Good for all that ail's ya...

You know, as I've been reading various articles, columns, letters to the editor and opinion pieces about AGW, I've noticed that AGW has been a real Godsend for many groups. It really is good for all that ails ya.

For the Malthusians, the solution to AGW is population control. Give condoms to poor people in Africa to stop climate change. Get sterilized to save the planet.

For the anti-meat crowd, solving the climate crisis is as easy as going vegan.

For the anti-oil, coal and nuclear power crowds, we can save the planet by being forced to use wind and solar power and CFL bulbs.

For the ant-prosperity groups, we can solve all the world's problems by not buying anything and going back to those idyllic, halcyeon days of scratching out a living in the dirt, like what so many destitute people in third world countries (with no lack in 2nd and 1st world countries, either) have been trying to escape from.

Don't like urban living? Solve AGW by living off the land. Don't like that humans are encroaching on wildlife? Do your part to stop AGW by living in crowded cities and multi-dwelling complexes.

AGW has sure been a bonanza for so many!

The climate is changing

AGW proponents often accuse skeptics of not believing in "climate change." Of course, what they really mean is "anthropogenic, catastrophic climate change," but I guess that's too much of a mouthful. Kind of like people keep saying "carbon" when they really mean "carbon dioxide."

The reality is that the climate is always changing. Mother Nature hurls herself chaotically from one extreme to the other, regardless of what we humans think we're doing to the earth, and has been for the past 4-5 billion years.

The reality is, the climate is changing now. Again. And in a few years - or decades - it'll change again. And again.

The Space and Science Research Center Issues a Formal Declaration: Global Warming Has Ended - The Next Climate Change to a Pronounced Cold Era Has Begun.

“After an exhaustive review of a substantial body of climate research, and in conjunction with the obvious and compelling new evidence that exists, it is time that the world community acknowledges that the Earth has begun its next climate change. In an opinion echoed by many scientists around the world, the Space and Science Research Center (SSRC), today declares that the world’s climate warming of the past decades has now come to an end. A new climate era has already started that is bringing predominantly colder global temperatures for many years into the future. In some years this new climate will create dangerously cold weather with significant ill-effects world wide. Global warming is over – a new cold climate has begun.”
...
“Though the SSRC first announced a prediction of the coming new climate era to the US government and media in early 2007, the formal declaration has been held off pending actual events that validate the previously forecast new cold period. We now have unmistakable signs of accelerating decline in global temperatures and growing glacial ice, coupled with the dramatic if not startling changes in the sun’s surface including unusually low and slow sunspot activity. These signs, in conjunction with the research center’s ‘relational cycle theory ” or “RC Theory” of climate change which predicted these changes, now leaves no doubt that the process has already been initiated. It is also unstoppable. Our world is rapidly cooling. Even though we still may have isolated warm temperature records, the global trend to a colder era is now irreversible.”

What we should be asking ourselves is, "are we prepared for climate change?" Not to try and stop it, which is out of our control, but to adapt to the changes - any changes - as they occur.

To Err is... profitable?

When I first found The Great Global Warming Swindle online, I was impressed to see a movie that actually showed many of the things I'd been finding myself over the years, and challenged claims made by AGW proponents with actual... you know... facts. I'd sent a link to a couple of email lists where the subject had been discussed before. I promptly got all sorts of people making derogatory comments about the movie, dismissing it out of hand. There were the usual Big Oil claims (because if it's skeptical of AGW, then it's controlled by Big Oil, don't you know...) and a few comments that the movie's facts were simply wrong.

Well, no. In this recent news, the UK regulator did find that they broke a few rules when making the movie - namely "the documentary violated rules on impartiality, and made significant allegations against individuals without giving them a chance to respond." However, the movie "did not mislead viewers..."

Compare this to the ruling by a judge that An Inconvenient Truth had 9 'exaggerations' in it.

A British High Court judge this week exposed nine inaccuracies in former U.S. vicepresident Al Gore's award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, labelling it "a political film" and calling many of its claims about climate change "alarmist" and "exaggerated."

The judge was being overly cautious. There are actually 35 factual errors in AIT, though I wouldn't be surprised if more are found. Visit the link for more details, but here's a list of the errors themselves. Every single one of these claims are false or falsely being blamed on AGW.

1. Sea levels rising six meters
2. Pacific islands "drowning"
3. Thermohaline circulation "stopping"
4. CO2 "driving temperature"
5. Snows of Kilimanjaro "melting"
6. Lake Chad "drying up"
7. Hurricane Katrina "man made"
8. Polar bear "dying"
9. Coral reefs "bleaching"
10. 100ppm of CO2 "melting mile-thick ice"
11. Hurricane Catarina "man made"
12. Japanese typhoons "new record"
13. Hurricanes "getting stronger"
14. Big storm insurance losses "increasing"
15. Mumbai "flooding"
16. Severe tornado's "more frequent"
17. The sun "heats the Arctic Ocean"
18. Arctic "warming fastest"
19. Greenland ice sheet "unstable"
20. Himalayan glacial melt waters "failing"
21. Peruvian glaciers "disappearing"
22. Mountain glaciers worldwide "disappearing"
23. Sahara desert "drying"
24. West Antarctic ice sheet "unstable"
25. Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves "breaking up"
26. Larson B Ice Shelf broke up "because of 'global warming'"
27. Mosquitoes "climbing to higher altitudes"
28. Many tropical diseases "spread through 'global warming'"
29. West Nile Virus in the US "spread through 'global warming'"
30. Carbon Dioxide is a "pollution"
31. The European heat wave of 2003 that "killed 35,000"
32. Pied flycatchers "cannot feed their young"
33. Gore's bogus pictures and film footage
34. The Thames Barrier "closing more frequently"
35. "No fact... in dispute by anybody."

Now, with so many factual errors, gross exaggerations and misleading implications, you'd think Gore and his movie would've been relegated to the trash heap long ago. Instead, AIT has become required viewing in schools (often repeatedly), he's been receiving rewards and making money off it hand over fist.

Clearly, one doesn't need to be honest or accurate to make money off AGW scares.

Just a couple of things

I came across a couple of articles today that I wanted to comment on.

One is a column, Monbiot's metamorphosis, that I found rather interesting. A while back, I'd started to write reviews as I read Heat: How to stop the planet from burning. The reviews I'd written so far are:

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

I never did finish the book. I'd actually borrowed it from the library several times, renewing it again and again as I found myself unable to actually pick the thing up and try to read it again before I had to return it to the library. If you read my reviews, you can probably understand why. It's one of the worst pieces of trash I've ever tried to read, and I just haven't been able to stomach wasting time reading the rest when there are so many better uses for my time. Between my attempts to read his book, his columns online, and even some passing comments by his wife in a column she's written, I've come to believe Monbiot is an egotistical fool who takes his fiction a little too seriously to be mentally healthy. It blows my mind that he's actually taken seriously, rather than laughed at for the demented garbage he spews.

Which is probably why I found this piece from spiked right up my alley.

I also found this story very interesting. Makin' Up Climate Data... From Junk! If you're a regular visitor of Watt's Up With That? (which I highly recommend) and Surface Stations, you know that there are serious problems with the data being used to determine global temperatures and other climate information. Poorly designed, situated and maintained sites are bad enough, but to get data from stations that have been closed for more than 10 years??

...The station closed in 1995 but the data continues until 2006? Did some of the worlds leading climate scientists create the data from thin air? Well, not exactly.

Part of the USHCN data is created by a computer program called “filnet” which estimates missing values. According to the NOAA, filnet works by using a weighted average of values from neighboring stations. Filnet is applied after a homogeneity adjustment which is not designed to find many of these problems.

Imagine that, the worlds leading climate scientists creating temperature data from surrounding stations which are biased by barbecues, bodies of water, wind blocks, jet engines, pavement, roof tops, air conditioner exhausts, inversion layers, non-standard equipment, urban heat islands, automobiles and chimneys.

They didn’t create climate data from thin air; they created it from junk.

The idea that we can (or even should) control global climate and "stop climate change" is arrogant enough. How can we even pretend to know what we're doing - and make decisions regarding laws, policies and just plain day to day living - if we don't even had accurate information to base those decisions on in the first place? And people are pushing for us to spend trillions of dollars to "fix the climate" based on crap like this?

Insanity.

Big Fat Lies

I found these through Boombatti.

Acid baths

There have been a lot of articles similar to this one.

Acid sea will dissolve coral reefs

CORAL reefs, lobsters and other marine creatures that build calcified shells around themselves could soon dissolve as climate change turns the oceans increasingly acidic.

The carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere by factories, cars and power plants is not just raising temperatures. It is also causing what scientists call "ocean acidification" as around 25 per cent of the excess CO2 is absorbed by the seas.

The language is pretty typical. CO2 is "spewed" by human activities. I guess the earth itself doesn't "spew" CO2? Even though all human CO2 emissions together, through industry, agriculture and just plain living, is just a tiny fraction what what the earth itself emits?

Images of dissolving coral reefs and crustacean shells are pretty common, too.

But how true is it? Well, take a look at the photos here.

The shallows near Dobu Island off Papua and New Guinea have active underwater fumaroles pumping out virtually pure CO2. The sea grass is extraordinarily lush and healthy and there is very healthy coral reef a few metres away.

Both photos show bubbles of CO2 which continually flow. I collected samples of gas years ago for a vulcanologist and he reported back to me that it was "virtually pure CO2".

There's also plenty of information from Seafriends, on ocean acidification
Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Meanwhile, on the topic of atmospheric CO2, there's this article from the Financial Post

In praise of CO2

Then, in the 1980s, ecologists realized that satellites could track production, and enlisted NASA to collect the data. For the first time, ecologists did not need to rely on rough estimates or anecdotal evidence of the health of the ecology: They could objectively measure the land's output and soon did -- on a daily basis and down to the last kilometre.

The results surprised Steven Running of the University of Montana and Ramakrishna Nemani of NASA, scientists involved in analyzing the NASA data. They found that over a period of almost two decades, the Earth as a whole became more bountiful by a whopping 6.2%. About 25% of the Earth's vegetated landmass -- almost 110 million square kilometres -- enjoyed significant increases and only 7% showed significant declines. When the satellite data zooms in, it finds that each square metre of land, on average, now produces almost 500 grams of greenery per year.

Why the increase? Their 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, a gas indispensable to plant life.

The more I look into the role of CO2, and historical atmospheric amounts of it, the more I become convinced that we have been living in a CO2 deficit. In the 4-5 billions years or so of Earth's history, atmospheric levels of CO2 have been much higher for much longer. I begin to suspect life on Earth would greatly benefit from increased CO2 levels, and that levels of 1000ppm or higher would be desirable.

Those who believe that CO2 is a pollutant and blame humans for increases in the last 100-150 years suggest the the pre-industrial levels of 250ppm were somehow better than today, and there's even a website and organization dedicated to limiting atmospheric CO2 levels to 350ppm. Plant life begins to suffer when levels drop to 200ppm, and die at 150ppm. Past levels have been as high at 4000ppm, possibly more. It's suggested that it would take CO2 levels of at least 5000ppm before they became harmful to humans, but that this is just an educated guess. We really don't know how high the levels would have to become before they are harmful (it's a given that levels high enough to displace oxygen would be harmful, no matter how ordinarily harmless it might be).

Back to the acidification of oceans, coral reefs evolved at a time when atmospheric levels of CO2 - and the acidity of the oceans - where much higher than they are today. If they were able to adapt to less acid oceans to survive today, why would they suddenly not be able to adapt back to the levels they evolved in?

Hmmm.... Is anyone surprised?

I found this article, courtesy of Icecap.

CBS News - Wikipropaganda on Global Warming

Naturally I was surprised to read on Wikipedia that Oreskes’s work had been vindicated and that, for instance, one of her most thorough critics, British scientist and publisher Bennie Peiser, not only had been discredited but had grudgingly conceded Oreskes was right.

I checked with Peiser, who said he had done no such thing. I then corrected the Wikipedia entry, and advised Peiser that I had done so.

Peiser wrote back saying he couldn’t see my corrections on the Wikipedia page. I made the changes again, and this time confirmed that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again. I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made.

Turns out that on Wikipedia some folks are more equal than others. Kim Dabelstein Petersen is a Wikipedia “editor” who seems to devote a large part of his life to editing reams and reams of Wikipedia pages to pump the assertions of global-warming alarmists and deprecate or make disappear the arguments of skeptics.

I soon found others who had the same experience: They would try to squeeze in any dissent, or even correct an obvious slander against a dissenter, and Petersen or some other censor would immediately snuff them out.

Read the rest here.

Celebration...

Wishing a Happy Independence Day to all my friends in the US.

Have a great one! :-D

Time to celebrate

A very happy Canada Day to all my fellow Canucks. It's a good time to appreciate what a great country we live in. :-D