By Chris Horner, Planet Gore
The hits (or rather misses) just keep on coming, in the form of observations and facts that are proving very inconvenient for James Hansen’s and the rest of the IPCC gang’s paranoid, hysterical, and angry advocacy for global governance, energy rationing, Kyoto, etc. Today, it is Hansen’s catastrophe posterchild, Bangladesh - which, far from being soon underwater, is actually gaining land mass rather than losing it.
See larger image here
It turns out that the genii at the IPCC never considered that rivers silt up. This should not be surprising: leading sea-level rise expert Nils-Axel Morner noted that the IPCC’s SLR panel is stacked with people who aren’t sea-level rise experts. Possibly they are the anthropology TAs, transport-policy instructors, and others that Climate Resistance discovered among the IPCC’s 2,000 “world’s leading climate scientists.”
So, let’s review the bidding. The IPCC and the models on which it premises its version of reality are wrong on rainfall. They are wrong on GHG concentrations and behavior. Models are wrong on Antarctica, on Andean snowpack, on Bangladesh, on ocean temperatures, and wrong on the Northwest Passage. Roy Spencer’s research appears to have affirmed that models are demonstrably and fatally wrong on the threshold question of climate sensitivity.
Not to worry, the U.S. government is preparing to issue a hysterical statement, on which EPA says it will base its CO2 regulations [the deadline for public comments to NOAA is August 14, everyone], claiming that at least the models are finding observations consistent with models’ projections in . . . Alaska. Um, except that in April, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation - which accounted for all of Alaska’s warming (with a little help from the urban-heat-island effect) - had flipped again, and cooling is in the cards.
Other than that, why, those models are perfectly wonderful tools on which to premise trillion-dollar economic decisions! Fortunately, we have two candidates for president promising to do just that.
Christopher Monckton on SPPI
“In the July 2008 edition of Physics and Society, a paper by Lord Monckton entitled “Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered” caused enormous worldwide interest when the Society, which had invited Lord Monckton to submit the paper, had reviewed it in detail and had published it, decided a week after publication, and without Lord Monckton’s knowledge or consent, to add a prefatory disclaimer to the paper. Next, a paid official of the Society, a Dr. Smith, drafted and circulated a rebuttal of Lord Monckton’s paper. That rebuttal, and Lord Monckton’s decisive refutation of it, are published here."
R. Arthur Smith’s critique of my paper “Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered” (Physics & Society, July 2008) begins ad hominem, saying most “issues” in my “introductory and concluding polemics” are “well addressed in the standard lists of arguments from ‘skeptics’”. Yet I introduced my paper not with a “polemic” about “issues” but with a heavily-referenced list of the models’ failures to represent the observed climate, not least the downtrend in global temperature since late 2001. In June 2008 global temperature was cooler than when Dr. Hansen started the “global warming” hare with his testimony to Congress 20 years previously. Dr. Smith’s pejorative use of the word “skeptics” is regrettable: as Huxley said, it is the duty of scientists to be skeptical. How would Dr. Smith like it if I said he has a vested interest in the climate bugaboo as a founder of the “Alternative Energy Action Network”, whose website recommends the serially-inaccurate RealClimate blog as though it were reliable? Let us debate ad rem.
Dr. Smith’s criticisms of my paper are superficially ingenious but in reality unmeritorious. Objectively speaking, the IPCC’s method of evaluating climate sensitivity, which is faithfully, concisely, and correctly expounded in the first part of my paper, suffers from multiple exaggerations and contains serious conceptual flaws - such as the abuse of the Bode equation - and is subject to uncertainties whose combined effect is so great as to render meaningless its 2007 conclusion that, to a 90% confidence interval, we have been responsible for more than half of the warming that may have occurred over the past half-century, and which ceased with the great el Nino of 1998.
Were we to be permitted to stray from the mathematics and physics just for a fleeting instant, we might say of the IPCC’s conclusions what Pope Innocent X said of the Treaty of Westphalia - that they are “null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, and empty of meaning for all time.”
See also this letter from an APS Fellow to the Society suporting Monckton’s skepticism.
By Nathaniel Shockey, North Star Writers
That global warming has continued to captivate the media, car companies, energy companies and so many more demonstrates how enormously brainwashed Americans are. Still convinced that “the entire global scientific community has a consensus on the question that human beings are responsible for global warming,” like Al Gore purported? Please.
For starters, in November 2005, Swiss researchers from the journal Quaternary Science Reviews overtly stated, “Whatever slight impact humans might have on the climate, it is too small to measure.” Bob Carter, an environmental scientist at James Cook University testified before a U.S. Senate Committee, saying, “Lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 percent).” We’re obviously not causing the type of damage we thought we were.
David Evans, a consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005, shared in an article for The Australian that his initial reaction to the theory and buzz of global warming in 1999 was one of excitement, feeling “useful and fairly important; we were saving the planet.” He goes on to explain a few points: “The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics . . . The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.
“The satellites that measure the world’s temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year. “None of these points is controversial. The alarmist scientists agree with them, though they would dispute their relevance.” I probably have significantly punier scientific knowledge than Al Gore, but it is fairly obvious that Gore’s entire premise for his misleading documentary, that we are causing global warming, is questionable at best, and most likely false.
What is truly upsetting about all of this is not that so many of us were duped. It’s that so many of us are still duped. American companies are still spending huge quantities in order to cater to this fraudulent belief. Instead of actually improving their products in ways that actually enhance efficiency and, hence, the strength of the company and the American economy, they’re catering to the brainwashed.
And in addition to the businesses, we have politicians who are either a) still clinging to empty threats about global warming or b) have seen the holes in the alleged global warming crisis but are too scared to take on the media. Is an alarmist theory that has been all but smothered really worth $6 trillion, which is what the proposed cap-and-trade climate bill is estimated to cost the U.S. by 2050? Does anyone else think this is crazy? It smells a lot like a control issue to me, but who knows? Maybe there are a lot of ill-informed people who are just really concerned . . . and we elected them to represent us.
Feel free to reach your own conclusions about why so many are still convinced of a totally unconvincing theory. But it is imperative that those of us who have learned to question global warming have the courage to say so. Our country can’t afford a government that wastes absurd amounts of taxpayer dollars fighting windmills. For full post go here.