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Showing posts with label Gore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gore. Show all posts

May 28, 2014

Extreme global warming, or cooling, is the norm on Earth


Extreme global warming and temperature extremes are not only nothing new, they are our experience


extreme global warming
Miami|Photo Credit J.D. Brown
Al Gore, the world’s number one purveyor of doom and gloom once wrote:
Our home — Earth — is in danger. What is at risk of being destroyed is not the planet itself, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings.
This really is the argument isn’t it? That the temperature increase that the climate cult led by their high priests such as Al Gore are prophesying is caused by mankind  and their nasty CO2 which will destroy conditions for humans and other life forms on Earth. Because of this Gore says that we are jeopardizing some idyllic climate condition :
…while the average temperature on Earth is a pleasant 59 degrees, the average temperature on Venus is 867 degrees. True, Venus is closer to the Sun than we are, but the fault is not in our star; Venus is three times hotter on average than Mercury, which is right next to the Sun. It’s the carbon dioxide.
So enamoured was Gore of this “pleasant” temperature he considers so important to the human race that shortly after writing this he went out andbought a $9 million mansion in Southern California where the average temperature is very close to his “pleasant 59.” As Noel Sheperd observed at the time, “Certainly not bad for a guy who supposedly was worth between one and two million dollars in 2000.”
Most of the rest of the world’s inhabitants are not able to live in such “pleasant” temperatures simply because the Earth is really not a “pleasant 59 degrees.” The global temperature is as diverse as the people who live on it.
Toronto Canada is the 52nd largest metropolitan area in the world with a population of over six million people in other words by Gore’s standards we would consider it “habitable”.  About 1500 miles to the south of Canada’s largest city is Miami an American city of comparable size, Miami is the 58th largest metropolitan area in the world.  Like all  of the world’s large cities these two cities have many similarities but one thing they do not have in common is their climate.
Toronto has an average temperature of 45.9 degrees while Miami’s average temperature is a balmy 77.2 degrees a difference of 41.3 degrees. This is their average temperatures when you look at the extremes the differences are even more noticeable. The coldest temperature ever recorded in Toronto is -31.4 degrees while the warmest temperature ever recorded in Miami is 98 degrees an amazing difference of  129.4 degrees.  These extreme conditions exist in cities where people are obviously able to live and  function normally.
Consider that the average annual temperature in Helsinki, Finland of 41 degrees is eleven degrees colder than the coldest temperature ever recorded in Bangkok, Thailand.  Residents of Helsinki live in an environment where the average temperature is 41 degrees while in Bangkok the resident’s live in an average temperature of 84 degrees neither of which is anywhere near Gore’s “pleasant 59.”
But you do not have to travel “around the world” to find extreme differences in temperatures, my experience proves this. Years ago I lived in the “great plains” of northeast Montana. One January an Arctic blast came sweeping down from Alberta and for several days we experienced temperatures well below 0. In fact for three days in a row the air temperature reached a low of -31 degrees and with the wind chill it was close to -50. But remarkably, but actually not, just six months later in July of the same year the temperature reached a 103 degrees. That is a 134 degree difference in temperature, not in different global “climate zones” but in the same location and in the same year. Now that is climate change!
The climate alarmist have conditioned us to look at minor changes in temperatures with foreboding. A half of degree celsius temperature increase over the course of more than a century is represented as some sort of harbinger of a coming global apocalypse. The fact that humans have  survived even thrived in divergent climates so far removed from the temperatures they warn us of is laughable.
read rest of article at Brenner Brief

August 26, 2013

An inconvenient chill

FROM-Editorial-The Washington Times

Global-warming proponents will face a day of reckoning on Capitol Hill

Al Gore and the climate doomsayers are at it again. The former vice president took to Twitter this week to declare the planet “under threat,” and he already has a solution. Mr. Gore’s group, the Climate Reality Project, is running a “put the heat on denial” campaign throughout August to remind people that it’s hot not because it’s summer, but because Americans are using their air conditioning and driving automobiles.

Alarmists hope to convince the public that the only way to avert certain catastrophe is to force everyone to use “green” energy. Mr. Gore coincidentally stands to profit handsomely from such a conversion through his politically correct investment firm, Generation Investment Management.

So far, Americans have been cold to the idea of giving up the conveniences of modern life. Because the planet has refused to warm up and cast doubt on the alarmist prophecies, Mr. Gore has stepped up his proganda game. In the past month, there have been 2,055 cities across the country reporting chilly summertime peak temperatures. In Texarkana, Texas, for example, the mercury can soar beyond 110 degrees in August. Residents on Friday enjoyed balmy temperatures in the 70s, beating a record set three decades ago.
Forget the evidence. The left insists proof of planetary overheating is overwhelming. “Nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since the year 2000,” says Mr. Gore’s climate group. “Extreme weather events like heat waves, heavy rains and drought are becoming more common and more severe. Coastal communities all over the world are preparing for the impacts of sea level rise.” Those predictions have proved less reliable than the local weatherman’s forecast.

Hurricane season began June 1, and there haven’t been any hurricanes yet. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s index of drought conditions has been well below normal over the past 12 months. The seas aren’t rising because the polar ice isn’t melting. The National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder reports Arctic sea ice is maintaining “average” levels while “Antarctic sea ice is near a record maximum extent for mid-August.” In short, everything is just fine, and that has Mr. Gore and his allies worried.

They ought to be. On Thursday, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Power announced plans next month to grill bureaucrats from a dozen federal agencies about how they’ve been using taxpayer funds to advance a global-warming agenda. This presents an ideal opportunity for Congress to insist the government get out of the propaganda business. Mr. Gore is a wealthy man with plenty of cash to advance his own business interests.


January 26, 2013

A "Goliath" Inconvenient Truth



Just this past August (2012), the chicken littles were out in full force warning us of imminent doom as the result of the melting Greenland ice sheets.
Today, Marco Tedesco, assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at The City College of New York, reported that melting over the Greenland ice sheet shattered the seasonal record in the modern era, a full four weeks before the close of the melting season. The melting season in Greenland usually lasts from June – when the first puddles of meltwater appear – to early September, when temperatures cool. This year, cumulative melting by 8 August had already exceeded the record of 2010 (chart above, year 2012 in red). "With more yet to come in August, this year's overall melting will fall way above the old records.
Wanting to be sure we understood how big a deal this is, they even broke into the biblical references
That's a goliath year
A Goliath year, wow that is big. How "Goliath" was it?
-- the greatest melt since satellite recording began in 1979," said Professor Tedesco.
Since 1979! Since 1979? I mean we are talking about dramatic changes not recorded since the end of the Disco epoch!

BUT, a new study puts the absurdity of this alarmist claim in perspective. As the Houston Chronicle...chronicles  (emphasis mine)
The study used ice cores to study conditions during a period of natural global warming that occurred between 115,000 and 130,000 years ago, when temperatures were about 14.5 Fahrenheit degrees higher than they are today. This was known as the Eemian period.
So what happened to the Greenland ice sheet when temperatures were 14.5 degrees warmer than today? During a period of natural global warming?
During this inter-glacial time about 75 percent of Greenland’s ice sheet remained intact.
Nowhere in any literature that I have ever read are any of the alarmist scientist predicting that temperatures as the result of man made CO2, going to come close to a 14.5 degree Fahrenheit increase.

In fact since the end of the Disco epoch (1979) the illustrious IPCC says that global temperatures have increased .72 degrees Fahrenheit or less than 5% of the increase experienced in the Eemian period. The absolute worst case scenarios projected by the IPCC for temperature increases as the result of a doubling of CO2 is 11.4 degrees Fahrenheit a full three degrees lower than previously experienced according to this study.

In the abstract to the new study we are told: (emphasis mine)
The response of the Greenland ice sheet to the warmer-than-present climate of the Eemian has thus remained unclear. Here we present the new North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (‘NEEM’) ice core and show only a modest ice-sheet response to the strong warming in the early Eemian.
Or as the Chronicle writer observed in the opening to his article:
New research suggests that Greenland’s vast ice sheet isn’t as fragile as some climate scientists feared.

The work, published in Nature this week (see abstract), indicates the majority of ice on Greenland could remain intact for hundreds of years even if the planet warms considerably.
Why is this important? It is important because the fear of the Greenland ice sheet melting is among the sited as one of the largest contributors to sea level rise that the alarmist use to scare the populace and drive public policy.

This narrative is embedded into our culture and has been taught in our schools for a generation, and continues to be.

What will happen in the future?

If people keep adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the average sea level around the world by the end of this century (the year 2099) could be anywhere from 7 to 23 inches higher than it was in 1990. Sea level could rise even more if the big ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica melt faster.

But the big ice sheets in Greenland will not melt faster, nor will the one in Antarctica, which is for another day.

The truth is that scientist have now shown that even if temperatures were to increase beyond the alarmist wildest claims, my home here near the Florida coast will be bulldozed under by future developers long before it is covered over by the rising Atlantic as depicted in Al Gore's fairy tale movie.

Yet people still believe in the fairy tale and that is a "Goliath" of an Inconvenient Truth.

January 15, 2013

Al Gore’s Payday

FROM-NRO



Whatever his intentions, the former veep has benefited America’s enemies.

By Robert Zubrin

Recently, it was reported that former vice president Al Gore had managed to sell his financially troubled Current TV network to the Al Jazeera company, owned by the Qatar government, for $500 million, netting himself about $100 million in the process.

There is something unsettling about this transaction. I own a small aerospace company that does some business with the U.S. government. If I were to take a NASA middle manager out to dinner and pick up the tab, the inspector general would be all over both of us in a heartbeat. Yet here is Al Gore, a former congressman, senator, and vice president of the United States, receiving $100 million from a foreign government — and not just any foreign government, but one involved in extremely damaging economic warfare against the United States and the promotion of terrorism worldwide — and yet the attorney general takes no action. What gives?

To be sure, Al Gore is not the first high-level U.S.-government official, or even the first in his family, to obtain a payoff from a foreign government opposed to the United States. For example, his father, then-congressman Al Gore Sr., received a herd of prize cattle from Armand Hammer, which he was able to sell repeatedly at grossly inflated prices to lobbyists who never bothered to pick them up. When Gore retired from the Senate, he took up a $500,000-per-year (in 1970s money) position as CEO of the American coal subsidiary of Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum. Edward Jay Epstein extensively documented in his book Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer, based on KGB files that became public after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that Hammer was in fact — as had been widely suspected before the release of said documents — a top-level paymaster of the Soviet foreign-intelligence services from 1922 onward. According to Epstein, Gore Sr. received his payoff in return for his help in preventing prosecution of Hammer by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, as well as for his key role in encouraging King Idris of Libya to transfer control of his country’s oilfields to Occidental — a move that no doubt facilitated the subsequent transfer of control of Libya itself to the Soviet camp.

So there is no doubt that Al Gore Sr. deserved his payoff from Armand Hammer. But what has Al Gore Jr. ever done for Qatar? Isn’t he, after all, the foremost champion of the worldwide environmentalist movement, which is bitterly opposed to oil production, the very lifeblood of the Qatari regime? Yes, he is, but there is a little catch, because while opposed in principle to oil production everywhere, the environmentalist movement has been effective in reality only in impeding it in the United States.

Read entire article

January 10, 2013

The Four Als

FROM-Front Page Magazine


by David Solway

Who can forget Al Capone, the Chicago mobster who profited from Prohibition and murdered and swashbuckled his way to a pot of gold before meeting an untimely end? Forbidding things that people want always seems to lead to violent or insidious forms of exploitation while generating a cast of power-hungry and sometimes flamboyant characters in the process. Today alcohol flows for the taking although other manifestations of constraint, interdiction and taboo flourish as exuberantly as ever. Certain words and phrases have been rigorously proscribed under the rubric of Political Correctness and cadres of petty tyrants and bureaucrats in the media, the political echelon and the academy are raking in obscene salaries applying the rules of speech. Criticism of the reigning shibboleths—readily obtainable abortion as a subsidized right, gay marriage, social entitlements, affirmative action, the campaign against the right to bear arms, big government, the obsolescence of the Constitution—is met with sanctimonious rectitude and programmatic suppression while the enforcers are promoted to high office, social cachet or plush employment.

No less crucial, the prohibition against carbon, ostensibly to avert “climate change” and to compel industrial temperance, has now become one of the most lucrative enterprises of our time. We should make no mistake about this; the war against carbon is both a repressive imposition and big business. It is prohibition writ large. Many rather colorful if unscrupulous individuals are filling their coffers advocating carbon teetotalism—one thinks of Rajendra Pachauri who heads the IPCC at the United Nations and sits on the boards of companies poised to gain from the “climate change” hoax, including his The Energy Research Institute (TERI), Canadian climate evangelist David Suzuki who benefits from ample foundational largess, and, of course, the redoubtable Al Gore who has not allowed moral principle and practical consistency to interfere with his profiteering agenda. In the words of Ed Driscoll, “Al lives in a mansion, flies around in a private plane, and, this, along with his various business ventures, gives him an overall carbon footprint the size of, well, one giant Manbearpig.”

As I document in my recent Global Warning: The Trials of an Unsettled Science, Al has done extremely well for himself, buying carbon offsets from the company he co-owns and chairs, Generation Investment Management, partnering with the venture capital investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers that is behind Terralliance, an oil wildcatter, and earning royalties from Pasminco Ltd. for a highly toxic zinc mine on his property. Then there are the tendentious books and erroneous films, and public appearances for which he charges hundreds of thousands of dollars. Al is now well on his way to amassing an indecent fortune that would make Al Capone’s stash look picayune by comparison.

Read entire article

January 5, 2013

October 27, 2011

Global Warming -- RIP

FROM-RCP

By Victor Davis Hanson


Not long ago, candidate Obama promised to cool the planet and lower the rising seas. Indeed, he campaigned on passing "cap-and-trade" legislation, a radical, costly effort to reduce America's traditional carbon energy use.

The theory was that new taxes and greater regulations would make Americans pay more for fossil-fuel energy -- a good thing if it reduced our burning of coal, oil and gas. Obama was not shy in admitting that under his green plans, electricity prices would "necessarily skyrocket." His energy secretary, Steven Chu, at one point had even said, "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe" -- that is, about $8-$10 per gallon. Fairly or not, the warming movement seemed to cast a tiny elite imposing costs on a poorer and supposedly less informed middle class.

But despite a Democrat-controlled House and Senate in 2009-2010, President Obama never passed into law any global warming legislation. Now the issue is deader than a doornail -- despite the efforts of the Environmental Protection Agency to enact new regulations that would never pass Congress.

So what happened to the global warming craze?

Corruption within the climate-change industry explains some of the sudden turnoff. "Climategate" -- the unauthorized 2009 release of private emails from the Climatic Research Unit in the United Kingdom -- revealed that many of the world's top climate scientists were knee-deep in manipulating scientific evidence to support preconceived conclusions and personal agendas. Shrill warnings about everything from melting Himalayan glaciers to shrinking polar bear populations turned out not always to be supported by scientific facts.

Unfortunately, "green" during the last three years has also become synonymous with Solyndra-style crony capitalism. Common-sense ideas like more windmills, solar panels, retrofitted houses and electric cars have all been in the news lately. But the common themes were depressingly similar: few jobs created and little competitively priced energy produced, but plenty of political donors who landed hundreds of millions of dollars in low-interest loans from the government.


Of course, it didn't help that the world's most prominent green spokesman, Nobel laureate Al Gore, made tens of millions of dollars from his own advocacy. And he adopted a lifestyle of jet travel and energy-hungry homes at odds with his pleas for everyone else to cut back.

But even without the corruption and hypocrisy, sincere advocates of man-made global warming themselves overreached. At news that the planet had not heated up at all during the last 10 years, "global warming" gave way to "climate change" -- as if to warn the public that unseasonable cold or wet weather was just as man-caused as were the old specters of drought and scorching temperatures.

Then, when "climate change" was not still enough to frighten the public into action, yet a third term followed: "climate chaos." Suddenly some "green experts" claimed that even more terrifying disasters -- from periodic hurricanes and tornadoes to volcanoes and earthquakes -- could for the first time be attributed to the burning of fossil fuels. At that point, serially changing the name of the problem suggested to many that there might not be such a problem after all.

Current hard times also explain the demise of global warming advocacy. With high unemployment and near nonexistent economic growth, Americans do not want to shut down generating plants or pay new surcharges on their power bills. Most people worry first about having any car that runs -- not whether it's a more expensive green hybrid model.

Over the last half-century, Americans have agreed that smoky plants and polluting industries needed to be cleaned up. But when the green movement began to classify clean-burning heat as a pollutant, it began to lose the cash-strapped public.

While the Obama administration was subsidizing failed or inefficient green industries, radical breakthroughs in domestic fossil-fuel exploration and recovery -- especially horizontal drilling and fracking -- have vastly increased the known American reserves of gas and oil. Modern efficient engines have meant that both can be consumed with little, if any, pollution -- at a time when a struggling U.S. economy is paying nearly half a trillion dollars for imported fossil fuels. The public apparently would prefer developing more of our own gas, oil, shale, tar sands and coal as an alternative to going broke by either importing more fuels from abroad or subsidizing more inefficient windmills and solar panels at home.

We simply don't know positively whether recent human activity has caused the planet to warm up to dangerous levels. But we do know that those who insist it does are sometimes disingenuous, often profit-minded, and nearly always impractical. 

May 17, 2011

An Inconvient Truth: A Fifth Anniversary Tribute



FROM-The American Spectator

By Mark Hyman

This month is the fifth anniversary of the release of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. The documentary film became a sensation among the political left, the easily impressionable segments of the public and a majority in Congress that was all too eager to enact legislation to solve the global crisis.

The film won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature and the audio version received a Grammy. For his efforts to save the planet, Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize. This is a very good haul for a film that grossed a rather paltry $23 million in domestic box office receipts.

There is no denying that Gore and his film deserve the lion's share of the credit (or blame) for launching the wild hysteria to combat "manmade global warming" that swept the nation in 2006.

The U.S. House of Representatives created an entirely new committee "The Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming" because "global warming is an urgent problem that requires action now" such as hastening the nation's "transition away from a fossil fuel-based economy."

Congress passed legislation banning incandescent light bulbs by 2014. Americans will soon exclusively use CFL (curly-fry light) bulbs that will keep a home as dimly light as a Third World hospital room.

On several occasions Congress was unsuccessful in enacting "cap and trade" legislation that would be a financial windfall for some groups but would also kill thousands of American jobs. Common sense prevailed as the legislation failed to move in Congress but, the Environmental Protection Agency has threatened to implement the legislation via regulatory edict.

After the film was released, a number of strange bedfellows jumped onto the manmade global warming bandwagon. In one public service announcement, Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich, who sat together on a sofa like a pair of love-struck lab partners before they were to head off to the senior prom, demanded a solution to global warming.

A year later the always-evolving Gingrich would abandon his newfound fossil-fuels-are-evil buddies and publish a book titled Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less in which he advocates pumping as much oil from the ground as is humanly possible.

Going Green became the catch phrase. There was a rush to purchase hybrid vehicles such as the two-seat Honda Insight, the impractical compact that is not much larger than a circus clown car, and the overpriced Toyota Prius that has been plagued with numerous battery and service problems.

The Discovery cable network launched Planet Green channel whose star celebrity is Ed Begley, Jr. That's right, who? That came on the heels of NBC Universal airing "green" theme programming on its stable of cable and broadcast channels during the month of April. Even Time magazine offered a "Going Green" column. Green expos, exhibits, conventions and bazaars popped up around the country. Green was in.

Not content with his role as Chicken Little, Gore went on to co-found a "carbon credit" company that has made him millions. He even used the carbon credit service for himself. He deems his extravagant, high-energy use home as being "carbon neutral" because he purchases "carbon offsets." From himself.

This review comes five years after the film's original release but, I confess the timing is only a mere coincidence. My primary goal in watching the film was to determine if I was correct in what I remembered of my 2006 viewing. I began to have doubts.....

Read entire article here

April 27, 2011

Climate Change As Religion: The Gospel According To Gore


FROM-Forbes

Larry Bell

Global warming (aka “climate change”) has become a religious mantra, a call for action in a crusade against larger evils we have perpetrated against nature, a punishment for our sins. Author Michael Crichton articulated the essence of this creed in a 2003 speech in which he observed:
There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with Nature; there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result from eating from the tree of knowledge; and as a result of our actions, there is a judgment day coming for all of us. We are energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment, just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs imbibe.
Let’s recognize that Crichton was not arguing against the importance of living more environmentally responsible lives that apply resources in sustainable ways, or against the central role that religion plays in guiding most of us, whether we subscribe to a particular orthodoxy or not. But that idyllic view of an Eden in the “good old days” before industrialization and modern technology wrecked everything warrants some objective reflection.
Realities going back a few hundred years and more reveal a different picture; one displaying widespread poverty, starvation, disease and hardship. Yes, throughout human history, people have had to adapt to climate changes – some long, some severe, and many unpredictable. They have blamed themselves for bad seasons, believing they had invoked the displeasure of the gods through a large variety of offenses.
High priests of doom told them so, extracting oaths of fealty and offerings of penance for promised interventions on their behalf. In this regard, at least for some, it seems little has changed. That penance today comes at a very high cost…our present and future national economy.
Nobel Physics laureate Ivar Giaever has called global warming a “new religion.”  Its temple is built on grounds of faith rather than scientific foundations. Climate change is not Mother Nature’s retribution for human audacity to multiply and survive, any more than a tornado that destroys a particular church is God’s retribution for belonging to the “wrong” congregation” Get over it! It’s not all about us!
Climate changes and shorter-term weather events are the way nature balances itself, move heat and moisture around, and provide motivations for species to evolve. CO2 is a small but nonetheless important part of the system. Without it life would not exist at all. No polar bears, no penguins, no coral reefs – and certainly no rain forests that directly breathe in lots of the stuff. Don’t call it “pollution.” At least show it a little respect!
Global warming has been effectively marketed by doom-speakers because it provides really exciting visual impressions: icebergs calving, polar bears exhausted from swimming, and such. Endless “authorities’ will back up these images with scary prophesies regarding just how bad things are likely to get based upon speculative theories and unproven computer models offered as articles of faith.
Religious history is replete with stories of floods, from Noah to Gilgamesh. But melting and freezing patterns are far too complex and regional to be predicted by models. In addition, accurate satellite records only recently became available. It’s also important to note that higher and lower atmospheric CO2 concentration trends have tended to follow, not lead, temperature changes which have occurred for a large variety and combination of natural reasons.
Knee-jerk responses to alarmist forecasts make for great media, but do so at the expense of good science. If claims that continuous Greenland melting accelerations were correct, even at previously measured advancing rates (and precluding intervention of another potentially overdue Ice Age), it would take thousands of years to significantly affect sea levels.
Anyone with even a modicum of knowledge about climate history recognizes that the Arctic experiences substantial climate swings about every 60-70 years due to entirely natural ocean oscillation cycles.  It was very much warmer 1,000 years ago when Eric the Red and his band of Icelandic Viking settlers raised livestock on Greenland’s coastal grasslands. I certainly didn’t see any sheep or goats during my year there in 1959-60 as a military air traffic controller when temperatures reached 60 degrees below zero.
A study presented in the July 2008 issue of the journal Science notes that Greenland’s melt rate may have been recently decreasing once again when viewed over a long timescale. This research, led by Dr. Roderick S. W. van de Wal of the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research in Utrecht, was based upon 17 years of satellite measurements. It concluded that speedups in melting rates are strictly short-term, transient phenomena, occurring primarily during summer months.
Al Gore and other perhaps less divinely inspired modern-day Noahs continue to speak out about an imminent threat of floods posed by rising ocean levels resulting from melting ocean and glacier ice. The “Goracle” carried out his prophetic ministry at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit, declaring an impending Arctic disaster.
Citing “new research” undertaken at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, Gore told attendees, “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr. [Wieslaw] Maslowski that there is a 75% chance the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years…It is hard to capture the astonishment that the experts in the science of ice saw when they saw this.”
Scientists were, in fact, astonished by Gore’s statements. One was none other than Dr. Maslowski himself, who responded, “It’s unclear how the figure was arrived at. I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.” Gore’s office later admitted that the 75% figure was one used by Dr. Maslowski as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Gore.
Global warming zealots have launched an aggressive jihad against those they brand as “deniers”, often asserting presumed fossil energy affiliations to those who don’t buy into their hysterical pronouncements. Another tactic is to conflate rejection of unfounded human-caused climate crisis alarmism with an absurd denial that climate changes regularly occur, or that human activities may have some influence (however incalculably minuscule, either with respect to warming or cooling, those effects may be). They would also have us believe that periods of global warming are assuredly “bad”, and have even caused recent global cooling! In other words, all climate change is bad.
In the church of climate change, most or all unfortunate events that occur are attributable to human causation. Eco-elitists seize upon this dogma to argue that economic growth, promulgated by spurious corporate interests, is the enemy of the environment.
They overlook the fact that that economic progress yields technological innovation and prosperity essential to support more resourceful, cleaner and healthier lifestyles. A return to small, self-sufficient, agrarian communal societies of our ancestors is no longer practical or desirable, either for us or other creatures that share and depend upon common ecosystems.
Whether or not we subscribe to a particular orthodoxy, religion plays a vital, if not central role in most of our lives, guiding us to believe we are all part of something much larger than ourselves. It provides age-old lessons that teach us the importance of taking responsibility for our actions, constantly motivating us to do better. Faith in those universal principles binds us together as stable, functioning societies.
Science also has a vital, but very different role. When purported “scientific experts” emulate spiritual prophets they overstep their bounds, and we can no longer trust them.

April 12, 2011

The New Weathermen


Climatologists mount a terror campaign

FROM-Pajamas Media

Recently, pretty much on a whim, I decided to monitor the accuracy of radio and TV weather reports, since these affect our daily behavior in all sorts of different ways: what we wear, whether we go in to work or not, look to the repair of the shutters, go up on the ladder to check the rain gutters, don’t forget the sunglasses, etc. I gave the weather experts one week to prove their credentials and began keeping careful score.

The TV reports were terribly impressive. They were also impressively terrible. For all the intricate color charts, the high pressure areas and low pressure areas marked in bold, the sweeping curvilinear lines, the little puffy clouds extruding rain drops, the smiley-face suns, the luminous chromatics of competing “systems,” and all the rest of it, it turned out that the cocksure prognostications were as just wrong as they were right.

After the week had passed, my scorecard showed that the weather person had blundered grievously on three days, had been correct on three days, and was partially correct on one day when the rainfall forecast for the morning arrived only in the evening. A 50% success rate hardly qualifies as confidence-inspiring, seeing that it approximates nothing more convincing than the results of a coin toss.

It’s tempting to extrapolate from the quotidian to the planetary, from the small tomorrow to the big tomorrow, and inquire into the competence of our “official” climatologists, who have assured us that we are heading for meteoric catastrophe, noncompliant weather notwithstanding. Climate warm-mongers naturally try to rescue their hypothesis by dishing up vain distinctions, like the climate “expert” interviewed on CBC Radio’s As it Happens who, confronted with the fact of colder winters, claimed there is a difference between climate and weather!

The game works like this. If the weather is warmer than usual, it is an infallible sign of global warming. If the weather is colder than usual, it is an equally infallible sign — owing to some ludicrous formula straight out of an alchemist’s notebook — that the climate is heating up alarmingly and we must all go green, pass cap and trade, drive Volts, turn down our thermostats, and set up phalanxes of unsightly, bird-shredding, budget-breaking, and neurosis-inducing windmills that may, on good days, produce enough electricity to power a 40-watt bulb. A massive snowfall climbing over the window ledge indicates the approach of desert-like winters when parents will recount nostalgic tales of snowball fights of yore to their wondering children. The predictions, though, need not always be counter-intuitive. A dry season means the baking inferno is nigh. A wet season signals the onset of Noahide floods, rising sea levels, and the submerging of Pacific islands. An ordinary day is merely the ominous quiet before the impending storm. It makes no difference what the data may be, they always point in the same direction.

Quite frankly, we have, most or at least many of us, gone stark raving mad. Experience counts for nothing. Theory is everything. One thinks of the old joke: It’s fine in practice, but will it work in theory? Only it’s not fine in practice, in defiance of which the theory must be patched together and upheld at all costs.

Thus, increasingly unable to rely on the accuracy of their findings, which had the annoying habit of turning into fables, mainstream climatologists, like their colleagues in the political arena, were compelled to fall back on their next best option. If reality refused to cooperate, then all that needed to be done was to change the terminology. First it was global warming. When the earth decided not to play along and pummeled us with a series of colder winters and major snow storms, we suddenly discovered we were the victims of climate change. When it became evident that there were fewer rather than more hurricane events, as confidently predicted by Al Gore, we were now subject to global weirding, whatever that was supposed to be. When the latest substitution didn’t catch on, it became global climate disruption, an umbrella term big enough to shelter climatologists from the facts pelting down on them.

The technique of blatantly merchandising outright lies as uncontested facts was evident in a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report claiming that the period 2002-2009 was “the warmest on record worldwide,” when something very close to the opposite was the truth (AP, February 8, 2010). Not content with passing off one whopper, the NOAA, which derives its evidence from the dubious NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, claimed that June 2010 was the warmest month on record and that Arctic temperatures had risen by close to four degrees from average. The problem here is that Goddard has no thermometers north of eighty degrees latitude and so projected their readings from their more southerly apparatus. “Really,” comments meteorologist Art Horn, who has closely tracked these facets of the climate fantasy, “they make it up.”
And that’s the truth. They make it up. Of course, making things up turns out to be a profitable business, generating all manner of perks, titles, offices, grants, and funds, an appanage without limit. Take UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chairman Rajendra Pachauri, who has recently been implicated in a conflict of interest, as he sits on the boards of companies poised to profit from the “climate change” industry. And when it comes to pure invention, let us recall that he was also the chief backer of the great “Himalaya melt” scare, which has now been shown to be based on an undocumented, unchecked, and unproven “speculation” of a single Indian scientist, Syed Hasnain, who was then recruited by Pachauri to his The Energy Research Institute (TERI). The IPCC’s 2007 report, vetted by Pachauri, said there was a 90% chance that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. This claim has now been decisively refuted. The Pachauri gang also had to admit that its 2007 statement that 55% of the Netherlands lies below sea level was in error — it is 26% (Big Journalism, February 13, 2010).

The plot thickened — or thinned — in late November 2009 when the Hadley Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia was hacked, releasing thousands of files suggesting a covert mega-operation to propagate an anthropogenic global warming myth. This is an excellent instance of the Groves of Hackademe doing what they do best — misconceiving the world and then misleading it. “Warmist scientists,” wrote James Delingpole about the Hadley contretemps, “have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause” (Telegraph.co.uk, November 21, 2009). The CRU was clearly practicing counterfeit science. It had become undeniable that measurements were tampered with to paint the desired canvas, that counter-evidence was deliberately squelched, that character assassination against climate skeptics was an accepted tactic, and that experimental results were falsely replicated.

The notorious Wikileaks cable dump made it even clearer that the climate “consensus” was more of a political and fiscal gambit than a scientific project (guardian.co.uk, December 3, 2010). Mark Levin’s chapter “On Enviro-Statism” in his Liberty and Tyranny provides a compendious summary of the various stages of the global warming hoax and how it functions as an instrument of statist control of civil society. Similarly, Ottmar Edenhofer, former co-chair of the IPCC’s Working Group III, admitted in an interview with Germany’s NZZ Online on November 14, 2010, that “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”

There are many “big names” associated with what has become perhaps the greatest scam of our times. Aside from Pachauri, there is, for example, James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute and has been prophesying climate apocalypse for years now, looking more like a carnival fortune teller on meth than a serious scientist. Indeed, he makes Nostradamus sound like a comparatively sober futurologist. Hansen warns that if we don’t get our act together soon, New York City will be under fifty feet of water by the end of the century. Interestingly, Hansen was forced to revise his figures showing that the warmest decade of the 20th century was the 1990s — the warmest decade was the 1930s. He has now been outed by his former NASA supervisor John Theon, who told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that Hansen “violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it)…” (Inhofe EPW Press Blog, January 27, 2009). And Christopher Horner reports that Hansen may well be in violation of waiver requirements from NASA for private and lucrative “outside employment.” As of this writing, NASA has not yet released its “ethics-related records” pertaining to Hansen’s case. All that one can say at this juncture is “Hmmm,” a skeptical intonation that appears to be merited.

Then there is Canada’s own poster geezer David Suzuki, who predicted some 20 years ago that we had only 10 years to go before suffering environmental collapse. Seems we’re still around, if only to judge from Suzuki’s obstreperous presence. Addressing a McGill University Business Conference on Sustainability on January 31, 2008, Suzuki stated: “What I would challenge you to do is put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail” for not acting more quickly on environmental issues. (Hansen echoed the same totalitarian sentiment in an article in The Guardian for June 23, 2008, in which he urged that CEOs of fossil energy companies “should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”) According to Suzuki, the world is falling apart, carbon-driven global warming will do us all in pronto, despite the fact that CO2 comprises a mere 380 parts per million of the earth’s atmosphere, not all of it anthropogenic, and even worse, polar bear colonies are on the verge of extinction. Actually, as biologist Mitchell Taylor, who works with the Nunavut Territorial Government of Canada, states categorically, their numbers in the Canadian north have increased by a factor of 25% (National Center for Policy Analysis, January 25, 2007; The Independent, February 10, 2009). This is only the tip of Suzuki’s melting iceberg. He appeals mainly to the vast cohort of the naïve and impressionable, that is to say, CBC television and the majority of Canadians.

And who can forget the illustrious Goracle, the Twelfth Imam of climate Armageddon? Until his recent embarrassment in a hotel room and subsequent marital problems reaching the Tipper point, Al Gore was well on his way to becoming the world’s first carbonaire. Gore has been making stuff up for as long as we can remember and doing quite handsomely in the process. He has been guilty of so many lapses and misdemeanors that one barely knows where to begin. A UK court ruled that his film An Inconvenient Truth contained at least nine salient falsehoods, that the film was scientifically unsound and little more than a form of “political indoctrination.” In his 1992 book Earth in the Balance, he blames the Antarctic ozone hole for causing blindness in animal populations. Unfortunately, Chilean scientists investigating the phenomenon had already accounted for it as owing to an epidemic of pink eye disease (NewScientist, August 21, 1993).

As is becoming plain by now, Gore is not noted for practicing what he preaches but for urging what he breaches. Fiona Kobusingye, coordinator of the Congress of Racial Equality Uganda, points out that Gore “uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year” (Townhall.com, July 29, 2009). He enjoys the lifestyle of a pampered plutocrat, jetting about the world, purchasing and equipping lavish mansions, keeping his limousine idling, while demanding austerity on the part of others in order to save the planet he methodically exploits. He has, for example, no compunction buying carbon offsets from the company he co-owns and chairs, Generation Investment Management (Canada Free Press, March 13, 2007; The Citizens Journal online; WorldNetDaily.com, etc.). He is a partner in the capital investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which floated a $500 million special fund for “green investments” — the same firm, incidentally, that is behind Terralliance, an oil wildcatter that is about as nongreen as one can get (Fortune magazine, Brainstorm 2008 and VentureBeat Clean Tech, July 16, 2008). He draws royalties from Pasminco’s highly toxic zinc mine (The Tennessean, March 17, 2000, The Wall Street Journal for June 29, 2000 and March 19, 2007, USA Today, March 18, 2007, and many others). The list goes on, but space precludes.

Time to get real. Geologist David Dee, chair of the 2008 International Geological Congress science committee, asks: “For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming?” (WorldNetDaily, December 11, 2008). This brute fact does not disturb Al Gore’s ally, former Under-Secretary of State Tim Wirth, who has gone on record justifying the kind of scientific fraud perpetrated by the IPCC. “Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,” he said, “we will be doing the right thing.” For Wirth and his mates, the means justify the end, and the end justifies nothing — except, of course, their own orgasmic sense of importance and righteousness and the emoluments flowing into their coffers.

February 13, 2011

Climate Change: Al Gore is Facing an Inconvenient Truth

FROM-Suite101

Thomas Hurd

" I read somewhere that the sun's getting hotter every year," said Tom genially. It seems that pretty soon the earth's going to fall into the sun - or wait a minute - its just the opposite - the sun's getting colder every year." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925

Al Gore where are you? I think he has vanished into a blinding snow storm. But I digress; I believe there is climate change, and I am not against trying to do what we can to make our planet livable for future generations per se, but I am not willing to live in a mud hut to do it. I realize that man has a trifling hand in the whole equation, but we are small potatoes when you look at the many ice ages, and warmings of the earth's past. Maybe some true believers think they could have held back nature, but I seriously doubt that. Eco-realism, grounded in logic, not sentiment best serves the interests of nature. The environmental, "Climate Change" movement has become a troika of competing factions, and In the last few of years these three factions have lost much of their credibility.

The Climate Change Troika:

The first leg of this three legged stool are the true believers who feel with all their heart that they are doing the right thing, but many of these are zealots who believe the end justifies the means. This first group includes the United Nations, legitimate environmental groups, university research departments, and the scientific community. The UN and most world leaders declared the Climate Change debate over before it began, but all of these aforementioned groups have a great monetary stake in promoting this debate. The UN looks forward to a new world order, the others look to government grants and donations to keep their nest's feathered. That may seem rather harsh, but there is more truth to this than these groups wouild like you to believe. Anyone who has the least question on this subject is shouted down, and declared a member of the flat-earth society. These are the zealots who feel empowered to make trillions of dollars worth of decisions for you, me, and the world. The hubris of these people is astonishing. These elites are so convinced of their own superior knowledge and virtue, and With the UN leading the way they can set dates, time-frames and precise percentages that will save the world. All this without the help of the major polluters, China, India, Russia and a couple volcanic eruptions here and there.

Read more at Suite101:Climate Change: Al Gore is Facing an Inconvenient Truth 

February 7, 2011

The Winter of Al Gore's Discontent

FROM-Human Events

by Daniel J. Flynn

Ice and snow cluttered the retractable roof of Cowboys Stadium and delayed fans traveling to Dallas for Super Bowl XLV. Super Bowl weekend is supposed to be shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, not ski cap and winter coat.

In Utah, Questar Gas set a single-day high mark for natural gas delivery to chilly customers. The weather kept the print edition of the Tulsa World from reaching the public for the first time in a century. More snow fell upon Chicago during February’s first two days than normally falls the entire month. A combination of unusually heavy snowfall and the frigid cold stubbornly holding off a melt has unleashed a wave of roof collapses in Massachusetts. Tucson’s mercury broke local records by dipping below 20 last week.

These are the times that try a man’s faith, particularly if that faith is in the Holy Church of Global Warming.

High priest Al Gore has emerged, presumably from a cloistered winter retreat—there’s a reason he shows up more in June than January—to assure the faithful that far from invalidating global warming, blizzards further validate it. He blogged that “the scientific community has been addressing this question for some time now and they say that increased heavy snowfalls are completely consistent with what they have been predicting as a consequence of man-made global warming.”

To buttress this point, Gore strangely cites as an authority the political pundit Clarence Page. (Was Eleanor Clift unavailable?) “A rise in global temperature can create all sorts of havoc, ranging from hotter dry spells to colder winters, along with increasingly violent storms, flooding, forest fires and loss of endangered species,” Page maintained in an AlGore.com-linked column. “That’s simple science for me, a guy whose scientific education pretty much ended with the old ‘Watch Mr. Wizard’ TV show and a subscription to ‘Popular Mechanics.’ ”

A July heat wave? That’s global warming. A frigid winter? That’s global warming too. Hurricanes? Global warming. Drought? Global warming, global warming, global warming.

When evidence against a theory is interpreted as proof of a theory, there is no point in continuing the debate. All roads lead to Rome, or in this case, all facts prove global warming. It’s worse than unfalsifiable theories. It’s worse than circular reasoning. It’s true believer syndrome.

In his mid-century classic, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer wrote, “The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. No doctrine however profound and sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth.”

Global warming, at least as it is advanced by Gore and company, isn’t a theory to be questioned, but a truth to be accepted. Thus, condescension substitutes for debate. Appeals to the number of scientist supporters supplant appeals to reason. And skeptics become “deniers,” i.e., morally on par with cranks who deny the Holocaust.

For all the talk of “science,” the primitive divinations of today’s weather have proved to be the Holy Church of Global Warming’s most persuasive means of proselytizing. A spree of especially hot summers did more to convert the heathens than any Paul Ehrlich holy book or televised Al Gore sermon. It would be fitting should mere cold spell anecdotes erode faith in the pseudo-scientific fad.

More than five hundred years ago, Christopher Columbus used meteorological phenomenon to induce the natives to do his bidding. Wanting food and labor, Columbus threatened the indigenous Jamaicans that his god would make the moon disappear if they didn’t do what he wanted. They balked. He awaited the scheduled eclipse. Frightened, they pledged themselves to him in exchange for getting the moon back.

Other than our pretentions of advancement, what’s the difference between those primitives and us? Columbus duped them with tales of horror in the skies. Similarly, Al Gore and company tell tales of meteorological chaos if we don’t agree to policies that they would support even without the issue of global warming. “Your village green will turn into a desert if you don’t do as I say” is at least as persuasive as “I’m going to make the moon disappear if you don’t feed me.”

One can forecast eclipses with precision. Less predictable, even for the weatherman, is tomorrow’s temperature. What does one make of a mere politician who tells us he can forecast the next century’s temperature?

Al Gore promised us that if we continued to expand our carbon footprint, we would get Miami’s weather. If only he had threatened us with Thunder Bay’s. We might have done as he commanded.

February 6, 2011

What a difference a year makes



One of the reasons the climate change/global warming community has no credibility is that even if people have terrible memories, they now have Google.

I was looking for articles about scientist comments on the current explanation for the relationship between all the recent Northern Hemisphere snow events and climate change. One of the articles that came up was this:

Climate change blamed for Olympic snow shortage
Winter snow season has been slowly shrinkng in past 50 years, says researcher

The David Suzuki Foundation says global warming and climate change are in part responsible for what's happening to a key Olympic venue.

Olympic organizers are working around the clock to ensure there's enough snow on Cypress Mountain, home to freestyle ski and snowboard events for the Games.

Record warm temperatures and heavy rains this winter have forced VANOC to use bales of hay and to truck in snow to create the courses for the events.

The Games are a perfect catalyst for Canada to take climate change seriously in the long term, according to Ian Bruce, the lead climate change researcher at the Suzuki Foundation.

"It's crucial, as far as our economy goes here in Canada [and] it's crucial to protect winter sports as far as our culture goes," Bruce said.

I had totally forgotten about all the hysterics regarding last years Olympics in Canada. It is also ironic that David Suzuki, Canada's version of Al Gore, is the one who is making the connection in light of his counterparts recent comments attempting to make a counter argument.

The article goes on to explain the reason for the problem last year:

Snow season shrinking

If we fail to act, we will also lose a big part of the economy for the many communities in the country that depend on winter sports and winter sports tourism, said Bruce.

"These are really important issues that I think should be integrated into hosting the Winter Olympics. We should be calling for leadership on climate change and putting in solutions."

Research gathered over a 50-year period showed that the snow season in winters in B.C. are getting shorter by between four and five weeks, with warmer temperatures overall, Bruce said.

Efforts like those underway on Cypress Mountain to create a snow pack for the Olympics are not viable strategies for the long term, he said.

Of course last years attempt to blame the Winter Olympics lack of snow was as disingenuous as most of the alarmist hyperbole is. As British Columbia was struggling to find enough snow for snow boarding, Washington DC was experiencing another bout of Snowbegeddon.

All the more galling for the organisers is the fact that it is an entirely different experience on the east coast of America, which is experiencing its snowiest winter on record.

Cities from Washington to New York were hit today by the second serious whiteout in days, with 40mph winds and snow falling at a rate of 5cm (2in) an hour. The United Nations in New York and the federal government in Washington were dark, schools were closed, and flights grounded

So as scientist and ALGORE go to extreme lengths to explain the Northern Hemispheres cold and snowy winter in spite of their previous assertions, this is but another example of the warmist having it both ways. When it snows it is global warming, when it doesn't it is global warming.

Oh by the way, if you are in the area, great skiing conditions on Cypress Mountain today!

Date of Update: February 6, 2011 at 6:00am
Alpine Area Update: 

Cypress Mountain will be open today from 9am until 10pm for another GREAT DAY of skiing and riding!!


Weather Conditions - Observed at Base
Weather Conditions: Snowing
Base Temperature: -2 C
Visibility: Unlimited
Winds: Light
Snow Conditions (Mid Mtn.)
New Snow - Mid Mtn. (Over Night): 3 cm
New Snow - Mid Mtn. (24 hrs): 3 cm
New Snow - Mid Mtn. (7 days): 13 cm
Total Snow Fall (Season): 674 cm
Alpine Snow Conditions: Machine Groomed
Snow Depth - Mid Mtn.: 297 cm

Enjoy the Snow, we will either have more or less of it in the years to come, I guarantee it.

January 12, 2011

Scientists Challenged to Become Better Global Warming Propagandists

FROM-American Thinker

By Norman Rogers

Can scientists become "Deadly Ninjas of Science Communication"? That was proposed by Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War Against Science," and a member of the board of directors of the American Geophysical Union. Mooney advocated this idea in a presentation at the Union's December 13-17 fall meeting in San Francisco.

Mooney is concerned that global warming skeptics are getting the upper hand in the ongoing debate. Mooney has an unquestioning belief that disaster will overtake the world if we don't mend our CO2-emitting ways. Many other speakers at the meeting, like Mooney, suggested that if scientists improved their communications skills, the skeptics could be defeated.

At the same fall meeting four years ago, Al Gore spoke to ten thousand assembled scientists. The scientists treated him like a rock star. Why would the scientists love Al Gore? His movie, An Inconvenient Truth, was full of scientific errors. But this is about not biting the hand that feeds you. When Al Gore spreads global warming hysteria, financial and political support for climate science increases. Scientists become guests on TV shows instead of lab drones.

But a dark cloud is gathering over climate science. Public fear of global warming is declining. Most of the activist scientists gathered in San Francisco were blind to the possibility that there is any defect in their scary product. It must be that forces of darkness (perhaps Republicans or coal companies) are financing skeptics. Apparently the skeptics, cleverly disguised as grassroots activists, have an uncanny knack for propaganda.


A few years ago, Exxon, a world-class provider of CO2 emissions, would have been top dog among the forces of darkness. But now Exxon is the sole "titanium" sponsor of the meeting, ranked above the platinum, gold, silver, and bronze sponsors. Apparently Exxon gave the Union so much money that they had to create a new category, and the logic of the nobility of the metals in the periodic table be damned. Exxon purchased an indulgence from the church of global warming, probably at a price that is Exxon chump change.

Susan Hassol, a professional climate change communicator, gave the scientists in San Francisco a long list of words that scientists should never use when communicating with the public. For example, to climate scientists, a positive feedback to global warming is bad, because a positive feedback would increase global warming. But to the man in the street, a positive feedback is good, as when your boss gives you positive feedback.

One of the most famous propagandists of global warming, professor Michael Mann, gave a bitter presentation. Mann is famous for creating the hockey stick curve, a graph that purported to show that the climate was stable for a thousand years until CO2 emissions in the 20th century made the temperature shoot up like the blade of a hockey stick. The hockey stick graph went viral and was published everywhere as absolutely positive scientific proof of man-caused global warming. A retired expert on mining, Steve McIntyre, working out of his modest Toronto house, thought the graph was suspicious and decided to investigate. Amateur scientist McIntyre demolished the hockey stick, along with Mann's reputation. Mann's presentation in San Francisco depicted him as a victim of dark forces. Some of his slides included a picture of Sarah Palin in the upper-left corner, probably to galvanize the left-leaning audience.

Steve Easterbrook, a professor and software expert, reported on his investigation of computer climate models. The entire edifice of global warming alarmism rests on a foundation of computer climate models used to make predictions about the future climate. Easterbrook visited four different laboratories where models are created. He basically said that these huge computer programs that have a million lines of computer code are kludges that would have to be completely rewritten to be up to modern software standards. It would take fifty programmers working for twenty years at a cost of $350 million to rewrite one of these software dinosaurs.

However, there is little reason to suppose that if the models were rewritten, they would be much better. As the brilliant and perhaps overly candid government scientist Kevin Trenberth said, "none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate. In particular, the state of the oceans, sea ice, and soil moisture has no relationship to the observed state at any recent time[.]" It is an embarrassing fact that the major models disagree with each other by more than two-to-one about the magnitude of future global warming.

It was apparent that scientists have little experience with propaganda. Rather than trying to do it themselves, they need to take a lesson from Al Gore and bring in the big guns from Hollywood and Madison Avenue. Or maybe they should stick to science and stop trying to convince us that doom is around the corner unless we reconfigure the world economy to their specifications.

The author is a senior policy advisor at the Heartland Institute and maintains a website at www.climateviews.com.

December 10, 2010

The Gore Effect Nature’s Little Joke

FROM-Tuscon Citizen



by Jonathan DuHamel


The Gore Effect strikes the Cancun Climate conference which experienced six straight days of record low temperatures. The “Gore Effect” is a tongue-in-cheek correlation between appearances of Al Gore to talk about global warming and the occurrence of unusually cold weather at that place and time. The term has subsequently applied to any conference on global warming that experiences unusually cold weather.

The Gore Effect was first noticed in January, 2004, when Al Gore visited Boston and New York to deliver a global-warming panic speech, and bitter cold weather came with him. Boston experienced its lowest temperatures in almost fifty years, while in New York it was -40 degrees with wind chill.

In October, 2006, Gore visited New Zealand, touting his film An Inconvenient Truth. New Zealand newspapers report an unusually cold October that left Southland dairy farmers struggling.

When Gore visited Australia in November, 2006, the Gore Effect struck again. It snowed in Queensland in November for the first time in at least 65 years. “Ski resort operators gazed at the snow in amazement. Parents took children out of school and headed for the mountains. Cricketers scurried amid bullets of hail as Melbourne residents traded lunchtime tales of the incredible cold.” (The Age).

Back in the U.S., in the L.A. area where Gore has been nominated for an Oscar, snow fell in West L.A. and Malibu. The last snowfall recorded at Los Angeles International Airport was in January 1962, according to the National Weather Service.

Some other examples:

First October snow since 1922 blankets London as global warming bill debated – October29, 2008.

Al Gore will be in Melbourne on 13 July 2009 for the launch of Safe Climate Australia. Melbourne is set for more icy weather from the current cold snap, with some temperatures set to drop below zero.

The Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality hearing scheduled for Wednesday, February 14, 2007, at 10:00 a.m. in room 2123 Rayburn House Office Building has been postponed due to inclement weather. The hearing is entitled Climate Change: Are Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Human Activities Contributing to a Warming of the Planet?

Mr Gore visited Italy last week, precisely Milan (Northern Italy). He gave a speech on his usual theme: the globe is warming, there’s a lot of warning signs, we shouldn’t be so foolish to dismiss them, we must act now, etc. Outside the hall, it was snowing and snowing. Dec. 2006

Al Gore visits Harvard, October, 2008, “the temperature in Cambridge is 44.5 °F. Tonight, it is predicted to drop to 34 °F, close to the record low of 28 °F measured in 1940.

You can find many more examples if you Google “gore effect.”

Read a satirical “scientific” paper that discusses the theoretical basis for the Gore Effect: Recent research has shown that the mere presence of Al Gore is able to reduce ambient temperatures by approximately 27.6°C. This phenomenon is termed the “Al Gore Effect.” Various theories about the physical mechanism of this phenomenon, its dangers, and its potential usefulness in fighting global warming are discussed. The paper cautions Mr. Gore to not overuse his powers, lest he cause another glacial epoch.

December 9, 2010

STOP THE PRESSES !

Sanity in the Main Stream Media



FROM-Chicago Tibune


End the binge

Aid to ethanol has gone on too long.

"I'm Al Gore, and I'm an alcoholic." No, that's not exactly how the former vice president began his recent mea culpa on alternative energy. But he admitted he had an unwise dependence on alcohol—corn-based ethanol as an ingredient in auto fuel, to be precise—and tried to steer others from the same course.

Gore's dependence was not physiological but political. He backed federal support of the industry as a member of Congress because he wanted to win the votes of farmers in his home state of Tennessee and, when he ran for president, in Iowa. "It is not good policy to have these massive subsidies," he says, now that he no longer aspires to elected office.

Maybe his admission has started something. Even many current politicians are swearing off the stuff.

It's not every day that California Democrat Barbara Boxer, one of the most liberal members of the U.S. Senate, joins forces with Arizona Republican Jon Kyl, one of the most conservative. But they and 15 other senators signed a letter calling the existing 45-cent-per-gallon federal subsidy to ethanol fuel and the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imported ethanol "fiscally irresponsible and environmentally unwise." They oppose renewal of the two programs, which are scheduled to expire at the end of this year.

Yet there's talk that an extension of the subsidy, and even a boost in the tariff, could be included in the tax deal reached by President Barack Obama and Republican leaders. That would be a terrible mistake.

The fiscal tab of the federal tax credit comes to about $6 billion a year, which is more than the entire savings from President Obama's two-year freeze on federal civilian pay. The more dire our fiscal predicament grows, the harder it is to justify this special-interest expense.

Then there are the environmental questions. Ethanol is actually worse than ordinary gasoline when it comes to some pollutants. True, it does generate fewer greenhouse gas emissions — but that savings could be canceled out if forests are cut down to expand corn production, because trees absorb so much carbon dioxide. Some estimates also suggest it takes more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than the gallon contains, making the whole exercise pointless.

The excuse for this favor to corn farmers and ethanol producers is that it reduces our dependence on foreign oil. But the effect is modest at best. In 1997, the General Accounting Office (now called the Government Accountability Office) said that "ethanol's potential for substituting for petroleum is so small that it is unlikely to significantly affect overall energy security."

If reducing our reliance on foreign oil producers were truly the goal of federal policy, the government wouldn't be so intent on keeping out foreign ethanol. The high duty on imported ethanol, noted the 17 senators, "discourages transportation fuel imports from Brazil, India, Australia and other sugar producing countries, and leads to more oil and gasoline imports."

In better fiscal times, it was easier to excuse our leaders for having their fun doling out subsidies for ethanol and protecting its makers from competition. But it's time for the party to end.