By Julian Morris, UK Daily News
Millions are suffering and thousands have died from flooding in Pakistan and China. An extraordinary heat wave in Russia sparked fires causing dreadful pollution and wiping out swathes of the wheat crop. Are these weather-related disasters caused by global warming? Do they portend to worse catastrophes? What can be done? Should Pakistan get more aid?
In its most recent report, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, asserts that as the world becomes warmer, “flood magnitude and frequency are likely to increase in most regions.” This seems plausible: a warmer world is also likely to be a wetter world, as more water evaporates from the oceans into the atmosphere. But, although rainstorms last week put out some of the fires, Russia has a drought.
Water vapor in different layers shows a decrease not an increase in recent decades in cotrast to theory. Data from climate4you.com source ISCCP.
The IPCC also claims that droughts, too, are more likely in a warmer world - and that they have become more frequent since the 1970s, partly because of reduced precipitation. In fact the number of droughts reached a low point between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s: The evidence shows there has been no statistically significant increase in droughts since the 1950s. Given that global temperatures appear to have risen considerably since then, it seems a stretch to blame the Russian drought on global warming.
Underpinning both the floods in Pakistan and China and the drought in Russia is a change in the usual pattern of the jet stream. Each hemisphere has a “polar” jet (7-12 km above sea level) and a “subtropical” jet (at 10-16 km). In the northern hemisphere, the polar jet pushes cooler air south and induces rain in mid-latitudes, while the subtropical jet pushes warm air north. But in mid-June, a kink appeared at the intersection, causing warm air to remain further north and east than normal and causing more cold air and rain to fall over northern Pakistan and China.
To make matters far worse, this kink in the jet stream was kept in place by a phenomenon called a “blocking event.” This kept the Russian heat wave going for nearly two months and massively exacerbated the precipitation in Pakistan and China.
See below, enlarged here.
Such blocking events are rare and there is no evidence of links with global warming. However, an explanation has been proposed by Professor Mike Lockwood, an astrophysicist at the University of Reading in the U.K., who shows in a recent paper that blocking events in winter are related primarily to solar activity (although he cautiously said in an email to me that he “cannot say much [yet] about summer conditions as most of our work to date has been on wintertime which shows relatively strong solar effects in the Eurasian region."). So the culprit is quite possibly the sun, not human emissions of greenhouse gases.
As for remedies, the current disasters demand a major humanitarian response. Worst affected is Pakistan, where an estimated 6 million face cholera and other waterborne diseases unless they urgently get potable water. Pakistan’s government responded slowly, making immediate national and international philanthropy even more important.
But what of the longer term? Floods, droughts and other weather disasters have plagued mankind for all of history. But deaths from such natural disasters have fallen by more than 90 percent in the past 100 years, in spite of dramatic population growth. Why? Because higher wealth and better technology enable people better to cope: Continued improvements are what is needed.
Last Thursday, Pakistan requested that the IMF restructure a $10 billion loan because the floods prevent it from meeting the conditions. But Pakistan’s reliance on Western “aid” (including these soft loans) has undermined incentives for economic reform. When governments must rely on local taxes rather than taxpayers in foreign countries, they are more strongly motivated to create conditions that generate wealth at home.
At present, Pakistan remains hidebound by restrictions on economic activity. Inefficient and expensive law courts make it difficult to enforce contracts. Restrictions on property make ownership insecure and undermine investment. Employment regulations and corruption make it difficult to operate a formal business, driving economic activity underground, where it cannot be taxed. These factors put Pakistan near the bottom of every ranking of economic freedom and are the main reasons for its weak economy and slow growth.
Instead of relying on foreign aid, governments of poor countries should remove these barriers to enterprise. Then next time they are struck by a natural disaster, people will be better able to cope - and far fewer will suffer and die. See post here.
Julian Morris is a visiting professor at the University of Buckingham and executive director of International Policy Network, London, an independent economic think tank.
By Anita Kumar, Washington Post
CHARLOTTESVILLE—A team of lawyers for Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II, a vocal skeptic of global warming, went to court Friday to further his investigation into whether former University of Virginia professor Michael Mann manipulated data to show that there has been a rapid, recent rise in the Earth’s temperature.
Lawyers from the attorney general’s office said the climate scientist might have engaged in fraud by purposely designing his well-known “hockey-stick” graph to show global warming or including manipulated research on his curriculum vitae, which he submitted for grants.
Deputy Attorney General Wesley G. Russell Jr., who argued the case on Cuccinelli’s behalf, said there was a possibility of a “consistent pattern of manipulation of data.”
But attorneys for the university say other investigations found no wrongdoing by Mann, who did not attend Friday’s hearing.
Cuccinelli issued a civil investigative demand, essentially a subpoena, for documents from U-Va. for five grant applications Mann prepared and all e-mail between Mann and his research assistants, secretaries and 39 other scientists across the country. U-Va. is fighting back, arguing that the demand exceeds Cuccinelli’s authority under state law and intrudes on the rights of professors to pursue academic inquiry free from political pressure.
Albemarle Circuit Court Judge Paul Peatross took the matter under advisement, saying he would rule within 10 days.
“It’s frankly offensive to be attacked by a sitting attorney general in a state I know and love,’’ Mann said in a phone interview after the hearing. “These charges continue to be made by climate-change deniers. There is no grounds whatsoever for the claims they are making.”
The long-awaited courtroom showdown between Cuccinelli and Virginia’s flagship university drew a packed house. Cuccinelli, who is suing the Environmental Protection Agency over global warming, has denied that he is seeking the documents because of Mann’s scientific findings. He did not appear in Charlottesville on Friday but issued a brief statement.
“The attorney general is the sole official charged with enforcing Virginia’s Fraud Against Taxpayers Act,’’ he said. “Our office is investigating whether a false claim was presented to the university to secure payment under government-funded grants—nothing more, nothing less.”
Russell argued that the attorney general’s office is allowed to have the documents because they are on state e-mail servers and because the grant money is in a state bank account. But Chuck Rosenberg, an attorney for the university, argued that four of the grants were from the federal government and are not subject to state law.
Rosenberg also argued that Cuccinelli failed to specifically identify in the civil investigative demand what Mann allegedly did wrong, which is required by law. Peatross repeatedly pressed Russell for that information.
“There is reason to believe that in information he submitted for grants, there is manipulated data,” Russell responded.
Cuccinelli issued a civil investigative demand under a 2002 state statute designed to catch government employees defrauding the public of tax dollars.
Mann’s work has long been under attack by global warming skeptics, particularly after references to a statistical “trick” Mann used in his research surfaced in a series of leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Mann has said the e-mail was taken out of context. Some of his methodologies have been criticized by other scientists, but an inquiry by Pennsylvania State University concluded that there was no evidence that Mann engaged in efforts to falsify or suppress data. Mann worked at U-Va. from 1999 to 2005 and now works at Penn State.
“Calling scientific findings ‘fraudulent’ because you don’t agree with them is dangerous,’’ said Francesca Grifo, director of the Scientific Integrity Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
See post here.
Icecap Note: Cuccinelli is a true American hero. Mann is a disgrace to the science, to UVA and PSU. The AMS, AGU, the union for college professors and UCAR are hypocites in their attack on Cuccinellui while they look the other way at the Greenpeace shotgun attack via FoIA on all skeptical scientists in the universities. Oh and one last thing “Scientific Integrity” and “Union of Concerned Scientsists” is an oxymoron if I ever heard one.
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Obama Sides Against States & Greens Over Global Warming Enforcement
By Gabriel Nelson, The New York Times, 25 August 2010
The Obama administration has urged the Supreme Court to toss out an appeals court decision that would allow lawsuits against major emitters for their contributions to global warming, stunning environmentalists who see the case as a powerful prod on climate change.
In the case, AEP v. Connecticut, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with a coalition of states, environmental groups and New York City. The decision, handed down last year, said they could proceed with a lawsuit that seeks to force several of the nation’s largest coal-fired utilities to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
The defendants—American Electric Power Co. Inc., Duke Energy Corp., Southern Co. and Xcel Energy Inc.—filed a petition for review with the Supreme Court earlier this month, asking the court to reject the argument that greenhouse gas emissions can be addressed through “public nuisance” lawsuits (Greenwire, Aug. 4).
In a brief (pdf) filed yesterday on behalf of the Tennessee Valley Authority, acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal agreed with the defendants, saying that U.S. EPA’s newly finalized regulations on greenhouse gases have displaced that type of common-law claim.
Katyal urged the court to vacate the decision and remand the case to the 2nd Circuit for further proceedings, this time taking into account the administration’s push to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
The 2nd Circuit’s decision rested on the assertion that “EPA does not currently regulate carbon dioxide,” but that has since changed. The Obama administration has finalized several regulations in response to the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, which told the agency to decide whether greenhouse gases were pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
“Since this court held in 2007 that carbon dioxide falls within that regulatory authority, EPA has taken several significant steps toward addressing the very question presented here,” Katyal wrote. “That regulatory approach is preferable to what would result if multiple district courts—acting without the benefit of even the most basic statutory guidance—could use common-law nuisance claims to sit as arbiters of scientific and technology-related disputes and de factoregulators of power plants and other sources of pollution both within their districts and nationwide.”
Matt Pawa, an attorney representing plaintiffs in the case, said he and his colleagues expected the White House to stay out of the matter. During a meeting with more than 30 administration lawyers at the solicitor general’s office on June 24, it seemed they had “a lot of friends in the room,” he said.
“We feel stabbed in the back,” Pawa said. “This was really a dastardly move by an administration that said it was a friend of the environment. With friends like this, who needs enemies?”
Top attorneys at environmental advocacy groups are buzzing about the brief, sources say. Some feel betrayed by a White House that has generally been more amenable to environmental regulation than its predecessor.
“This reads as if it were cut and pasted from the Bush administration’s briefing in Massachusetts,” said David Bookbinder, who served as the Sierra Club’s chief climate counsel until his resignation in May.
Full story
By Kirk Myers
The Church of Global Warming (a.k.a. the Church of CO2 Emissions), which has converted many a true believer over the past few decades, is facing a Reformation of sorts. Its pews are beginning to empty as snow-bound and shivering skeptics increasingly question its once-unchallenged doctrines. Still, many millions of worshipers remain faithful to the religion’s man-is-warming-the-earth theology - a belief system based on demonstrably fraudulent science and false prophecy. In the face of overwhelming scientific evidence that the earth is now cooling - not warming - why do so many cling to their Greenhouse God while denouncing CO2 as the planetary Satan? Why do they continue to recite chapter and verse from necromancer Al Gore’s Bible of Inconvenient Truth?
Have the good disciples not read or seen the mountain of real-world evidence that belies the pronouncements of the High Priests of Mother Earth? Are they so in thrall to their environmental gospel that they have abandon reason? The answer, regrettably, is yes. As Caroline May of BigGovernment.com notes, Warmist worship is rooted not in facts, but in “blind adherence to an unproven principle”:
“This unquestioned adherence to the theory of Global Warming bears all the markings of what traditionally would be recognized as a religion. Complete with sin (the emitting of carbon dioxide), scriptures (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports), commandments (drive a Prius, use Compact Florescent Light bulbs, do not eat meat etc.), indulgences (carbon offsets), proselytism, prophets (Al Gore), priests (scientists), prophecy and apocalypse (floods, hurricanes, dead polar bears), infidels (Warming skeptics), and salvation (the halting of carbon emitting industrial progress) . . . .”
Those who argue that the sun is largely responsible for climate change are branded as heretics, just as Galileo was condemned by church authorities for claiming the earth revolves around the sun. The sun’s impact on earth’s climate is huge compared to that of human beings - a fact well understood by most climate scientists and solar physicists. But green theologians and their flock of well-meaning, but misguided, believers ignore or downplay the sun’s dominant role. Instead, they blame humans in the most apocalyptic language.
As columnist Don Feder notes, the new Church of Mother Earth, is rooted in the secular doctrines of Marxism. It is a quasi-religion that promises to take adherents to the Promised Land of “rigid control, central planning, rationing, pre-industrial living standards and flagellation to purge us of our sins.”
The late Michael Crichton, a celebrated author who penned Jurassic Park and several other best-selling novels, condemned the religious-like aspects of environmentalism as far back as 2003 in a speech to San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club:
“Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism,” Crichton observed. “Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists . . . a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.”
“There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability.”
Some of the biggest critics of the church of eco-theology are scientific experts, many of whom are ostracized and treated by fellow researchers as apostates - “unbelievers” and “deniers.”
According to Dr. Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “We are shifting away from science and into the realm of religious fanaticism, where the followers of the creed, brimming with self-righteous fury, believe that they are in possession of a higher truth.
Like a religion, environmentalism is suffused with hatred for the material world and again, like religion, it requires devotion rather than intellectual rigor from its adherents. It is intolerant of dissent; those who question the message of doom are regarded as heretics, or ‘climate change deniers’, to use green parlance.
And, just as in many religions, the route to personal salvation lies in the performance of superstitious rituals, such as changing a light bulb or arranging for a tree to be planted after every plane journey. Even Czech President Vaclav Klaus has taken a verbal swipe at the new eco-creed, calling the global warming movement a “new religion.”
“I’m convinced that after years of studying the phenomenon, global warming is not the real issue of temperature . . . This is a religion which tells us that the people are responsible for the current, very small increase in temperatures. And they should be punished,” Klaus said. “They [global warmists] will try to dictate to us how to live, what to do, how to behave.”
The rigid strictures of eco-worship don’t leave much room for fun. Virtually everything one does is sinful - traveling during holidays (especially if it involves plane travel), driving your car, having a comfortable temperature in your home, using incandescent light bulbs, leaving the phone charger plugged in, idling in the school parking lot, driving instead of walking or bicycling to the corner store, using the fireplace, and on and on. The new eco-doctrine demands that everyone - believers and unbelievers - must endure a living Purgatory on earth so Polar Bears can procreate in greater numbers and Greenlanders can remain comfortably frozen.
As John Brignell writes, “The eleventh commandment for the killjoys is ‘Thou shalt not have fun,’ and global warming provides a delightful playground for them."`But don’t dare complain about or challenge the anti-carbon creed. Those who defy the religious order are branded apostates and eternally damned - or worse.
Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada received five death threats after publicly challenging the man-causes-global-warming doctrine."I can tolerate being called a skeptic because all scientists should be skeptics, but then they started calling us deniers, with all the connotations of the Holocaust. That is an obscenity. It has got really nasty and personal.”
In recent years, the green religion has filtered into the ecclesiastical realm where it has found a sympathetic ear. Britain’s Archbishop of Canterbury is one of several godly potentates to cloak himself in the vestments of green and preach eco-sermons to his flock. According to a story in London’s Daily Mail, the archbishop “urged people to recycle their rubbish and cut down on air travel . . . He also called for people to ‘go out of doors in the wet from time to time’ and take chances to watch the changing of the seasons in order to ‘restore a sense of association with the material place and time and climate we inhabit and are part of.’”
And in a Twilight Zone moment, a British judge recently ruled in favor of a worker who claimed he was unfairly dismissed from his job at a property management firm for expressing his concerns about man-made global warming to his fellow employees. As Chuck Colson of Breakpoint.org reported, “The judge’s ruling opens the door to the possibility of employees suing their employers ‘for failing to account for their green lifestyles, such as providing recycling facilities or offering low-carbon travel.’”
Tragically, the environmental movement has become the gathering place for a growing assemblage of Gaia worshipers, neo-pagans, animists, wiccans and eco-magic believers - most of them neither interested in nor possessing an understanding of the complex scientific principles that drive climate change. The true mystics among them have turned from saving the polar bears to embracing a belief in fairies, pixies, gnomes, elves and other spirits of nature.
The groups pushing the global warming religion the hardest are those who stand to profit most from the evolving carbon-trading market. They are religious only in their worship of Almighty Wealth, and they plan to make a killing from the global warming scare through carbon trading. Carbon-trading offsets are similar to the medieval indulgences of old - pardons granted by the church for sinful behavior. As Alexander Cockburn writes: “The Roman Catholic Church was a bank whose capital was secured by the infinite mercy of Christ, Mary, and the Saints, and so the Pope could sell indulgences, like checks. The sinners established a line of credit against bad behavior and could go on sinning. Today a world market in ‘carbon credits’ is in formation. Those whose ‘carbon footprint’ is small can sell their surplus carbon credits to others, less virtuous than themselves.”
This carbon-trading scheme - and lots of investment money - is the driving force behind the global warming hysteria. Dirty, polluting humans must be convinced that global-government control of CO2 emissions is their salvation - even if destroys industry and reduces the world to peasantry. A great effort is underway to avoid blaming climate change on the sun - and for good reason: It is impossible to enact an international treaty to control the sun’s magnetic activity. If the sun, not human-generated atmospheric CO2, is responsible for global warming (and cooling), carbon taxes and a world carbon-trading exchange are pointless. Ergo, there would be no carbon fortunes to made by the CO2 warriors at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America-Merrill Lynch.
As Cockburn explains, the relentless demonizing of CO2 by the high priests of global warming is a sham - a deliberate deception. “There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world’s present warming trend,” he says.
“The greenhouse fearmongers rely entirely on unverified, crudely oversimplified computer models to finger mankind’s sinful contribution. Devoid of any sustaining scientific basis, carbon trafficking is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism, and greed, just like the old indulgences . . . .”
“The truth is there is no man-made global warming,” says Capitalism Magazine’s Tom DeWeese. “There’s only the scam of an empty global religion designed to condemn human progress and sucker the feeble minded into worldwide human misery.”
See post here. To show you how unreceptive the believeers are to even hearing facts that question their faith, see how Marc Morano was handled in a planned debate in Aspen, CO Sunday originally arranged by James Cameron, who backed out at the suggestion of Climate Progress’s Joe Romm here. Crowd called for Morano to kill himself.