The Week That Was (May 17, 2008) brought to you by SEPP

 

NO TWTW UNTIL JULY 5

 

European briefing program for NIPCC report “Nature – Not Human Activity – Rules the Climate”   http://www.sepp.org/publications/NIPCC_final.pdf. 

If you are nearby, e-mail  <…>  for details

 

May 28-29 at Unconventional Fuel Conference, Marriott-Westchase Hotel, Houston

June 3  in Amsterdam;  June 4,5 Briefings around Holland  <H.Labohm@freeler.nl>

June 6  Press briefing on NIPCC in Dusseldorf, Germany; interviews  <limburg@grafik-system.de>

June 7  Cologne, Mainz

June 8  Frankfurt  <stotko@vdst-akademie.de>

June 9  Briefing in Fkft,Stuttgart  <stotko@vdst-akademie.de>

June 10, 11  Munich. Various talks and interviews  <stotko@vdst-akademie.de>

June 12  Huckelrieden: NIPCC Briefing of Bundestag group [not open]

June 13,14  Vienna.  Luncheon talk Hayek Institute  <barbara.kolm@hayek-institut.at>

June 15 Venice and Padova

June 16 Padova-Verona – (Brixen)- Milan  <Renato.A.Ricci@lnl.infn.it>

June 17, 18  Milan.  Interviews, lectures, Luncheon talk June 18  <carlo.stagnaro@brunoleoni.it>

June 19-22  Paris.  Seminar  <preiter@pasteur.fr>

June 23  Brussels. Seminar at Royal Observatory; Briefing at EU Parliament 

              <roger.helmer-assistant@europarl.europa.eu>

June 24-26  London.  Luncheon talk on NIPCC at CPS on June 25  < jill@cps.org.uk>

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Quote of the Week:

“People only insist that a debate stop when they are afraid of what might be learned if it continues.”

George Will, in reference to climate science

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“As University of California physicist John Holdren has said, it is possible that carbon dioxide-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020.”

-          Paul Ehrlich, The Machinery of Nature (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 274.

Were they predicting the ethanol mandate that’s supposed to save the world from global warming?

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The announcement by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne amounted to the government's first use of the Endangered Species Act to list a species as menaced because of a loss of habitat caused by global warming. [ITEM #1].  SO --- HOW WILL THEY PROVE THAT GW IS HUMAN-CAUSED?  IF THEY SUE THE  GOVT, WE  WANT TO RESPOND.

 

McCain goes for Cap&Trade [ITEM #2].  But it has been part of his record; he cannot deny it  But he should proclaim loudly: “I will always follow the best science.”

 

WSJ: The Ethanol horror story [ITEM #3]

 

How to explain current global cooling: Trying hard to keep the Greenhouse scare going [ITEM #4]

 

The US public is doubting GW, polls show.  Why don’t the media and politicians?  [ITEM #5]

 

Cal Thomas on the need for Climate Debate [ITEM #6]

 

The real GW catastrophe is the economic damage from mitigation [ITEM #7]

 

In praise of CO2 [ITEM #8]

 

GW war on the family [ITEM #9]

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NEWS YOU CAN USE:

For years the modelers said they had The Exact Analysis.  Now they admit their models don’t work very well - so they need Megamillions for computing power to better convert GI to GO.  But there is no point to increase resolution (at great cost) while the atmospheric physics of clouds and WV remains incomplete. 

[Comment on Editorial: Nature 453, 257 (15 May 2008) | doi:10.1038/453257a;  The next big climate challenge:  Governments should work together to build the supercomputers needed for future predictions that can capture the detail required to inform policy.]

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Oregon Petition Project:  Dr. Arthur Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM) will announce that more than 31,000 scientists have signed a petition rejecting claims of global warming alarmism at 10:00 AM on Monday, 19 May 2008 at the National Press Club in Washington D. C.  The complete list will be available at www.petitionproject.org on Monday morning.

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BELOW THE BOTTOM LINE:

Obesity contributes to global warming: study
http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSL1572011320080515?feedType=RSS&feedName=healthNews&rpc=22&sp=true
Obese and overweight people require more fuel to transport them and the food they eat, and the problem will worsen as the population literally swells in size (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine).
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Apocalypse around the corner? Climate change and human extinction--are you ready to be fossilized? Just like the dinosaurs   http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/storypage.aspx?StoryId=118533
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1.  LISTING THE POLAR BEAR UNDER THE ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT

Comment by National Center for Public Policy Analysis President Amy Ridenour

 

Washington, D.C. - The decision to list the polar bear as "threatened" announced today by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne was probably the best that could be expected from a government agency operating under a severely-flawed Endangered Species Act, but it is a regrettable decision nonetheless.

The Secretary's clear intent to deny environmental organizations the power to regulate the energy use of the American people through Endangered Species Act-related lawsuits is commendable, but it is only through a failure of lawmaking that such a threat to representative government is even possible.

It remains to be seen if the Secretary's effort to keep the development of climate policies it belongs -- with Congress -- will succeed.

Environmental organizations will continue to try to use the Endangered Species Act to impose energy-use restrictions on the American public, but no climate policy should be adopted without the consent of the public as expressed through the votes of their elected representatives in Congress.

Those politicians who support the effort to impose climate policy without public consent are doing so due to political expediency.  The present majority leadership of the House and Senate claim to be persuaded that the theory that human beings are causing significant climate change is correct, yet it is unwilling to push energy-use restrictions through Congress because the public does not support this action.  The Congressional leadership is taking the coward's way out.

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2.  MCCAIN’S EMBARRASSING CLIMATE SPEECH

By Steven Milloy

http://www.junkscience.com/ByTheJunkman/20080515.html

While no one knows who first uttered the sentiment, “It’s better to say nothing and seem a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt,” Republican presidential hopeful John McCain’s speech this week on climate change certainly supports the phrase’s validity.

McCain spoke at the facilities of Vestas Wind Technology, an Oregon-based firm that manufactures wind power systems. The irony of the setting was rich, given McCain’s outspoken opposition to pork-barrel spending. He even risked his presidential hopes by criticizing ethanol subsidies ahead of the all-important Iowa caucuses.

Next to solar power, however, wind power is the most heavily subsidized form of energy. Taxpayers cough up an astounding  $23.37 per megawatt hour of electricity produced, according to the Wall Street Journal. In contrast, coal and natural gas are only subsidized  to a tune of $0.44 and $0.25, respectively.

McCain lauded wind as a “predictable source of energy.” He must have missed this Feb. 27 headline from Reuters “Loss of wind causes Texas power grid emergency.” The electric grid operator was forced to curtail 1,100 megawatts of power to customers within 10 minutes.

“Our economy depends upon clean and affordable alternatives to fossil fuels,” McCain stated. What he’s talking about is not quite clear since our current economy is about 75 percent dependent on fossil fuels and will remain that way for at least the next 25 years, as solar and wind technologies remain only marginal sources of energy.

If anything, we are likely to be even more dependent on fossil fuels in the future as nuclear power, which now provides about 20 percent of our electricity, shrinks in availability as a supply of energy. Although our energy needs are ever-growing, construction of nuclear power plants is not keeping pace -- not one has come online in the last 30 years. Even if a few nuke plants are constructed during the next decades, they will not supply enough power to keep nuclear power at the 20 percent level.

McCain then demonstrated how little he knows about the science of global warming:  “No longer do we need to rely on guesswork and computer modeling, because satellite images reveal a dramatic disappearance of glaciers, Antarctic ice shelves and polar ice sheets. And I’ve seen some of this evidence up close…”

Global warming alarmism, however, is entirely based on the “guesswork and computer modeling” that McCain says isn’t necessary. The reason that the United Nations relies on “guesswork and computer modeling” is because the glaciers that are receding have been doing so since at least the 19th century, before significant human output of greenhouse gases.  In any event, the melting of glaciers is not evidence that humans are involved. Glaciers have been advancing and retreating for hundreds of millions of years. Just because humans are witnessing changes in glaciers does not mean that humans are causing them.

“We have seen sustained drought in the Southwest, and across the world average temperatures that seem to reach new records every few years. We have seen a higher incidence of extreme weather events,” McCain stated. But that “sustained drought” is why the Southwest is commonly known as a “desert” -- and it was a desert long before industrial emissions of greenhouse gases.

As to global temperature, the world has cooled since 1998 and the latest research from UN-approved researchers indicates that more global cooling is on the way.

With respect to extreme weather events, I can’t think of a single scientist – even an alarmist scientist – who has the temerity to stand up and link specific weather events with climate change. McCain’s apparent climate mentor, Al Gore, learned this lesson the hard way last fall.

McCain touted a so-called cap-and-trade system for controlling greenhouse gas emissions, citing the supposed success of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments’ cap-and-trade system for the sulfur dioxide emissions linked to alleged phenomenon of acid rain.  But even if acid rain was a genuine environmental problem -- and studies leading up to the 1990 law cast significant doubt -- controlling sulfur dioxide emissions is many orders of magnitude easier than controlling greenhouse gas emissions. The volume of sulfur dioxide emissions to be eliminated is much smaller, the sources (coal-fired power plants) are relatively few and the smokestack technology is comparatively inexpensive.

McCain said that “A cap-and-trade policy will send a signal that will be heard and welcomed all across the American economy.” This is unlikely, since cap-and-trade’s economic harms have been exposed and condemned by the likes of the Congressional Budget Office, the Environmental Protection Agency, and renown economists such as Alan Greenspan and Arthur Laffer. Even the Clinton Administration warned of the economic harms that would be caused by cap-and-trade.

Although China, the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter, vows not to reduce its emissions, McCain says the U.S. should act anyway. So as China, India and other developing nations become the world's greenhouse gas smokestacks, thereby nullifying any reductions made by the U.S., McCain willingly condemns the U.S. to more expensive and less available energy supplies for no environmental benefit whatsoever.

Undaunted by facts, McCain appears to be programmed with every nonsensical Green platitude and policy -- a truly worrisome situation since global warming regulation is shaping up to be the most important domestic policy issue of the upcoming election.

Many McCain supporters believe he is the candidate to lead the country at a time of war. But there is a war of sorts at home too -- the struggle against the Greens for control over vital domestic energy and economic policy. We can’t afford to lose the latter war, either.

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Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and DemandDebate.com. He is a junk science expert, and advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute

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3.  THE BIOFUELS BACKLASH 

Wall Street Journal  May 7th, 2008   

St. Jude is the patron saint of lost causes, and for 30 years we invoked his name as we  opposed ethanol subsidies. So imagine our great, pleasant surprise to see that the world is  suddenly awakening to the folly of subsidized biofuels.  All it took was a mere global "food crisis."

    Last week chief economist Joseph Glauber of  the USDA, which has been among Big Ethanol's best friends in Washington, blamed biofuels for increasing prices on corn and soybeans. Mr. Glauber also predicted that corn prices will continue their historic rise because of demand from "expanding use for  ethanol."  Even the environmental left, which pushed ethanol for decades as an alternative to  gasoline, is coming clean. Lester Brown, one of the original eco-Apostles, wrote in the  Washington Post that "it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that food-to-fuel mandates have failed." We knew for sure the tide had turned when Time magazine's recent cover  story, "The Clean Energy Myth," described how turning crops into fuel increases both  food prices and atmospheric CO2. No one captures elite green wisdom better than Time's  Manhattan editors. Can Vanity Fair be far behind? 

     All we can say is, welcome aboard. Corn ethanol can now join the scare over silicone  breast implants and the pesticide Alar as among the greatest scams of the age. But before  we move on to the next green miracle cure, it's worth recounting how much damage this  ethanol political machine is doing.  To create just one gallon of fuel, ethanol slurps up 1,700 gallons of water, according to  Cornell's David Pimentel, and 51 cents of tax credits. And it still can't compete against oil  without a protective 54-cents-per-gallon tariff on imports and a federal mandate that  forces it into our gas tanks. The record 30 million acres the U.S. will devote to ethanol  production this year will consume almost a third of America's corn crop while yielding  fuel amounting to less than 3% of petroleum consumption.  In December the Congressional Research Service warned that even devoting every last  ear of American-grown corn to ethanol would not create enough "renewable fuel" to meet  federal mandates.

    According to a 2007 OECD report, fossil-fuel production is up to  10,000 times as efficient as biofuel, measured by energy produced per unit of land.  Now scientists are showing that ethanol will exacerbate greenhouse gas emissions. A  February report in the journal Science found that "corn-based ethanol, instead of  producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years . . .  Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%."  Princeton's Timothy Searchinger and colleagues at Iowa State, of all places, found that  markets for biofuel encourage farmers to level forests and convert wilderness into  cropland. This is to replace the land diverted from food to fuel. 

     As usual, Congress is the last to know, but maybe even it is catching on. Credit goes to  John McCain, the first presidential candidate in recent memory who has refused to bow  before King Ethanol. Onetime ethanol opponent Hillary Clinton announced her support in  2006, as the Iowa caucuses beckoned. In 2006 Barack Obama proposed mandating a  staggering 65 billion gallons a year of alternative fuel by 2025, but by this Sunday on  NBC's "Meet the Press" he was suggesting that maybe helping "people get something to  eat" was a higher priority than biofuels. 

     Mr. McCain and 24 other Senators are now urging EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson  to consider using his broad waiver authority to eliminate looming biofuel mandates.  Otherwise, the law will force us to consume roughly four times the current requirement  by 2022. In fact, with some concerned state governments submitting helpful petitions,  Mr. Johnson could largely knock out the ethanol mandate regime, at least temporarily.  Over the longer term, however, this shouldn't be entrusted to unelected bureaucrats. The  best policy would repeal the biofuel mandates and subsidies enacted in the 2005 and 2007  energy bills. We say repeal because there will be intense lobbying to keep the subsidies,  or transfer them from projects that have failed to those that have not yet failed. 

    Like Suzanne Somers in "American Graffiti," the perfect biofuel is always just out of  reach, only a few more billion dollars in subsidies away from commercial viability. But  sometimes even massive government aid can't turn science projects into products. The  industry's hope continues for cellulosic ethanol, but there's no getting around the fact that  biofuels require vegetation to make fuel. Even cellulosic ethanol, while more efficient  than corn, will require countless acres of fuel if it is ever going to replace oil.

     Perhaps  some future technology will efficiently extract energy from useless corn stalks and fallen  trees. But until that day, Congress's ethanol subsidies are merely force-feeding an  industry that is doing far more harm than good.  The results include distorted investment decisions, higher carbon emissions, higher food  prices for Americans, and an emerging humanitarian crisis in the developing world. The  last thing the poor of Africa and the taxpayers of America need is another scheme to  conjure gasoline out of corn and tax credits.   

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4.  THE GLOBAL-WARMING MYTH
By Patrick J. Michaels, The Washington Times, 16 May 2008
http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080516/EDITORIAL/8210510/-1/RSS_EDITORIAL&template=printart

On May Day, Noah Keenlyside of Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Science, published a paper in Nature forecasting no additional global warming "over the next decade."

Al Gore and his minions continue to chant that "the science is settled" on global warming, but the only thing settled is that there has not been any since 1998. Critics of this view (rightfully) argue that 1998 was the warmest year in modern record, due to a huge El Nino event in the Pacific Ocean, and that it is unfair to start any analysis at a high (or a low) point in a longer history. But starting in 2001 or 1998 yields the same result: no warming.

The Keenlyside team found that natural variability in the Earth's oceans will "temporarily offset" global warming from carbon dioxide. Seventy percent of the Earth's surface is oceanic; hence, what happens there greatly influences global temperature. It is now known that both Atlantic and Pacific temperatures can get "stuck," for a decade or longer, in relatively warm or cool patterns. The North Atlantic is now forecast to be in a cold stage for a decade, which will help put the damper on global warming. Another Pacific temperature pattern is forecast not to push warming, either.

Science no longer provides justification for any rush to pass drastic global warming legislation. The Climate Security Act, sponsored by Joe Lieberman and John Warner, would cut emissions of carbon dioxide - the main "global warming" gas - by 66 percent over the next 42 years. With expected population growth, this means about a 90 percent drop in emissions per capita, to 19th-century levels.

Pressure to pass impossible-to-achieve legislation, like Lieberman-Warner, or grandstanding political stunts, like calling polar bears an "endangered species" even when they are at near record-high population levels, are based upon projections of rapid and persistent global warming.

Proponents of wild legislation like to point to the 2007 science compendium from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, deemed so authoritative it was awarded half of last year's Nobel Peace Prize. (The other half went to Al Gore.) In it there are dozens of computer-driven projections for 21st-century warming. Not one of them projects that the earth's natural climate variability will shut down global warming from carbon dioxide for two decades. Yet, that is just what has happened.

If you think about it, all we possess to project the future of complex systems are computer models. Therefore, if the models that serve as the basis for policy do not work - and that must be the conclusion if indeed we are at the midpoint of a two-decade hiatus in global warming - then there is no verifiable science behind the current legislative hysteria. What does this mean for the future? If warming is "temporarily offset" for two decades, does all the "offset" warming suddenly appear with a vengeance, or is it delayed?

Computer models, like the one used by Keenlyside, et al., rely on "positive feedbacks" to generate much of their warming. First, atmospheric carbon dioxide warms things up a bit. Then the ocean follows, raising the amount of atmospheric water vapor, which is a greater source of global warming than carbon dioxide. When the ocean does not warm up, it seems that the additional warming is also delayed. All of this may mean that we have simply overestimated the amount of warming that results from increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

That final point has been a subject of debate for a long time. Several recent publications in the peer-reviewed literature argue that observed changes in temperature show the "sensitivity" of temperature to increasing carbon dioxide is lower than earlier estimates. All of this suggests a 21st-century warming trend that will be lower than the average value calculated by the climate models in the IPCC compendium.

But who really knows? Before Keenlyside dropped his bombshell, few scientists would have said publicly that global warming could stop for two decades. Anyone raising that possibility would doubtlessly have been treated to the smug reply that "the science is settled," and that only the most bumptious ignoramus could raise such a question.

One final prediction: The teeming polar bear population will be listed as "endangered," and in the next year or two, Congress will pass a bill mandating large and impossible cuts in carbon dioxide. What is "settled" is the politics, not the science.
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Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute.

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5.  AMERICANS COOLING TO GLOBAL WARMING:

by Lawrence Solomon, May 15, 2008

All three U.S. presidential hopefuls have made global warming a high-profile issue in their campaigns. In this they are out of step with the broad electorate, which ranks global warming well down the scale of important issues. The public's increasing skepticism is particularly surprising given the overwhelming air time that the press has given to the notion that global warming spells doom.

According to a new Pew Poll released last week, for the U.S. population as a whole, only 47% believe that the earth is warming due to man made causes. Democrats are likeliest to believe this (58%) and Republicans least likely (27%) with Independents split right down the middle (50%).

Although most Democrats believe man is the culprit, they don't take the crime too seriously. When asked to prioritize global warming among the many concerns that face Americans -- everything from terrorism to crime to government ethics -- global warming comes in 15th out of 21. Independents take a dimmer view, ranking global warming the 18th most important issue, and Republicans rank it last, as the 21st most important. Overall, according to a poll released in January, only 35% of Americans said global warming should be a top priority for the president and Congress this year, down from 38% a year earlier.

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Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

E-mail: LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

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6.  CAL THOMAS ON THE NEED FOR CLIMATE DEBATE

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/05/mccain_joins_global_warming_cu.html

No, the most relevant question is whether global warming is true. Cults ignore evidence and facts contrary to their blind faith. ...

Instead of buying into the claims of global warming alarmists who seek more control over our lives through big government intrusion, McCain should demand a debate on the issue. Global warming cult leaders won't debate. Al Gore has refused every debate challenge, asserting the facts are undeniable and that global warming is real. That's another mark of a cult leader; he will tolerate no doubters.

Growing numbers of atmospheric scientists and others with related expertise are emerging from the global warming cult and testifying to their conversions. They are mostly ignored by the media and by politicians who have embraced the cultists' doctrines.

On April 6, 2006, 60 scientists wrote a letter to the Canadian prime minister asserting that the science is deteriorating from underneath global warming alarmists:

'Observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future. ... Significant (scientific) advances have been made since the (Kyoto) protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases. If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary.'"

Among the noted converts is Claude Allegre, a member of the French Socialist Party and a former Minister of National Education. Allegre is also a member of the French and U.S. Academy of Sciences. He once was a believer in the "science" behind global warming, but no more. He, too, wants a debate and his ranks are growing. If global warming alarmists are right, they will only strengthen their position by having robust debates, not between politicians who seek votes, but among scientists who seek truth. The issue is too important to allow politicians to decide it for us because it has the potential to drastically change the way we live.

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7.  GORE IS RIGHT. CLIMATE CHANGE CATASTROPHE IS IMMINENT!

http://www.webcommentary.com/asp/ShowArticle.asp?id=websterb&date=080515

 

Excerpt (courtesy Marc Morano): : I've been a long-time skeptic of global warming/climate change alarmism. I've written many times about the folly of the IPCC/Gore claim that human emissions of CO2 will bring about "catastrophic" change for human society. Well, I now freely admit I was wrong - but not for the reasons most often cited by alarmists. [] The danger and cost to human society from climate change will be catastrophic and is, apparently, unavoidable. But ironically, while the catastrophe to which I refer is unquestionably human-caused, it is completely avoidable. Therein lies the rub.

    The danger is not from a catastrophe arising from soaring temperatures and human misery that alarmists claim will follow (a highly debatable proposition). The catastrophe that seems unstoppable is the human misery that will unquestionably arise from the massive costs of soaring imprudent government regulation of CO2 emissions in the form of Gore-enriching "cap and trade" schemes that will, in the end, provide no discernable impact on global climate. []

    A further irony of the pending economic catastrophe that will be brought about by climate change legislation is that there is a strong likelihood that the next 20-30 years could see dramatic cooling brought about by climate forces that, up until now, the IPCC/Gore alarmists have claimed were not major climate change forces. The reason why the IPCC has been blind-sided by this act of nature (global cooling) is simple. They simply do not understand enough about climate science and climate change forces to come to any rational conclusions. But that has not stopped them from issuing dire warnings based on irresponsible use of inadequate computer simulations based on incomplete data for climate models that do not reflect a sufficient understanding of climate science!

    This UN effort (the IPCC is a creation of the UN) appears to be the most successful effort ever launched at destroying the US economic system (capitalism) that is routinely taught as the cause of all evil, even in the US university system. You have to give the Left credit for their tenacity. They make up with perseverance what they lack in common sense.
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8.  LOUD AND PROUD IN PRAISE OF CARBON 

 By David Archibald, The West Australian,  May 8, 2008 

John Connor of The Climate Institute says that my boat, my car and I are destroying the environment. My work says the opposite. The more carbon dioxide you put into the atmosphere, the more you are helping all plants on the planet to grow, and of course that makes you a better person. Virtue is in direct proportion to your carbon dioxide output. What of the temperature, you ask? Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but the effect is strongly logarithmic. The first 20 ppm achieves 1.5 degrees of heating, but it takes more than another 400 ppm to equal that. By the time we get to the current level of 384 ppm, carbon dioxide is tuckered out as a greenhouse gas. From here, every 100 ppm extra may be worth 0.1 of a degree.   

     So how does the IPCC achieve 5 degrees of heating from a doubling of the pre-industrial level of carbon dioxide to 560 ppm? They do it by cheating. Their computer models are written so that a little bit of carbon dioxide-caused heating puts more water vapour in the air. Water vapour is the major greenhouse gas, so they have the heating compounding away until they get a number that will melt icecaps, kill polar bears and all the other effects of their apocalyptic visions. Their view of the Earth’s climate is that it is tremendously unstable, prone to thermal runaway at the slightest provocation. In fact it is the opposite, a buffered system that dampens disturbances. Tropical seas can’t get warmer than 31 degrees because they start evaporating too rapidly to get any hotter. Similarly, high level tropical clouds part to vent radiation to space. The Earth is just about perfect for sustaining equable living conditions over a good proportion of its surface  

     What is strange is that the wailing of the global warming proponents is in the face of a temperature record that does not support their theory. Peak global temperature was in 1998 and we have had ten years of cooling since. The satellite record shows that the temperature of the Southern Hemisphere has been flat for the last 30 years. The Earth’s failure to warm has become quite annoying to the global warmers, and signs of cognitive dissonance are appearing in their camp. Surely a few more years of cooling will leave only the true believers in their misanthropic ideology, and the truly idiotic. Or is that moment with us now?

     The next decade will not be a good time to be a Canadian wheat farmer. In fact the current high grain prices caused by the mandated levels of ethanol in US petrol are just a warm up to the main event: a big reduction in mid-latitude grain production due to shorter growing seasons and unseasonable frosts. The global warmers do not have a monopoly on apocalyptic visions. Higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will help agricultural production a little. A 300 ppm increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide would increase wheat yields by 50%. Australia is a dry continent and we will benefit more than most others.  

     The next question is how to get more of that beneficial carbon dioxide up in the atmosphere where we need it. Non-OPEC oil production peaked in 2002, with flow on effects to the prices of coal and LNG. It won’t be cheap to do good from here. The good news for Australia is that coal-to-diesel plants are profitable at US$40 per barrel. At the current oil price, they are extremely profitable, and Australia has plenty of coal. The conversion process produces abundant carbon dioxide, so it is win-win all round.  

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(David Archibald is a Perth-based scientist working in the fields of climate and cancer research. He also explores for oil in northern Western Australia.)  

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9.  GLOBAL WARMING – LATEST EXCUSE FOR WAR ON FAMILY

By Don Feder, May 9, 2008

Procreation is killing the planet, and traditional religion is to blame, Global-Warming cultists insist.  First the industrial revolution had to go. Then it was to the wall with oil company executives, those malignant Carbon Interests. Next, SUVs were declared enemies of the planet.  Now, the left’s attention has shifted back to its perennial targets – large families and “patriarchal” religion.

   In a commentary in the April 21st. edition of USA TODAY (“Might our religion be killing us?”), Oliver “Buzz” Thomas quotes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- a tool of the global village idiots at the United Nations -- to the effect that Global Warming, caused by CO2 emissions, will lead to “drought, starvation and species extinction.” (Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies ... rivers and seas boiling… forty years of darkness… dogs and cats living together!)

     The culprits are religions that oppose birth control and abortion and instruct us regarding fructification and multiplication. Thomas even names names: “Now, consider the Roman Catholic Church’s continued opposition to modern birth control or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints’ (i.e. Mormons) encouragement of large families … . Many Orthodox Jews and some Muslims also eschew birth control.”

    Only “some Muslims”? Bet Planned Parenthood isn’t doing a land –office business in Mecca.  These benighted faiths are literally drowning us in kids, causing CO2-levels to rise, the hole in the ozone-layer to grow, and polar bears to float away on break-away chunks of the rapidly shrinking Arctic ice cap.

     But, what can you expect from churches mired in a literal reading of Scriptures? Thomas asks. “I recognize that religious organizations tend to be conservative institutions. Their continued opposition to equal rights for woman and gays is a good example.”  By failing to ordain women and opposing abortion and homosexual marriage, conservative denominations prove their resistance to progress and human rights, Buzz sneers.

     Said reactionary tendencies also are evident in their callous disregard for the environment. (For the left, the quintessential spiritual experience would be an abortion performed at a same-sex marriage ceremony, while transgendered ushers throw condoms instead of confetti, and bridesmaids confiscate handguns from passersby.)

     Says Thomas: “In the interest of preserving our planet and our species, shouldn’t religious organizations be encouraging smaller families? Do our spiritual leaders need additional divine revelation to realize that our current doctrines – which threaten to take the entire world down with us – have become ethically and theologically questionable?”  Welcome to the Church of Choice – services performed by the Reverend Rodham, Sundays at 9 and 11.

     For 200 years, the left has been fixated on an imaginary overpopulation crisis.  In 1798, Thomas Malthus warned that wars, famine and plagues were needed to reduce the “surplus population” else we would soon inhabit Planet SRO.  In his 1969 book, “The Population Bomb” (the prequel to “An Inconvenient Truth”), Paul Ehrlich forecast worldwide famine by 1975.  Natural resources would be severely depleted and arable land exhausted in a futile effort to keep up with the population explosion. Soon, we would be reduced to eating each other -- like Democratic presidential candidates in late April of an election year.

     That none of these doomsday scenarios came to pass is irrelevant to the left. Hysteria is the only way to propagate their creed. The Today Show’s Matt Lauer insists: “The stark reality is that there are too many of us. And we consume too much … The solutions are not a secret: control population, recycle, reduce consumption.” Spoken like a TV personality feigning an idea.

    How many people are too many? They never tell us.  As Dr. Jacqueline Kasun  noted in “The War Against Population: The Economics and Ideology of World Population Control” (1998), humans occupy 1% to 3% of the earth’s land surface.  A decade ago, all 5.8 billion of us could have fit in the state of Texas, with each having 1,269 square feet of living-space – the equivalent of a ranch house.  Since 1900, the world’s population has quadrupled, while the planet’s GDP has increased between 20 and 40 times.

    In 1960, India had to import food to deal with periodic famines. Today, with twice the population it had then, India is a net food exporter. Worldwide, half as many people die of starvation today as in 1900, even though we have four times as many people. Those who starve to death now are mostly victims of government-engineered famine.

    A 1990 report of United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that by employing what were then the most up-to-date technologies, the earth could yield enough to feed 30 to 35 billion.  So, we’re not running out of food or space. How about natural resources? In 1948, the world’s oil reserves were estimated at around 600 billion barrels. By 2000, the estimate was revised slightly upward – to 3 trillion barrels. The actual figure is anyone’s guess.

    Having failed with the foregoing, the left now has hit on what it believes to be the ultimate strategy to advance population control – Global Warming. Families are about to feel the blade of the guillotine in the coming Green Terror.

    In May, 2007, an outfit called the Optimum Population Trust warned that if the British didn’t voluntarily limit population size, it would be up to the state to force them to be environmentally conscious in the bedroom. (FYI, in the U.K., the birth rate is well-below replacement level.) The Trust warned that the average lifetime “carbon footprint” of a child born in Britain was the equivalent of 620 roundtrip flights between London and New York.

    Last December, Barry Walters, an associate professor of obstetric medicine at the University of Western Australia, urged the government in Canberra to levy a $5,000 “baby tax” and an annual $800 “carbon tax,” for each addition child born to a family with two children. All of the left’s crusades begin with proselytizing and end in coercion.

    “Every newborn baby in Australia represents a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions for an average of 80 years, not simply by breathing but by the profligate consumption of resources typical of our society,” Walters writes. The left is incapable of viewing individuals as anything other than polluters, never as producers or innovators – let alone seeing them in spiritual terms, as manifestations of God’s goodness.

    Global Warming is the left’s perfect storm – a force to demolish faith, family and freedom. There’s no area of our lives that can’t be invaded – taxed, controlled, regulated or obliterated – in the name of serving and protecting the planet.  Unlike food production and oil reserves, the myth of man-made Global Warming is resistant to factual analysis. The left treats it as revealed truth and skeptics are scorned as heretics and  troglodytes – the scientific equivalent of Holocaust-deniers. Al Gore, the movement’s P.T. Barnum-cum-Grand Inquisitor, compares them to the cranks who believe the earth is flat.

    If Global Warming didn’t exist, the left would have to invent it. In fact, they did. As Nigel Calder, former editor of the British magazine New Scientist explains: “Twenty years ago, climate research became politicized in favor of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the study as the effect of the study of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers.”

    Still, the evidence is there for those not blinded by dogma. Al Gore’s brain is melting faster than the Arctic ice cap, which is making a spectacular comeback. A February 18, 2008 story in the London Daily Express notes that Arctic ice levels, which had shrunk from 13 million to 4 million sq. km., between January and October 2007, are now almost back to their original levels. In the meantime, according to the paper, “Figures show that there is nearly a third more ice in Antarctica than is usual for the time of year.”

    In New England, I spent much of the past winter shoveling Global Warming.  The entire Northern Hemisphere experienced the coldest winter in decades. Again, from the Daily Express: “Even the Middle East saw snow, with Jerusalem, Damascus, Amman and northern Saudi Arabia reporting the heaviest falls in years and below zero temperatures. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, snow and freezing weather killed 120 people.”

    So many inconvenient facts that contradict the myth of Global Warming. In the United States, the 10 hottest years on record were all in the 1920s and 1930s. (Those Model A Fords have wide carbon tire-tracks.) Temperatures rose between 1910 and 1945, fell from 1945 to 1975, and rose again for the next 20 years – which bears no relationship to the production of greenhouse gasses.

    In an open letter to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon (December 13, 2007), 100 eminent scientists from all over the world observed: “It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity throughout the ages. … The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued increasingly alarming conclusions about the climate influences of human produced carbon-dioxide (CO2), a non- polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis.”

    Not only is there no reliable evidence that reducing CO2 emissions will affect climate change, the signers note, but “because attempts to cut emissions will slow development, the current UN approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it.”

    Not that human suffering ever stopped the left. It wants and needs man-made Global Warming as a way to counter what it considers the most potent threats to its agenda -- faith and family.  The left must have its scapegoat. This is absolutely essential. For Marx it was the bourgeoisie. For the ‘60s New Left, it was America – spelled with a “k.” White males are the villains of multiculturalism. Now, it’s babies and retrograde churches that are destroying the planet. The environment has assumed the role of the proletariat, the Third World and racial minorities in earlier models of damnation and salvation.

    In particular, the left cringes at the thought of Catholics, evangelicals, Orthodox Jews and Mormons having lots of children -- passing their misogynistic, homophobic, species-centric, suicidally archaic worldview to the next generation.  The left has always worried about the reproductive patterns of certain people. As Jonah Goldberg explains in his book “Liberal Fascism,” from the beginning, racial eugenics was a project of the left -- or progressives, as they called themselves then and now.

    H.G. Wells, a hero of pre-World War II progressivism (a socialist who wrote science fiction, much like Al Gore), said that in order for humankind to move to the sunny uplands of utopia, “swarms of black and brown, and dirty (lower class) white and yellow people” would have to be discouraged from breeding – or physically eliminated. Moreover, Goldberg explains, “The foremost institution combating eugenics around the world was the Catholic Church.”

    For those like Oliver “Buzz” Thomas (perpetrator of the aforesaid USA TODAY commentary), hordes of rapidly multiplying Catholics, Mormons, evangelicals and Orthodox Jews have taken the place of “swarms of black and brown, and dirty white and yellow peoples.”

    The irony here is that, unlike Global Warming, rapidly declining birthrates is a reality, not a theory. Worldwide, in 1970, the average woman had 6 children. Today, that average is only 2.8, with further declines forecast.  If current trends continue, by 2050, the world will hold 248 million fewer children under 5 years of age than it does today. The crisis we will confront in this century isn’t overpopulation, but a birth-dearth leading to population decline. When it comes to maintaining civilization, people are the one indispensable element.  By heeding His words and having large families, those reactionary believers indicted by Green Jacobins are doing God’s work, as well as humanity’s.

    In his USA TODAY diatribe, Thomas writes: “Population growth hits hardest in poor nations, and, as poverty increases, public health declines. I am quite certain that God is not the author of human misery, but by preaching against birth control at the same time we are preaching against abortion, it seems that we are making God out as cruel, a buffoon or both.” Thomas believes the word of God is negotiable – and must be constantly reinterpreted so as not make him “cruel, a buffoon or both.”

    Buzz has it backward. Poor countries are often rich in natural resources but lacking in human capital. By encouraging or forcing emerging nations to limit their population, Global Warming hysterics are dooming them to perpetual poverty.  God, on the other hand, tells us that children are the true source of prosperity as well as happiness.  Ultimately, it comes down to this: do we listen to God or a guy called Buzz? Hmmm, tough decision.