Tag Archives: Science / Environment

Scientists’ Leaked Correspondence Illustrates Bitter Feud over Global Warming

There’s been a lot of buzz about this on the internet. I think some of the reporting overstates what these stolen emails reveal. They don’t show a coordinated conspiracy to lie about global warming. They do, however reveal many scientists’ bias against opposing views, as well as their pettiness.

In one email, Benjamin Santer from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., wrote to the director of the climate-study center that he was “tempted to beat” up Mr. Michaels. Mr. Santer couldn’t be reached for comment Sunday.

In another, Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University that skeptics’ research was unwelcome: We “will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” Neither man could be reached for comment Sunday. (Read more from wsj.com)

This celebratory, told-you-so video by climate skeptics is probably premature, but it is funny:

Climate Change Cash Unaccounted For

Large sums promised to developing countries to help them tackle climate change cannot be accounted for, a BBC investigation has found.

Rich countries pledged $410m (£247m) a year in a 2001 declaration – but it is now unclear whether the money was paid.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has accused industrialised countries of failing to keep their promise.

The EU says the money was paid out in bilateral deals, but admits it cannot provide data to prove it.

. . . .

The Bonn Declaration is surrounded by confusion and has led to mistrust between developed and developing countries.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says any new financing agreement signed at Copenhagen must be clear. (Read more from news.bbc.co.uk)

Give Up Meat!

Technological advances, not “live more simply” environmentalism, will deliver a greener planet, argues Madsen Pirie. Lord Stern, whose 2006 report set out the consequences and costs of various levels of global warming, has now called for humans to stop eating meat. His reasoning is that our farm animals, especially cows and pigs, expel methane, which is 23 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, making meat-production account for 18 percent of all carbon emissions. He says that it will become as socially unacceptable to eat meat as it is to drink and drive. The proposal is not surprising, since it is but the latest in a series of proposed behavioural changes which are claimed to be essential to the planet’s survival. . . .

Free-Market Analysis: It is very hard to deal with the idea that a powerful group of men create dominant social themes (memes) designed for the consumption of the rest of the world. It is even harder to wrap one’s mind around these memes being marketed the control and profit of those who generate them. But how else to explain many of the memes currently circulating?

These dominant social themes include the deadly swine flu, the ticking time bomb of overpopulation, the flooding of the world from global warming, the freezing of the world from peak oil – and on and on. We are even supposed to be scared of a meteor hitting earth. In all these instances – every one – a government solution is proposed that will ameliorate the difficulty. And all the solutions, we note, are increasingly international and involve the United Nations and other global bodies.

This can all be construed as coincidence – luck, etc. – but when one looks at the actual mechanism it is evident, in our opinion, that many of these dominant social themes are created and marketed by only a few highly placed, powerful, (often-titled) and wealthy people. (Read more from thedailybell.com)

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

A Complete List Of Things Supposedly Caused By Global Warming

Acne, agricultural land increase, Afghan poppies destroyed, Africa devastated,  Africa in conflict, African aid threatened, African summer frost, aggressive weeds, air pressure changes,  airport malaria, Agulhas current, Alaska reshaped, moves,  allergy season longer, alligators in the Thames, Alps melting, Amazon a desert, American dream end,  amphibians breeding earlier (or not),  anaphylactic reactions to bee stings,  ancient forests dramatically changed, animals head for the hills, animals shrink, Antarctic grass flourishes, Antarctic ice grows, Antarctic ice shrinks, Antarctic sea life at risk,   anxiety treatment, algal blooms, archaeological sites threatened, Arctic bogs melt, Arctic in bloom, Arctic ice free, Arctic ice melt faster, Arctic lakes disappear, Arctic tundra to burn . . . and much, MUCH more. (see the complete list at whatreallyhappened.com)

Ha! Even the BBC: What happened to global warming?

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man’s influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is.

. . . .

Skeptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth’s warmth comes from the Sun.

. . . .

The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.

But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.

These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.

So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.

. . . .

One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say its hotting up. (Read more from news.bbc.co.uk)

Study links H1N1 to seasonal flu shot

A “perplexing” Canadian study linking H1N1 to seasonal flu shots is throwing national influenza plans into disarray and testing public faith in the government agencies responsible for protecting the nation’s health.

Distributed for peer review last week, the study confounded infectious-disease experts in suggesting that people vaccinated against seasonal flu are twice as likely to catch swine flu. (Read more from theglobeandmail.com)

Calorie restrictive eating for longer life? The story we didn’t hear in the news

I grow more and more comfortable with my conclusion that Television’s job is to tell us who to hate and what to fear, and the less we listen to them, the better.

“This should have been the lead:

The long-awaited research on the effects of calorie restriction on aging in rhesus monkeys from the University of Wisconsin and Wisconsin National Primate Research Center have just been released. It found no statistically significant difference in the number of deaths among the monkeys who’ve been eating a calorie-restrictive diet for more than 20 years compared to the monkeys who’ve been allowed to eat ad lib all day as much as 20% over their normal calories.

But that’s not what made the news, of course. Instead, we’ve been bombarded with a thousand news stories all reporting in lockstep that low-calorie diets have been proven to add years to our lives.” (Read more from junkfoodscience.blogspot.com)

Goldman Sachs & Climate Change

As Matt Taibbi detailed in last month’s rollingstone, Goldman Sachs is poised to make huge profits from Cap & Trade legislation if it goes through.

“Last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of their lobbyists at the time was none other than Patterson, now Treasury chief of staff.)” (More at failedexperiment.com)

And as of not-too-long-ago, the front page of Goldman’s website depicts a melting glacier:

Makes me say HMMMMMMmmmmm….

Time Magazine (1974): Another Ice Age?

“As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.

Telltale signs are everywhere —from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest.Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.” (Read more from time.com)

See Also:
How to win the war on Global Warming

Climate Cops Video Game!

I beat the first three levels. They never show what happens when you catch up to the “energy wasting criminal” in the SUV, whose crimes apparently include using old fashioned light bulbs instead of the energy saving sort. I had hoped to see to billy-clubbing meted out by these perfectly multi-cultural and absurdly righteous defenders of our planet.

Cap & Trade Skepticism

“Two weeks after his election as president, Barack Obama said, ‘Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear.’ Shortly thereafter, more than 100 scientists signed a newspaper advertisement responding, ‘With all due respect Mr. President, that is not true.’ The scientists, from places as varied and esteemed as Los Alamos National Laboratory, the American Physical Society, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania, said the ‘case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated.’

But even many who are not skeptical about global warming found things to dislike in ACES. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who voted against it, said, ‘It won’t address the problem. In fact, it might make the problem worse.’ Kucinich faulted the bill’s ‘Enron-style accounting methods’ and allocation of $60 billion for Carbon Capture and Sequestration, ‘a single technology which may or may not work.’ Kucinich faulted the corporate welfare embedded in the bill, saying that the “trillion dollar carbon derivatives market will help Wall Street investors,’ with any benefits ‘passed through coal companies and other large corporations, on whom we will rely to pass on the savings.’

‘I take climate change seriously,’ libertarian economist Megan McArdle wrote last week. But she said the projections for ACES’s ‘effect on global warming are entirely negligible,’ and any hope that U.S. passage of the bill will ‘persuade China and India to get on board’ is ‘entirely wishful thinking on the part of American environmentalists. China is not going to let its citizens languish in subsistence farming because 30 years from now, some computer models say there will be some not-well-specified bad effects from high temperatures. Nor is India.'” (Read more from campaignforliberty.com)

Global Warming Petition Signed by 31,478 Scientists

Ron Paul’s Statement before the US House of Representatives, June 4, 2009:

“Madam Speaker, before voting on the ‘cap-and-trade’ legislation, my colleagues should consider the views expressed in the following petition that has been signed by 31,478 American scientists:

‘We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.’

Circulated through the mail by a distinguished group of American physical scientists and supported by a definitive review of the peer-reviewed scientific literature, this may be the strongest and most widely supported statement on this subject that has been made by the scientific community.” (Read more from lewrockwell.com)

Al Gore: There’s a consensus, I tell you! A fucking consensus! Now buy some solar panels from the companies I invested in!!!