These "scientists" and the United Nations make a living from instilling fear in people, coercing them to pay higher taxes giving them more control. The late, lamented Michael Crichton was "spot on" with his book "State of Fear". Nature will pretty much take its course, no matter what us "insignificant" humans do. Giving money to these self-serving "scientists" and the United Nations is a total waste.
Do a search for Michael Crichton on this blog for much more information on his expose' of environmental fear tactics.
Peter
Environmental collapse now a serious threat: scientists
People walk together in a city …
Climate change, population growth …
The Khumbu Glacier at Everest-Khumbu
Climate change, population growth and environmental destruction could cause a collapse of the ecosystem just a few generations from now, scientists warned on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The paper by 22 top researchers said a "tipping point" by which the biosphere goes into swift and irreversible change, with potentially cataclysmic impacts for humans, could occur as early as this century.
The warning contrasts with a mainstream view among scientists that environmental collapse would be gradual and take centuries.
The study appears ahead of the June 20-22 UN Conference on Sustainable Development, the 20-year followup to the Earth Summit that set down priorities for protecting the environment.
The Nature paper, written by biologists, ecologists, geologists and palaeontologists from three continents, compared the biological impact of past episodes of global change with what is happening today.
The factors in today's equation include a world population that is set to rise from seven billion to around 9.3 billion by mid-century and global warming that will outstrip the UN target of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
The team determined that once 50-90 percent of small-scale ecosystems become altered, the entire eco-web tips over into a new state, characterised especially by species extinctions.
Once the shift happens, it cannot be reversed.
To support today's population, about 43 percent of Earth's ice-free land surface is being used for farming or habitation, according to the study.
On current trends, the 50 percent mark will be reached by 2025, a point the scientists said is worryingly close to the tipping point.
If that happened, collapse would entail a shocking disruption for the world's food supply, with bread-basket regions curtailed in their ability to grow corn, wheat, rice, fodder and other essential crops.
"It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point," said lead author Anthony Barnosky, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California in Berkeley.
"The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations."
The authors stressed it was unclear when this feared tipover would happen, given blanks in knowledge about the phenomenon.
And they said there were plenty of solutions -- such as ending unsustainable patterns of growth and resource waste -- that mean it is not inevitable.
"In a nutshell, humans have not done anything really important to stave off the worst because the social structures for doing something just aren't there," said Arne Mooers, a professor of biodiversity at Simon Fraser University in Canada's British Columbia.
"My colleagues who study climate-induced changes through the Earth's history are more than pretty worried," he said in a press release. "In fact, some are terrified." (Yes, they're terrified they're going to lose their funding and government pensions.)
Past shifts examined in the study included the end of the last Ice Age, between 14,000 and 11,000 years ago, and five species mass extinctions which occurred around 443 million, 359 million, 251 million, 200 million and 65 million years ago.
Earth today is vulnerable to fast change because of the growing connectedness between ecosystems, voracious use of resources and an unprecedented surge in greenhouse gases, the authors concluded.
In a report on Wednesday issued ahead of the "Rio+20" summit, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) warned that burgeoning populations and unsustainable patterns of growth were driving Earth towards "unprecedented" eco-damage.
It is not just in the U.S.A. that "environmentalists" and their liberal elitist enablers screw things up in their ignorance of science and basic economics. I won't even mention their lack of knowledge about human nature. The utterly absurd and unfounded belief in the myth of man-caused global warming has led and is leading to disasters such as this in Australia, and is being repeated around the world.
Let your politicians know enough is enough. End the nonsense! Peter
Upstream on the Mitchell Rive (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
FLOODS? On Gippsland's Mitchell River? Again? What a surprise to anyone stupid enough to trust the warmist politicians who recently ran this sorry state.
Remember how the Bracks and Brumby governments refused to build a cheap dam on the Mitchell River for a quarter of the price of their $5.7 billion desalination plant?
Remember how Labor even turned the dam reservation on the Mitchell into a national park to stop anyone else from building a dam on Victoria's fastest-flowing river - a dam to harvest cheap water for booming Melbourne and minimise the flooding you're now seeing downstream?
Remember premier John Brumby insisting global warming was drying up our rains, so a new dam would be useless since "we don't lack for storage, we lack for rain"?
Remember Melbourne Water parroting the same warming creed, arguing against a dam on the Mitchell because a "rainfall-dependent water source in the face of rapidly changing climate patterns is very risky"?
Yeah, right.
Now let's remember what came next.
Let's remember how the undammed Mitchell flooded in 2007, sending a year's worth of drinking water for Melbourne down to the sea.
Let's remember how pigheaded Labor nevertheless ploughed ahead with its desalination plant, now hopelessly behind schedule and over budget. Read rest…
As the result of a Freedom of Information Act request, the US Government has released the list of words that will trigger the Department of Homeland Security to start monitoring your online contributions and conversations. The list is divided into sections by subject matter.
Figure 1. You can call it a thunderstorm, but under no circumstances should you call it “extreme weather”
I was greatly amused to find a section for words about “Weather” on the list, which contains the following terms.
Weather/Disaster/Emergency
Emergency
Hurricane
Tornado
Twister
Tsunami
Earthquake
Tremor
Flood
Storm
Crest
Temblor
Extreme weather
Forest fire
Brush fire
Ice
Stranded/Stuck
Help
Hail
Wildfire
Tsunami Warning Center
Magnitude
Avalanche
Typhoon
Shelter-in-place
Disaster
Snow
Blizzard
Sleet
Mud slide or Mudslide
Erosion
Power outage
Brown out
Warning
Watch
Lightening
Aid
Relief
Closure
Interstate
Burst
Emergency Broadcast System
Looks like WUWT is going to be front and center 24/7/365 at the Department of Homeland Security, no matter what we do …
Lest you think I’m making this up, the list of words is on page 23 of the “Analyst’s Binder“, which describes the situation for those doing the analysis …
w.
Surprise, surprise. The more educated people are the less easy they are to manipulate, fool and control.
Our public education system has failed, explaining why people believe such nonsense as man-caused global warming. (and elect such ignorant political leaders as we now have in the White House).......the following gov-funded study supports this obvious observation. Think about it when you wonder how things have gotten this bad....and when you next vote. Peter
Combating the alarmist nature of the mainstream media and the climate change zealots who have turned man-made global warming into a profit-driven industry and not a scientific endeavor for answers. We seek to explore the notion that the fractional increase in temperature is primarily caused by man a...(continued here)
Gator 2012-05-29 18:29
Ignorance is not bliss, it is servitude.
Well said Gator!
Grade-school teacher known as "Evil Mr. Methane" teaching (brainwashing) children about the grave dangers of fossil fuels that "cause global warming". This guy is what is known as a useful idiot by central control advocates.
We have not totally won this war, but we're making progress. Much depends on our ultimate victory; our economy, jobs, the environment itself, on even the integrity of science. Unfortunately this whole sordid affair has become all too political and is now one major reason Obama must go. The following article is excellent. Share it. Peter
“We are winning the war,” was a phrase I heard repeatedly this week. Congressman Sensenbrenner, Vice Chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, said: “We won on these issues because we were right.”
Which war? The war that brought together more than 60 scientists from around the world—including astronauts, meteorologists, and physicians; politicians—comprising the Congressman, a head of state, and a member of the European Parliament; and policy analysts and media for two-and-a-half days in Chicago, in a battle over climate change and the belief that there needs to be real science—more “about honest debate than ideological warfare.”
Assembled by the Heartland Institute, the seventh International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC7) provided the second opportunity for Congressman Sensenbrenner to address the group. In his opening comments, Sensenbrenner said, “We’ve come a long way.”
He recounted: “When I last spoke, the House of Representatives was poised to pass the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill; the United Nations was promising the extension and expansion of the Kyoto Protocol; and President Obama was touting Spain as our model for a massive increase in renewable energy subsidies. Three years later, cap-and-tax is dead; the Kyoto Protocol is set to expire; and Spain recently announced that it eliminated new renewable energy subsidies.”
Sensenbrenner told about the behind the scenes wrangling that went on to get the Waxman-Markey bill passed. “I was on the House floor on June 29, 2009, when then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi desperately pulled Members aside to lobby, beg, and bargain for votes for the Waxman-Markey bill.” It did pass. But “the electoral consequences for the proponents of these policies was severe.” Just 16 months later, in the 2010 elections, “over two dozen of the Members she convinced to vote ‘yes’ lost their jobs.”
It wasn’t just the Members who suffered harsh political ramifications for their support of the Waxman-Markey bill—which was supposed to nullify the impact of manmade global warming through a cap-and-trade scheme. Sensenbrenner contends that support of the manmade (anthropogenic) global warming position (AGW) also cost Al Gore the presidency back in 2004. He explained: “West Virginia’s 5 electoral votes would have tipped the election for Gore, and Gore’s near-evangelical support for climate change easily cost him the 42,000 votes he would have needed to win there.”
While there is little debate that the climate does change, there is debate as to what causes it. The camps are divided into two general groups along the line of human’s role—with Al Gore’s camp believing that the “science is settled” concluding that man’s driving of SUVs burning petroleum products that emit CO2 (and other symptoms of the developed world) is the cause, and the other disagreeing. The “other” is who gathered in Chicago last week amid the thousands of NATO protestors. The “other” not only disagrees with Al Gore’s AGW position—but they disagree with each other.
I attended session after session where sunspots were addressed, deep ocean circulation changes were discussed, the CO2 contribution of volcanoes was brought up, and the health impacts of a warmer planet were touted—just to name a few. I brought home reams of documentation, some of which are, frankly, beyond my comprehension.
Whether or not the documentable climate change—cooler in the seventies, warmer in the nineties, stable for the last decade (just to point out some recent changes)—is due to the sun or the sea, or myriad other causes, the key take away is that the science is not settled.
Four former NASA employees presented at ICCC7—two astronauts: Walter Cunningham (Apollo 7) and Dr. Harrison “Jack” Schmitt (Apollo 17). They talked about a letter sent to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Jr., in which they requested that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) “refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites.”
The March 28 letter, signed by 49 former NASA employees, declares that they “believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.
“The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.”
It is the “unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change” that should concern you and me—and, it is not just coming from NASA. It is coming from the White House and the EPA, from environmental groups and protestors.
The belief that CO2 is causing catastrophic climate change is the driver for today’s energy policy.
Based on a supposed “consensus,” politicians, and the nonelected bureaucrats they appointed, have, and are, making risky investments with taxpayer dollars (think Solyndra, et al); subsidizing “alternative” energies such as wind and solar that are not effective, efficient, or economical; blocking access to resources that are abundant, available, and affordable—which raises gasoline prices and punishes those who can least afford it; and regulating America’s most cost-effective electricity out of commission. The increasing energy costs are hurting all of America—individuals and industry—and our competitive edge.
Roger Helmer, a member of the European Parliament, offered these comments regarding wind energy and the entire green project in his presentation at ICCC7: “Wind plus gas back up results in virtually zero emissions savings. So, we are desecrating the countryside, we are wasting huge amounts of money, we are impoverishing our children, we are choosing poverty over prosperity—and after all that, we are not even achieving what we set out to achieve. This is madness, madness, madness writ large.”
Once you remove the manmade climate change/CO2 concerns, the foundation for expensive, intermittent “renewable” energy goes away—and there is a huge investment, emotional, ideological, and financial, in keeping the ruse alive.
In comparing the manmade climate change scheme to the European single currency, Helmer said: “Both of the projects are falling apart before our very eyes. But, as they fall apart, the true believers, especially the people with a financial interest—let’s not forget that these projects have attracted vast political and intellectual capital, but they’ve also attracted vast numbers of rent seekers and hangers on, and people whose jobs depend on these projects, and these people do not want to see them go away so these people are coming forward and—are thinking of every possible excuse which might explain what has gone wrong with the projects.”
No wonder there is a war. One side wants to “defend its findings,” while the other wants to “find the truth.”
While America is in an economic war, “advocacy of an extreme position, prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers, is inappropriate.” In this election season, all candidates would do well to remember the fate of Al Gore and his many AGW supporters. Sensenbrenner offered these wise words on energy policy: “Going forward, we must continue to oppose bad ideas and continue to support technological development the only way it works—by allowing markets to determine the technological winners and losers.”
Echoing the war theme, Helmer offered encouragement in his closing remarks: “This is a battle that we must win. We must win it for America. We must win it for Europe. We must win it for our children and grandchildren. And, we must win it for all mankind. I’ll tell you why we will win it, because, we have two weapons in our armory that the bad guys don’t have. The first weapon is the truth, and the second weapon is the climate.”
Whether scientist or politician, policy analyst or media, one message that came through loud and clear at the ICCC7 is that we’ve come a long way in the climate change war, and we are winning, but we haven’t won yet! The climate change battle is at the center of global energy policy, and the countries that have the ability to develop their natural resources to produce cheap energy will be the victors.
Marita Noon
Marita Noon is Executive Director of Energy Makes America Great.
The attempt to blame rich "developed" countries for global warming (and the real joke -- climate change) and extort money from them is coming to an end. They say it is because nobody can agree on who is rich and who is poor. Could it be that nobody really believes the ridiculous, absurd, and scientifically, morally, and financially corrupt concept that fossil fuel-related carbon dioxide is causing global warming?
Hopefully this grand hoax championed by no less than Nobel Prize winner and genius Al Gore, is coming to an end. Billions if not Trillions of dollars have already been squandered. It is past due time to end this fiasco and stop the monetary bleeding. The world is facing far greater challenges. Peter
Is China poor? Key question at climate talks
Is China a developing country? Key question unresolved in latest round of climate talks
By Karl Ritter, Associated Press | Associated Press – 12 hours ago
View Photo
FILE- Smoke billows from a chimney of a heating plant as the sun sets in Beijing in this file photo dated Monday, Feb. 13, 2012. U.N. climate talks being held in Bonn, Germany, are in gridlock Thursday May 24, 2012, as a rift between rich and poor countries risked undoing some of the advances made last year in the two-decade-long effort to control carbon emissions from fast-growing economies like China and India as well as developed industrialized nations that scientists say are overheating the planet.(AP Photo/Alexander F. Yuan, File)
BONN, Germany (AP) -- Another round of U.N. climate talks closed without resolving how to share the burden of curbing man-made global warming, mainly because countries don't agree on who is rich and who is poor.
China wants to maintain a decades-old division between developed and developing countries, bearing in mind that, historically, the West has released most of the heat-trapping gases that scientists say could cause catastrophic changes in climate.
But the U.S. and Europe insisted during the two-week talks that ended Friday in Bonn that the system doesn't reflect current economic realities and must change as work begins on a new global climate pact set to be completed in 2015.
"The notion that a simple binary system is going to be applicable going forward is no longer one that has much relevance to the way the world currently works," U.S. chief negotiator Jonathan Pershing said.
Countries like Qatar and Singapore are wealthier than the U.S. per capita but are still defined as developing countries under the classification used in the U.N. talks. So is China, the world's second largest economy.
Finding a new system that better reflects the world today, while also acknowledging the historical blame for greenhouse gas emissions, is the biggest challenge facing the U.N. process as it seeks a global response to climate change.
"That is a fundamental issue," said Henrik Harboe, Norway's chief climate negotiator. "Some want to keep the old division while we want to look at it in a more dynamic way."
The U.N. climate talks are based on the premise that industrialized countries must take the lead on climate change by committing to reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. They are also expected to provide money to help poor countries grow in a sustainable way and to protect the most vulnerable nations from rising sea levels, droughts and other consequences of a warming world.
Disputes on how to categorize countries going forward was behind much of the procedural wrangling that slowed down the talks in Bonn. Delegates failed to agree on an agenda until the last day, leaving most of the work for a bigger summit in Qatar in November.
A separate dispute between developing countries delayed the appointment of officials to steer the talks. That stalemate was also unlocked on the last day.
The slow pace frustrated climate activists who fear that there won't be enough political will to rein in emissions to avoid dangerous levels of warming in coming decades.
"The talk here doesn't match the action that science says is required," said Mohamed Adow, senior climate change adviser at Christian Aid.
China's lead negotiator Su Wei told The Associated Press that the proposed new deal, which would have binding commitments for all countries after 2020, must be based on the principle of "common but differentiated responsibility" enshrined in previous climate agreements.
"That means we still would continue the current division between developed and developing countries," Su said.
He said China is still a developing country because if you look at wealth per capita, it barely makes the world's top 100. More than 100 million Chinese live below the poverty line, which Beijing has defined as about $1 a day.
Still, Western officials say China's fast-growing energy needs and rising emissions mean it can no longer be off the hook in climate negotiations.
"We need to move into a system which is reflecting modern economic realities," EU negotiator Christian Pilgaard Zinglersen said.
In the early 1950s, China accounted for just 2 percent of global emissions while the U.S. accounted for more than 40 percent, according to Climate Analytics, a climate research group based in Potsdam, Germany.
Today China's share of global emissions exceeds 25 percent, while the U.S. share has fallen toward 20 percent.
China and its supporters reject blame for stalling the climate talks, saying it is the U.S. and other developed nations that are unwilling to live up to their obligations to cut carbon emissions.
The U.S. refused to join the only binding accord to limit emissions — the 1997 Kyoto Protocol — partly because it didn't include China.
Seyni Nafo, spokesman for a group of African countries in the climate talks, noted that the U.S. also said that joining Kyoto would harm the U.S. economy. Years later, the U.N. climate effort still has little support in the U.S. Congress, which includes outspoken climate skeptics.
"We are hoping that they will get on board this time, which is not a given," Nafo said.
Ok, this is ignorance taken to its maximum. We all know what permafrost is; frozen soil, and it traps naturally occuring methane gas below it from escaping. When the soil warms and thaws, this gas escapes and goes into the Earth's atmosphere. Hello? This has been going on for millions, billions of years. Glaciers advance and retreat. The oceans rise and fall. The sun sets and rises. This has all been going on long, long before us evil human beings began burning fossile fuels.
So let's not be afraid of methane, that gas which we use to heat our homes and cook our food, scare us. Don't let them blow smoke up our....bums....... Peter
Josh Haner/The New York TimesKatey M. Walter Anthony, the lead author of a new paper, examining a methane seep in Alaska.
Methane held underground by caps of Arctic ice is bubbling out as a warming climate causes those caps to melt, researchers report in the journal Nature Geoscience. The paper offers some of the strongest field evidence yet that a melt-back of land ice can release methane.
Removing an ice cap seems to work a bit like popping the cap on a bottle of soda, allowing pent-up gas to escape. In an interview, the paper’s lead author, Katey M. Walter Anthony of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, said that this mechanism has probably been at work since the end of the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago.
“We’re not necessarily saying this is a new source, so much as it’s newly discovered,” Dr. Walter Anthony said. “And at the moment, it’s not a huge source.”
The discovery raises concerns nonetheless.
The study implies that as human-induced greenhouse gas emissions warm the planet in the coming century, the retreat of land ice throughout the Arctic will send extra methane into the atmosphere. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas itself, so such additional emissions, if large enough, could function as a feedback that would accentuate the warming.
The new mechanism may sound similar to one that I described last year in an article focusing on other work by Dr. Walter Anthony on the frozen lakes of central Alaska. But the two methane sources are not the same.
As that article explained, old organic material is locked up across much of the Arctic in frozen ground called permafrost, much of which dates back to the last ice age. As these shallow deposits thaw in today’s warmer climate, bacteria are converting the carbon into methane and carbon dioxide, both of which are escaping into the atmosphere.
The new paper describes a different type of deposit known as a geologic reservoir, in which methane gas has been trapped underground for a long time, thousands or even millions of years. Atop those deposits, land ice – in the form of permafrost, glaciers or ice caps, which are collectively known as the earth’s cryosphere – has helped to keep the methane sealed underground. But now that the ice is melting, the gas can escape.
Dr. Walter Anthony and her husband, a researcher named Peter Anthony, found the leaks by flying over Alaska and hiking across Greenland, looking for spots where methane from deep in the earth was bubbling vigorously enough to create holes in the ice cover of frozen lakes.
They believe they have identified 150,000 seeps in Alaska alone, and they approached a fraction of them from the ground to take gas samples. The Alaskan seeps were often near the margins of retreating glaciers or thawing permafrost. In Greenland, the seeps tended to be concentrated around the margins of ice caps that have been retreating over the past 150 years, since the end of the Little Ice Age.
The big question raised by the paper is exactly how big this flux of geological methane will become in a warming climate. “As the cryosphere degrades further, it could be a really big source,” Dr. Walter Anthony said.
Still, new findings about Arctic methane must be interpreted with caution.
Researchers in recent years have repeatedly found additional sources of methane in the Arctic, and additional ways for it to escape from underground or from the sea. Writers of news articles and blog posts have often leaped to the conclusion that these fluxes are new, instead of just newly discovered, with some write-ups carrying headlines like “Arctic Armageddon.”
Experts say the published science on this issue does not merit such panic, at least not yet.
It is true that the level of methane in the atmosphere has begun to rise in recent years, for reasons science cannot fully explain. And researchers are definitely concerned about that increase.
But data from monitoring stations in the two hemispheres suggests that the increase is not coming from the Arctic. Some of it could actually be coming from increased human production of natural gas with the drilling method known as hydraulic fracturing (natural gas is mostly methane).
Edward J. Dlugokencky, who monitors global methane emissions for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in an e-mail that the available information “does not exclude the possibility of future increasing Arctic emissions resulting from Arctic warming, but it is strong evidence that it is not happening yet.”
Many experts do believe, however, that the situation is urgent in a scientific sense. They say we need a much better handle on where methane is coming from today and where it could come from in the future, so as not to be caught off guard by potentially nasty surprises.
People walk together in a city …
Climate change, population growth …
The Khumbu Glacier at Everest-Khumbu
