Global Warming

BREAKING NEWS: Intimidating the Anti-AGW Bloggers

Published by Papa Giorgio

From What’s Up With That

The first blogger to break the Climategate2 story has had a visit from the police and has had his computers seized. Tallbloke’s Talkshop first reported on CG2 due to the timing of the release being overnight in the USA. Today he was raided by six UK police (Norfolk Constabulary and Metropolitan police) and several of his computers were seized as evidence.

From the Guardian:

Police officers investigating the theft of thousands of private emails between climate scientists from a University of East Anglia server in 2009 have seized computer equipment belonging to a web content editor based at the University of Leeds.

On Wednesday, detectives from Norfolk Constabulary entered the home of Roger Tattersall, who writes a climate sceptic blog under the pseudonym TallBloke, and took away two laptops and a broadband router. A police spokeswoman confirmed on Thursday that Norfolk Constabulary had “executed a search warrant in West Yorkshire and seized computers”. She added: “No one was arrested. Investigations into the [UEA] data breach and publication [online of emails] continues. This is one line of enquiry in a Norfolk constabulary investigation which started in 2009.”

Tattersall posted his own account of the police search on his blog: “An Englishman’s home is his castle they say. Not when six detectives from the Metropolitan police, the Norfolk constabulary and the computer crime division arrive on your doorstep with a warrant to search it though … They ended up settling for two laptops and an ADSL broadband router … I got the feeling something was on the go last night when WordPress [the internet host for his blog] forwarded a notice from the US Department of Justice.”

[….]

Last month, Tattersall’s blog, as well as at least four other blogs popular with climate sceptics, received a comment from a user called “FOIA” providing a link to a Russian server hosting a compressed folder containing more than 5,000 emails exchanged between climate scientists, along with a short message setting out the perpetrator’s motives. The folder also contained an encrypted subfolder containing a further 220,000 emails. It was the second time such a release had occurred.

In November 2009, thousands of emails were released in a similar manner on the eve the Copenhagen climate summit. The episode prompted a series of inquiries into the working practices of climate scientists. Although these were critical of the scientists’ handling of Freedom of Information Act requests and lack of openness, they did not find fault with the climate change science they had produced.

Both Tattersall and a US-based climate sceptic blogger known as Jeff Id said they had received a “formal request” via the blogging platform WordPress from the US Department of Justice’s criminal division, dated 9 December, to preserve “all stored communications, records, and other evidence in your possession” related to their own blogs as well as to Climate Audit, a climate sceptic blog run by a Canadian mining consultant called Steve McIntyre.

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What This Is Really About

The point of this is not to catch the leaker, it’s to intimidate bloggers…. this is aimed at intimidating bloggers rather than catching the climategate leaker…. This has nothing at all to do with finding a hypothetical hackert

  Jo Nova makes a great point — highlighted — from the Washington Examiner has this story:

Tallbloke’s computers were confiscated by police today, allegedly in the search for the climategate leaker. But it’s obvious that there won’t be any clues left on Tallbloke’s computer (it would have no record of comments dropped onto wordpress.com, a US service). See Watts Up.

The point of this is not to catch the leaker, it’s to intimidate bloggers.

 Jeff ID writes:   Tallbloke a fellow recipient blog of the climategate emails, and linked on the right, was raided today in what seems to be a coordinated effort by Metropolitan Police, the Norfolk Constabulary and the Computer Crime division and the U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division.  His home was raided and computers were taken for ‘examination’.

They don’t really want to catch the leaker, because a whistleblower is protected by UK legislation. The proof that this is aimed at intimidating bloggers rather than catching the climategate leaker is the coordinated and pointless US dept of Justice action through wordpress. To wit:

Both Tallbloke and JeffID received “the following notification from the U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division and forwarded by Ryan at WordPress.  ClimateAudit is also mentioned yet I’m not certain that Steve Received notice.  It seems that the larger paid blogs may not have received any notice.  On pdf –WordPress Preservation Request-1“

The notification apparently asks them not to make the information public or else... they may terminate their wordpress account.

This has nothing at all to do with finding a hypothetical hacker.

How would anyone feel knowing that agents may turn up at their home, take all their computers, phones, routers and records, and have a copy of all their emails, their tax records, letters to friends, music, photos, information about family and friends, and their passwords?

The inconvenience of living without their computer, software and everything else would cost potentially thousands but worse, for someone who values their privacy, just the knowledge that so much personal information was in the hands of strangers would be unsettling.

Furthermore, there’s the risk that a single malicious person in the government could “leak” the emails, photos, or letters, medical records and spread them on the internet. These are home offices, so everything is on the computer. It would only take one agent — someone thinking it was “only fair” to release all that information. There’s a perverse logic that though the climategate leaker carefully removed personal emails, and was releasing work related information from a work account, it was somehow “just” to release irrelevant personal information from the accounts of volunteers.

If the establishment was really in the mood to send a signal that blogging is a risky business, what’s next — Nixon style tax audits?

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 See also Tall Bloke & JeffID

Some Recent GloBULL Warming articles

Published by Papa Giorgio

Religions are sustained in the long run by the consolations of their teachings and the charisma of their leaders. With global warming, we have a religion whose leaders are prone to spasms of anger and whose followers are beginning to twitch with boredom. Perhaps that’s another way religions die. (WSJ)

Co2 Levels – Now and Then (BigGov)

The Register reports on a study from the December issue of Science:

By analysing ancient algae found in deep-sea core samples, Professor Matthew Huber and his colleagues determined that the mile-thick ice which now covers the south polar continent formed around 34 million years ago. At that stage the atmosphere held much more CO2 than it does now, some 600 parts per million (ppm) as opposed to today’s level of 390 ppm.

Although the Antarctic ice sheet formed while CO2 levels were more than 33% higher than today, Washington spends heaps of cash on CO2-reduction boondoggles each year. Antarctica isn’t the only icy show in town, but Prof. Huber described the threat of CO2 melting an ice sheet in terms that would make Al Gore spew brimstone:

“If we continue on our current path of warming we will eventually reach that tipping point,” he says. “Of course after we cross that threshold it will still take many thousands of years to melt an ice sheet.”

Evidence or not, President Obama, the EPA, and congressional Democrats know their priorities: We have seen the enemy, and his name is Carbon Dioxide. Evil activities like “producing energy,” “building things,” and “going places” need to be taxed and regulated further, or Carbon Dioxide wins! If this means the sort of government control Progressives wanted anyway, well, shucks, we’ll just have to make government bigger.

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Green energy policies currently being pursued are not helping the environment or the economy. More likely, they will lead to greater emissions in China, more outsourcing to India, and lower growth rates for the well-intentioned “green” countries ~ Bjørn Lomborg

Sea Levels NOT Rising (Spectator)

It has now become traditional for climate change summits to open with a new, dazzling prediction of impending catastrophe. The UN Climate Conference under way in the South African coastal town of Durban is no exception. This year’s focus is on a familiar and certainly arresting argument: that sea levels are rising at a catastrophic and unprecedented rate mainly due to man-made global warming.

No one makes this point with quite so much panache as Mohamed Nasheed, president of the Maldives. In the run-up to the summit, he declared that he leads ‘an island nation that may slip beneath the waves if all this talk on climate does not lead to action soon’.

Since chairing a meeting of his Cabinet underwater, Nasheed has been busy rallying other low-lying countries to make similar points. He chaired a summit of them in Bangladesh, to compare notes ahead of the Durban summit, and they agree to limit their own carbon emissions. Ban Ki-moon, the head of the United Nations, was delighted — saying that it was unfair to ask ‘the poorest and most vulnerable to bear the brunt of the impact of climate change alone’ and called for them to be given subsidies by richer countries to adapt. Such funds do not seem to be forthcoming. It seems the summit in Durban will, like so many climate summits, be disappointing.

I may be able to help. As someone with some expertise in the field, I can assure the low-lying countries that this is a false alarm. The sea is not rising precipitously. I have studied many of the low-lying regions in my 45-year career recording and interpreting sea level data. I have conducted six field trips to the Maldives; I have been to Bangladesh, whose environment minister was claiming that flooding due to climate change threatened to create in her country 20 million ‘ecological refugees’. I have carefully examined the data of ‘drowning’ Tuvalu. And I can report that, while such regions do have problems, they need not fear rising sea levels.

My latest project was a field expedition to India, to the coast of Goa, combining observations with archeological information. Our findings are straightforward: there is no ongoing sea level rise. The sea level there has been stable for the last 50 years or so, after falling some 20cm in around 1960; it was well below the present level in the 18th century and some 50 to 60cm above the present in the 17th century. So it is clear that sea levels rise and fall entirely independently of so-called ‘climate change’.

Explaining this to the public can be very hard. There are so many misconceptions about sea levels, not least that they are constant throughout the world. In fact, there are big variations — by as much as two metres. You need to think not of a constant, level surface, but of an agitated bath where the water is slopping back and forth. This is a dynamic process. In 900 ad, for example, the high level was in Tanzania and the low was in Peru; a century later this had reversed. It is also often forgotten that while sea levels may rise and fall (‘eustasy’), so too may the land mass itself (‘isostasy’).

Today, all people talk about is the sea level — because it coincides with the IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) narrative about melting icesheets, diminishing glaciers and man-made global warming. This leads to confusion over cases such as Bangladesh, whose plight is the exact opposite of the one claimed by environmental lobbyists and the IPCC.

Bangladesh is cursed because of rain over the Himalayas. This has nothing to do with the sea. It is also cursed because of the cyclones which push water inland. Again, this has nothing to do with the sea. Bangladesh is cursed because about half of its land mass lies less than eight metres above sea level — making it highly vulnerable to coastal flooding. But this has always been the fate of delta regions: it has little if anything to do with ‘climate change’.

Two years ago, I visited the Sundarban delta area in Bangladesh and was able to observe clear evidence of coastal erosion, but no rise in sea level. In fact it has been stable there for 40 to 50 years. One way to tell this is by examining the mangrove trees, whose horizontal root systems now hang some 80cm above the mudflats as a result of erosion.

But the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007) tells a different story about sea levels worldwide and is worth quoting in some detail: ‘Even under the most conservative scenario, sea level will be about 40cm higher than today by the end of 21st century and this is projected to increase the annual number of people flooded in coastal populations from 13 million to 94 million. Almost 60 per cent of this increase will occur in South Asia.’

This is nonsense. The world’s true experts on sea level are to be found at the INQUA (International Union for Quaternary Reseach) commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution (of which I am a former president), not at the IPCC. Our research is what the climate lobby might call an ‘inconvenient truth’: it shows that sea levels have been oscillating close to the present level for the last three centuries. This is not due to melting glaciers: sea levels are affected by a great many factors, such as the speed at which the earth rotates. They rose in the order of 10 to 11cm between 1850 and 1940, stopped rising or maybe even fell a little until 1970, and have remained roughly flat ever since.

So any of the trouble attributed to ‘rising sea levels’ must instead be the result of other, local factors and basic misinterpretation. In Bangladesh, for example, increased salinity in the rivers (which has affected drinking water) has in fact been caused by dams in the Ganges, which have decreased the outflow of fresh water.

Even more damaging has been the chopping down of mangrove trees to clear space for shrimp farms. In one area, 19 square miles of mangrove vegetation in 1988 had by 2005 decreased to barely half a square mile. Mangrove forests offer excellent protection against the damage of cyclones and storms, so inevitably their systematic destruction has drastically increased local vulnerability to these problems.

At Tuvalu in the Pacific, I found no evidence of flooding — despite claims in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth that it was one of those ‘low-lying Pacific nations’ whose residents have had to ‘evacuate their homes because of rising seas’. In fact the tide gauge of the past 25 years clearly shows there has been no rise.

But the best-known ‘victim’ of rising sea levels is, without doubt, the Maldives. This myth has been boosted by the opportunism of Mohamed Nasheed, who stars in a new documentary called The Island President. The film’s tagline is ‘To save his country, he has to save our planet’. It is a depressing example of how Hollywood-style melodrama has corrupted climate science. Nasheed has been rehearsing his lines since being elected in 2009. ‘We are drowning, our nation will disappear, we have to relocate the people,’ he repeatedly claims.

If this is what President Nasheed believes, it seems strange that he has authorised the building of many large waterside hotels and 11 new airports. Or could it perhaps be that he wants to take a cut of the $30 billion fund agreed at an accord in Copenhagen for the poorest nations hit by ‘global warming’? Within two weeks of Copenhagen, the Maldives foreign minister Ahmed Shaheed wrote to the US secretary of state Hillary Clinton to express support for the accord.

The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment claimed that ‘there is strong evidence’ of sea level rising over the last few decades. It goes as far as to claim: ‘Satellite observations available since the early 1990s provide more accurate sea level data with nearly global coverage. This decade-long satellite altimetry data set shows that since 1993, sea level has been rising at a rate of around 3mm yr–1, significantly higher than the average during the previous half century. Coastal tide gauge measurements confirm this observation, and indicate that similar rates have occurred in some earlier decades.’

Almost every word of this is untrue. Satellite altimetry is a wonderful and vital new technique that offers the reconstruction of sea level changes all over the ocean surface. But it has been hijacked and distorted by the IPCC for political ends.

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The figure you sent is very deceptive….  I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run….   The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering (Mail Online)

Refreezing Greenland, An Atlas of Lies (NYT)

The news release promoting the latest edition of Britain’s influential Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World hailed it as “the Greatest Book on Earth.”

Not the way climate scientists see it.

“Fiasco” was the word chosen by one scientist in an e-mail to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., alerting his colleagues to erroneous claims made by the publishers of the atlas (whose name derives from The Times of London) about the speed at which Greenland’s glaciers are melting.

He also feared that a map in the atlas, along with news accounts repeating an error in the news release, could pull climate scientists into another vortex of damaging controversy.

The news release, echoed by the news media, claimed that Greenland had lost 15 percent of its permanent ice cover from 1999 to 2011. That translates to 125,000 cubic miles, according to a rough calculation by Etienne Berthier, a glaciologist with the University of Toulouse, enough melted ice to raise sea levels three to five feet.

The corresponding map in the atlas itself indicated that significant portions of Greenland’s coastline had become ice-free.

Glaciologists, previously bruised by an exaggerated claim about the melting of Himalayan glaciers in a 2007 United Nations report that became fodder for global warming skeptics, mobilized as a truth squad.

On blogs, on radio programs and in newspaper columns, they stated emphatically that Greenland has not lost 15 percent of its ice cover in recent years. The retreat, they said, is more like one-tenth of 1 percent. They were quick to add that nobody at the atlas had consulted them.

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The climate issue is one of politics, not of science…. The atmospheric data was telling a totally different story than we’ve been led to believe about a climate crisis and an Earth warming (Palm Beach Daily News) 

Nobel Prize Winner in Physics Leaves the AGW Camp (Fox) [Also See Great New List]

Dr. Ivar Giaever, a former professor with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, abruptly announced his resignation Tuesday, Sept. 13, from the premier physics society in disgust over its officially stated policy that “global warming is occurring.”

The official position of the American Physical Society (APS) supports the theory that man’s actions have inexorably led to the warming of the planet, through increased emissions of carbon dioxide.Giaever does not agree — and put it bluntly and succinctly in the subject line of his email, reprinted at Climate Depot, a website devoted to debunking the theory of man-made climate change.

“I resign from APS,” Giaever wrote.

Giaever was cooled to the statement on warming theory by a line claiming that “the evidence is incontrovertible.”

“In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?” he wrote in an email to Kate Kirby, executive officer of the physics society. 

“The claim … is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period,” his email message said.

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Alien Scare Tactics Are In Play~But Not By NASA~Just A Bunch of Nerds

Published by Papa Giorgio

HotAir posts a story that makes the Left seem crazier than ever!

It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim…

The authors warn that extraterrestrials may be wary of civilisations that expand very rapidly, as these may be prone to destroy other life as they grow, just as humans have pushed species to extinction on Earth. In the most extreme scenario, aliens might choose to destroy humanity to protect other civilisations.

“A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilisation may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand. Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilisational expansion could be detected by an ETI because our expansion is changing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, via greenhouse gas emissions,” the report states.

“Green” aliens might object to the environmental damage humans have caused on Earth and wipe us out to save the planet. “These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets,” the authors write.

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Forbes Magazine joins ni the fun!

Over at National Review, Daniel Foster has some fun with this paper which goes through various scenarios that might result in (or after) contact with aliens. Foster spins the paper a bit, mockingly titling his post “Space Aliens are Probably Progressive Liberals” because some of the likely scenarios include reactions to our bad environmental policies:

But if ETI [extraterrestrial intelligence] doubt that our course can be changed, then they may seek to preemptively destroy our civilization in order to protect other civilizations from us.  A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilization may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand.  Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilizational expansion could be detected by an ETI because our expansion is changing the composition of Earth’s atmosphere (e.g. via greenhouse gas emissions), which therefore changes the spectral signature of Earth.  While it is difficult to estimate the likelihood of this scenario, it should at a minimum give us pause as we evaluate our expansive tendencies….

Speaking of spin, this part of the paper reminds me quite a lot of the science fiction novel, Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson. Spoilers ahead…

In Spin, the stars suddenly disappear, and Earth is enveloped in some sort of space/time cocoon that removes the planet from the rest of the universe (not entirely, just from the time of the universe). While time passes extremely slowly on Earth, the rest of the universe continues on at a normal pace. Scientists discover that for every second now passing in Earth time, three years pass outside the planet. This causes quite the existential crisis for Earth’s population. The government sends out a ship to colonize Mars and then watches as millions of years go by in just a few days. Mars is colonized, developed and then…suddenly goes into a cocoon of its own. These cocoons are called “Spin” and nobody knows exactly what they are or what’s causing them.

It turns out an ancient system of self-replicating machines known as the “Hypotheticals” have created the Spin phenomenon in order to tie groups of planets together through a series of wormhole-like gates. All the planets in a series are hospitable to all the others. The “Hypotheticals” it appears, link these planets once they discover that they are on a crash course with environmental unsustainability. In other words, they are a sort of savior-entity attempting to address the issue of scarcity and resource depletion by rescuing Earth (and Mars, as well as many other planets) from self-destruction by pooling our resources with a potentially unlimited number of other planets throughout the universe.

The book is excellent, politics aside. I don’t find it particularly likely that an alien species or ancient computer-entity will come save us from ourselves or destroy us because they view us as resource-depleting parasites. The notion of some great beneficent intergalactic force just doesn’t resonate with me.

I think we should look at our own Space Race for one thing. What inspired our drive to the moon? To the galaxy and beyond? Simple: the Cold War and the arms race with Soviet Russia.

If we do encounter aliens in the distant or near future, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were in the midst of their own galaxy-spanning arms race. More than likely, any aliens we encounter will have done a great deal more damage to the universe than we have so far, no matter how advanced and enlightened they’ve become. And when they encounter us between blowing the hell out of one another? Well…

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Some Historical Perspective (all Time Mag Covers Linked)-Secularists Doomsday

Published by Papa Giorgio

In 1974, the National Science Board announced:

“During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade. Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end…leading into the next ice age.”

April 1977

 

Jan 1977

Dec 1974

Dec 1973

Climate Change Timeline – 1895-2009

For at least 114 years, climate “scientists” have been claiming that the climate was going to kill us…but they have kept switching whether it was a coming ice age, or global warming.

  • 1895 – Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again – New York Times, February 1895
  • 1902 – “Disappearing Glaciers…deteriorating slowly, with a persistency that means their final annihilation…scientific fact…surely disappearing.” – Los Angeles Times
  • 1912 – Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age – New York Times, October 1912
  • 1923 – “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada” – Professor Gregory of Yale University, American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress, – Chicago Tribune
  • 1923 – “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age” – Washington Post
  • 1924 – MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age – New York Times, Sept 18, 1924
  • 1929 – “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and that it will continue to get warmer” – Los Angeles Times, in Is another ice age coming?
  • 1932 – “If these things be true, it is evident, therefore that we must be just teetering on an ice age” – The Atlantic magazine, This Cold, Cold World
  • 1933 – America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise – New York Times, March 27th, 1933
  • 1933 – “…wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather…Is our climate changing?” – Federal Weather Bureau “Monthly Weather Review.”
  • 1938 – Global warming, caused by man heating the planet with carbon dioxide, “is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power.”– Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
  • 1938 – “Experts puzzle over 20 year mercury rise…Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cities thuout the world which have been affected by a mysterious trend toward warmer climate in the last two decades” – Chicago Tribune
  • 1939 – “Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right… weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer” – Washington Post
  • 1952 – “…we have learned that the world has been getting warmer in the last half century” – New York Times, August 10th, 1962
  • 1954 – “…winters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing” – U.S. News and World Report
  • 1954 – Climate – the Heat May Be Off – Fortune Magazine
  • 1959 – “Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures” – New York Times
  • 1969 – “…the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two” – New York Times, February 20th, 1969
  • 1969 – “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000″ — Paul Ehrlich (while he now predicts doom from global warming, this quote only gets honorable mention, as he was talking about his crazy fear of overpopulation)
  • 1970 – “…get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come…there’s no relief in sight” – Washington Post
  • 1974 – Global cooling for the past forty years – Time Magazine
  • 1974 – “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age” – Washington Post
  • 1974 – “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed” – Fortune magazine, who won a Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics for its analysis of the danger
  • 1974 – “…the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure…mass deaths by starvation, and probably anarchy and violence” – New York Times
  • 1975 – Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable – New York Times, May 21st, 1975
  • 1975 – “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind” Nigel Calder, editor, New Scientist magazine, in an article in International Wildlife Magazine
  • 1976 – “Even U.S. farms may be hit by cooling trend” – U.S. News and World Report
  • 1981 – Global Warming – “of an almost unprecedented magnitude” – New York Times
  • 1988 – I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that thegreenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves. – Jim Hansen, June 1988 testimony before Congress, see His later quote and His superior’s objection for context
  • 1989 -”On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” – Stephen Schneider, lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Discover magazine, October 1989
  • 1990 – “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing – in terms of economic policy and environmental policy” – Senator Timothy Wirth
  • 1993 – “Global climate change may alter temperature and rainfall patterns, many scientists fear, with uncertain consequences for agriculture.” – U.S. News and World Report
  • 1998 – No matter if the science [of global warming] is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” —Christine Stewart, Canadian Minister of the Environment, Calgary Herald, 1998
  • 2001 – “Scientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible.” – Time Magazine, Monday, Apr. 09, 2001
  • 2003 – Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue, and energy sources such as “synfuels,” shale oil and tar sands were receiving strong consideration” – Jim Hansen, NASA Global Warming activist, Can we defuse The Global Warming Time Bomb?, 2003
  • 2006 – “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.” — Al Gore, Grist magazine, May 2006
  • Now: The global mean temperature has fallen for four years in a row, which is why you stopped hearing details about the actual global temperature, even while they carry on about taxing you to deal with it…how long before they start predicting an ice age?

Gods Sense of Humor

Published by Papa Giorgio

Drudge linked to an article from The Week that cataloged the following:

The irony: As negotiators from nearly 200 countries met in Cancun to strategize ways to keep the planet from getting hotter, the temperature in the seaside Mexican city plunged to a 100-year record low of 54° F.

Money Quote
…the temperature in the seaside Mexican city plunged to a 100-year record low of 54° F.

Climate-change skeptics are gleefully calling Cancun’s weather the latest example of the “Gore Effect” — a plunge in temperature they say occurs wherever former Vice President Al Gore, now a Nobel Prize-winning environmental activist, makes a speech about the climate. Although Gore is not scheduled to speak in Cancun, “it could be that the Gore Effect has announced his secret arrival,” jokes former NASA scientist Roy W. Spencer.

 

humor and lawsuits aside, there is some seriousness coming from this meeting that all conservatives should be made aware of:

Bolivian President Evo Morales called Thursday to save the Kyoto Protocol and to create an international climate justice tribunal. ‘The planet is wounded,’ Morales, Bolivia’s first president of indigenous descent, said in Mexico’s Caribbean resort city of Cancun. ‘We have an enormous responsibility with life and with humanity,’ he told the UN Climate Conference in a 20-minute speech. Morales asked industrialized nations to approve a second round of commitments to the Kyoto Protocol, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions after 2012. ‘If we send the Kyoto Protocol to the bin, we will be responsible for ‘ecocide,’ and thus for genocide, because we would be attacking humanity as a whole,’ he said.

I think that this is just another of the many grabs for control by those who do not believe in nation states. If we are worse than Hitler (what Al Gore thinks — see below) and commit genocide (President of Bolivia), who wouldn’t convict those who disagree with the eco-Left?

EPA versus JOBS and Common Sense

Published by Papa Giorgio

“I now find that many environmental groups have drifted into self-serving cliques with narrow vision and rigid ideology….  many environmentalists are showing signs of elitism, left-wingism, and downright eco-fascism. The once politically centrist, science-based vision of environmentalism has been largely replaced with extremist rhetoric. Science and logic have been abandoned and the movement is often used to promote other causes such as class struggle and anti-corporatism. The public is left trying to figure out what is reasonable and what is not.” Patrick Moore, co-founder of Green Peace.

HotAir h/t:

Boxer: Greatest National Security Threat Is Carbon Dioxide

Published by Papa Giorgio

We’ve had four terrorist attacks in less than a year, two of which succeeded in killing people and another two which only failed because of the incompetence of the terrorist. Iran is a year or less away from getting a nuclear weapon. Turkey is rapidly sliding towards Islamism. North Korea is doing their best to restart the Korean War. And what does Barbara Boxer think is the greatest national-security threat facing us in the next generation? Carbon dioxide.

Evangelical’s Support for Global Warming vs the Bible

Published by Papa Giorgio

NEWSBUSTERS has this:

…..according to Dr. Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. Beisner, speaking at the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change on May 18 in Chicago, was asked if there was any Biblical basis that would lead evangelical Christians to assume they had a duty to join the anti-global warming bandwagon.

“I don’t think they have any good Biblical basis at all,” Beisner said. “What they do is they jump quickly from the Biblical teaching that we’re supposed to be caring for the poor to ‘global warming is going to hurt the poor more than it hurts anybody else,’ which by the way is true of every problem. You know, poverty makes you vulnerable, period. Wealth makes you less vulnerable, period. There’s even a proverb in the book of Proverbs that says essentially that.”

According to Beisner, the belief that fighting global warming was a component of helping the poor was specifically used by the Evangelical Environmental Network and endorsed by others to make this case.

“They jump quickly from, ‘We need to help the poor,’ to ‘global warming is going to hurt the poor, therefore we need to fight global warming,'” Beisner said. “In 2006, a group – the Evangelical Environmental Network launched a new project called the Environmental Climate Initiative, which put out a statement, ‘Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action.’ And that statement was endorsed by 86 different leading evangelicals – presidents of the evangelical colleges, admission organizations. And I went down the list of endorsers. There was no list of authors of that. I later found out the main author was an ethics professor named David Gushee. When I debated him over that at this university, he told me before the debate, ‘You know when I was preparing for this debate, I found out the science was a whole more nuanced than I realized when I wrote the paper.’ I thought, ‘David, you should have known that before you wrote.'”…..