The following is an essay by a very prominent biological Professor, Scientist, and author, Dr. Daniel Botkin. Note that he is not a "climatologist", or a meteorologist, but he has studied, observed, and reported on life in many forms and how it responds to climate change. He explains how and why he is disturbed and highly skeptical of how modern computer climate models are being used for political purposes, to influence and control public behavior. He is concerned about science being mis-used, and he is worried about how this will impact society.
I wish he would express his distaste for the hype and hysteria surrounding the man-caused global warming issue more strongly, but even someone with his impeccable credentials apparently dare not rock the boat too much. Heaven forbid, he might be labelled a "denier".
Peter
Daniel Botkin has been a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara since 1979. Currently Dan is Professor Emeritus, Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara. Called one of the one of the preeminent ecologists of the 20th century.” (see http://egj.lib.uidaho.edu/egj19/short1.html ). he has been on the faculty of UCSB since 1979; for six years he was chairman of the University’s Environmental Studies Program. He is also President and Founder of The Center for the Study of the Environment, A Non-Profit Research and Educational Corporation.
Source:http://www.danielbbotkin.com/archives/category/global-warming-and-life
Science and soothsaying
Published originally in the International Herald TribuneDecember 28, 2007
by Daniel B. Botkin
NEW YORK:
Now that the Bali conference is over and climate scientists have warned us again about the dire predictions of their climate models, a question remains: Will their forecasts come true? Given the current international focus on global warming, you would think that, in 10, 15 or 20 years, many people will want to know whether today’s predictions proved accurate.
But, in fact, people rarely look back to see if their old forecasts were on the mark. Foretelling the future has always been difficult and almost always wrong. Charles Mackay, in his wonderful 1841 book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” observes that the so-called necromancers of earlier centuries who purported to divine the future were grouped with the worst alchemists. Today, however, computers seem to have undermined our natural skepticism. Many of us put our faith in complex software that most of us cannot understand.
My own experience makes me skeptical of how environmental forecasting is being used. In 1991, several colleagues and I drew national and international attention when we used a computer model to forecast possible effects of global warming on an endangered species. Our computer program forecast that the Kirtland’s warbler, the first songbird in America ever subjected to a complete census, would likely face extinction by 2010. Its habitat, jack pine trees, would be unable to thrive in conditions that climate computer programs forecast for southern Michigan, the only place and only trees where the bird nested.
The computer told us these declines should be measurable even in the year we made the forecast. We suggested that measurements of jack pine growth be started to verify the forecasts and to see whether the potential effects of global warming on the diversity of life were actually occurring. People could have started going to southern Michigan to check out our forecasts 16 years ago. Nobody did. I tried to get funding to do this, but no government agency or private foundation was interested.
Even today, amid the furor over global warming, no one is rushing out to verify that it does indeed threaten the Michigan jack pine. (But, happily, independent action by the government, the Audubon Society and private individuals has brought the Kirtland’s warbler back from the brink of extinction.)
What could explain the lack of interest in verifying a dated computer forecast? After all, computer forecasts are the basis for the current alarm. Did people perhaps decide that a 16-year-old forecast had to have been based on inferior methods?
But wait a minute. Given the usual progress of science, won’t forecasting methods in the future always be better than in the past? What this suggests is that today the primary uses of, and interest in, such forecasts are political, not scientific - that scientists as well as politicians are using forecasts for political and ideological purposes to influence public behavior here and now.
The question is not really whether the forecasts are scientifically valid, but how much impetus they can provide to influence society.
It wasn’t always this way. In the 1960s, when research into global warming was just beginning, it seemed impossible that people could change the global environment; the Earth was just too big. Charles Lyell, the father of modern geology, considered the possibility in detail in the mid-19th century and decided it was impossible because the mass of living things amounted to less than a drop in the bucket compared to the weight of all the materials in the oceans, atmosphere, soil and rocks.
In the 1970s, however, scientists began to realize that life had in fact greatly changed the Earth’s environment, starting more than a billion years ago. At the same time, evidence was building that burning fossil fuels was increasing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. In 1957, Charles Keeling began the first continuous measurements to study carbon-dioxide change over time at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. By 1973, he reported at a landmark conference at Brookhaven National Laboratory on “Carbon and the Biosphere” that carbon dioxide showed a definite increase in 15 years, consistent with releases from burning fossil fuels. For those of us working on these issues, the scientific and environmental implications were vast.
Global environmental change began to become a political issue in the 1980s. Climatologists and astrophysicists showed that a nuclear war could put so much dust in the air that disastrous cooling would occur, the infamous nuclear winter. With the end of the Cold War, the focus shifted to global warming. At that time, climatologists explained that their computer models were crude approximations of the real atmosphere and pushed the limit of computer technology, requiring months of computing for a single simulation. You could accept either the results of these crude models or the less-formal projections by the most experienced meteorologists. The primary focus continued to be on the implications of what we knew.
In 1988, in a move that marked a shift to the politicization of forecasts, Congress asked the Environmental Protection Agency to report on the potential effects of global warming. Computer forecasting became much more complex; output from the huge climate models became input into ecological models. My projection for the little warbler was part of that work. The attempt was to be more realistic, but the result was that forecasts became more difficult to verify and also more alarming, thus drawing more and more public attention.
Thinking over this history, I see three primary uses of environmental computer forecasts: to understand the implications of what we know (Can living things change the global environment?); to know the future; and to influence public behavior. Only the first can be strictly scientific. The third is wandering farther and farther away from science.
Since proving the validity of long-term forecasts is difficult and the ultimate tests would take years, and since many scientists are alarmed at the dire scenarios, my colleagues are beginning to talk about whether it is O.K. to exaggerate and push forecasts that are not currently provable if the only way to get societies to act is to frighten people. I think it is not O.K. It is a short-term view, and even if it works, it will inevitably debase science and scientists.
Soothsayers have always tried to persuade people that they could predict the future. What is new today is that the incredibly powerful tools of science - nuclear weapons, flights to the moon, computers, iPods - have such huge implications for civilization that they may contain the seeds of their own destruction.
Thirty years from now, we will probably not be interested in today’s specific computer forecasts, but we may have lost our faith in science, a deeper and, to me, a more important problem.
—————
Additional information about the Kirtland’s warbler forecast:
The scientific paper for the original forecast is:
Botkin, D. B., D. A. Woodby, and R. A. Nisbet, 1991, Kirtland’s Warbler Habitats: A Possible Early Indicator of Climatic Warming, Biological Conservation 56 (1): 63-78.
Those interested in the forecasting method can download the computer model of forest growth, JABOWA, from website www.naturestudy.org and play around with it. The software is pretty easy to use, and you can grow your own forest, log it, test it against various global warming climate regimes, etc. It isn’t as sophisticated a computer game as you can get today, but it is ecologically realistic and is used in research around the world.
And if you really want to get into the science part of this in depth, there are other scientific papers, including:
Botkin, D. B., and R. A. Nisbet, 1992, Forest response to climatic change: effects of parameter estimation and choice of weather patterns on the reliability of projections, Climatic Change 20: 87-111.
Botkin, D. B. and R. A. Nisbet, 1992, Projecting the effects of climate change on biological diversity in forests, pp. 277 - 293 in R. Peters and T. Lovejoy, (Eds.) Consequences of the Greenhouse Effect for Biological Diversity, Yale University Press, New Haven.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Monday, January 7, 2008
The Boston Globe Beginning To Question The Myth Of Man-Caused Global Warming
Here is another example of the mainstream media beginning to question the myth of man caused global warming. Hopefully voters will also take notice.
Peter
BR-R-R! WHERE DID GLOBAL WARMING GO?
By Jeff Jacoby, writing in "The Boston Globe"
The stark headline appeared just over a year ago. "2007 to be 'warmest on record,' " BBC News reported on Jan. 4, 2007. Citing experts in the British government's Meteorological Office, the story announced that "the world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007," surpassing the all-time high reached in 1998.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the planetary hot flash: Much of the planet grew bitterly cold. In South America, for example, the start of winter last year was one of the coldest ever observed. According to Eugenio Hackbart, chief meteorologist of the MetSul Weather Center in Brazil, "a brutal cold wave brought record low temperatures, widespread frost, snow, and major energy disruption. The death toll for the 10-day cold wave was the highest for any single weather event in Argentina in recent history." In Buenos Aires, it snowed for the first time in 89 years, while in Peru the cold was so intense that hundreds of people died and the government declared a state of emergency in 14 of the country's 24 provinces. In August, Chile's agriculture minister lamented "the toughest winter we have seen in the past 50 years," which caused losses of at least $200 million in destroyed crops and livestock.
Latin Americans weren't the only ones shivering. University of Oklahoma geophysicist David Deming, a specialist in temperature and heat flow, notes in the Washington Times that "unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007." Johannesburg experienced its first significant snowfall in a quarter-century. Australia had its coldest ever June. New Zealand's vineyards lost much of their 2007 harvest when spring temperatures dropped to record lows.
Closer to home, 44.5 inches of snow fell in New Hampshire last month, breaking the previous record of 43 inches, set in 1876. And the Canadian government is forecasting the coldest winter in 15 years. To be sure, weather isn't climate. In theory, all of these might be short-lived weather anomalies, mere blips in the path of the global climatic warming that Al Gore and a host of alarmists proclaim the deadliest threat we face. But what if the frigid conditions that have caused so much distress in recent months signal an impending era of global cooling?
"Stock up on fur coats and felt boots!" advises Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and senior scientist at Moscow's Shirshov Institute of Oceanography. "The latest data . . . say that earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012." Sorokhtin dismisses the conventional global warming theory that greenhouse gases, especially human-emitted carbon dioxide, is causing the earth to grow hotter.
Like a number of other scientists, he points to solar activity -- sunspots and solar flares, which wax and wane over time -- as having the greatest effect on climate."Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change," Sorokhtin writes in an essay for Novosti. "Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind."
In a recent paper for the Danish National Space Center, physicists Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen concur: "The sun . . . appears to be the main forcing agent in global climate change," they write. Given the number of worldwide cold events, it is no surprise that 2007 *didn't* turn out to be the warmest ever. In fact, 2007's global temperature was essentially the same as that in 2006 -- and 2005, and 2004, and every year back to 2001. The record set in 1998 has not been surpassed. For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to accumulate -- it's up about 4 percent since 1998 -- the global mean temperature has remained flat.
That raises some obvious questions about the theory that CO2 is the cause of climate change. Yet so relentlessly has the alarmist scenario been hyped, and so disdainfully have dissenting views been dismissed, that millions of people assume Gore must be right when he insists: "The debate in the scientific community is over."
When even UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon declares that global warming is at least as dangerous as nuclear war, and Bill Clinton calls it a "more profound threat" than international terrorism, laymen can be forgiven for assuming that the issue really is settled. But it isn't. Just last month, more than 100 scientists signed a strongly worded open letter to Ban pointing out that climate change is a well-known natural phenomenon, and that adapting to it is far more sensible than attempting to prevent it.
Because slashing carbon dioxide emissions means retarding economic development, they warned, "the current US approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it." Climate science isn't a religion, and those who dispute its leading theory are not heretics. Much remains to be learned about how and why climate changes, and there is neither virtue nor wisdom in an emotional rush to counter global warming -- especially if what's coming is a global Big Chill.
Source
Peter
BR-R-R! WHERE DID GLOBAL WARMING GO?
By Jeff Jacoby, writing in "The Boston Globe"
The stark headline appeared just over a year ago. "2007 to be 'warmest on record,' " BBC News reported on Jan. 4, 2007. Citing experts in the British government's Meteorological Office, the story announced that "the world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007," surpassing the all-time high reached in 1998.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the planetary hot flash: Much of the planet grew bitterly cold. In South America, for example, the start of winter last year was one of the coldest ever observed. According to Eugenio Hackbart, chief meteorologist of the MetSul Weather Center in Brazil, "a brutal cold wave brought record low temperatures, widespread frost, snow, and major energy disruption. The death toll for the 10-day cold wave was the highest for any single weather event in Argentina in recent history." In Buenos Aires, it snowed for the first time in 89 years, while in Peru the cold was so intense that hundreds of people died and the government declared a state of emergency in 14 of the country's 24 provinces. In August, Chile's agriculture minister lamented "the toughest winter we have seen in the past 50 years," which caused losses of at least $200 million in destroyed crops and livestock.
Latin Americans weren't the only ones shivering. University of Oklahoma geophysicist David Deming, a specialist in temperature and heat flow, notes in the Washington Times that "unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007." Johannesburg experienced its first significant snowfall in a quarter-century. Australia had its coldest ever June. New Zealand's vineyards lost much of their 2007 harvest when spring temperatures dropped to record lows.
Closer to home, 44.5 inches of snow fell in New Hampshire last month, breaking the previous record of 43 inches, set in 1876. And the Canadian government is forecasting the coldest winter in 15 years. To be sure, weather isn't climate. In theory, all of these might be short-lived weather anomalies, mere blips in the path of the global climatic warming that Al Gore and a host of alarmists proclaim the deadliest threat we face. But what if the frigid conditions that have caused so much distress in recent months signal an impending era of global cooling?
"Stock up on fur coats and felt boots!" advises Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and senior scientist at Moscow's Shirshov Institute of Oceanography. "The latest data . . . say that earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012." Sorokhtin dismisses the conventional global warming theory that greenhouse gases, especially human-emitted carbon dioxide, is causing the earth to grow hotter.
Like a number of other scientists, he points to solar activity -- sunspots and solar flares, which wax and wane over time -- as having the greatest effect on climate."Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change," Sorokhtin writes in an essay for Novosti. "Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind."
In a recent paper for the Danish National Space Center, physicists Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen concur: "The sun . . . appears to be the main forcing agent in global climate change," they write. Given the number of worldwide cold events, it is no surprise that 2007 *didn't* turn out to be the warmest ever. In fact, 2007's global temperature was essentially the same as that in 2006 -- and 2005, and 2004, and every year back to 2001. The record set in 1998 has not been surpassed. For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to accumulate -- it's up about 4 percent since 1998 -- the global mean temperature has remained flat.
That raises some obvious questions about the theory that CO2 is the cause of climate change. Yet so relentlessly has the alarmist scenario been hyped, and so disdainfully have dissenting views been dismissed, that millions of people assume Gore must be right when he insists: "The debate in the scientific community is over."
When even UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon declares that global warming is at least as dangerous as nuclear war, and Bill Clinton calls it a "more profound threat" than international terrorism, laymen can be forgiven for assuming that the issue really is settled. But it isn't. Just last month, more than 100 scientists signed a strongly worded open letter to Ban pointing out that climate change is a well-known natural phenomenon, and that adapting to it is far more sensible than attempting to prevent it.
Because slashing carbon dioxide emissions means retarding economic development, they warned, "the current US approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it." Climate science isn't a religion, and those who dispute its leading theory are not heretics. Much remains to be learned about how and why climate changes, and there is neither virtue nor wisdom in an emotional rush to counter global warming -- especially if what's coming is a global Big Chill.
Source
Thursday, January 3, 2008
The Weather Channel Up For Sale......(An Escape Before The Myth Of Global Warming Explodes?)
According to the following article in the NY Times, The Weather Channel is up for sale. This is the cable TV and internet weather news channel infamous for its sensationalistic coverage of worldwide weather phenomena. I have posted other articles and commentaries about their activities in the past.
The Weather Channel makes it clear that it buys into the great myth and scare of man-caused global warming because it is "good business". This means they've been making lots and lots of money by perpetuating the "big lie". (A company worth $5 Billion) Now they want to cash in, and sell out, take their profits and run. They're doing this, in my opinion, because they can see the myth of man-caused global warming is crumbling, the house of cards is set to collapse.
One of the favored candidates to buy The Weather Channel and its assets is none other than General Electric, owner of NBC and MSNBC, and Newsweek Magazine. If General Electric can control The Weather Channel they will be in position to create their own weather, scare everyone to death about it by reporting on this over the internet, the nightly news and a weekly news magazine. Then of course, General Electric has the tools and equipment to save mankind from this climate "crisis". Surely I'm not the only person to see the many examples of conflict of interest here. What a collosal scandal this is going to be. Oh, gee, and I wonder if General Electric has any lobbyists in Washington, D.C. influencing our politcians?
Peter
source:
Chain Said to Seek Bids for Weather Channel
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
Published: January 3, 2008
The Weather Channel, one of the last privately owned cable channels, is being put up for sale and could fetch more than $5 billion, according to people briefed on the auction. The channel and its rapidly growing Web site, weather.com, are already attracting interest from some of the biggest names in media, including NBC, a unit of General Electric; the News Corporation; and Comcast, these people said.
The sale of the Weather Channel, these people said, is part of a larger breakup of its parent, Landmark Communications, a privately held company controlled by the Batten family of Norfolk, Va., which also owns daily newspapers and other media properties. Landmark’s newspaper holdings include The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, The News & Record of Greensboro, N.C., and The Roanoke Times in Virginia, as well as 50 other community newspapers. The company, which does not release its earnings, generated $1.75 billion in revenue in 2006 and has 12,000 employees, according to Hoover’s.
JPMorgan Chase is advising Landmark on the sale of the Weather Channel, and Lehman Brothers is advising the company on the sale of its other media assets, people briefed on the process said.
A spokesman for Landmark could not be reached.
The sale of the Weather Channel, once written off as a dull network for weather buffs, could become especially heated as it is one of the few remaining basic cable channels available for sale. One potential suitor approached by Landmark described the Weather Channel as “beachfront property.”
Its audience has mushroomed as the channel has expanded its coverage of hurricanes and others storms around the world and created programming about climate change, taking an aggressive and sometimes controversial role in the global warming debate.
The channel is also a godsend for advertisers. Like live sports, it is largely immune from TiVos and other digital video recorders. The channel has 800 employees; 125 are meteorologists.
Perhaps more appealing for some big media companies may be the Weather Channel’s Web business, which was started in 1995. Weather.com ranks as the nation’s 18th-largest media site by traffic, with more than 32 million unique users in November, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. That is bigger than CNN and Facebook.
Weather.com has partnerships with dozens of big media companies. In October, the site struck a deal to provide forecasts to MySpace, a unit of the News Corporation. The company also has deals with Yahoo and AOL.
Among the Weather Channel’s suitors, NBC is expected to compete aggressively, people involved in the auction said. NBC has a weather-related unit called NBC Weather Plus, a joint project of NBC News and NBC affiliates, but the venture has never taken off. NBC Weather Plus includes a cable channel, frequently available only on digital cable platforms and high on the dial, along with a Web site, weatherplus.com.
Fox, a unit of the News Corporation, has also expressed interest in the Weather Channel, which it could link with its Fox News cable channel and its hundreds of affiliates. Other big media companies like Comcast, which is increasingly looking to add content, may participate in the auction as well. Time Warner and perhaps even Yahoo could also jump in.
Media companies have expressed interest in the Weather Channel before. In an interview last June, Debora J. Wilson, the Weather Channel’s chief executive, said: “Every media conglomeration has approached Landmark, and there’s never been a yes. We actually think that we’re stronger being independent.” Ms. Wilson added that she was glad to avoid the “distractions” that would come with being part of a larger company. “We like focusing on what we do.”
The breakup and sale of Landmark Communications would spell the end of a small but storied fixture in the media landscape. The company was formed at the turn of the 20th century when Samuel L. Slover acquired The Newport News Times-Herald in Virginia. Mr. Slover’s nephew, Frank Batten, the former chairman, took over the company in 1954. Over the years, Mr. Batten bought and sold newspapers and television affiliates in the South and Midwest.
It is unclear how big the appetite will be for the company’s remaining newspaper assets, though community newspapers have fared much better than large dailies in recent years.
Of course, Mr. Batten’s best investment was the creation of the Weather Channel in 1982.
In his memoir, “The Weather Channel: The Improbable Rise of a Media Phenomenon,” Mr. Batten wrote: “Our first year was full of crises and a full-fledged near-death experience,” but eventually “narrowcasting — the long-delayed potential of cable television — has become a reality.”
The Weather Channel makes it clear that it buys into the great myth and scare of man-caused global warming because it is "good business". This means they've been making lots and lots of money by perpetuating the "big lie". (A company worth $5 Billion) Now they want to cash in, and sell out, take their profits and run. They're doing this, in my opinion, because they can see the myth of man-caused global warming is crumbling, the house of cards is set to collapse.
One of the favored candidates to buy The Weather Channel and its assets is none other than General Electric, owner of NBC and MSNBC, and Newsweek Magazine. If General Electric can control The Weather Channel they will be in position to create their own weather, scare everyone to death about it by reporting on this over the internet, the nightly news and a weekly news magazine. Then of course, General Electric has the tools and equipment to save mankind from this climate "crisis". Surely I'm not the only person to see the many examples of conflict of interest here. What a collosal scandal this is going to be. Oh, gee, and I wonder if General Electric has any lobbyists in Washington, D.C. influencing our politcians?
Peter
source:
Chain Said to Seek Bids for Weather Channel
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
Published: January 3, 2008
The Weather Channel, one of the last privately owned cable channels, is being put up for sale and could fetch more than $5 billion, according to people briefed on the auction. The channel and its rapidly growing Web site, weather.com, are already attracting interest from some of the biggest names in media, including NBC, a unit of General Electric; the News Corporation; and Comcast, these people said.
The sale of the Weather Channel, these people said, is part of a larger breakup of its parent, Landmark Communications, a privately held company controlled by the Batten family of Norfolk, Va., which also owns daily newspapers and other media properties. Landmark’s newspaper holdings include The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, The News & Record of Greensboro, N.C., and The Roanoke Times in Virginia, as well as 50 other community newspapers. The company, which does not release its earnings, generated $1.75 billion in revenue in 2006 and has 12,000 employees, according to Hoover’s.
JPMorgan Chase is advising Landmark on the sale of the Weather Channel, and Lehman Brothers is advising the company on the sale of its other media assets, people briefed on the process said.
A spokesman for Landmark could not be reached.
The sale of the Weather Channel, once written off as a dull network for weather buffs, could become especially heated as it is one of the few remaining basic cable channels available for sale. One potential suitor approached by Landmark described the Weather Channel as “beachfront property.”
Its audience has mushroomed as the channel has expanded its coverage of hurricanes and others storms around the world and created programming about climate change, taking an aggressive and sometimes controversial role in the global warming debate.
The channel is also a godsend for advertisers. Like live sports, it is largely immune from TiVos and other digital video recorders. The channel has 800 employees; 125 are meteorologists.
Perhaps more appealing for some big media companies may be the Weather Channel’s Web business, which was started in 1995. Weather.com ranks as the nation’s 18th-largest media site by traffic, with more than 32 million unique users in November, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. That is bigger than CNN and Facebook.
Weather.com has partnerships with dozens of big media companies. In October, the site struck a deal to provide forecasts to MySpace, a unit of the News Corporation. The company also has deals with Yahoo and AOL.
Among the Weather Channel’s suitors, NBC is expected to compete aggressively, people involved in the auction said. NBC has a weather-related unit called NBC Weather Plus, a joint project of NBC News and NBC affiliates, but the venture has never taken off. NBC Weather Plus includes a cable channel, frequently available only on digital cable platforms and high on the dial, along with a Web site, weatherplus.com.
Fox, a unit of the News Corporation, has also expressed interest in the Weather Channel, which it could link with its Fox News cable channel and its hundreds of affiliates. Other big media companies like Comcast, which is increasingly looking to add content, may participate in the auction as well. Time Warner and perhaps even Yahoo could also jump in.
Media companies have expressed interest in the Weather Channel before. In an interview last June, Debora J. Wilson, the Weather Channel’s chief executive, said: “Every media conglomeration has approached Landmark, and there’s never been a yes. We actually think that we’re stronger being independent.” Ms. Wilson added that she was glad to avoid the “distractions” that would come with being part of a larger company. “We like focusing on what we do.”
The breakup and sale of Landmark Communications would spell the end of a small but storied fixture in the media landscape. The company was formed at the turn of the 20th century when Samuel L. Slover acquired The Newport News Times-Herald in Virginia. Mr. Slover’s nephew, Frank Batten, the former chairman, took over the company in 1954. Over the years, Mr. Batten bought and sold newspapers and television affiliates in the South and Midwest.
It is unclear how big the appetite will be for the company’s remaining newspaper assets, though community newspapers have fared much better than large dailies in recent years.
Of course, Mr. Batten’s best investment was the creation of the Weather Channel in 1982.
In his memoir, “The Weather Channel: The Improbable Rise of a Media Phenomenon,” Mr. Batten wrote: “Our first year was full of crises and a full-fledged near-death experience,” but eventually “narrowcasting — the long-delayed potential of cable television — has become a reality.”
Jim Hansen Wins Award....
NASA's Jim Hansen is tempting fate by continually venturing out onto thinner, and thinner ice. The charade he has been putting on about man-caused global warming is falling apart around him. Read the following article by Cliff Ollier of The University of Western Australia about how glaciers really behave and you'll understand just how misleading Jim Hansen has been.
Peter
The Biggest Whopper of 2007
Julie Walsh, CEIJanuary 2, 2008
Among the candidates for the biggest cock-and-bull story in 2007 must be NASA’s James Hansen with his work of creative genius on Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice sheets and his wannabes, who subsequently copied his imaginative tour de force.
Even the facts are no match for James Hansen and his incredible modeling machine! Though Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice rests in deep bowls, Hansen declares them inclined planes. Then despite ice cores that show little to no movement for the past 400,000 years (including the warm periods), he shamelessly states that these gigantic ice sheets are slip, slidin’ away and the world will be flooded.
The idea of “meltwater lakes on the surface finding their way down through cracks in the ice and lubricating the bottom of the glacier is not compatible with accumulation of undisturbed snow layers. It might conceivably work on valley glaciers but it tells us nothing of the ‘collapse’ of ice sheets,” according to Cliff Ollier, School of Earth and Geographical Science at the University of Western Australia, “Indeed ‘collapse’ is impossible.”
Alarmists have to be thrilled with the successfulness of Hansen’s 2007 con—without this lie there is no catastrophic flooding, and all they are left with is the IPCC’s non-eventful one-foot-in-a-century sea level rise.
I wonder if Hansen’s modeler can also make Everlasting Gobstoppers!
Peter
The Biggest Whopper of 2007
Julie Walsh, CEIJanuary 2, 2008
Among the candidates for the biggest cock-and-bull story in 2007 must be NASA’s James Hansen with his work of creative genius on Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice sheets and his wannabes, who subsequently copied his imaginative tour de force.
Even the facts are no match for James Hansen and his incredible modeling machine! Though Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice rests in deep bowls, Hansen declares them inclined planes. Then despite ice cores that show little to no movement for the past 400,000 years (including the warm periods), he shamelessly states that these gigantic ice sheets are slip, slidin’ away and the world will be flooded.
The idea of “meltwater lakes on the surface finding their way down through cracks in the ice and lubricating the bottom of the glacier is not compatible with accumulation of undisturbed snow layers. It might conceivably work on valley glaciers but it tells us nothing of the ‘collapse’ of ice sheets,” according to Cliff Ollier, School of Earth and Geographical Science at the University of Western Australia, “Indeed ‘collapse’ is impossible.”
Alarmists have to be thrilled with the successfulness of Hansen’s 2007 con—without this lie there is no catastrophic flooding, and all they are left with is the IPCC’s non-eventful one-foot-in-a-century sea level rise.
I wonder if Hansen’s modeler can also make Everlasting Gobstoppers!
Global Warming, Articles and Resources
Here are some articles and resources worth reading and saving on the subject of global warming.
Peter
News Highlights
Bali Highs
Peter Hannaford, Spectator.org, 2 January 2008
Al Gore a Prophet, Global Warming a Religion
Cal Thomas, Sun Sentinel, 2 January 2008
Global Warming Consensus?
Orange County Register Editorial, 1 January 2008
In 2008, 100% Chance of Alarm
John Tierney, New York Times, 1 January 2008
Why Won’t Al Gore Debate?
Les Kinsolving, WorldDailyNet.com, 1 January 2008
On the Need for Healthy Skepticism
George Pell, news.com.au, 30 December 2007
Moving Deck Chairs on the Titanic
Terry Easton, Human Events, 27 December 2007
Not So Hot
Patrick Michaels, Spectator.org, 27 December 2007
Arnold’s Fake Global Warming Fix
Shikha Dalmia, NY Post, 26 Decemebr 2007
A Nation of Dim Bulbs
Andrew Ferguson, Weekly Standard, 31 December 2007
News You Can Use
Global Warming: Where’s the Beef?
The leading surface temperature data sets compiled by the Met Office's Hadley Centre and by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the weather satellite data set compiled by John Christy and Roy Spencer show no increase in the global mean temperature since 1998, even though the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has risen by roughly four per cent.
Inside the Beltway
CEI’s Myron Ebell
Members of the House and Senate don’t return until the 15th to begin the second session of the 110th Congress. It’s not clear whether Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will try to pick up any of the pieces they dropped from their big anti-energy package before passing it last month. These include the 15% renewable portfolio standard for electric utilities and the $21 billion in new taxes for oil companies.
It’s also not clear whether Reid and Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, will try to bring the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act to the floor. Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), Chairman of the relevant subcommittee, have said that the committee will consider their version of a cap-and-trade bill this year. But it’s unclear when or what’s going to be in it in the way of targets and timetables for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Turning to the executive branch, it’s unclear whether the Bush Administration is going to go ahead and find that carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and welfare and therefore must be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The EPA did decide the day after the President signed the anti-energy bill not to grant California’s request for a waiver so that California and twenty-two other States could begin regulating CO2 emissions from new vehicles. EPA based its decision on the fact that the new CAFÉ standards in the anti-energy bill were a more effective way to achieve what California wants to do. This week California Attorney General Jerry Brown filed suit in federal court to overturn EPA’s denial. It’s not clear which way the court will rule.
So that’s what my crystal ball tells me for 2008: unclear.
Whopper of the Year: 2007
CEI’s Julie Walsh
Among the candidates for the biggest whopper in 2007 must be NASA’s James Hansen with his work of creative genius on Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice sheets.
Though Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice rest in deep bowls, Hansen declares them inclined planes. Despite ice cores that show little to no movement for the past 400,000 years (including the warm periods), he shamelessly states that these gigantic ice sheets are slip, slidin’ away and the world will be flooded. Of course, Hansen’s ignorance isn’t all that shocking. After all, he studied physics, not geology.
According to an actual expert, Cliff Ollier at the School of Earth and Geographical Science at the University of Western Australia, a “collapse” of the ice sheets is “impossible.”
Contact CEI
If you or your organization is working on energy or global warming policy, please use CEI as a resource. Contact William Yeatman at wyeatman@cei.org.
For More Information on the Global Warming Debate:
Globalwarming.org World Climate Report CCnet.org Planet Gore Marc Morano Co2science.org
Peter
News Highlights
Bali Highs
Peter Hannaford, Spectator.org, 2 January 2008
Al Gore a Prophet, Global Warming a Religion
Cal Thomas, Sun Sentinel, 2 January 2008
Global Warming Consensus?
Orange County Register Editorial, 1 January 2008
In 2008, 100% Chance of Alarm
John Tierney, New York Times, 1 January 2008
Why Won’t Al Gore Debate?
Les Kinsolving, WorldDailyNet.com, 1 January 2008
On the Need for Healthy Skepticism
George Pell, news.com.au, 30 December 2007
Moving Deck Chairs on the Titanic
Terry Easton, Human Events, 27 December 2007
Not So Hot
Patrick Michaels, Spectator.org, 27 December 2007
Arnold’s Fake Global Warming Fix
Shikha Dalmia, NY Post, 26 Decemebr 2007
A Nation of Dim Bulbs
Andrew Ferguson, Weekly Standard, 31 December 2007
News You Can Use
Global Warming: Where’s the Beef?
The leading surface temperature data sets compiled by the Met Office's Hadley Centre and by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the weather satellite data set compiled by John Christy and Roy Spencer show no increase in the global mean temperature since 1998, even though the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has risen by roughly four per cent.
Inside the Beltway
CEI’s Myron Ebell
Members of the House and Senate don’t return until the 15th to begin the second session of the 110th Congress. It’s not clear whether Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will try to pick up any of the pieces they dropped from their big anti-energy package before passing it last month. These include the 15% renewable portfolio standard for electric utilities and the $21 billion in new taxes for oil companies.
It’s also not clear whether Reid and Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, will try to bring the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act to the floor. Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), Chairman of the relevant subcommittee, have said that the committee will consider their version of a cap-and-trade bill this year. But it’s unclear when or what’s going to be in it in the way of targets and timetables for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Turning to the executive branch, it’s unclear whether the Bush Administration is going to go ahead and find that carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and welfare and therefore must be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The EPA did decide the day after the President signed the anti-energy bill not to grant California’s request for a waiver so that California and twenty-two other States could begin regulating CO2 emissions from new vehicles. EPA based its decision on the fact that the new CAFÉ standards in the anti-energy bill were a more effective way to achieve what California wants to do. This week California Attorney General Jerry Brown filed suit in federal court to overturn EPA’s denial. It’s not clear which way the court will rule.
So that’s what my crystal ball tells me for 2008: unclear.
Whopper of the Year: 2007
CEI’s Julie Walsh
Among the candidates for the biggest whopper in 2007 must be NASA’s James Hansen with his work of creative genius on Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice sheets.
Though Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice rest in deep bowls, Hansen declares them inclined planes. Despite ice cores that show little to no movement for the past 400,000 years (including the warm periods), he shamelessly states that these gigantic ice sheets are slip, slidin’ away and the world will be flooded. Of course, Hansen’s ignorance isn’t all that shocking. After all, he studied physics, not geology.
According to an actual expert, Cliff Ollier at the School of Earth and Geographical Science at the University of Western Australia, a “collapse” of the ice sheets is “impossible.”
Contact CEI
If you or your organization is working on energy or global warming policy, please use CEI as a resource. Contact William Yeatman at wyeatman@cei.org.
For More Information on the Global Warming Debate:
Globalwarming.org World Climate Report CCnet.org Planet Gore Marc Morano Co2science.org
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
And The Fear-Mongering Goes On....Courtesy Of Newsweek
Here is more rubbish and fear about global warming from Newsweek, you know the magazine owned by General Electric, which also owns the television "news" organization NBC. These formerly reputable news outlets have become nothing more that propaganda mouthpieces for the corporate profit agenda of General Electric. To refer to either as producing objective and honest news is a joke....a joke on everyone. We are all going to take a huge hit to our pocketbook; in fact we already are. How much of this insanity will the public take?
Read the following essay just published in Newsweek and see if this isn't the most ridiculous attempt to instill fear into readers that you have ever read...not including Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", of course.
Peter
source:
Learning to Love Climate ‘Adaptation’
It's too late to stop global warming. Now we have to figure out how to survive it.
By Sharon Begley NEWSWEEK
Dec. 31, 2007-Jan. 7, 2008 issue
Two words: airport runways. As scientists and policy types figure out what changes will be necessary to cope with global warming, it's obvious that massive sea walls will be required to hold back rising oceans, that enormous new reservoirs will be needed to cope with the alternating droughts and deluges that many regions will suffer and that a crash program to develop heat- and drought-resistant crops would be a good idea if people are to keep eating.
But it's the less-obvious yet no-less-necessary adaptations to climate change that are likely to wreak havoc. So, runways: hotter air, which we'll have more of in a greenhouse world, is less-dense air (hence, hot air rises). In less-dense air, says Bernoulli's principle, for planes to gain lift and stay aloft they need to take off faster. Ergo, airport runways will need to be longer to give planes the requisite ground speed before they're wheels up. Will someone please tell O'Hare?
It's such a polite, unthreatening word: "adapt." The kind of thing you do as you roll with the punches or keep a stiff upper lip, modifying your behavior to a new situation. But as it will be used in 2008, adaptation is a euphemism for widespread, expensive changes that will be needed to cope with climate change. Although some adaptations will be modest and low tech, such as cities' establishing cooling centers to shelter residents during heat waves, others will require such herculean efforts and be so costly that we'll look back on the era beginning in 1988, when credible warnings of climate change reached critical mass, and wonder why we were so stupid as to blow the chance to keep global warming to nothing more extreme than a few more mild days in March.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which just picked up its Nobel Peace Prize), we are in for a minimum of 90 more years of warming no matter how many Hummers are junked in favor of Priuses. The reason is both atmospheric (greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide remain aloft for about a century) and political (the world can't seem to summon the will to reduce greenhouse emissions). We are now at 385 parts per million of carbon dioxide, and there is no way, short of an asteroid impact that sends the world economy back to the Stone Age, to avoid reaching 450ppm by midcentury, says Jay Gulledge of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.
Unfortunately, the effects of even 385ppm are worse than forecast. More Arctic sea ice is melting, for instance, and global sea levels are rising faster. "Climate change is with us now, and the rates and impacts are greater than predicted," says Pew's Vicki Arroyo. "We have no choice but to talk about adaptation."
The required adaptations will be much more profound than turning up the air conditioning a notch come summertime. Melting glaciers will trigger "glacier lake outburst floods," warns the IPCC; if you have a child wondering which field to enter, dam-engineering and -building look like excellent bets. Permafrost is melting, so villages and roads in the (once) frozen north that are built on it will have to be relocated. Sea-level rise is inundating the wetlands and mangrove swamps that once absorbed storm surges; sea-wall design and construction will also be a growth industry, at least in areas that can afford it.
For the tens of millions of Bangladeshis and other impoverished people living in coastal regions that will be underwater, inland areas can "adapt" by making room for unprecedented waves of environmental refugees. In a warmer world, the atmosphere holds more moisture. When moist air collides with Arctic air, freezing rain will fall, as it did in the nation's midsection in December, leaving tens of thousands of people without power for more than a week. Let's hope some smart utility engineers are figuring out how to build power lines that don't snap when they've got hundreds of pounds of ice on them.
Already some cities (New York, Seattle) and states (California, Alaska, Maryland, Oregon, Washington) have adaptation plans. Alaska is figuring out howo protect or relocate villages at risk from wave surges or flooding. California is beefing up its firefighting capacity because, in a greenhouse world, more forest fires will rage; it has also proposed desalinization plants for when seawater must substitute for rain that never fell and snowpack that never accumulated. Other locales are requiring new bridges to be built above anticipated storm surges (as for existing bridges, good luck) and developing heat-wave early-warning systems so they can ramp up cooling centers and get the word out to at-risk populations such as the elderly. They are vulnerable for both biological reasons (old bodies have trouble keeping cool) and social ones (they resist leaving their homes).
A trickle of money is beginning to fund such efforts. In August the Rockefeller Foundation announced a $70 million program on "climate-change resilience" to help the developing world in particular cope with what's coming. A climate bill in Congress would take some of the money raised from auctioning off permits to emit carbon dioxide and use it to fund adaptation research and programs (though other proposals would give the permits to industry gratis). Of course, if we do as competent a job adapting to climate change as we've done preventing it, too-short runways will be the least of our problems.
Read the following essay just published in Newsweek and see if this isn't the most ridiculous attempt to instill fear into readers that you have ever read...not including Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", of course.
Peter
source:
Learning to Love Climate ‘Adaptation’
It's too late to stop global warming. Now we have to figure out how to survive it.
By Sharon Begley NEWSWEEK
Dec. 31, 2007-Jan. 7, 2008 issue
Two words: airport runways. As scientists and policy types figure out what changes will be necessary to cope with global warming, it's obvious that massive sea walls will be required to hold back rising oceans, that enormous new reservoirs will be needed to cope with the alternating droughts and deluges that many regions will suffer and that a crash program to develop heat- and drought-resistant crops would be a good idea if people are to keep eating.
But it's the less-obvious yet no-less-necessary adaptations to climate change that are likely to wreak havoc. So, runways: hotter air, which we'll have more of in a greenhouse world, is less-dense air (hence, hot air rises). In less-dense air, says Bernoulli's principle, for planes to gain lift and stay aloft they need to take off faster. Ergo, airport runways will need to be longer to give planes the requisite ground speed before they're wheels up. Will someone please tell O'Hare?
It's such a polite, unthreatening word: "adapt." The kind of thing you do as you roll with the punches or keep a stiff upper lip, modifying your behavior to a new situation. But as it will be used in 2008, adaptation is a euphemism for widespread, expensive changes that will be needed to cope with climate change. Although some adaptations will be modest and low tech, such as cities' establishing cooling centers to shelter residents during heat waves, others will require such herculean efforts and be so costly that we'll look back on the era beginning in 1988, when credible warnings of climate change reached critical mass, and wonder why we were so stupid as to blow the chance to keep global warming to nothing more extreme than a few more mild days in March.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which just picked up its Nobel Peace Prize), we are in for a minimum of 90 more years of warming no matter how many Hummers are junked in favor of Priuses. The reason is both atmospheric (greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide remain aloft for about a century) and political (the world can't seem to summon the will to reduce greenhouse emissions). We are now at 385 parts per million of carbon dioxide, and there is no way, short of an asteroid impact that sends the world economy back to the Stone Age, to avoid reaching 450ppm by midcentury, says Jay Gulledge of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.
Unfortunately, the effects of even 385ppm are worse than forecast. More Arctic sea ice is melting, for instance, and global sea levels are rising faster. "Climate change is with us now, and the rates and impacts are greater than predicted," says Pew's Vicki Arroyo. "We have no choice but to talk about adaptation."
The required adaptations will be much more profound than turning up the air conditioning a notch come summertime. Melting glaciers will trigger "glacier lake outburst floods," warns the IPCC; if you have a child wondering which field to enter, dam-engineering and -building look like excellent bets. Permafrost is melting, so villages and roads in the (once) frozen north that are built on it will have to be relocated. Sea-level rise is inundating the wetlands and mangrove swamps that once absorbed storm surges; sea-wall design and construction will also be a growth industry, at least in areas that can afford it.
For the tens of millions of Bangladeshis and other impoverished people living in coastal regions that will be underwater, inland areas can "adapt" by making room for unprecedented waves of environmental refugees. In a warmer world, the atmosphere holds more moisture. When moist air collides with Arctic air, freezing rain will fall, as it did in the nation's midsection in December, leaving tens of thousands of people without power for more than a week. Let's hope some smart utility engineers are figuring out how to build power lines that don't snap when they've got hundreds of pounds of ice on them.
Already some cities (New York, Seattle) and states (California, Alaska, Maryland, Oregon, Washington) have adaptation plans. Alaska is figuring out howo protect or relocate villages at risk from wave surges or flooding. California is beefing up its firefighting capacity because, in a greenhouse world, more forest fires will rage; it has also proposed desalinization plants for when seawater must substitute for rain that never fell and snowpack that never accumulated. Other locales are requiring new bridges to be built above anticipated storm surges (as for existing bridges, good luck) and developing heat-wave early-warning systems so they can ramp up cooling centers and get the word out to at-risk populations such as the elderly. They are vulnerable for both biological reasons (old bodies have trouble keeping cool) and social ones (they resist leaving their homes).
A trickle of money is beginning to fund such efforts. In August the Rockefeller Foundation announced a $70 million program on "climate-change resilience" to help the developing world in particular cope with what's coming. A climate bill in Congress would take some of the money raised from auctioning off permits to emit carbon dioxide and use it to fund adaptation research and programs (though other proposals would give the permits to industry gratis). Of course, if we do as competent a job adapting to climate change as we've done preventing it, too-short runways will be the least of our problems.
Anthropogenic Global Warming Is Nonsense
Here is an interesting commentary on the issue of global warming and climate change; more food for thought.
Peter
Anthropogenic Global Warming is Nonsense
by Edward Townes
These days it is well nigh impossible to not be aware of the 'Global Warming' hysteria. From the doomsday movies, to alarming media headlines, to politicians scrambling over each other to get on the green bandwagon, one thing is clear - it's not politically correct to question it. When I first decided to look into what all the fuss was about on climate change, I was not opinionated on the subject at all. From what I understood then, the only difference between the global warming alarmists and me was a difference in opinion on the economics involved. That has now completely changed.
They have engaged in exaggeration and deception on just about every single last aspect of climate change. In fact, the only thing I can really confirm for you is that carbon dioxide has a 'greenhouse effect' in our atmosphere, and we are responsible for 0.28% of it [6]. Actually, even the word "greenhouse" is misleading because that implies a restriction on convection currents, which is not physically accurate. The moon doesn't have an atmosphere and experiences an average surface temperature of 107øC and -153øC for day and night respectively, which is obviously a much larger range compared to Earth's. The best explanation for how an atmosphere's "greenhouse" effect acts, is it increases the planet's heat capacity (i.e. it holds more energy and thus takes longer to heat up and cool down) and thus makes the climate more gentle and hospitable.
But let's step back for a moment from the atmosphere and talk about Earth's historical and current temperatures. Global warming alarmists would have us believe that we are now seeing a global temperature at a height not achieved for a very long time. This is simply not true. We have seen temperatures even within the last 1,000 years higher than our present, which is not even a blip in Earth's history.Possibly the most infamous display of this garbage is the "hockey-stick graph". Although Mann et al compiled it in 1998, it was not until 2003 that the first independent person was able to look at the algorithms used in the graph, because they refused to release it.
It turned out that, even using completely randomized data, one could create a graph that looked exactly the same because the algorithms had a bias to exaggerate the last century! Not only that, but it should be obvious from the fact that the Vikings were settling and farming Greenland from the 9th to the 13th century, in places now covered with permafrost and ice, that this graph is just total nonsense! Of course, this was not before the graph had been used as the backdrop for the 2001 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. You would have thought that was a pretty good indication of their scientific integrity, but I promise you it gets much, much worse.
Perhaps even more interesting than the inability of the IPCC to verify its data before using it at all, let alone as a centerpiece, or subsequently apologising after it became public how fraudulent the graph was, is the fact that environmentalists to this day still use this graph to illustrate their points. Al Gore's entire sensationalist "documentary" (boy is that charitable) revolves around this widely discredited graph and others like it. It should honestly occur to us that anyone who continues to use this graph to support their arguements has little interest in actually presenting reality.
The IPCC used to publish the real temperature data on the past millennium in its earlier reports, but not anymore because it's an inconvenient truth to their agenda.What about recent temperature rises in the last century? Surely it is impossible to deny that we are seeing warming now at an unusual and alarming rate? Well, you'd be surprised. Measuring Earth's average temperature to any interesting degree of precision is a considerably complex task. Even defining exactly what the absolute surface air temperature means is challenging, giving plenty of room for pursuing an agenda. The vast majority of graphs you've seen on this subject will have come from data using land-based measurements, as these allow the graph to continue back beyond the 1970s.
There are numerous problems with land-based measurements, ranging from the fact that land only accounts for 30% of the planet's surface, to urban heat islands and other effects from changes in local land use. Dr. Dick Morgan, former advisor to the World Meteorological Organization and climatology researcher at University of Exeter, U.K. says, [7] "Had the IPCC used the standard parameter for climate change (the 30 year average) and used an equal area projection, instead of the Mercator (the 2D representation of a sphere which exaggerates the polar area) warming and cooling would have been almost in balance."
However, in the last 30 years we've had consistent measurements from weather balloons and satellites, which produce much more reliable results for obvious reasons, and what we've observed from this equipment is a only a very slight warming trend. This data should be puzzling to the people who built the climate models for the IPCC, because they actually predicted the reverse - the troposphere should be warming faster than the surface if the current warming is due to the 'greenhouse effect'.
While we're on the subject of climate models, I'd like to say a few things. Climate models are in their infancy. They are highly dependent on the assumptions that go into them, and there are a lot of them. In fact, there are so many assumptions and parameters that it is genuinely possible to create any relationship you like. Climate models are made fun by the inclusion of "positive feed-backs" (multiplier effects) so that a small temperature increment expected from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide invokes large increases in water vapor, which seem to produce exponential rather than logarithmic temperature response to CO2.
It seems to have become somewhat of a game to see who can add in the most creative feedback mechanisms to produce the scariest warming scenarios from their models, but there remains no evidence that the planet behaves in such a manner. Not only is it highly debatable as to whether water vapour acts as a positive or negative feed-back, but what has been observed in laboratories is that CO2 actually has a logarithmic relationship with temperature [i.e. it takes a big increase in of CO2 to produce a small rise in temperature].
The IPCC literally made its entire conclusion from the results of 6 models. Three of these were extreme scenarios with numbers like a global population of 15 billion by 2100 (almost all demographers expect our population to level at 9 billion), and even the 3 that were `moderate' were predicting things like the annual rainfall in Ireland should be equivalent to the Sahara's. Today. The unreliable nature of these models probably helps to explain why the IPCC cut almost of all its predictions by a third from 2001 to its most recent report. They also failed to predict the fall in methane levels we've seen since 2002, and their predictions for sea temperatures have been halved due to "incorrectly calibrated instrumentation". As the saying in computer programming goes; "Garbage in, garbage out".
There is an erroneous assumption flying around these days that CO2 is somehow an important forcing factor on the global climate, when every last piece of empirical evidence shows otherwise. Al Gore, and I'm positive he's not the only one, has a graph with 500,000 years of ice core samples showing their chronological temperature and respective CO2 levels. There is a nice correlation, and the two are definitely linked, but he lies and pretends the relationship is the other way around.
In every single time period it is clear that CO2 levels always trail temperature changes by 500-800 years. Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia had the following to say about this; [8] "Al Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak, that they are pathetic. The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science." The historical evidence consistently shows temperature is independent of CO2. In fact, 450 million years ago when we were in the depths of the coldest period the Earth has had in half a billion years, CO2 levels were 10 times above today's!
Even using the last century as evidence for a dependent relationship is meaningless. 65% of the warming this century occurred in the first three decades, and then, while CO2 levels continued to rise, temperatures fell for four decades in a row.Another misconception that seems to be rife at the moment is that somehow CO2 is a pollutant. I'm sure that you've all learned that this gas is actually fundamental to our existence, but this seems to be as good a time as any to re-cap. Estimates vary, but somewhere around 15% seems to be the common number cited for the increase in global food crop yields due to increased carbon dioxide since 1950. This increase has both helped avoid a Malthusian disaster and preserved or returned enormous tracts of marginal land as wildlife habitat that would otherwise have had to be put under the plow in an attempt to feed the growing global population.
Commercial growers deliberately generate CO2 and increase its levels in agricultural greenhouses to between 700ppmv and 1,000ppmv to increase productivity and improve the water efficiency of food crops far beyond those in the somewhat carbon-starved open atmosphere. CO2 feeds the forests, grows more usable lumber in timber lots, meaning there is less pressure to cut old growth or push into "natural" wildlife habitat, makes plants more water efficient, helping to beat back the encroaching deserts in Africa and Asia and generally increases bio-productivity. If it's "pollution," then it's pollution the natural world exploits extremely well and to great profit. What should be obvious is that increases in CO2 directly increase the vitality of the bio-world.
It is no wonder that the Sahara has shrunk 300,000 km^2 in the last couple decades, or that the dinosaurs managed to find the sustenance to survive, despite their size, in an era with 5 times our current CO2 levels.The last myth I'd like to debunk is the idea that global warming is necessarily a bad thing, regardless of whether we have any significant control over it, or that historically warm periods have been the most prosperous for humans. By far the most hyped consequences are increasing intensities of weather storms, and rising sea levels. Global storm intensities are dominated by the temperature difference between the equator and the poles, and it really is that simple.
Even by the IPCC's own admission, in manipulating the area of the poles using the Mercator system to distort the global temperature, the poles must be warming at a rate faster than the equator and this subsequently leads to gentler storms, despite the media explicitly or implicitly making an attempt to blame every last weather anomaly on "climate change". Ah yes, you say, but that would imply that we are in danger of rising sea levels because the warming would melt the ice at the poles. Well, consider this. Since the last ice age 18,000 years ago the global sea level has risen by 130 meters, and is still doing so at a current rate of around 20cm per century, which is dwarfed by local tectonic movements.
This will obviously displace people, but it will pale in insignificance when compared to the migrations over the next century caused by other factors such as geographical changes in important resources, fresh water locations, industrialization, etc. Dramatic pictures of breaking seasonal ice is just patent propaganda, the reality is that Antarctica's ice mass has now been growing for the last 30 years against a 6,000 year trend of melting, and it contains over 90% of the world's land ice (sea ice, by Archimedes's principle, does not affect sea levels).
Dr. Wibjorn Karlen, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden, admits, [9] "Some small areas in the Antarctic Peninsula have broken up recently, just like it has done back in time. The temperature in this part of Antarctica has increased recently, probably because of a small change in the position of the low pressure systems."Our climate is changing, just as it has always done, and always will. In fact, the only constant about our climate is that it changes, which makes you realise the term "climate change" is at best meaningless, and at worst intentionally ambiguous. It feels silly that I need to say this, but clearly it has to be done.
The main determinant of our climate is not some gas, which comprises 0.038% of the atmosphere, but the Sun, the planet's orbital eccentricities and axial wobble, cosmic ray flux, and other celestial factors. Greenhouse gases play an important role, but a passive one. It should not come as a surprise that our entire solar system has been warming for the last quarter century, or that the most accurate weather forecasts come from algorithms that concentrate on solar fluctuations and cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are responsible for cloud formations, which are central to the overwhelmingly most important greenhouse gas. Water vapour accounts for 95% of the `greenhouse effect' and, apart from the elaborate positive feed-back systems in their models that have no actual basis with reality, the global warming alarmists have completely ignored it. This is staggering because H20, by a country mile, in its gas, liquid, and solid form dominates all other terrestrial climate factors.
More here
Peter
Anthropogenic Global Warming is Nonsense
by Edward Townes
These days it is well nigh impossible to not be aware of the 'Global Warming' hysteria. From the doomsday movies, to alarming media headlines, to politicians scrambling over each other to get on the green bandwagon, one thing is clear - it's not politically correct to question it. When I first decided to look into what all the fuss was about on climate change, I was not opinionated on the subject at all. From what I understood then, the only difference between the global warming alarmists and me was a difference in opinion on the economics involved. That has now completely changed.
They have engaged in exaggeration and deception on just about every single last aspect of climate change. In fact, the only thing I can really confirm for you is that carbon dioxide has a 'greenhouse effect' in our atmosphere, and we are responsible for 0.28% of it [6]. Actually, even the word "greenhouse" is misleading because that implies a restriction on convection currents, which is not physically accurate. The moon doesn't have an atmosphere and experiences an average surface temperature of 107øC and -153øC for day and night respectively, which is obviously a much larger range compared to Earth's. The best explanation for how an atmosphere's "greenhouse" effect acts, is it increases the planet's heat capacity (i.e. it holds more energy and thus takes longer to heat up and cool down) and thus makes the climate more gentle and hospitable.
But let's step back for a moment from the atmosphere and talk about Earth's historical and current temperatures. Global warming alarmists would have us believe that we are now seeing a global temperature at a height not achieved for a very long time. This is simply not true. We have seen temperatures even within the last 1,000 years higher than our present, which is not even a blip in Earth's history.Possibly the most infamous display of this garbage is the "hockey-stick graph". Although Mann et al compiled it in 1998, it was not until 2003 that the first independent person was able to look at the algorithms used in the graph, because they refused to release it.
It turned out that, even using completely randomized data, one could create a graph that looked exactly the same because the algorithms had a bias to exaggerate the last century! Not only that, but it should be obvious from the fact that the Vikings were settling and farming Greenland from the 9th to the 13th century, in places now covered with permafrost and ice, that this graph is just total nonsense! Of course, this was not before the graph had been used as the backdrop for the 2001 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. You would have thought that was a pretty good indication of their scientific integrity, but I promise you it gets much, much worse.
Perhaps even more interesting than the inability of the IPCC to verify its data before using it at all, let alone as a centerpiece, or subsequently apologising after it became public how fraudulent the graph was, is the fact that environmentalists to this day still use this graph to illustrate their points. Al Gore's entire sensationalist "documentary" (boy is that charitable) revolves around this widely discredited graph and others like it. It should honestly occur to us that anyone who continues to use this graph to support their arguements has little interest in actually presenting reality.
The IPCC used to publish the real temperature data on the past millennium in its earlier reports, but not anymore because it's an inconvenient truth to their agenda.What about recent temperature rises in the last century? Surely it is impossible to deny that we are seeing warming now at an unusual and alarming rate? Well, you'd be surprised. Measuring Earth's average temperature to any interesting degree of precision is a considerably complex task. Even defining exactly what the absolute surface air temperature means is challenging, giving plenty of room for pursuing an agenda. The vast majority of graphs you've seen on this subject will have come from data using land-based measurements, as these allow the graph to continue back beyond the 1970s.
There are numerous problems with land-based measurements, ranging from the fact that land only accounts for 30% of the planet's surface, to urban heat islands and other effects from changes in local land use. Dr. Dick Morgan, former advisor to the World Meteorological Organization and climatology researcher at University of Exeter, U.K. says, [7] "Had the IPCC used the standard parameter for climate change (the 30 year average) and used an equal area projection, instead of the Mercator (the 2D representation of a sphere which exaggerates the polar area) warming and cooling would have been almost in balance."
However, in the last 30 years we've had consistent measurements from weather balloons and satellites, which produce much more reliable results for obvious reasons, and what we've observed from this equipment is a only a very slight warming trend. This data should be puzzling to the people who built the climate models for the IPCC, because they actually predicted the reverse - the troposphere should be warming faster than the surface if the current warming is due to the 'greenhouse effect'.
While we're on the subject of climate models, I'd like to say a few things. Climate models are in their infancy. They are highly dependent on the assumptions that go into them, and there are a lot of them. In fact, there are so many assumptions and parameters that it is genuinely possible to create any relationship you like. Climate models are made fun by the inclusion of "positive feed-backs" (multiplier effects) so that a small temperature increment expected from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide invokes large increases in water vapor, which seem to produce exponential rather than logarithmic temperature response to CO2.
It seems to have become somewhat of a game to see who can add in the most creative feedback mechanisms to produce the scariest warming scenarios from their models, but there remains no evidence that the planet behaves in such a manner. Not only is it highly debatable as to whether water vapour acts as a positive or negative feed-back, but what has been observed in laboratories is that CO2 actually has a logarithmic relationship with temperature [i.e. it takes a big increase in of CO2 to produce a small rise in temperature].
The IPCC literally made its entire conclusion from the results of 6 models. Three of these were extreme scenarios with numbers like a global population of 15 billion by 2100 (almost all demographers expect our population to level at 9 billion), and even the 3 that were `moderate' were predicting things like the annual rainfall in Ireland should be equivalent to the Sahara's. Today. The unreliable nature of these models probably helps to explain why the IPCC cut almost of all its predictions by a third from 2001 to its most recent report. They also failed to predict the fall in methane levels we've seen since 2002, and their predictions for sea temperatures have been halved due to "incorrectly calibrated instrumentation". As the saying in computer programming goes; "Garbage in, garbage out".
There is an erroneous assumption flying around these days that CO2 is somehow an important forcing factor on the global climate, when every last piece of empirical evidence shows otherwise. Al Gore, and I'm positive he's not the only one, has a graph with 500,000 years of ice core samples showing their chronological temperature and respective CO2 levels. There is a nice correlation, and the two are definitely linked, but he lies and pretends the relationship is the other way around.
In every single time period it is clear that CO2 levels always trail temperature changes by 500-800 years. Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia had the following to say about this; [8] "Al Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak, that they are pathetic. The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science." The historical evidence consistently shows temperature is independent of CO2. In fact, 450 million years ago when we were in the depths of the coldest period the Earth has had in half a billion years, CO2 levels were 10 times above today's!
Even using the last century as evidence for a dependent relationship is meaningless. 65% of the warming this century occurred in the first three decades, and then, while CO2 levels continued to rise, temperatures fell for four decades in a row.Another misconception that seems to be rife at the moment is that somehow CO2 is a pollutant. I'm sure that you've all learned that this gas is actually fundamental to our existence, but this seems to be as good a time as any to re-cap. Estimates vary, but somewhere around 15% seems to be the common number cited for the increase in global food crop yields due to increased carbon dioxide since 1950. This increase has both helped avoid a Malthusian disaster and preserved or returned enormous tracts of marginal land as wildlife habitat that would otherwise have had to be put under the plow in an attempt to feed the growing global population.
Commercial growers deliberately generate CO2 and increase its levels in agricultural greenhouses to between 700ppmv and 1,000ppmv to increase productivity and improve the water efficiency of food crops far beyond those in the somewhat carbon-starved open atmosphere. CO2 feeds the forests, grows more usable lumber in timber lots, meaning there is less pressure to cut old growth or push into "natural" wildlife habitat, makes plants more water efficient, helping to beat back the encroaching deserts in Africa and Asia and generally increases bio-productivity. If it's "pollution," then it's pollution the natural world exploits extremely well and to great profit. What should be obvious is that increases in CO2 directly increase the vitality of the bio-world.
It is no wonder that the Sahara has shrunk 300,000 km^2 in the last couple decades, or that the dinosaurs managed to find the sustenance to survive, despite their size, in an era with 5 times our current CO2 levels.The last myth I'd like to debunk is the idea that global warming is necessarily a bad thing, regardless of whether we have any significant control over it, or that historically warm periods have been the most prosperous for humans. By far the most hyped consequences are increasing intensities of weather storms, and rising sea levels. Global storm intensities are dominated by the temperature difference between the equator and the poles, and it really is that simple.
Even by the IPCC's own admission, in manipulating the area of the poles using the Mercator system to distort the global temperature, the poles must be warming at a rate faster than the equator and this subsequently leads to gentler storms, despite the media explicitly or implicitly making an attempt to blame every last weather anomaly on "climate change". Ah yes, you say, but that would imply that we are in danger of rising sea levels because the warming would melt the ice at the poles. Well, consider this. Since the last ice age 18,000 years ago the global sea level has risen by 130 meters, and is still doing so at a current rate of around 20cm per century, which is dwarfed by local tectonic movements.
This will obviously displace people, but it will pale in insignificance when compared to the migrations over the next century caused by other factors such as geographical changes in important resources, fresh water locations, industrialization, etc. Dramatic pictures of breaking seasonal ice is just patent propaganda, the reality is that Antarctica's ice mass has now been growing for the last 30 years against a 6,000 year trend of melting, and it contains over 90% of the world's land ice (sea ice, by Archimedes's principle, does not affect sea levels).
Dr. Wibjorn Karlen, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden, admits, [9] "Some small areas in the Antarctic Peninsula have broken up recently, just like it has done back in time. The temperature in this part of Antarctica has increased recently, probably because of a small change in the position of the low pressure systems."Our climate is changing, just as it has always done, and always will. In fact, the only constant about our climate is that it changes, which makes you realise the term "climate change" is at best meaningless, and at worst intentionally ambiguous. It feels silly that I need to say this, but clearly it has to be done.
The main determinant of our climate is not some gas, which comprises 0.038% of the atmosphere, but the Sun, the planet's orbital eccentricities and axial wobble, cosmic ray flux, and other celestial factors. Greenhouse gases play an important role, but a passive one. It should not come as a surprise that our entire solar system has been warming for the last quarter century, or that the most accurate weather forecasts come from algorithms that concentrate on solar fluctuations and cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are responsible for cloud formations, which are central to the overwhelmingly most important greenhouse gas. Water vapour accounts for 95% of the `greenhouse effect' and, apart from the elaborate positive feed-back systems in their models that have no actual basis with reality, the global warming alarmists have completely ignored it. This is staggering because H20, by a country mile, in its gas, liquid, and solid form dominates all other terrestrial climate factors.
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