Martin Durkin in The Australian
Martin Durkin says his British documentary rejecting the idea of human-caused global warming has survived last week’s roasting by the ABC | July 21, 2007. “When I agreed to make The Great Global Warming Swindle, I was warned a middle-class fatwa would be placed on my head.
So I wasn’t shocked that the film was attacked on the same night it was broadcast on ABC television last week, although I was impressed at the vehemence of the attack. I was more surprised, and delighted, by the response of the Australian public. The ABC studio assault, led by Tony Jones, was so vitriolic it appears to have backfired. We have been inundated with messages of support, and the ABC, I am told, has been flooded with complaints. I have been trying to understand why.
First, the ferocity of the attack, I think, revealed the intolerance and defensiveness of the global warming camp. Why were Jones and co expending such energy and resources attacking one documentary? We are told the global warming theory is robust. They say you’d have to be off your chump to disagree. We have been assured for years, in countless news broadcasts and column inches, that it’s definitely true. So why bother to stamp so aggressively on the one foolish documentary-maker - who clearly must be as mad as a snake - who steps out of line?
I think viewers may also have wondered (reasonably) why the theory of global warming has not been subjected to this barrage of critical scrutiny by the media. After all, it’s the theory of global warming, not my foolish little film, that is turning public and corporate policy on its head. The whole damned theory is in tatters. No wonder they’re defensive.
The man-made global warming parade, on one level, has been a phenomenal success. There isn’t a political party or important public body or large corporation that doesn’t feel compelled to pay lip service. There are scientists and journalists (a surprising number) who have built careers championing the cause. There’s more money going into global warming research than there is chasing a cure for cancer. Many important people and institutions have staked their reputations on it. There’s a lot riding on this theory. And it has bugger-all to do with sea levels. That is why the warmers greeted my film with red glowing eyes. Last week on the ABC they closed ranks. They were not interested in a genuine debate. They wanted to shut it down. And thousands of wonderful, sane, bolshie Australian viewers saw right through it. God bless Australia. The DVD will be out soon.
See full story here.
AER, Lexington, MA
Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc. (AER) announced a major new development that will impact global warming and climate change predictions. Supported by the US Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program, AER’s rapid radiative transfer model for short wave energy has recently proven to be very effective in improving operational weather forecasts. The potential impact on global climate models is now under study.
“The importance of this advance is that all global warming and climate change predictions are based on models of the atmosphere, and in these models the depiction of clouds and how clouds interact with the scattering of sunlight is crucial to calculating the heating of the atmosphere,” stated Dr. Ross Hoffman, Vice President of Research & Development at AER. “More accurate simulation of cloudiness means more accurate forecasts of climate change due to CO2 increases.”
AER’s scientists helped solve a long-standing problem of over predicting clouds over the oceans. The AER radiation model simulates the processes of absorption and scattering of sunlight in the atmosphere by gases such as CO2 and ozone, as well as water vapor, and by particles including water drops in cloud and various types of dust, including smog. Water, both as vapor and in clouds is the most important and most variable substance in the atmosphere. Using observations of water vapor, temperature, and solar and infrared radiation from instruments at the ARM Program field measurement sites, AER scientists conducted experiments to refine their radiation model. Last month, the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts implemented the AER radiation model in conjunction with an improved method to depict the detailed structure of cloudiness developed by scientists at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Environment Canada (EC). The Centre reported a significant improvement for all forecasts in the tropics. Of note for climate studies, the new technique more accurately predicts fewer low clouds over the oceans.
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By Jerry Adler, Newsweek
The Second Coming may be the most widely anticipated apocalypse ever, but it’s far from the only version of the end times. Environmentalists have their own eschatology—a vision of a world not consumed by holy fire but returned to ecological balance by the removal of the most disruptive species in history. That, of course, would be us, the 6 billion furiously metabolizing and reproducing human beings polluting its surface. There’s even a group trying to bring it about, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, whose Web site calls on people to stop having children altogether. And now the journalist Alan Weisman has produced, if not a bible, at least a Book of Revelation, “The World Without Us,” which conjures up a future something like ... well, like the area around Chernobyl, the Russian nuclear reactor that blew off a cloud of radioactive steam in 1986. In a radius of 30 kilometers, there are no human settlements—just forests that have begun reclaiming fields and towns, home to birds, deer, wild boar and moose.
Sound appealing? Well, it did to Weisman, too, when he began work on the book four years ago. And “four out of five” of the people he’s told about it, he estimates, thought the idea sounded wonderful. Since we’re headed inexorably toward an environmental crash anyway, why not get it over cleanly and allow the world to heal? Over time, though, Weisman’s attitude toward the rest of humanity softened, as he thought of some of the beautiful things human beings have accomplished, their architecture and poetry, and he eventually arrived at what he views as a compromise position: a worldwide, voluntary agreement to limit each human couple to one child. This, says Weisman—who is 60, and childless after the death of his only daughter—would stabilize the human population by the end of the century at about 1.6 billion, approximately where it was in 1900. And then, perhaps, more of the world could resemble ... Varosha, the beach resort in Cyprus in the no man’s land between the Greek and Turkish zones, where, Weisman writes, thickets of hibiscus, oleander and passion lilac grow wild and houses disappear under magenta mounds of bougainvillea.
Too bad there’s no one there to see it. Read the chilling story here.