The Death of the Global Warming Myth

[American Patriot]

Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age
National Post ^ | 2/25/2008 | Lorne Gunter

Lorne Gunter, National Post Published: Monday, February 25, 2008

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.

But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.

And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.

lgunter@shaw.ca

[American Patriot]

Temperature Monitors Report Global Cooling
The Daily Tech, Drudgereport ^


A twelve-month long drop in world temperatures erases global warming
Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on. No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.


Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it's the single fastest temperature change every recorded, either up or down.


Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.


Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.


Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.

[American Patriot]

Cold Water On 'Global Warming' (Thomas Sowell)
GOPUSA ^ | February 28, 2008 | Thomas Sowell

It has almost become something of a joke when some "global warming" conference has to be cancelled because of a snowstorm or bitterly cold weather.

But stampedes and hysteria are no joke -- and creating stampedes and hysteria has become a major activity of those hyping a global warming "crisis."

They mobilize like-minded people from a variety of occupations, call them all "scientists" and then claim that "all" the experts agree on a global warming crisis.

Their biggest argument is that there is no argument.

A whole cottage industry has sprung up among people who get grants, government agencies who get appropriations, politicians who get publicity and the perpetually indignant who get something new to be indignant about. It gives teachers something to talk about in school instead of teaching.

Those who bother to check the facts often find that not all those who are called scientists are really scientists and not all of those who are scientists are specialists in climate. But who bothers to check facts these days?

A new and very different conference on global warming will be held in New York City, under the sponsorship of the Heartland Institute, on March 2nd to March 4th -- weather permitting.

It is called an "International Conference on Climate Change." Its subtitle is "Global Warming: Truth or Swindle?" Among those present will be professors of climatology, along with scientists in other fields and people from other professions.

They come from universities in England, Hungary, and Australia, as well as from the United States and Canada, and include among other dignitaries the president of the Czech Republic.

There will be 98 speakers and 400 participants.

The theme of the conference is that "there is no scientific consensus on the causes or likely consequences of global warming."

Many of the participants in this conference are people who have already expressed skepticism about either the prevailing explanations of current climate change or the dire predictions about future climate change.

These include authors of such books as "Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years" by Fred Singer and Dennis Avery, and "Shattered Consensus," edited by Patrick J. Michaels.

This will be one of the rare opportunities for the media to hear the other side of the story -- for those old-fashioned journalists who still believe that their job is to inform the public, rather than promote an agenda.

The subtitle of the upcoming conference -- "Global Warming: Truth or Swindle?" -- is also the title of a British television program that is now available on DVD in the United States. It is a devastating debunking of the current "global warming" hysteria.

Nobody denies that there is such a thing as a greenhouse effect. If there were not, the side of the planet facing away from the sun would be freezing every night.

There is not even a lot of controversy over temperature readings. What is fundamentally at issue are the explanations, implications and extrapolations of these temperature readings.

The party line of those who say that we are heading for a global warming crisis of epic proportions is that human activities generating carbon dioxide are key factors responsible for the warming that has taken place in recent times.

The problem with this reasoning is that the temperatures rose first and then the carbon dioxide levels rose. Some scientists say that the warming created the increased carbon dioxide, rather than vice versa.

Many natural factors, including variations in the amount of heat put out by the sun, can cause the earth to heat or cool.

The bigger problem is that this has long since become a crusade rather than an exercise in evidence or logic. Too many people are too committed to risk it all on a roll of the dice, which is what turning to empirical evidence is.

Those who have a big stake in global warming hysteria are unlikely to show up at the conference in New York, and unfortunately that includes much of the media.

--------

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.

[American Patriot]

http://www.globalwarmingheartland.org/

2008 International Conference on Climate Change
New York City, New York, USA
March 2-4, 2008
On March 2-4, 2008, a very different kind of conference will take place at the Marriott Times Square Hotel in downtown New York. Hundreds of the world's leading scientists, economists, and policy analysts will come together to explore key issues overlooked by advocates of the theory of man-made global warming.

[American Patriot]

http://www.glennbeck.com/content/art...icle/196/6727/
Inconvenient Thermometers

Audio Available:

March 3, 2008 - 13:01 ET

Surfacestations.org and this is a project that is photographing and documenting the quality of the stations in their placements around the United States.

GLENN: All right, you sick twisted freak. We told you last week that there is a big global warming convention going on in New York with, all the scientists getting back together to talk about global warming, except this one is different. These are all the scientists getting together saying I don't think so but tonight the press just won't cover it. Tonight we're covering it as if it's the second coming of Jesus. We're spending a whole half hour on it. We have the president of the Czech Republic on with us and a couple of other scientists. Right now we have Anthony Watts on. He is a meteorologist and he is a guy who decided to look at all of the temperature readings because remember, temperature's going up. So he wanted to look at all the thermometers and every thermometer that is taking these readings and Anthony, what exactly did you find?

WATTS: Well, Glenn, I kind of stumbled into this. This was a project started on serendipity. I started out looking at paint. You may call seeing some of the early weather shelters that are housing the thermometers. They look like chicken coops on stilts that are white with slots and so forth. Anyway, to make a long story short, the weather bureau designed them back in the 1800s and they lasted until now, some of them still in use. They changed the paint in '79. A long time ago I had a conversation with the state climatologist of California about them and we wondered if the change in paint, the original spec was the old Tom Sawyer whitewash because they were designed in the 1890s and they changed the paint check in 1979 to latex. So I wanted to do an experiment about finding out whether that paint made a difference. The first thing I had to do was determine if, in fact, the stations had been repainted. So I went around to look at three of them in my area and the first one I went to had been automated but it had the radio transmitter, the electronics right next to the temperature sensor, six inches away and I thought that was really odd. Who puts electronics that makes heat next to the temperature sensor. I figured it was a fluke. I went on to the next station about 30 miles to the West Orland, California and it was perfect. Everything looked good. So I just assumed it was a fluke. And then I went to another station in Marysville, California at the fire station and it was a new design and I discovered that the fire chief parked his vehicle, radiator end, right next to the sensor within about two feet of the sensor. And the sensor was next to this cell phone building that they had put in there. They dropped in these portable cell phone buildings because the city had rented out space there, the fire station, for a cell phone tower and I could feel air conditioning exhaust from the air-conditioners cooling those electronics, blowing around the sensor. So I had two out of three now that said, wait a minute, these aren't good measurement environments.

So my project changed from looking at paint to looking at stations all around the country.

GLENN: And so -- and you did. And is it surfacestatistics.org?

WATTS: Surfacestations.org and this is a project that is photographing and documenting the quality of the stations in their placements around the United States. There are 1221 official climate monitoring stations in the United States operated by NOAA. The data that come from these is used by researchers worldwide and so it's extremely important to know what the environment that the temperature is being measured in.

GLENN: Okay. So now I'm looking at this and you have pictures and graphs and everything else and some of the pictures of the -- well, here's the picture of the one with the firehouse. I mean, it's -- I mean, look at that. It is sitting there on asphalt. I mean, who -- how much -- have you looked at all of them yet here in the United States?

WATTS: So far -- I have a volunteer organization and these are just people that are just interested in finding out just like myself, a volunteer organization that has covered a good portion of this, the network. We're now up to 502 stations out of 1221. We still have a lot of them to go, particularly in the Midwest because a lot of the stations there are located in the agricultural belt on farms and private ranchers and things of that nature and a little more difficult to locate and get to. But out of 502 stations surveyed thus far we found the vast majority of them to be out of compliance of NOAA's own published specifications for station sighting and these stations at the bare minimum, they have something called the 100 foot rule. The 100 foot rule says if you are going to place an official thermometer for use in measuring climate, weather, whatever, it needs to be 100 feet away from asphalt, concrete, automobiles, buildings and other such influences that might bias the temperature.

GLENN: My gosh, I'm just looking at some of these pictures on the website. You've got one in Oregon that is -- I mean, it's just surrounded by equipment and asphalt and it's -- is it on top of a roof as well?

WATTS: I think you may be looking at the one in Roseburg, Oregon?

GLENN: Yeah, yeah.

WATTS: Okay, that was taken by the state climatologist in Oregon, George Taylor, who was just recently under fire from the governor there.

GLENN: Yeah, I know.

WATTS: To step down because George was saying things the governor didn't approve of. Yes L with, yes, that one's on a roof. It's at a radio station in Roseburg, Oregon. It is on the roof next to an air conditioning unit and that is the official climate monitoring station for Roseburg, Oregon. And yes, it is used in the records.

GLENN: So what is the -- so what do you think the total variance is of, you know, plus or minus so many degrees Celsius? What is the error rate, do you suppose?

WATTS: Well, I can tell you individually about stations. NOAA has a reference that they do --

GLENN: You know what? I don't mean to be -- I don't mean to be rude, Anthony, but I'm being told I've only got about 10 seconds. Do you have a short answer?

WATTS: Short answer is I don't know the total for all the United States but I can tell you that things that are on a rooftop are typically going to read as much as 5 degrees higher.

GLENN: Oh, my gosh. Anthony, thank you so much. We'll look for you at the convention in New York. These are the scientists that are saying, wait a minute, hold your horses on global warming.

[Ryan Ruck]

Weather Channel Founder Blasts Network; Claims It Is 'Telling Us What to Think'

TWC founder and global warming skeptic advocates suing Al Gore to expose 'the fraud of global warming.'

The Weather Channel has lost its way, according to John Coleman, who founded the channel in 1982.

Coleman told an audience at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change on March 3 in New York that he is highly critical of global warming alarmism.

"The Weather Channel had great promise, and that's all gone now because they've made every mistake in the book on what they've done and how they've done it and it's very sad," Coleman said. "It's now for sale and there's a new owner of The Weather Channel will be announced – several billion dollars having changed hands in the near future. Let's hope the new owners can recapture the vision and stop reporting the traffic, telling us what to think and start giving us useful weather information."

The Weather Channel has been an outlet for global warming alarmism. In December 2006, The Weather Channel's Heidi Cullen argued on her blog that weathercasters who had doubts about human influence on global warming should be punished with decertification by the American Meteorological Society.

Coleman also told the audience his strategy for exposing what he called "the fraud of global warming." He advocated suing those who sell carbon credits, which would force global warming alarmists to give a more honest account of the policies they propose.

"[I] have a feeling this is the opening," Coleman said. "If the lawyers will take the case – sue the people who sell carbon credits. That includes Al Gore. That lawsuit would get so much publicity, so much media attention. And as the experts went to the media stand to testify, I feel like that could become the vehicle to finally put some light on the fraud of global warming."

Earlier at the conference Lord Christopher Monckton, a policy adviser to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, told an audience that the science will eventually prevail and the "scare" of global warming will go away. He also said the courts were a good avenue to show the science.

[American Patriot]

I would like to take a minute to ask to vote to rename this thread.

I want it to be called, "The Death of the Global Warming Myth"....


Yea or nay?

Yea....

(Read the next article posted then vote)

[American Patriot]

Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations "Totally Wrong"
Daily Tech ^

Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations "Totally Wrong" Michael Asher (Blog) - March 6, 2008 11:02 AM

New derivation of equations governing the greenhouse effect reveals "runaway warming" impossible

Miklós Zágoni isn't just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary's most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was.

That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too. The theory was developed by another Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA's Ames Research Center.

After studying it, Zágoni stopped calling global warming a crisis, and has instead focused on presenting the new theory to other climatologists. The data fit extremely well. "I fell in love," he stated at the International Climate Change Conference this week.

"Runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations," Miskolczi states. Just as the theory of relativity sets an upper limit on velocity, his theory sets an upper limit on the greenhouse effect, a limit which prevents it from warming the Earth more than a certain amount.

How did modern researchers make such a mistake? They relied upon equations derived over 80 years ago, equations which left off one term from the final solution.

(Excerpt) Read more at dailytech.com ...

[Ryan Ruck]

If you think it will make a better thread title, sure!

[American Patriot]

Prominent Scientists Debunk Global Warming
The Land of The Free ^ | 3/7/08 | Guest Author

The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, which was held at the Marriott Marquise Hotel in New York City, concluded Tuesday. It got very little coverage in the dinosaur press, even though it was a gathering of some of the most prestigious and most learned experts on climatology from around the world.

The conference didn’t attract much attention from the dieing dinosaur media because it didn’t have any of the falderal that attracts the “journalists” and management of faltering old media. Plus, the scientists presented facts and scientific research that debunks the global warming hoax the dinosaur media helped create and is invested in perpetuating.

Rather than speeches and fear mongering propaganda films from a hack politician turned huckster, or outlandish suggestions from a geneticist turned broadcaster, the conference presented science from some of world’s leading climatologists and scientists in related fields, along with world renowned economists, and policy analysts.

Instead of David Suzuki, who isn’t a climatologist, he’s a geneticist turned broadcaster, and one of the leaders in spreading the global warming hoax, calling for jailing politicians who don’t participate in the hysteria or fall for the hoax, (Last month at a conference in Canada, Suzuki said: “What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they’re doing is a criminal act.”), the conference heard from people like Patrick J. Michaels, PhD, Research Professor of Environmental Science, University of Virginia, Robert Balling, PhD, Professor of Climatology, Arizona State University, James J. O’Brien, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Meteorology and Oceanography, Florida State University, and Dr. Yuri Izrael, Science Advisor, President Vladimir Putin, Russia, to name just a few.

Instead of Al Gore, failed journalist turned political hack turned con-man, the conference featured such academic heavyweights as J. Scott Armstrong, Ph.D., a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, an expert on mathematical forecasting. Dr. Armstrong challenged the Gore to a $10,000.00 wager to see who could more accurately predict the Earth’s temperature over the next 10 years. Gore refused saying he was too busy.

But the biggest news coming out of the conference is the release of a report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate”. This report is the most complete, up-to-date, authoritative summary of peer-reviewed critical positions with respect to “Anthropogenic Global Warming” issued to date, and debunks most of the junk science used to spread the global warming hoax.

This scholarly work comes with an introduction from Frederick Seitz, a physicist and past president of the National Academy of Sciences and of Rockefeller University who passed away on Monday March 3. In the introduction Dr. Seitz stated; “we do not currently have any convincing evidence or observations of significant climate change from other than natural causes.”

“Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate” should convince all but the most gullible alarmists the hysteria over global warming is not warranted by science. At the very least it exposes Al Gore’s outright lie that “the debate in the scientific community is over.”

However, the challenge will be to get wide circulation of this scientific report. The dinosaur media and charlatans like Al Gore have a vested interest in spreading misleading, fear-mongering, propaganda, and generating fear among gullible. They exploit that fear for personal gain. They don’t want the truth to get widespread circulation.

The good news is that as fewer people turn to the old dieing media outlets for their news, turning instead to the new media for news, the new media outlets are in a position to inform the public of the real science and the findings of the climate realists.

[Ryan Ruck]

I've been driving around in "Global Warming" all day. In fact, we are expected to have up to 15" or so inches of it by the end of tomorrow. In some places there will be drifts of "Global Warming" as deep as 2'.

[PsycoJoe]

Cry me a glacier. It was so hot, I froze to death. (Ok, not really but you get the point.)

[American Patriot]

The media snowjob on global warming
National Post ^ | 2008-03-10 | Lorne Gunter,

Just how pervasive the bias at most news outlets is in favour of climate alarmism -- and how little interest most outlets have in reporting any research that diverges from the alarmist orthodoxy -- can be seen in a Washington Post story on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), announced last week in New York.

The NIPCC is a counter to the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The group was unveiled this week in Manhattan at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, along with its scientific report claiming that natural factors -- the sun, El Ninos and La Ninas, volcanoes, etc, -- not human sources are behind global warming.

The Washington Post's first instincts (not just on its opinion pages, but in its news coverage, too) were cleverly to sew doubt of the group's credibility by pointing out to readers that many of the participants had ties to conservative politicians, such as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and that the conference sponsor -- the Heartland Institute -- received money from oil companies and health care corporations.

That's standard fare, and partly fair, so that's not what I am talking about.

The insidiousness I am referring to is the unfavourable way the Post compared the NIPCC report to the IPCC's famous report of last year.

After reminding readers that the IPCC and former U.S. vice-president Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for their work on climate change, the paper then, sneeringly, added: "While the IPCC enlisted several hundred scientists from more than 100 countries to work over five years to produce its series of reports, the NIPCC document is the work of 23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists."

First of all, the IPCC and Mr. Gore won the Peace Prize, not a science prize, which only proves they are good at politics. They didn't win the Physics Prize, for instance.

Also, while the former vice-prez may have invented the Internet (by his own admission), he is demonstrably not a scientist. Yet in the same paragraph as the Washington Post lionizes Mr. Gore for his work saving the planet, it backhands non-scientists for meddling in the climate change debate, never once showing any hint it recognized its own hypocrisy.

And the paper displays its utter lack of intellectual curiosity, too.

Hundreds of scientists may have contributed bits and pieces of work to the IPCC's gargantuan report, but just 62 wrote the chapter said to "prove" that man is behind global warming -- not that many more than the 23 from the new NIPCC who the Post so snidely dismiss as inconsequential in number. And just 52 people -- many of them the kind of non-scientists the Post would have us believe have no business passing judgment -- wrote the IPCC's "Summary for Policy-makers." That's the publication that gets all the ink and drives the climate alarmism because it contains the most provocative statements about the certainty of manmade warming.

The bias is that whatever the IPCC and its defenders claim, the Washington Post and most other outlets report without scrutiny. Meanwhile, the motives and sources of all sceptics are instantly suspected and derided.

There's nothing wrong with scrutinizing the motives of people engaged in a dicey debate. The subjectivity arises from scrutinizing only one side and always with a preconceived notion of what you are going to find.

Such bias is typical, though, of the climate debate, and not just among reporters and editors.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a column that was provocatively titled, "Forget global warming:Welcome to the New Ice Age." In it, I explained that, far from being warming activists, some solar scientists see the recent downturn in solar activity as harbinger of a coming Ice Age.

I wondered how come we don't hear about that in equal measure with the claims of an impending meltdown?

I received over 1,800 e-mails, most of them complimentary. A large number, though, were as hysterical and vicious as any I have received on any subject in almost two decades in journalism.

How could I not believe? Was I being dishonest or just stupid? How much had EXXON paid me? Until I could write in favour of the warming theorists, I should "go back into your oil company-funded bubble. You @*!/x-ing hack."

And that was from a climate scientist at a major university.

At last week's Manhattan climate conference, delegate after delegate related stories about how they had been denied tenure, shut out of scientific conferences and rejected by academic journals because no matter how scrupulous their research, their conclusions disagreed with the prevailing orthodoxy of the Climate Change Pharisees. They spoke, too, of colleagues too afraid for their jobs even to turn up at the conference.

I don't believe we are headed for an ice age any more than we're hurtling towards a meltdown. But we are in the midst of overwhelming bias in favour of the meltdown side.

[American Patriot]

(SOW doubt... not SEW.... geez.)

[Malsua]

It's fascinating watching the myth of CO2 as a climate driver fall apart. It's a TRACE gas. We contribute a few percentages to it and yet, we get doomsday articles like the following

http://environment.newscientist.com/...er-planet.html

Suggesting that only if we reduce all emissions to zero can we prevent runaway warming.

The real story is more complicated and more simple at the same time.

If you haven't read the recent article at American Thinker, here's the link. It's a good one. It shows how tenaciously beliefs were held by those who were certain that the Sun revolved around the earth. How when it didn't fit the model, they added epicycles...cycles upon cycles to it.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/...al_warmin.html

How can this super-cold winter happen? It's got all the faithful a little worried. Climate modeling teams all over the world are sweating 24/7 to deal with it. They are producing epicycles for their models, to hang on the warming story.

"Epicycles" are cycles on top of cycles. When traditional astronomy began to collapse in the years before Copernicus, True Believers reacted by adding lots of little cycles on top of the great cycles of the planetary orbits, to protect their faith. Trouble is, they had to add so many cycles on top of cycles that eventually, the whole system became a laughingstock. Ultimately you could explain anything you wanted -- after the fact.

The Polish astronomer Nicholas Koepernick -- called Copernicus -- pointed out that a sun-centered planetary model could get rid of all those epicycles with elegant simplicity. You only had to assume that the planets are going around the sun, not the earth. Suddenly all those cycle-on-cycle orbits simplified into near-circular ellipses.

[Brian Baldwin]

But think of all the grants and funding that will suddenly end if the myth is exposed...

[Ryan Ruck]

Not exactly global warming bull but, still environazi lies being disproven by cold hard facts.

Scientists Trash Plastic Bag Ban

SCIENTISTS and environmentalists have questioned the case against the use of plastic shopping bags as based on flawed science and misreporting.

And in a blow to Environment Minister Peter Garrett's plan to phase out plastic bags by January 1 next year, questions have also emerged over the accuracy of a claim in a report carried out for the Australian Government in 2002 which said plastic bags were responsible for the deaths of 100,000 animals a year.

The report, later amended but widely quoted by environmentalists, actually attributed the deaths to all plastic debris, including fishing nets and equipment.

The Times newspaper in Britain has quoted scientists, including an expert who advises environmental group Greenpeace, as saying plastic bags pose only a minimal threat to most marine species, including seals, whales, dolphins and seabirds.

In January, Mr Garrett said he wanted to phase out the use of supermarket plastic bags by the end of the year and was prepared to consider a ban if necessary.

And yesterday, while denying a Sunday newspaper report that he wanted customers charged $1 per bag, Mr Garrett said he remained committed to a phase out by January 1 and would meet state government counterparts next month to consider "a range of options" which did not include a levy on bag use.

The claim that the bags kill more than 100,000 marine mammals every year is based on a misinterpretation of a 1987 Canadian study in Newfoundland, which found that, between 1981 and 1984, more than 100,000 animals were killed by discarded nets. The Canadian study did not mention plastic bags.

However, in 2002, a report prepared for the Australian Government by Nolan-ITU in association with the RMIT Centre for Design and Eunomia Research and Consulting Ltd said the Newfoundland study attributed the deaths to "plastic bags".

But according to the Australian Government's Environment Department website, the report was amended in 2006.

The figure has often been used by conservationists as proof that the bags are killers.

But in Britain, scientists, politicians and marine experts have attacked the British Government for joining an anti-bag "bandwagon" based on poor science.

Lord Taverne, the chairman of Sense about Science, said: "The Government is irresponsible to jump on a bandwagon that has no base in scientific evidence.

"This is one of many examples where you get bad science leading to bad decisions which are counter-productive.

"Attacking plastic bags makes people feel good but it doesn't achieve anything."

David Laist, the author of a seminal 1997 study on the subject, said plastic bags did not figure in the majority of cases where animals died from marine debris.

"The main culprits are fishing gear, ropes, lines and strapping bands," he said. "Most mammals are too big to get caught up in a plastic bag."

David Santillo, a marine biologist at Greenpeace, told The Times that bad science was undermining the Government's case for banning the bags.

"It's very unlikely that many animals are killed by plastic bags," Dr Santillo said. "The evidence shows just the opposite. We're not going to solve the problem of waste by focusing on plastic bags. On a global basis plastic bags aren't an issue."

[American Patriot]

The Great Global Warming Hoax? (excellent)
http://www.middlebury.net/op-ed/global-warming-01.html ^ | James A. Peden

Our planet has been slowly warming since last emerging from the "Little Ice Age" of the 17th century, often associated with the Maunder Minimum. Before that came the "Medieval Warm Period", in which temperatures were about the same as they are today. Both of these climate phenomena are known to have occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, but several hundred years prior to the present, the majority of the Southern Hemisphere was primarily populated by indigenous peoples, where science and scientific observation was limited to non-existent. Thus we can not say that these periods were necessarily "global". However, "Global Warming" in recent historical times has been an undisputable fact, and no one can reasonably deny that.

But we're hearing far too often that the "science" is "settled", and that it is mankind's contribution to the natural CO2 in the atmosphere has been the principal cause of an increasing "Greenhouse Effect", which is the root "cause" of global warming. We're also hearing that "all the world's scientists now agree on this settled science", and it is now time to quickly and most radically alter our culture, and prevent a looming global catastrophe. And last, but not least, we're seeing a sort of mass hysteria sweeping our culture which is really quite disturbing. Historians ponder how the entire nation of Germany could possibly have goose-stepped into place in such a short time, and we have similar unrest. Have we become a nation of overnight loonies?

(Excerpt) Read more at middlebury.net ...

[American Patriot]

The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat
npr ^ | 1/19/2008 | Richard Harris



Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather.


Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them. "I suspect that we'll able to put this together with a little bit more perspective and further analysis," Trenberth says. "But what this does is highlight some of the issues and send people back to the drawing board."


Trenberth and Willis agree that a few mild years have no effect on the long-term trend of global warming. But they say there are still things to learn about how our planet copes with the heat.


(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...

[American Patriot]

An Emerging Truth
http://www.spectator.co.uk ^ | Wednesday, 9th April 2008 | SpectatorUK

There is now unequivocal evidence that the temperature of the planet is dropping like a stone. As the DailyTech site reports:

All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASAGISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously. A compiled list of all the sources can be seen...The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years.

- The troposphere hasn’t warmed for the past five years. And the oceans haven’t warmed for five years either.

- Ross McKittrick (who exposed the fundamental flaw in the research underpinning the whole of MMGW theory, the hockey-stick curve whose upward warming trend was achieved by omitting several hundred years of global climate history) revealing that there is an error in groundstation measurements such that past warming as measured by near-surface air has been over-estimated by 100% for over 20 years to 2002 (since when there has been cooling). While at Climate Audit, John Goetz says that the temperature record for 2005-2007 has actually been falsified to produce an upward trend. Crumbs!

-Now look at this curious development. The British government, as we know,has swallowed the predictions of man-made global warming and is busily trying to persuade us that it is committed to reducing carbon emissions to counter the threat that we’re all about to fry. Yet HM Treasury has posted on its website a paper about solar cycles, which says:

Based on solar maxima of approximately 50 for solar cycles 24 and 25, a global temperature decline of 1.5°C is predicted to 2020, equating to the experience of the Dalton Minimum.

And it also concludes: A rural US temperature data set shows that recent and current temperatures remain below the average of the first half of the 20th century.

-Now, you may not know about this sudden deadly chill in the MMGW atmosphere because the BBC hasn’t told you. To be more precise, it did try to report this — but then appears to have altered its report under pressure from a global warming activist.

-