Fossil fuels are not ruining the environment, the world is not running out of oil and the U.S. can never be energy independent.Brad Richards, executive vice president of the Mt. Vernon-based Illinois Oil & Gas Association, took issue Thursday in Carmi with “three myths that threaten our country.”

He also took issue with the idea that the world is running out of oil. U.S. crude oil production peaked in the early 1970s and it may well be that world production has peaked recently, he said.  But there will be no precipitous decline in production across the globe, he said. Instead, “Supply and demand will reach an uneasy equilibrium. And we’ll have a bumpy plateau of production for decades to come; extreme volatility will be the rule."The world is not running out of oil, he said, but it is running out of cheap, easily-found oil. Still, “there’s no way to run away from oil” entirely, he cautioned.Richards told the group that U.S. energy independence is “neither do-able nor desirable.” The truth is that the world is becoming more interdependent, he said, and unrealistic talk of energy independence hampers realistic discussion of the matter.

“It’s feel-good talk,” he said, but even aggressive development of alternative energy sources wouldn’t begin to provide the volume of energy now derived from fossil fuels."The truth is,” said Richards, “that we’re all married to fossil fuels.” And he predicted that this won’t change for 30 to 50 years, adding that the U.S. should “accept the reality of energy interdependence.” The club was told that crude oil now provides about 39 percent of the energy that the U.S. uses, natural gas 24 percent, coal 23 percent, nuclear power eight percent and hydroelectric power three percent. And Richards noted that environmentalists don’t like any of these sources.

Sadly, however, just as the nation can’t drill its way to energy independence, it can’t build enough windmills or install enough solar panels to replace fossil fuels.There are encouraging signs. U.S. natural gas production is expected to increase by eight percent this winter to a 35-year high, thanks to higher prices and new technology. What’s going on in the U.S. industry is “amazing” and “unbelievable,” Richards told the club, with horizontal drilling and other technologies being used to find and exploit huge gas fields. While admitting that John McCain was not the ideal candidate of the U.S. energy industry, Richards made it clear that the industry has little enthusiasm for the president-elect.

Barack Obama called for a new windfall profits tax on oil when the price of crude was over $100, Richards said. A similar tax didn’t work in the ‘70s; it increased the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, depressed domestic exploration and generated less than 25 percent of what was projected. More of the same could be expected if a new tax were implemented now, he added."Let free markets, not the government, make energy choices,” Richards told the crowd. Asked about the viability of tar sands and oil shales as energy sources, the speaker said they’re realistic if crude oil stabilizes at $90 a barrel or so. Read more here.

The argument propounded by the dubious United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on Anthropogenic (human-induced) Global Warming (AGW) is willfully fraudulent. The report has been vigorously and critically undermined, scientifically denounced and found wanting from both notable scientists here and abroad.

In spite of this fact, it is likely that the new U.S. Democratic Congress and Administration will once again proclaim that they know better than we do about such things.  Get ready for them to move surreptitiously under the guise of Global Climate Control in an effort to enhance their own legacies and pocketbooks.  To be sure, the Left hears nothing but their own incestuous voices, despite the voices of clarity and reason that abound around them.  And there are many, many distinguished dissenters against the charade of AGW.

Let me assure you that we’re not in good humor, nor take it kindly to be slurred and ridiculed by taking the other side in this debate.  And our numbers are still growing.  Indeed, we’re angry that the vast majority of American Scientists will not be heard by the media.  We’re dismayed over the fact that the Global Warming fiasco has become politically popular and expedient to those left-wing politicians and power-brokers whose sole aim is to literally tax everything with a carbon footprint and give them control over all life, hidden within their PC guileful pretence to save the planet.  They wish to save no one but themselves.

And the tide turns further.  Of the 2500 originally aligned scientists and putative authors of the UN’s IPCC report some 500 are no longer faithful to Big Al’s errand. Many of these scientists discovered that their individual findings and comments were willfully misrepresented. All participant conclusions were unilaterally changed to adhere strictly to the United Nations objective of building support for world taxation and rationing of industrially useful energy.  Since the original IPCC report (and there have been some 4 others now formally issued), the defecting 500 scientists have issued public statements challenging global warming. Approximately 100 of these scientists are now open defectors. Others are currently suing the UN for the misuse of their good names and research. It is difficult to see why a thinking person would even consider the IPCC report as legitimate. 

The entire IPCC process is but obfuscation by the secular and atheist Left. It has allowed the Left to conflate the vanity of secular opinion with scientific and/or moral truth. There is an easy and immediate remedy for their debacle. Will Rogers stated it simply:  “When you are in a hole ... stop digging.... Please!” Read full post here.

Dr. Gregory Young is a neuroscientist and physicist, a doctoral graduate of the University of Oxford, Oxford, England. He is currently involved with a privately funded think-tank engaged in experimental biophysical research.

The Earth’s temperature for the month of October was the second-warmest since records began in 1880, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The month’s average temperature of 58.2 degrees was 1.1 degrees above the 20th century average of 57.1 degrees, trailing only October 2003. For the Earth’s land areas, it was the warmest October on record.

And this NOAA data does include the correct October temperature data for Russia...unlike NASA’s October data released last week, which caused the agency to end up with egg on its face. After NASA announced that October was the warmest ever recorded, eagle-eyed bloggers at skeptic blogs Climate Audit and Watts up with that pointed out that the data from Russia was for September, not October. Of course, this skewed the global temperature higher than it would have been.

Even if you don’t agree with all (or any) of the points or claims posited by the warming skeptics, I think they are doing a needed service by keeping the climate change adherents, such as authors of the RealClimate blog, on their toes. RealClimate’s Gavin Schmidt addressed this in this post: “the extra attention has led to improvements in many products. Nothing of any consequence has changed in terms of our understanding of climate change, but a few more i’s have been dotted and t’s crossed.”

Indeed, as noted above, even with the correct October data from Russia, temperatures across Australia, Asia (including Russia), the western USA, eastern Europe, northern Canada, eastern Brazil, and the southern countries of South America were all warmer-than-average in October. And so far this year, 2008 is the ninth-warmest year on record for the planet, with all nine of the Earth’s warmest years occurring since the mid-1990s. See post here.

This is not surprising as NOAA has become the biggest outlier in recent months. They have thanks to Tom Peterson and Tom Karl a global data base that is worth nothing. There is little or no adjustment for urbanization, land use changes, no adjustment for bad station siting (69% of the 560 US climate stations surveyed by Anthony Watts team of volunteers were poor or very poorly sited), 2/3rds of the stations globally dropped out around 1990, the number of missing months increased tenfold in the FSU and Africa after 1990, and changes in instrumentation like here in the US that Tom Karl himself found produced a warm bias of 0.5F. All these introduce a warm bias, none of which are corrected for. Not less than 6 peer review studies (bold in references) have shown these issues may account for up to 50% of the warming since 1900. Trust only the satellite. In fact, this October was the 10th warmest of the 30 years of data for the MSU satellite according to UAH with only a 0.167C (0.3F) anomaly instead of the 1.1F (2nd warmest out of 129 years) as per NOAA. Unfortunately satellite data extends only back to 1979.

Over the last few years, the evidence that sunspots on our sun are directly related to climate change on earth has been steadily increasing. I explained the exact proposed mechanism in some detail previously. Great work in this field is being carried out by Dr Henrik Svensmark and coworkers in Denmark and elsewhere. Briefly, the mechanism is that cosmic rays impact on the earth from deep space. These cosmic rays penetrate our atmosphere and lead to the formation of cloud cover. The cosmic rays nucleate sites in the atmosphere, from which clouds form from the natural water vapour. If one puts a spoonful of coffee powder into a cup of microwaved water, the water forms bubbles of foam on the coffee grains. This is basically the same principle as the cosmic rays forming clouds in the atmosphere.

The earth’s magnetic field, which acts as a shielding, is altered by the sun’s activity, which, in turn, is indicated by means of the number of sunspots. As the earth’s magnetic shield varies, so the cloud cover varies. Few sunspots mean a weaker earth shield, which means more cosmic rays, which mean more clouds, which mean a cooling earth. The correlation for this effect, going back thousands of years, is good, remarkably so. Scientifically, this looks believable, and it is consistent with the theory and observation.

In contrast, the argument that man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) is causing warming does not fit the facts at all. Firstly, there was no industrial CO2 produced in vast quantities when the Roman Warming period occurred, or when the Medieval Warming period occurred. Both are well documented in various archives, such as the historical and archaeological.

But there is more - global warming is extremely complex, and it is really naïve to believe that a relatively simple theory will explain it satisfactorily. It is far too simple just to say: CO2 traps heat and, therefore, more CO2 means more heat, and so we have global warming. As the makers of heat-seeking missiles know very well, the CO2 in the atmosphere has ‘windows’ in it. This means that certain ‘heat frequencies’ pass through the atmosphere easily but other frequencies are trapped. It is these windows that the missile uses to hunt its prey. As a consequence, there are ‘frequency bands’ related to the CO2 cover of the earth. In various ‘bands’, the infrared passes through easily, or not so easily.

Further, CO2 can trap incoming heat from space and outgoing heat being radiated from the earth. The frequency bands linked to the CO2 also become saturated - they cannot just keep sucking up more and more heat. Essentially, this CO2 argument is very complex. Over the last century, the temperature changes in our planet’s atmosphere, let alone ground and sea, just do not match the atmospheric CO2 concentration at all. This is cause for warning bells that, perhaps, this whole CO2 argument is not correct. In comparison, the cosmic ray and sunspot information match well. However, as I have said, this whole atmospheric temperature issue is very complex, and no capable scientist in the field is going to say otherwise.

Right now, we have been experiencing a rather long period of sunspot inactivity on our sun, some 200 days plus. This has happened before. Formal sun- spot data collection started in 1749 and has been monitored ever since. But long before that date, sunspots were known and informal measurements were taken. It is, therefore, known that the Little Ice Age, which took place from the midseventeenth century to the eighteenth century, was preceded and paralleled by a period of some 50 years with a virtual absence of sunspots, according to informal records.

In more recent times, we have had relatively long periods without sunspots. This year, we passed the mark of 200 days without sunspots, which is unusual. In fact, the sun has been blanker now than in any other year since 1954, when it was spotless for 241 days, and this year is now being called the sun’s quietest year of the space age. The sun was also very quiet in 1913, so runs of 200-plus spotless days are rare, but not that rare. As I have already said, the global warming and cooling issue is complex, and so a run of 200-plus days without sunspots cannot be compared to a 50-year quiet period during the Little Ice Age, but it is cause for some scientific thinking.

Further, a cooling that could be initiated by a lack of sunspots will induce other climatic effects that will either favour warming or cooling. The jury is still out on exactly what happens, but the evidence for sunspot involvement in climate change is just too compelling for it to be brushed aside by those who want to cling to the simplistic idea that man-made CO2 is the only factor.

I read all this week with great attention all the discussion regarding the temperature data from NASA’s GISS and other sources. If the exact dimension of the positive anomaly in Russia can be disputed, there is no doubt October was much warmer than average in that region. Russian press reported it was the warmest October on record in Moscow.

The October global temperature discussions once more reveal how unreliable all these metrics are. In fact, I suggest the reading of a very interesting post I read this week at Climate Skeptic exactly on this matter.

I tell my listeners and reader over here in Southern Brazil that October was near average globally (UAH data), but in the next day there is a report on the papers and on television that the month was the warmest on record on Earth. Of course, the average listener and reader start to question where my first information was correct. NASA is contracting the information from the day before. Try to tell people that the agency that has sent the man to the moon cannot measure the temperature on Earth correctly and you get a credibility problem with regular people. But the readers of ICECAP are not regular people and they know NASA, in fact, had some serious problems.

Every month, I take a look at these global maps not only to track the planet trend, but also to compare with my local reality. It is common to see very important discrepancies. I believe much of you do the same and have reached the same conclusion. If Steve McIntyre was surprised to see the warmer than average October in Toronto, I can say the same on Rio Grande do Sul. Both GISS and Met Office data for last month indicated a warmer than average October in Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state of Brazil where I live. Take a look at the circles in this map:

See larger images here

In fact, October was not 1C warmer than average here. It was very close to the average with some minor positive or negative deviations, depending on the station. It was a very wet month with a cold start. Both conditions prevented a large positive anomaly as depicted by GISS and the Met Office. For this matter, take a look at the maps for October in Brazil with the anomalies for low temperature (minima) and high (maxima). The maps were generated early this month by the officials Brazilian weather bureaus: Cptec and Inmet.

See larger images here

Temperature in the metropolitan area of Porto Alegre (4 million people) was 0.1 below average last month, but the same area appears in the map as above average. The truth it was a mild and comfortable October over here with few very warm days. I am sure the same discrepancies with local reality can be found in many other areas in the world. For that and other reasons, I still believe UAH and RSS are much more reliable. At least they do not have almost the entire African continent in gray. See full post here.