By Christopher Booker, UK Telegraph
Considering that the measures recommended by the world’s politicians to combat global warming will cost tens of trillions of dollars and involve very drastic changes to our way of life, it might be thought wise to check the reliability of the evidence on which they base their belief that our planet is actually getting hotter. There are four internationally recognised sources of data on world temperatures, but the one most often cited by supporters of global warming is that run by James Hansen of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
Hansen has been for 20 years the world’s leading scientific advocate of global warming (and Al Gore’s closest ally). But in the past year a number of expert US scientists have been conducting a public investigation, through scientific blogs, which raises large question marks over the methods used to arrive at his figures. First they noted the increasingly glaring discrepancy between the figures given by GISS, which show temperatures continuing to race upwards, and those given by the other three main data sources, which all show temperatures having fallen since 1998, dropping dramatically in the past year to levels around the average of the past 30 years.
Two sets of data, from satellites, go back to 1979: one produced by Dr Roy Spencer, formerly of NASA, now at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, the other by Remote Sensing Systems. Their figures correspond closely with those produced by the Hadley Centre for Climate Studies of our own Met Office, based on global surface temperature readings. Right out on their own, however, are the quite different figures produced by GISS which, strangely for a body sponsored by Nasa, rely not on satellites but also on surface readings. Hansen’s latest graph shows temperatures rising since 1880, at accelerating speed in the past 10 years.
The other three all show a flattening out after 2001 and a marked downward plunge of 0.6 degrees Celsius in 2007/8, equivalent to almost all the net warming recorded in the 20th century. (For comparisons see “Is the Earth getting warmer, or colder?” by Steven Goddard on The Register website.) Even more searching questions have been raised over Hansen’s figures by two expert blogs. One is Climate Audit, run by Steve McIntyre, the computer analyst who earlier exposed the notorious “hockeystick” graph that was shamelessly exploited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore. (This used a flawed computer model to suppress evidence that the world was hotter in the Middle Ages than today.) The other site is Watts Up With That, run by the meteorologist Anthony Watts.
All this has raised such doubts over the methodology behind the GISS data that informed observers are calling for it to be independently assessed. Hansen himself is notoriously impatient of any criticism of his methods: earlier this month he appealed to Congress that the leaders of those who question global warming should be put on trial. It is still too early to suggest that the recent drop in temperatures shown by everyone but him is proof that global warming has stopped. But the fact is that not one of those vaunted computer models predicted what has happened to temperatures in recent years. Yet it is on those models (and Hansen’s alarmist figures) that our politicians are basing all their proposals for irrevocably changing our lives.
Read more here.
By Gerard Baker, Times Online
And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness. The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow. And so it was, in the fullness of time, before the harvest month of the appointed year, the Child ventured forth - for the first time - to bring the light unto all the world.
When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?” In the great Battles of Caucus and Primary he smote the conniving Hillary, wife of the deposed King Bill the Priapic and their barbarian hordes of Working Class Whites.
As word spread throughout the land about the Child’s wondrous works, peoples from all over flocked to hear him; Hittites and Abbasids; Obamacons and McCainiacs; Cameroonians and Blairites. And they told of strange and wondrous things that greeted the news of the Child’s journey. Around the world, global temperatures began to decline, and the ocean levels fell and the great warming was over. Read more and hear his speech here.
By Steven Milloy, FOX News
Liberals have done a U-turn on conservative billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens. Formerly reviled for funding the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” campaign against Sen. John Kerry, he’s now adored by the Left - unfortunately, for trying to gaslight the rest of us on energy policy. This column recently spotlighted Pickens’ proposed plan to get America off foreign oil by substituting wind-generated electricity for natural gas-generated electricity and then using the natural gas to replace gasoline.
Already having addressed the proposal’s flaws - and Pickens’ plan to profit at taxpayer expense from it - let’s consider how Pickens’ marketing shades the truth. On his Web site and in TV commercials, Pickens tries to frighten Americans about being “addicted to foreign oil.” “In 1970, we imported 24 percent of our oil. Today, it’s nearly 70 percent and growing,” he intones. Aside from the fact that the Department of Energy (DOE) puts the import figure at a more moderate 58 percent, Pickens gives the impression that imported oil is scary because it all comes from the unstable Mideast. His TV commercials feature images of American soldiers fighting in Iraq and he likens the annual $700 billion cost of foreign oil to “four times the annual cost of the Iraq war.” But hold the phone. Only 16 percent of our imported oil comes from the Persian Gulf - barely up from 13.6 percent in 1973, according to the DOE. Imports from OPEC countries are actually down - from 47.8 percent in 1973 to 44.5 percent in 2007.
Contrary to Pickens’ assertion that oil imports are growing, the DOE expects oil imports to decrease by 10 percent by 2030. Pickens tries to shame Americans because, “America uses a lot of oil ... That’s 25 percent of the world’s oil demand, used by just 4 percent of the world population.” Some might think these figures make us sound greedy and wasteful. But what Pickens omitted to mention is that the size of the U.S. economy in 2007 was about $13.8 trillion and the size of the global economy was $54.3 trillion. This means that the U.S. economy represents about 25.4 percent of the global economy. So what’s the problem if a nation that produces 25 percent of the world’s goods and services needs 25 percent of the world’s oil output?
Would he prefer that we shrink our economy by 84 percent to match our share of world population? Pickens plays the hope-squasher. “Can’t we just produce more oil?” he asks. “The simple truth is that cheap and easy oil is gone,” he responds. But there are hundreds of billions of barrels of oil in the form of oil tar sands and oil shale in North America, not to mention the more than one hundred billion barrels of oil in the outer continental shelf of the U.S. and on public lands like the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve (ANWR). And don’t forget that coal-to-liquids technology can convert our 268 billion tons of coal into 20 times the nation’s current crude oil reserves, according to investment analysts. We have liquid fuels to burn. While producing this oil may not be as easy as it was in 1859, when crude oil bubbled out of the ground in northwest Pennsylvania, it is much more feasible and far less expensive than Pickens’ fantasy of replicating the entire existing U.S. wind supply system every year for the next 15 years in addition to building the national infrastructure for natural-gas filling stations. Read more here.
Also see how water is another resource this entrepreneur hopes to make into the new oil here.