can turn the most innocent public employee into the moral equivalent of a Gestapo agent, issuing dictates and imposing fines, ferreting out the water thieves, all in the name of the public interest. Droughts turn neighbor against neighbor, and force the whole of everyone into the criminal class, reduced to sneaking around at night to water tomato plants. Droughts make everyone feel dependent on the state. We must read their rules, such as, “Even-numbered houses may water their lawns from 4am to 6am, Monday, Thursday, and Sunday.” So rain, rain, go away. That’s their theme. Read more here.

There’s snow in Baghdad, and global temperatures have seen their biggest one-year change - in this case, downward - in recorded history. So is global warming kaput?  It’s cooler outside the beltway. Cooler weather has the blogosphere alight with speculation about the climate’s real changes. Short-term temperature moves fire up both camps. From Planet Gore: “Hopefully this will cool the hysteria in the U.S. Congress and parliaments around the world so that we can understand the science of our climate before we pursue policies that could wreck our economy and quality of life.” Environmental Defense says one month does not a trend make: “Global warming is a process that occurs over decades. It can’t be proven or disproven by a single month’s temperature.”

There are theories for all tastes. Daily Tech started it all, arguing that last year’s nippy weather “wipes out a century of warming.” Energy Outlook pored through the data and points at the sea. Maybe it’s the sun? Environmental Economics did the heavy lifting, parsed all the sunspot data from Goddard, and concluded that’s not to blame: “The current downturn in temperatures may be caused by a valley in the sunspot cycle. But that doesn’t mean that global cooling is taking place. It just means that temperatures are likely to be more variable until sunspot activity increases again.”

Whether it’s sunspots, La Nina, or something else altogether, the timing couldn’t be better for the Heartland Institute, set to host a global warming skeptics powow Monday on Broadway. Friends in high places? Read more here.

Climate change could be the problem. Under climate theory, as we know, all weather can be explained as part of the global-warming scare. Extreme weather events, such as frost on the Nile or wherever, are exactly the kind of weather developments we should expect from global warming. If it gets really cold suddenly, that’s because of global warming. This explanation was offered up by a World Meteorological Organization official on CBC Radio. How cold is it? It’s so cold it’s getting hotter. Above all, however, under no circumstances are we ever to begin to think that evidence of a cooler climate or colder weather (different things) are a sign that the great climate change theories of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore might be weak or even wrong.

As reassurance on this, on Wednesday night CBC Television’s The National brought in Andrew Weaver, of the University of Victoria and a lead author on IPCC reports, for the following exchange with reporter Kelly Crowe, introduced by host Peter Mansbridge: Crowe:  “It’s a question Andrew Weaver hears all the time as a climatologist and a lead author on the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” Weaver: “It’s always fascinating when we have a cold snap or a cold-weather event that everybody suddenly believes that global warming has somehow gone away.” So there’s Mr. Weaver decrying the ignorance of people who might suspect that when it gets cold outside it might mean something more than the mere fact that it’s getting cold. But then, a few minutes later, Mr. Weaver makes the same assumption in the other direction: Crowe Even as we shiver through this winter, there is mounting evidence of climate change. Weaver:  “Whether it be through temperature, sea ice melting much more rapidly than we thought before, precipitation extremes, increased likelihood of drought, you know, pine-beetle infestation, forest fires and on and on and on and go.” So when it gets hot or when pine beetles infest forests, that’s a sign of man-made climate change. But if it gets cold or the ice caps return, that’s not a sign of anything. Whatever the facts are, Mr. Weaver and climate activists cannot have it both ways. Read more here.