By the New Party, UK

The decision by the government to distribute Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth has been the subject of a legal action by New Party member Stewart Dimmock.  Although a full ruling has yet to be given, the Court found that the film was misleading in 11 respects and that the Guidance Notes drafted by the Education Secretary’s advisors served only to exacerbate the political propaganda in the film.

In order for the film to be shown, the Government must first amend their Guidance Notes to Teachers to make clear that

1.) The Film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument.

2.) If teachers present the Film without making this plain they may be in breach of section 406 of the Education Act 1996 and guilty of political indoctrination.

3.) Eleven inaccuracies have to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children.

See the list of inaccuracies found by the courts here.

Most Ice Ages occur at intervals of about 100,000 years.  Though the last ice age ended more than 100,000 years ago, one of the essential prerequisites for the IPCC case for extended global warming is the claim that we face an extended Holocene like interglacial warm period because orbital geometry now is similar to the 400,000 years ago interglacial leading the IPCC to proclaim in their robust findings that the current deglaciation (warm interglacial) should last at least another 30,000 years. In this paper Peter Harris explains why he believes the assumptions used are incorrect and why there may be in fact good reason to expect the imminent termination of the interglacial because of the coincident action of 6 major cyclic processes.

In the Australian Broadcasting Corporation story, Dr. Barrows of the Australian National University sees the poossibility of a sudden cooling but for entirely different reasons. Dr Barrows explains that Europe is at risk of a new ice age as a result of global warming.There are some fears that warming in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly around the Greenland ice sheet, might cause quite a bit of meltwater to come into the North Atlantic Ocean,” he said. “That might change the salinity of the water there and stop what’s called ‘the great conveyor belt of the oceans’ forming deep water that releases an enormous amount of heat that keeps Europe out of an ice age, essentially. “So if global warming does stop this circulation from occurring, then we could potentially have a new ice age in Europe.” Dr Barrows says this effect is similar to what happened about 12,900 years ago, when the earth experienced rapid cooling. He says a new ice age in the Northern Hemisphere is not far off.  “You’d begin to feel the effects almost immediately and certainly within a century,” he said.  This you may recall was a theory proposed years ago by Woods Hole scientists and the theme of the movie “Day after Tomorrow”.

By Bjom Lomborg

All eyes are on Greenland’s melting glaciers as alarm about global warming spreads. This year, delegations of U.S. and European politicians have made pilgrimages to the fastest-moving glacier at Ilulissat, where they declare that they see climate change unfolding before their eyes.
Curiously, something that’s rarely mentioned is that temperatures in Greenland were higher in 1941 than they are today. Or that melt rates around Ilulissat were faster in the early part of the past century, according to a new study. And while the delegations first fly into Kangerlussuaq, about 100 miles to the south, they all change planes to go straight to Ilulissat—perhaps because the Kangerlussuaq glacier is inconveniently growing.

I point this out not to challenge the reality of global warming or the fact that it’s caused in large part by humans, but because the discussion about climate change has turned into a nasty dustup, with one side arguing that we’re headed for catastrophe and the other maintaining that it’s all a hoax. I say that neither is right. It’s wrong to deny the obvious: The Earth is warming, and we’re causing it. But that’s not the whole story, and predictions of impending disaster just don’t stack up.

We have to rediscover the middle ground, where we can have a sensible conversation. We shouldn’t ignore climate change or the policies that could attack it. But we should be honest about the shortcomings and costs of those policies, as well as the benefits.

Environmental groups say that the only way to deal with the effects of global warming is to make drastic cuts in carbon emissions—a project that will cost the world trillions (the Kyoto Protocol alone would cost $180 billion annually). The research I’ve done over the last decade, beginning with my first book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” has convinced me that this approach is unsound; it means spending an awful lot to achieve very little. Instead, we should be thinking creatively and pragmatically about how we could combat the much larger challenges facing our planet.  Read full story here