Notes on the ‘global warming’ scam.

Christopher Booker writes in the Telegraph: 

It was delightfully appropriate that, as large parts of Argentina were swept by severe blizzards last week, on a scale never experienced before, the city of Nashville, Tennessee, should have enjoyed the coolest July 21 in its history, breaking a record established in 1877. Appropriate, because Nashville is the home of Al Gore, the man who for 20 years has been predicting that we should all by now be in the grip of runaway global warming.

His predictions have proved so wildly wrong – along with those of the Met Office’s £33 million computer model which forecast that we should now be enjoying a “barbecue summer” and that 2009 would be one of “the five warmest years ever” – that the propaganda machine has had to work overtime to maintain what is threatening to become the most expensive fiction* in history.

* According to the Science and Public Policy Institute, ‘the US government has spent over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technologu research, administration, education campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks.’

Check out the full report at scienceandpublicpolicy.org

Investor’s Business Daily suggests that the only place that’s really getting hotter is Al Gore’s head –

Because he must be getting flustered now, what with his efforts to save the benighted world from global warming continually being exposed as a fraud.

The true believers will not be moved by the peer-reviewed findings of Chris de Freitas, John McLean and Bob Carter, scientists at universities in Australia and New Zealand.

Warming advocates have too much invested in perpetuating the myth. (And are probably having too much fun calling those who don’t agree with them “deniers” and likening skeptics to fascists.)

But these scientists have made an important contribution to the debate that Gore says doesn’t exist.

Their research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, indicates that nature, not man, has been the dominant force in climate change in the late 20th century.

“The surge in global temperatures since 1977 can be attributed to a 1976 climate shift in the Pacific Ocean that made warming El Nino conditions more likely than they were over the previous 30 years and cooling La Nina conditions less likely” says co-author de Freitas.

“We have shown that internal global climate-system variability accounts for at least 80% of the observed global climate variation over the past half-century. It may even be more if the period of influence of major volcanoes can be more clearly identified and the corresponding data excluded from the analysis.”

These findings are largely being ignored by the mainstream media. They simply don’t fit the worn narrative that man is dangerously warming the Earth through his carbon dioxide emissions and a radical alteration of Western lifestyles mandated by government policy is desperately needed.

They will be ignored, as well, by the Democratic machine that is trying to ram an economy-smothering carbon cap-and-trade regime through Congress.

Despite efforts to keep the global warming scare alive, the growing evidence that humans aren’t heating the planet is piercing the public consciousness and alarmists are becoming marginalized.

Sharp Americans are starting to understand H.L. Mencken’s observation that “The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it.” That pretty much sums up the modern environmentalist movement.

Deroy Murdock writes at ScrippsNews:

Despite his dire warnings, the Earth has cooled 0.74 degrees F since former Vice President Al Gore released ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ in 2006.”

Earth’s temperatures fall even as the planet spins within what global-warmists consider a thickening cloud of toxic carbon dioxide.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory at Mauna Loa, Hawaii consistently and reliably has measured CO2 for the last 50 years. CO2 concentrations have risen steadily for a half-century.

For December 1958, the Laboratory reported an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 314.67 parts per million (PPM). Flash forward to December 1998, about when global cooling reappeared. CO2 already had increased to 366.87 PPM. By December 2008, CO2 had advanced to 385.54 PPM, a significant 5.088 percent growth in one decade.

This capsizes the carbon-phobic global-warmist argument. For Earth’s temperatures to sink while CO2 rises contradicts global warming as thoroughly as learning that firefighters can battle blazes by spraying them with gasoline.

So, to defeat so-called “global warming,” there is no need for the $864 billion Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, the Kyoto Protocols, elaborate new regulations, or United Nations guidelines. Instead, let the cold times roll.

It is one thing to have a national debate about a serious problem, with adults differing over which solution might work best. Reasonable people, for instance, can dispute whether growing federal involvement would heal or inflame our healthcare system’s serious maladies.

But as so-called “global warming” proves fictional, those who would shackle the economy with taxes and regulations to fight mythology increasingly resemble deinstitutionalized derelicts on an urban street corner, wildly swatting at their own imaginary monsters.

From the minority page of the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public works. 

 Link to Full Printable PDF Report of More Than 650 Dissenting Scientists  

WASHINGTON, DC – Award winning Princeton University Physicist Dr. Will Happer, who was reportedly fired by former Vice President Al Gore in 1993 for failing to adhere to Gore’s scientific views, has now declared man-made global warming fears “mistaken.”

“I am convinced that the current alarm over carbon dioxide is mistaken,” Happer, who has published over 200 scientific papers, told EPW on December 22, 2008. Happer made his remarks while requesting to join the 2008 U.S. Senate Minority Report from Environment and Public Works Ranking Member James Inhofe (R-OK) of over 650 (and growing) dissenting international scientists disputing anthropogenic climate fears. [Note: Joining Happer as new additions to the Senate report, are at least 10 more scientists, including meteorologists from Germany, Netherlands and CNN, as well as a professors from MIT and University of Arizona.  See below for full quotes and bios of the new skeptical scientists added to the groundbreaking report, which includes many current and former UN IPCC scientists.]  

“I had the privilege of being fired by Al Gore, since I refused to go along with his alarmism. I did not need the job that badly,” Happer said this week. Happer is a Professor at the Department of Physics at Princeton University and former Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy from 1990 to 1993, has published over 200 scientific papers, and is a fellow of the American Physical Society, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Sciences.   

Senator Inhofe said that the continued outpouring of prominent scientists like Happer – who are willing to publicly dissent from climate fears – are yet another strike to the UN, Gore and the media’s claims about global warming. “The endless claims of a ‘consensus’ about man-made global warming grow less-and-less credible every day," Inhofe said.

Happer, who served as the Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy in 1993, says he was fired by Gore in 1993 for not going along with Gore’s scientific views on ozone and climate issues. “I was told that science is not going to intrude on policy," Happer explained in 1993. 

“I have spent a long research career studying physics that is closely related to the greenhouse effect, for example, absorption and emission of visible and infrared radiation, and fluid flow,” Happer said this week. “Fears about man-made global warming are unwarranted and are not based on good science. The earth’s climate is changing now, as it always has. There is no evidence that the changes differ in any qualitative way from those of the past,” he added.  

“Over the past 500 million years since the Cambrian, when fossils of multicellular life first became abundant, the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have been much higher than current levels, about 3 times higher on average.  Life on earth flourished with these higher levels of carbon dioxide,” he explained. “Computer models used to generate frightening scenarios from increasing levels of carbon dioxide have scant credibility,” Happer added.

 From WorldNetDaily:

 A United Nations climate change conference in Poland is about to get a surprise from 650 leading scientists who scoff at doomsday reports of man-made global warming – labeling them variously a lie, a hoax and part of a new religion.

Later today, their voices will be heard in a U.S. Senate minority report quoting the scientists, many of whom are current and former members of the U.N.’s own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

About 250 of the scientists quoted in the report have joined the dissenting scientists in the last year alone.

In fact, the total number of scientists represented in the report is 12 times the number of U.N. scientists who authored the official IPCC 2007 report.
Here are some choice excerpts from the report:

• "I am a skeptic … . Global warming has become a new religion." – Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.

• "Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly … . As a scientist I remain skeptical." – Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology  and formerly of NASA who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called "among the most pre-eminent scientists of the last 100 years."

• Warming fears are the "worst scientific scandal in the history … . When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists." – U.N. IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning Ph.D. environmental physical chemist.

• "The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds … . I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists." – Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the U.N.-supported International Year of the Planet.

• "The models and forecasts of the U.N. IPCC "are incorrect because they only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity." – Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

• "It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming." – U.S. Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

• "Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapor and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will." – Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

• "After reading [U.N. IPCC chairman] Pachauri’s asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it’s hard to remain quiet." – Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society’s Probability and Statistics Committee and is an associate editor of Monthly Weather Review.

• "For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?" – Geologist Dr. David Gee, the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer-reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.

• "Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp … . Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact." – Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, who reversed his belief in man-made warming to become a skeptic, is a former member of the Dutch U.N. IPCC committee.

• "Many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly (from promoting warming fears), without having their professional careers ruined." – Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh, Pa.

• "Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense … . The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning." – Environmental Scientist Professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal, the founder of the Numerical Weather Forecast group, has more than 150 published articles.

• "CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another … . Every scientist knows this, but it doesn’t pay to say so … . Global warming, as a political vehicle, keeps Europeans in the driver’s seat and developing nations walking barefoot." – Dr. Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan.

• "The [global warming] scaremongering has its justification in the fact that it is something that generates funds." – Award-winning Paleontologist Dr. Eduardo Tonni, of the Committee for Scientific Research in Buenos Aires and head of the Paleontology Department at the University of La Plata.

 

 Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, is about to take over the presidency of the EU, which he thoroughly despises. He has declared it to be as dangerous as the old Soviet Union.

We agree with him.

We also agree with him that ‘global warming’ is a myth; and that the US and global economic crisis was caused by too much government ‘regulation’ – ie interference – rather than too little. 

Of course the New York Times is against him. You can find its typically narrow-minded lefty piece on him here.

The Times of London is only a little more objective in its account of Klaus and his opinions.

We doubt that Klaus is ‘close’ to Putin as the reports allege. If he is, it’s one thing about him that we don’t applaud.  But for the most part he is an admirable conservative free-marketeer who values the nation state and knows that  there are worse threats to civilization than the weather. 

 Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, is about to take over the presidency of the EU, which he thoroughly despises. He has declared it to be as dangerous as the old Soviet Union.

We agree with him.

We also agree with him that ‘global warming’ is a myth; and that the US and global economic crisis was caused by too much government ‘regulation’ – ie interference – rather than too little. 

Of course the New York Times is against him. You can find its typically narrow-minded lefty piece on him here.

The Times of London is a little more objective in its account of Klaus and his opinions.

We doubt that Klaus is ‘close’ to Putin as the reports allege. If he is, it’s one thing about him that we don’t applaud.  But for the most part he is an admirable conservative free-marketeer who values the nation state and knows that  there are worse threats to civilization than the weather. 

 Timothy Sandefur writes:

Liberals have lately been making much of the purported anti-intellectualism of conservatives in the late election. No doubt they’re right. But I must say I find it laughable that this charge would come from liberals of all people. The left in this country has had a long and dismal history of embracing a wide variety of anti-intellectual credos.

Start with the most obvious: the left has long been the welcoming home of fashionable postmodern nonsense like deconstructivism and moral and cultural relativism. Under these doctrines there are supposed to be different kinds of “logics” (male logic, female logic, &c.) and none is more valid than the other. All of them are simply clever masks for a brutal competition for wealth and power. This is a profoundly anti-intellectual strain of pseudo-thought which avoids the need to take any arguments seriously, because such ideas can simply be accused of corruption. When Sandra Harding called Newton’s Principia a “rape manual,” she did so from the left, not from the right. And the cultural relativists who demand that we treat the dismal productions of barbaric cultures as the intellectual equivalents of Shakespeare and Homer—and tars as “racist” anyone who suggests that some cultures and their mores are better than others—are fundamentally, even proudly anti-intellectual.

These ideologies masquerade, unconvincingly, as intellectual movements, but they are simply attempts to ignore ideas, or to shoot them down with reactionary appeals to political dogmas. They treat the world of thought with the same contempt as a street thug, except that they phrase his appeal to violence in more clever terminology. In the end it is the same: power over thought, force over reason…

“Radical chic” is a leftist phenomenon, not a conservative one. It was, and is, liberals who accord street thugs and petty vandals the respectability of academic honors. The terrorist Bill Ayers? Or the terrorist Angela Davis, winner of the Lenin Peace Prize of the U.S.S.R.? She’s presidential chair at U.C. Santa Cruz. It was liberals who not only gave the anti-intellectual thug Norman Mailer pop icon status, but handed him the mantle of a respectable intellectual. The Jack Abbott case was a curiosity to them, and a source of gossip. When he stabbed his wife with a penknife at a dinner party, almost killing her in 1960, was that the end of his run as a leftist intellectual? Hardly. The left respects its anti-intellectual thugs.

Very similar to their awe for ideological violence is the liberal respect for consistently leftist liars like Michael Moore. Moore was made of, by, and for liberals, and he remains a celebrity to liberals despite the fact that there is probably no more recklessly anti-intellectual a figure in America today (with the possible exception of the moronic liberal darling Cornell West). He has contempt for anything approaching a truthful description of reality or a reasonable theory of politics or economics. His work is a set of cheap thrills for those with a knee-jerk hostility to the free market. Yet those thrills don’t even add up to anything like a sensible plot. His lies and distortions are well documented, and even turn off some thoughtful liberals. Yet he is still admired by a great many others, who are more committed to the party than to the basic facts. If that isn’t anti-intellectualism, I don’t know what is.

What about the “Bush lied, people died” meme? No serious person can believe that the Bush Administration consciously lied about the intelligence on Iraq in order to trump up a war to seize Iraqi oil. Yet tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people believe this, and proudly say so on the bumpers of their cars. Is this the intellectualism of the Democratic party?

Many rank and file liberals believe a whole host of basic untruths, and do not bother themselves with examining their beliefs any farther than their emotional prejudices allow them. Consider the environmentalists, who believe in a wide variety of panicky flasehoods about the state of the earth. Al Gore made a film riddled with misleading or half-true claims. Did the left correct him or urge him to be more intellectually honest? No, they gave him an Oscar.

It doesn’t get much better when you move to the more moderate liberals, either. Liberals believe that government can efficiently allocate resources, and run, say, a health care system for hundreds of millions of people, despite the basic failures of such systems in other countries. And they believe this, not because they disagree with the discoveries of economists like Friedrich Hayek, or have an answer to the problem of rent-seeking, a term which most Democrats have probably never heard. No, they believe this because of their emotional commitment to wealth-redistribution, a commitment based on a moral premise—that the wealthy should pay the bills of the poor because poverty is “unfair”—which they rarely even bother to defend. Ask why your earnings should be taken from you by the state and given to someone else, and you will rarely get an intellectual answer. I’ve certainly never been given one. I’ve heard a lot of emoting, and a lot of accusations of nefarious corporate meanness, and a lot of heart-rending stories about how hard it is to be poor. But an intellectual defense of redistributive government? That’s a rarity.

The leadership of the American left appeals not to ideas but to emotion—envy, usually, or panic—to move party members to embrace empty promises of material prosperity through government manipulation, promises no competent economist can fail to see through. The left is fond of violence and power, and the romanticism and iconography of thugs who are transformed into celebrities among leftist intellectuals. Liberals are this country’s leading practitioners of race and gender politics. Barack Obama exploits the power of crowds to chant empty slogans promising that the laws of economics can be magically suspended if we just have enough faith (“Yes, we can!”)…. And yet this is not the party of anti-intellectuals and populists?

 Here’s a delicious article by Burt Prelutsky (from Townhall):

By this time, I don’t think it will shock anyone if I come right out and admit that I’m not a bleeding heart. When I read about a lava flow or an earthquake taking 500 theoretically innocent lives on the other side of the world, my first reaction is to ask myself if I knew anyone who might be visiting Sumatra or Mongolia. If the answer is no, my second reaction is to get on with my life.

There are, I’m well aware, many nicer, kinder people around – the sort of folks who immediately organize collection drives, so that blankets, canned goods and medical supplies, can be rushed to the survivors. Quite honestly, that would never even occur to me. In fact, when the giant tsunami hit Indonesia a while back, my initial thought was that, as with Sodom and Gomorrah, God was sending a long overdue message to a part of the world where the child sex trade is a major industry.

I do have a hunch, though, that a lot of the same people who are always ready to provide pajamas and peanut butter to people they don’t know are the same ones who hold candlelight vigils outside prisons when serial killers are being executed. Whenever I see them huddled outside in the cold, looking as if they’re posing for stained glass windows, I always find myself wondering how they treat their spouses and their kids when they pack up their candles and go back home.

All that being said, it should come as no big surprise when I confess that I am not in line to receive awards from the ecological zealots. That’s not to suggest that I wouldn’t offer bounties for the hides of spray-painting vandals (aka taggers, graffiti artists, public nuisances). But I certainly wouldn’t ban cigarette smoking in the great outdoors or even in bars and restaurants if the owners wish to encourage that sort of thing. If you don’t like cigarette smoke getting in your eyes, lungs or clothing, you eat, drink and get a job someplace else. If rolling out the red carpet to smokers is a really lousy idea, the place will go out of business. That’s the way it’s supposed to work in a free society.

Something else I find irksome is the constant moaning over endangered species. I recently read an article that claimed the earth has gone through four major periods of mass extinctions. About 440 million years ago, give or take a month or so, 85% of marine animal species were wiped out. Roughly 70 million years later, many species of fish and marine invertebrates perished. Then, 245 million years ago, another major extinction of sea and land creatures took place. Finally, a mere 65 million years ago, 75% of all species – including dinosaurs and saber-toothed tigers – took French leave. The causes of these massive upheavals have been attributed to volcanic eruptions, huge meteorites and climatic changes which obviously had nothing to do with human beings or the internal combustion engine.

When I read about all those species vanishing from the face of the earth, my immediate reaction is “So what?” But after due deliberation, my response changes from one of mild disinterest to one of jubilation. Imagine if every single time you went outside to collect your newspaper, you had to fight a tyrannosaur for it or had to worry that a pterodactyl was going to swoop down because its idea of fast food is you.

Apparently, there are presently 10 million different species of animal life on earth. Even though, according to this article I read, only a small percent of all animal life has been evaluated, the ecologists estimate that 750 species of fish, 290 species of reptiles and 150 species of amphibians, are currently at risk.

Inasmuch as dogs, cats, horses, llamas, bunnies, cows and guinea pigs, aren’t on the list, frankly, my dear, I don’t give a darn. I mean, how many different kinds of reptiles does anyone need to be really, truly happy?

Thanks to Al Gore and his motley crew, I’m willing to wager that a lot of you suddenly flashed on a mental image of a polar bear going down for the third time. My question is, who cares if polar bears disappeared once and for all? The truth of the matter is that nobody would really miss the vicious brutes. And, what’s more, baby seals would throw a party. 

 … says a real weatherman, John Coleman, who: 

tells Gore and the UN’s intergovernmental panel on Climate Change, "Your science is flawed; your hypothesis is wrong; your data is manipulated and may I add your scare tactics are deplorable. The earth does not have a fever. Carbon dioxide does not cause significant global warming." From there Coleman presents the scientific data to prove his case.

It is a remarkable speech. It is posted at www.kusi.com/weather/colemanscorner/19842304.html 

(From an article by Paul Weyrich on the Townhall website)