By Michael Fox, Hawaii Reporter
The year 2008 marked the tenth consecutive year of no global warming. This is not widely reported or known. In fact the Earth has been cooling for the last 6 years.
Richard Lindzen: A profound analysis of the global warming issues including huge political issues was written and presented in August this year by Dr. Richard Lindzen, climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He asks two very important questions: 1. Has the global warming alarm become the goal itself, instead of the result of scientific research? 2. Is climate science really designed to answer questions or promote political goals? Too often we witness climate alarmism being promoted while solid science is ignored, misrepresented, or downplayed. This makes great fodder for scary movies, scary news articles, and scary documentaries, but it is still bad science.
We also note that the nearly $5 billion/year being spent on global warming research is buying a lot of name-calling, ad hominem attacks, and all around nastiness by many of the indentured recipients of that money. Such behavior certainly is not scientific. In fact it inhibits the progress of science, and the intelligent formulations of science and energy policies. If half the participants are ignored by the science journals, insulted with ad hominem attacks by the promoters, and ignored and dismissed by the media, then the simple and rational scientific processes are stopped.
Lindzen describes the origins of global warming alarm, the political agenda of the alarmists, their intimidation tactics, and the reasons for their success. Also, in painstaking detail, he debunks their key scientific claims and counterclaims.
This Lindzen paper, although quite lengthy, is must reading for all decision makers, energy policy makers, and their staffs. Of course it would also help if the entire US population and the media read it as well, to help them understand the unscientific political processes taking place right before their eyes.
Les Kinsolving: Writer Kinsolving reports more of the bad news. As Dr. David Gee at the University of Uppsala Sweden asks “For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?” Geologist Dr. David Gee, chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress, has authored 130-plus peer-reviewed papers, and currently is at Uppsala University of Sweden. As if this weren’t bad enough, the list of credentialed skeptics is growing by leaps and bounds. Kinsolving provides a number of other important quotations from the scientists who don’t accept the dogma of man-made global warming: 1. “I am a skeptic. Global warming has become a new religion.” – Nobel Prize winner for physics Ivar Giaever. 2. “Anyone who claims that the debate is over and the conclusions are firm has a fundamentally unscientific approach to one of the most momentous issues of our time.” – Solar physicist Dr. Pal Brekke, senior adviser to the Norwegian Space Centre. 3. “It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” – U.S. government atmospheric scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA. 4. “After reading (U.N. IPCC Chairman) Pachauri’s asinine comment (comparing skeptics to) Flat Earthers, it’s hard to remain quiet.” – Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs. 5. “All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead.” – Geophysicist Dr. Phil Chapman, an astronautical engineer and former NASA astronaut, serving as staff physicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 6. “The (global warming) scaremongering has its justification in the fact that it is something that generates funds.” – Award-winning paleontologist Dr. Eduardo Tonni, of the Committee for Scientific Research in Buenos Aires and head of the Paleontology Department at the University of La Plata. 7. “Earth has cooled since 1998 in defiance of the predictions by the U.N.-IPCC. ... The global temperature for 2007 was the coldest in a decade and the coldest of the millennium ... which is why ‘global warming’ is now called ‘climate change.’” – Climatologist Dr. Richard Keen of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado.
The Petition Project: There are many more scientists and engineers who do not accept the fuzzy “science” of global warming. More than 31,000 of them are now listed on the Petition Project, including more than 9000 Ph.D.s. These 31,000 scientists, engineers, and medical professionals sign a simple statement which says: “We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan, in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that the human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.” This is not an unreasonable appeal by very well educated people asking our government not to fall for the steady stream of a continuing hoax. Solid evidence is needed. If we don’t get the science right, we won’t get the policy right.
Summary: A nation which abolishes its fossil energy sources (coal. oil, and natural gas), nuclear energy, hydro energy, as these political forces are pushing, will lose all of the energy needed for our industries, homes, and infrastructure such as hospitals, office buildings, schools, and hotels. A powerful nation such as ours cannot sustain its energy needs on sunbeams and gentle breezes, as many of the warmers propose. That pathway to the future is dangerous and instead is a pathway to economic suicide. Read full post here.
By Harold Ambler, Huffington Post
You are probably wondering whether President-elect Obama owes the world an apology for his actions regarding global warming. The answer is, not yet. There is one person, however, who does. You have probably guessed his name: Al Gore. Mr. Gore has stated, regarding climate change, that “the science is in.” Well, he is absolutely right about that, except for one tiny thing. It is the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind.
What is wrong with the statement? A brief list:
1. First, the expression “climate change” itself is a redundancy, and contains a lie. Climate has always changed, and always will. There has been no stable period of climate during the Holocene, our own climatic era, which began with the end of the last ice age 12,000 years ago. Mr. Gore has used a famously inaccurate graph, known as the “Mann Hockey Stick,” created by the scientist Michael Mann, showing that the modern rise in temperatures is unprecedented, and that the dramatic changes in climate just described did not take place. They did. One last thought on the expression “climate change”: It is a retreat from the earlier expression used by alarmists, “manmade global warming,” which was more easily debunked. There are people in Mr. Gore’s camp who now use instances of cold temperatures to prove the existence of “climate change,” which is absurd, obscene, even.
2. Mr. Gore has gone so far to discourage debate on climate as to refer to those who question his simplistic view of the atmosphere as “flat-Earthers.” This, too, is right on target, except for one tiny detail. It is exactly the opposite of the truth. Indeed, it is Mr. Gore and his brethren who are flat-Earthers. Mr. Gore states, ad nauseum, that carbon dioxide rules climate in frightening and unpredictable, and new, ways. When he shows the hockey stick graph of temperature and plots it against reconstructed C02 levels in An Inconvenient Truth, he says that the two clearly have an obvious correlation. “Their relationship is actually very complicated,” he says, “but there is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others, and it is this: When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer.” The word “complicated” here is among the most significant Mr. Gore has uttered on the subject of climate and is, at best, a deliberate act of obfuscation. Why? Because it turns out that there is an 800-year lag between temperature and carbon dioxide, unlike the sense conveyed by Mr. Gore’s graph. You are probably wondering by now—and if you are not, you should be—which rises first, carbon dioxide or temperature. The answer? Temperature.
If not carbon dioxide, what does “drive” climate? I am glad you are wondering about that. In the short term, it is ocean cycles, principally the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the “super cycle” of which cooling La Ninas and warming El Ninos are parts. Having been in its warm phase, in which El Ninos predominate, for the 30 years ending in late 2006, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation switched to its cool phase, in which La Ninas predominate.
Concurrent with the switchover of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation to its cool phase the Sun has entered a period of deep slumber. The number of sunspots for 2008 was the second lowest of any year since 1901. That matters less because of fluctuations in the amount of heat generated by the massive star in our near proximity (although there are some fluctuations that may have some measurable effect on global temperatures) and more because of a process best described by the Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark in his complex, but elegant, work The Chilling Stars.
To re-tool our economies in an effort to suppress carbon dioxide and its imaginary effect on climate, when other, graver problems exist is, simply put, wrong. Particulate pollution, such as that causing the Asian brown cloud, is a real problem. Two billion people on Earth living without electricity, in darkened huts and hovels polluted by charcoal smoke, is a real problem. So, let us indeed start a Manhattan Project-like mission to create alternative sources of energy. And, in the meantime, let us neither cripple our own economy by mislabeling carbon dioxide a pollutant nor discourage development in the Third World, where suffering continues unabated, day after day.
Again, Mr. Gore, I accept your apology. Read full post here.
By Noel Sheppard
Climate realists around the world have contended for years that the real goal of alarmists such as Nobel Laureate Al Gore and his followers is to use the fear of man-made global warming as a means of redistributing wealth.On Monday, one of Gore’s leading accomplices, Goddard Institute for Space Studies chief James Hansen, sent a letter to Barack and Michelle Obama specifically urging the president-elect to enact a tax on carbon emissions in a fashion that would take money from higher-income Americans and distribute the proceeds to the less fortunate.
The cat was let out of the bag on page five of a PDF Hansen published at Columbia University’s website on December 29 (Britain’s Guardian, Rising price on carbon emissions via a “carbon tax and 100% dividend”. A rising price on carbon emissions is the essential underlying support needed to make all other climate policies work. For example, improved building codes are essential, but full enforcement at all construction and operations is impractical. A rising carbon price is the one practical way to obtain compliance with codes designed to increase energy efficiency. A rising carbon price is essential to “decarbonize the economy, i.e., to move the nation toward the era beyond fossil fuels. The most effective way to achieve this is a carbon tax (on oil, “gas, and coal) at the well-head or port of entry. The tax will then appropriately affect all products and activities that use fossil fuels.
The public’s near-term, mid-term, and long-term lifestyle choices will be affected by knowledge that the carbon tax rate will be rising. The public will support the tax if it is returned to them, equal shares on a per capita basis (half shares for children up to a maximum of two child-shares per family), deposited monthly in bank accounts. No large bureaucracy is needed. A person reducing his carbon footprint more than average makes money. A person with large cars and a big house will pay a tax much higher than the dividend. Not one cent goes to Washington. No lobbyists will be supported.
Unlike cap-and-trade, no millionaires would be made at the expense of the public. The tax will spur innovation as entrepreneurs compete to develop and market low-carbon and no-carbon energies and products. The dividend puts money in the pockets of consumers, stimulating the economy, and providing the public a means to purchase the products. A carbon tax is honest, clear and effective. It will increase energy prices, but low and middle income people, especially, will find ways to reduce carbon emissions so as to come out ahead. The rate of infrastructure replacement, thus economic activity, can be modulated by how fast the carbon tax rate increases.
Effects will permeate society. Food requiring lots of carbon emissions to produce and transport will become more expensive and vice versa, encouraging support of nearby farms as opposed to imports from half way around the world.The carbon tax has social benefits. It is progressive. It is useful to those most in need in hard times, providing them an opportunity for larger dividend than tax. It will encourage illegal immigrants to become legal, thus to obtain the dividend, and it will discourage illegal immigration because everybody pays the tax, but only legal citizens collect the dividend. “Cap and trade” generates special interests, lobbyists, and trading schemes, yielding non productive millionaires, all at public expense.
The public is fed up with such business. Tax with 100% dividend, in contrast, would spur our economy, while aiding the disadvantaged, the climate, and our national security. We should all be pleased with Hansen’s honesty, and sincerely pray American media outlets will publish his letter so the citizenry can finally understand what the anthropogenic global warming myth is all about. Keep your fingers crossed. See more here.
Also note the following: Obama’s energy czar, Carol Browner, is a member of Socialist International’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society. See the Socialist’s International principles here.