Notable Quotes

FROM-Jer's Place

"We’re offering conservative reforms that are proven ideas to grow the economy. We want to reapply our nation’s founding principles to fix those problems. I would argue our president is replacing our founding principles.”

Paul Ryan

Cyber Wag Alert-Little Fishes

FROM-Jer's Notes

Wherein: Climate models which are nothing more than hypothesis are used to generate studies of future events, which are unmeasurable and unverifiable. Also known as CYBER WAG (Computer generated Wild Ass Guesses)

Since I have not done a Cyber Wag  alert in awhile I would suggest that that you read the above link to review.

In this particular incident the scientific community is using their vast computer power to kill off and stunt the growth of the entire fish population of planet Earth.

Fish to shrink by up to a quarter due to climate change, study reveals 

Scientists predict 14-24% reduction in fish size by 2050 as ocean temperatures increase

After considerable wringing of hands:

Global warming is likely to shrink the size of fish by as much as a quarter in coming decades, according to a groundbreaking new study of the world's oceans.

The reduction in individual fish size will be matched by a dwindling of overall fish stocks, warned scientists, at a time when the world's growing human population is putting ever greater pressure on fisheries.

And further alarmist verbage meant to scare the unenlightened masses:

"It could be worse than that," said Prof Callum Roberts, at the University of York, who described the research as the most comprehensive to date. Roberts, who was not one of the study's authors,...

Of course it could be our friendly scientist are known for their conservatism when it comes to hyperbolic rhetoric.

"We will see dramatic changes in the oceans likely to reduce productivity," said Roberts. "One billion people rely on fish for primary animal protein and that is going to increase, especially in developing countries. We have to get to grips with our dependence on fossil fuels otherwise we are stuffed."

Oh yes of course couldn't have a scientific discussion without throwing the old fossil fuel/big oil angle into it. But to make sure everyone makes the connection our scientist point it out

"Our work shows a very concerning future for the oceans and so it is very important to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop better fish management policies to adapt to these changes," said Cheung.

The pertinent passage is found well down in the article and identifies it as a Cyber Wag:

Cheung's team projected temperature rises using data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, based on a high-emissions scenario that matches the current trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions.

So as is usual they are using a hypothesis, a model, which can not be proven to make model of what will happen decades hence and using this to drive their society crushing agendas and feed their government grant coffers.

One wonders what the world would look like today if these same scientist used their talents and intellect to truly help mankind rather than to saddle it with unsustainable policies based solely on Cyber Wag fecal matter.

The Solar Market?

FROM-New Jersey Star Ledger

Solar panels come to Union County, but program's future not so bright

(Excerpt)

...But instability in New Jersey’s market for solar energy credits, known as SRECs, has raised concerns about the program’s potential to be expanded in the future. And it also calls into question the revenue streams of a private company, California-based Tioga Energy, which owns the solar panels and is obligated to pay back $15 million in debt that Union County guaranteed.

It’s one of many public-backed solar energy initiatives undertaken in New Jersey in recent years, and the uncertainty that surrounds it is an example of what’s being experienced around the state in other parts of the nation. 

The SREC credits, essentially a subsidy, are awarded to homeowners, businesses and utilities that generate energy with solar panels. Prices are set on a market in which utilities buy credits to meet state-mandated quotas. 

For the first few years of the SREC market, solar panel owners got $600 or more for each SREC they earned by generating 1,000 kilowatts of solar energy, equal to about two thirds of the monthly electricity needs of the average New Jersey household. 

Then, once supply of SRECs exceeded what the state told utilities to procure, prices plummeted to the mid-$100 range on spot markets.
That was bad for anyone who relied on high SREC values to pay off solar panel financing, like Tioga, and bad for solar builders if it brings new projects to a screeching halt. 

To save jobs, the state Legislature sharply increased the utilities’ demand for credits over a three-year period, and Gov. Chris Christie signed the bill into law in July. 

So far, though, it hasn’t worked: Prices on the spot market dropped from the mid-$100s to $60 or $70 as of last week, according to the SREC trading company Flett Exchange. 

In the case of the Union County program, Tioga will generate the majority of its revenue by selling electricity to the agencies that allowed it to install the solar panels. But it will also sell SRECs to generate income, and the low prices are bad for its bottom line. 

"We’re going to have to dig in to our own coffers to make the bond repayments," said Marc Roper, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing....

What could go wrong?

From The Reno Gazzete Journal

Tequila plant is tapped for biofuel

UNR research gets federal backing with $14.3M grant

Feel free to read the article but it seems to me that giving millions of dollars to a University to study Tequila has the potential to  get, uh be wasted, and the University of Nevada at that.

Science Fiction: ‘Climate Vulnerability Monitor Report’ Released

This irresponsible report does not belong anywhere near policy planners.

FROM-PJ Media

On Wednesday, the 2012 “Climate Vulnerability Monitor – a Guide to the Cold Calculus of a Hot Planet“ was released to great fanfare in New York City. Conducted by the DARA group, a non-governmental organization based in Europe, and the Climate Vulnerable Forum, the 331-page report forecasts death and destruction on a scale normally reserved for science fiction.

Media covering the report printed extraordinary headlines. Per US News & World Report: “Report: 100 Million Could Die From Climate Change By 2030.”

The Manila Bulletin headlined an Agence France-Presse newswire article: “Climate Change Choking World Economy — Report.”

Businessweek announced: “Climate Change Reducing Global GDP by $1.2 Trillion.”

Only a few questioned whether the report made any sense. Calling it “a triumph for public relations,” statistician Bjorn Lomborg — director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center in Denmark — showed how the report’s handling of “climate change deaths, economic costs, and the costs of ‘action versus inaction’” is nonsense.

However, even Lomborg accepts the climate change science underlying the report. This is a serious mistake. Science misunderstandings continue to drive the climate scare, and lead to exaggerated reports such as the “Monitor.” While humans undoubtedly have some impact on climate, especially at regional levels due to the “urban heat island” effect, preventing climate from changing on a global basis is science fiction.


Read article here

CLIMATE LOSERS GETTING DESPERATE

FROM-Power Line

Did you know that climate change kills! At least that’s the claim out in a new study yesterday, as reported in The Daily Beast, which, last I checked, relies heavily upon a hydrocarbon-intensive energy system to exist. Anyway, according to the latest CO2-breathless story, climate change kills 400,000 people a year, and costs the global economy $1.2 trillion. Jeepers: Maybe the climate—or Mother Nature Herself—should come with a warning label like cigarette packs.

The report comes from something called the Climate Vulnerability Forum (with offices conveniently located in Geneva and Madrid, because you wouldn’t want to be located where any of the world’s poor actually have to live without modern energy would you?), and is hardly worth pouring through the methodology to debunk. In fact, it is not necessary to dispute the death toll estimate to grasp how colossally stupid the study is.

I’m reminded of P.J. O’Rourke’s great line about socialized medicine: if you think health care is expensive now, wait till you see what it costs when it’s free....

Read here

Reefer Madness (Climate Change Edition)

FROM-American Thinker

By Daren Jonescu

A new study by climate researchers from Germany, Australia, and Canada seems to prove beyond any doubt that -- hold on to your hat -- if global temperatures reach levels at which coral reefs are damaged, then coral reefs will be damaged. Terrifyingly irrefutable logic.

The news article outlining the study's findings, entitled "World's coral reefs will die without drastic action on climate change: study," is as typical in its alarmism as it is alarming in its typicality. What does "drastic action" entail? How are such "drastic" measures to be undertaken? Who is to take them? Might there be any legal or ethical issues implied by such measures? A real journalist, if there were one, would be asking these questions. Our modern Official Story disseminators simply say, "Wow, listen to this!" In reply, the online commentators on this article line up to say, "Yeah, it's all the right-wingers' fault," or "Man, this is scary."

So, what computer-generated scenario are they alarming us with now? The study's lead author, Dr. Katja Frieler, explains the study's conclusions in the clearest possible terms (emphasis added).

Our findings show that under current assumptions regarding thermal sensitivity, coral reefs might no longer be prominent coastal ecosystems if global mean temperatures actually exceed two degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level.

Here we go again. The global warming grant-seekers and their promoters at the United Nations have thrown some more data into their Big If Machine and come up with another argument for destroying the world's economy, impoverishing or eliminating millions, and violating natural rights in the name of Gaia. (See further examples here and here.)

"If global mean temperatures actually exceed two degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level." The news article notes that this warning matches up perfectly with the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which declares that "any further rise in global temperatures should be kept to below two degrees C over pre-industrial levels." The author presents this similarity as a case of mutually reinforcing findings, whereas of course that "two degrees above pre-industrial levels" trope is the standard jargon of climate change fear-mongering. The new study, like so many others, is merely adopting the U.N.'s Framework assumption and running with it.

This study asserts that coral reefs might be harmed if temperatures "exceed" two degrees above pre-industrial levels. Exceed by how much? And what if "current assumptions regarding thermal sensitivity" are wrong? And should not scientific researchers feel obliged to answer such questions -- not to mention the question of whether there is any imminent risk of such a rise in temperature -- with a greater degree of certitude before drawing conclusions that imply a need for "drastic measures"? Furthermore, what are we to make of the conclusion itself -- namely, that if all these conditions obtain, then coral reefs "might no longer be prominent coastal ecosystems"? Might? Quantify "might," please. (Just kidding -- please do not try to quantify might; we have been inundated with enough specious computer models already.)

Notice, further, the loaded terminology of "pre-industrial levels." This way of framing the historical temperature record pre-determines that the subsequent rising temperatures were the result of the industrial age per se -- i.e., that you built that, as it were.

If we restated Dr. Frieler's conclusion using the accepted categories of climate science, rather than the politically loaded phrase "pre-industrial," the study's findings would sound like this: "Coral reefs might become less prominent if global mean temperatures actually exceed two degrees above the levels from the end of the Little Ice Age." That seems to make a bit of a difference, doesn't it? Substituting "pre-industrial" for "Little Ice Age" is sleight-of-hand unworthy of science.

This is the point in a "climate denial" article where Al Gore's acolytes usually jump in to say, "You're only reading a media report, not the actual study with all its hard evidence." First of all, there are plenty of careful scientific analyses of the scholarly heart of the global warming charade. And from all these analyses -- from the cherry-picked tree ring samples and ice core data to the carefully bracketed "hockey stick" -- we have learned that the chief theoretical weakness of "orthodox" climate change theory is the fundamental closed-mindedness of the theorists. They set out to find a predetermined answer to their question, and then they take any necessary steps to make darned sure their chosen evidence seems to back it up.

The controversy over the infamous e-mail discussion of "hiding the decline" has taken on a life of its own, obscuring a more basic point. The mention of hiding the decline was merely an admission of guilt; the fact of guilt -- i.e., bad science -- had already long been established.

Secondly, most run-of-the-mill climate change "studies" do not bear intense analysis for the simplest reason of all: on their face, they are not really claiming to have proven anything beyond their own computer models' imaginary worlds. Such is the case with this latest coral reef study. The researchers hypothesize that if certain things happen, certain adverse outcomes will occur. The question they do not, cannot, and do not even feel the need to answer, is: "Why should we assume that these hypothetical conditions are anything but science fiction?"

Their entire study rests on the "pre-established" wisdom of man-made global warming. Since J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, many people of various degrees of talent have milked a lot of money out of adapting his characters and settings to their various purposes. But if someone turned around and tried to present "new research" on hobbit social arrangements to the Anthropological Society of London, he would be laughed out of town. (Okay, probably not these days, but you get my point.)

The case of these studies which purport to add to our scientific understanding of the world according to the thoroughly discredited notion of man-made global cooling/global warming/global climate change is no different from that of our imaginary hobbit anthropologist. Or rather, it is different in one way only: the researchers into Middle-earth's climate have thus far gotten away with the ruse. The governments of the world are taking or proposing expensive and despotic steps to prevent Sauron from killing Frodo. And in this version of the story, Sauron, the villain, is you -- you who wish to live a productive, comfortable life in an advanced, free society. It is you who must be stopped.

The article concludes with one more dire warning from another of the researchers.

"The window of opportunity to preserve the majority of coral reefs, part of the world's natural heritage, is small," says co-author of the study Malte Meinshausen, who is a senior researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne.

"We close this window if we follow another decade of ballooning global greenhouse-gas emissions."

Really? Not if the dean of climate fear-pmongering, Phil Jones of East Anglia University, is correct. He has reluctantly admitted that there has been no significant increase in global mean temperatures since 1995. The trajectory of doom assumed by the authors of all these tagalong studies, and built into their Big If Machine computer models, simply is not borne out by the facts.

This study is thus reducible in spirit to the wording I used at the outset: if global temperatures should somehow happen to reach levels at which we think coral reefs might be adversely affected, then coral reefs would, obviously, be adversely affected.

This is science?

Global Warming and Shrinking Manhood

FROM-the Corner

By Mark Steyn .

 Readers have asked me for an update on climate scientist Michael Mann’s threatened lawsuit against National Review for mocking his hockey stick. I don’t really have anything new to report on that front, but I heard Rush mention this story the other day – CBS News, in an alarming story headlined “Male Genitalia Shrinking“, is reporting that global warming may be responsible for a ten per cent reduction in male private parts over the last fifty years. According to this alleged Italian study:

Air pollution has been shown to ‘negatively impact penis size’.

So no hockey stick there. We may have to call these Italian scientists as expert witnesses.

North Dakota Oil Production Sets Records in July, Monthly Output Exceeds 20m Bbls. for First Time

FROM-Carpe Diem