Cap-n-Tax will eat the heart out of Australia March 31, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming
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Cap-n-Tax will eat the heart out of Australia
Via ICECAP
By Viv Forbes, The Carbon Sense Coalition
The Carbon Sense Coalition today claimed that the Emissions Trading Scheme would eat the heart out of regional Australia by destroying jobs in mining, processing, construction, farming, forestry, transport and tourism.
In a submission to the Australian Senate Economics Committee, the Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that the mis-named “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” had nothing to do with carbon or pollution – “it is essentially a cap and a tax on carbon dioxide, the harmless, colourless natural gas that sustains all life on earth”.
To cut man’s emissions of carbon dioxide, we need to curb electricity generation, cement manufacture, mining, smelting, refining, all forms of transport, farm and earth moving machinery, all farmed animals, forestry and construction. In return they would have us believe that the inland will survive when these once vibrant industries are replaced by feral forests feeding on carbon credits, vast mobs of kangaroos, regiments of becalmed wind towers, treeless tracts of ethanol crops and deserts of solar panels.
California and Spain have proved that the war on carbon dioxide will kill real jobs faster than fake green jobs can be created. At the same time, the silly claims that alternate energy can provide continuous, economical and reliable power will encourage neglect of Australia’s key reliable low cost electricity source – coal power.
When the lights go out, industry migrates to Asia and our power bills soar, it will be too late to prevent great harm to our economy, our jobs and our life style. The global warming hysteria has passed its zenith. The recession is already cutting industrial emissions, and natural cycles are cooling the weather. And the flimsy scientific basis for the hysteria is being demolished daily by a growing army of sceptics.
“Depopulating the outback is not a sensible policy for any Australian Government. The Senate should refuse to pass this dangerous and unnecessary legislation.”
Viv Forbes
Chairman
The Carbon Sense Coalition
The detailed submission from the Carbon Sense Coalition can be found here.
Bogeymen of the C02 Hoax Losing Ground March 30, 2009
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Bogeymen of the C02 Hoax Losing Ground
Posted on ICECAP
By Dr. Timothy Ball
“You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.” Eric Hoffer
James Hansen, head of NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), and Andrew Weaver, lead author of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports, made statements clearly designed to frighten people.
Both men are politically active in climate change and at the forefront of the attempt to convince the world that CO2 is a problem. Their remarks are intended to scare people by threatening impending doom – nothing new – except there is increasing urgency and fear because their message is failing. As Andrew Weaver summarized, “All those fossil fuel emissions need to be eliminated. And we must do so quickly if we are to have any chance of stabilizing the climate and maintaining human civilization as we know it.”
Hansen increases urgency for action claiming we are on the verge of a tipping point, defined as follows. “Tipping points can occur during climate change when the climate reaches a state such that strong amplifying feedbacks are activated by only moderate additional warming.” We�re reaching a tipping point, but it’s not the one Hansen anticipates. We�re close to the point where the public and politicians realize they have been totally deceived about the nature and cause of climate change. Even before a shift to concern about the economy polls showed a growing shift in public opinion.
Weaver is also troubled by his own definition of dramatic change occurring. He wrote in a March 24 article, in the Vancouver Sun, “There are many depressing things about being a climate scientist these days. The emerging data is going from bad to worse and the political leadership is still acting as if we have all the time in the world to deal with global warming.” Yes, it’s depressing but because people are not fooled any more and politicians are not acting as Weaver expects. And yes, emerging data is going from bad to worse, but only because it shows CO2 is not causing warming.
Other remarks by both men indicate their fear. For example, Hansen said, “The democratic process doesn�t seem to be working.” It’s a bizarre comment from a civil servant prior to his apparently breaking US law (the Hatch Act) again by participating in a public protest at the headquarters of E.ON, a power firm in Coventry, England. The push for elimination of CO2 emissions is failing because, despite his histrionics, democracy is working.
A few days later in the Vancouver Sun article ironically titled “‘Environmentalists’ are abandoning science,” Weaver wrote, “The scientific community has a very solid understanding of what is causing global warming: It is overwhelmingly because of the combustion of fossil fuels. Thus, the solution to the problem is as simple as it is daunting: The elimination of fossil fuel use in our economies.”
Weaver claims he and his IPCC colleagues “have been as a clear as we know how about the science and the measures needed.” This is simply not the case. Their rules mean they only look at human causes of climate change. They produce a political summary for policymakers then used to make sure the science report agrees with the summary. (Canada Free Press)
More important, the entire claim of human caused CO2 global warming is based on computer models that simply can’t work. It’s not surprising Hansen and Weaver are computer modelers; they have the most invested in these claims and the most to lose professionally and politically. I watched over the years as computer modelers took over and dominated climate science, particularly through the IPCC. But as Freeman Dyson, Professor Emeritus of Physics at Princeton, said in the May 1999 issue of the American Physical Society and still valid today, “They are not yet adequate tools for predicting climate.� However, “If we persevere patiently with observing the real world and improving the models, the time will come when we are able both to understand and to predict. Until then, we must continue to warn the politicians and the public: don’t believe the numbers just because they come out of a supercomputer.”
Read much more here.
Banning black cars to stop global warming? March 30, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, climate change madness, global warming
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Banning black cars to stop global warming?
New Scientist, March 27, 2009
News that California may ban the sale of black cars for climate protection reasons raised the hackles of many a petrolhead yesterday.
At the root of the stir was a presentation (pdf) by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Resources Board (CARB). The Cool Paints initiative suggests that the state should set a minimum level of reflectivity for all car paints and windows.
More reflective vehicles, goes the idea, could stay up to 10 °C cooler in the sunshine state – this in turn could reduce the need to have air conditioning on and thereby cut greenhouse-gas emissions.
However, as black paints can’t currently achieve this level, every cool dude’s favourite hue would effectively be banned. Motoring blogs lamented the end of consumer freedom to buy a car in their preferred colour, saying that “mud-puddle brown” could be the new black, as that’s what you get once you’ve added the reflective ingredients.
Read the rest here
Rise of sea levels is ‘the greatest lie ever told’ March 29, 2009
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Rise of sea levels is ‘the greatest lie ever told’
By Christopher Booker, The Telegraph
If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.
Although the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.
But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.
Despite fluctuations down as well as up, “the sea is not rising,” he says. “It hasn’t risen in 50 years.” If there is any rise this century it will “not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm”. And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by
Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.
Read the rest here
Global warming is running out of hot air March 27, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Global Cooling.Tags: climate change, Global Cooling, global warming
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Global warming is running out of hot air 
Written by Phyllis Schlafly, Bend Weekly
Friday, 27 March 2009
The coldest winter in a decade in many places, with snow in unlikely cities such as New Orleans, has deflated some of the hot air in global warming. And a heavy snowfall that paralyzed Washington, D.C., upstaged a mass demonstration scheduled to promote global warming.
Nevertheless, according to Al Gore and the mainstream media, “the debate is over” proving that global warming exists, that humans are causing it and that “science is settled.”
But 680 of the world’s leading scientists, economists and policy analysts, who met March 8-10 in New York City for the second Heartland International Conference, beg to differ. The title of the conference expressed their doubts: “Global Warming: Was It Ever Really a Crisis?”
These authorities assert that scientists worldwide do not agree that global warming is human induced (in scientific lingo, anthropogenic). They do not even agree that the Earth is still warming.
Many scientists and other observers have come to realize that global warming is no longer a question of science but is all about politics and money. Their slogan, cap-and-trade, was best explained by House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, as “a carbon tax that will increase taxes on all Americans who drive a car, who have a job, who turn on a light switch.”
President Obama is being pressured by James McCarthy, head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to rush his carbon tax through Congress before the American people discover the lie in Obama’s promise that “95 percent of working families” will not see their taxes rise by “a single dime.” In fact, his own budget shows that taxes will rise for 100 percent of Americans for the sake of global warming.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change plans to use a treaty to reduce America’s use of energy and therefore our standard of living, while forcing us to subsidize energy production in other countries and close our eyes to the omission of China and India from any obligation.
Aussies urged to give Earth Hour the flick March 27, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, climate change madness, Earth Hour, global warming
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Aussies urged to give Earth Hour the flick
From News.com.au, March 27, 2009
Show of support … before and after shots as the lights go out for Earth Hour 2008 in Sydney / Reuters
|
AN anti-Earth Hour group urging Australians to keep their lights blazing this weekend is a sign of waning interest in environmentalism, experts say.
The global Earth Hour movement – founded in Australia in 2007 – is asking people to switch off their lights for one hour on Saturday night.
But a Facebook group is urging people to “keep every light you own running during Earth Hour”.
The group urges people to protest by switching lights on “if you think turning the lights out for an hour is completely ridiculous and will change nothing”.
Read the rest here
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P.S. Here at An Honest Climate Debate we will be joining Australian Climate Madness in preparation of Earth Hour!
Understanding Alaska’s Climate Variation March 27, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: alaska, climate change, global warming
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Understanding Alaska’s Climate Variation
Via ICECAP
By John Papineau, Ph.D, NWS Anchorage, Alaska
The climate of Alaska (i.e. long-term weather patterns) is a product of a number of different external and internal ‘forcings’. Climate varies over time as these forcings change (often small changes). The primary external forcings are: solar output, atmospheric gases (volcanic eruptions, CO2), the temperature of the water in the Pacific Ocean, as well as the strengthening or weakening of ocean currents. Changes in one or several of these forcings typically causes changes within the atmosphere as well (internal forcings), like the repositioning of the polar jet stream and the Aleutian low pressure system or the frequency of La Nina’s and El Nino’s. We will look at some of these forcings in some detail later in this study. Excerpts:
Pacific Decadal Oscillation
In the mid and late 1990’s researchers noticed that fish catches in the Gulf of Alaska seemed to fluctuate on a time scale of roughly 20 to 30 years. Closer investigation showed that sea surface temperatures (SST’s) across the region fluctuated roughly over the same time period (Manuta et al, 1997). The fluctuation from above normal water temperatures to below and vis versa has been termed the Pacific Decadal Oscillation or PDO. When SST’s in the central North Pacific are above normal, SST’s along the coast of Alaska and British Colombia tend to be warmer than normal, this is referred to as the positive phase of the PDO. When SST’s in the central North Pacific are below normal, water temperatures along the coasts are usually above normal (negative phase of the PDO). One phase of the PDO last approximately 20 to 30 years, there are occasions however where the PDO undergoes a 2-5 year mini-reversal, before reverting to its original state.
Combined Forcings
So far we have been considering forcings as individual events, in reality of course they can occur simultaneously – it is this interaction of climate forcings which makes climate research challenging. For example, El Nino’s that occur during the positive phase of the PDO do not have the same impact on temperatures and precipitation across Alaska that the equivalent El Nino would have if the PDO was in a negative phase. In some cases these climate forcings may positively interfere one with another, leading to a very large anomaly, at other times they may have a negative interference, effectively weakening each forcing.
Icecap Note: See the similarity in patterns in PDO and corresponding ENSO states.
In general El Ninos are favored in the positive PDO and La Ninas in the negative phase. That can be seen in the tracking of ENSO (MEI) with PDO here)
El Nino’s that occur when the PDO is negative tend to be slightly cooler when compared to the long-term mean, but the variability is large. During the positive phase of the PDO, El Nino’s tend to be warmer than normal, however there is still considerable variability (in statical terms the standard deviation is large). Notice that La Nina’s which occur during -PDO tend to produce abnormally cooler temperatures, with incidently very little variability. La Nina’s which occur during +PDO are not listed because only one occurred during the 1977-1996 period (which by the way may give some clue about the development of La Nina’s).
Winter temperature anomalies (F) larger version here.
Read much more here. See earlier stories on this Alaska PDO connection here and here and advancing glaciers here.
Freeman Dyson: speaking out on “global warming” March 27, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, Freeman Dyson, global warming
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Freeman Dyson: speaking out on “global warming”
From Watts Up With That, March 26, 2009
Freeman Dyson
This is a well written essay by the New York times on Freeman Dyson. Dyson is one of the world’s most eminent physicists. As many WUWT readers know he is a skeptic of AGW aka “global warming”, even going so far as to signing the Oregon Petition, seen below.
This part really spoke to me:
What may trouble Dyson most about climate change are the experts. Experts are, he thinks, too often crippled by the conventional wisdom they create, leading to the belief that “they know it all.” The men he most admires tend to be what he calls “amateurs,” inventive spirits of uncredentialed brilliance like Bernhard Schmidt, an eccentric one-armed alcoholic telescope-lens designer; Milton Humason, a janitor at Mount Wilson Observatory in California whose native scientific aptitude was such that he was promoted to staff astronomer; and especially Darwin, who, Dyson says, “was really an amateur and beat the professionals at their own game.”
You can read an essay about his views on climate change, posted here on WUWT on 11/05/2007.
Excerpt: from the NYT article:
IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.” Since then he has only heated up his misgivings, declaring in a 2007 interview with Salon.com that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books, the left-leaning publication that is to gravitas what the Beagle was to Darwin, that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism. Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”
“The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models,” Dyson was saying. “They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.”
Read the rest here
Lights off, as are brains March 26, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, climate change madness, Earth Hour, global warming
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Lights off, as are brains
Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun, March 27, 2009
Professor Bjorn Lomborg finds another reason to wonder if Earth Hour worshippers have any idea what they are doing or why:
When asked to extinguish electricity, people turn to candlelight. Candles seem natural, but are almost 100 times less efficient than incandescent light globes, and more than 300 times less efficient than fluorescent lights. If you use one candle for each extinguished globe, you’re essentially not cutting CO2 at all, and with two candles you’ll emit more CO2. Moreover, candles produce indoor air pollution 10 to 100 times the level of pollution caused by all cars, industry and electricity production.
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Also, here in Australia we are getting ready for Earth Hour, as per the Australian Climate Madness blogpot 🙂
Kiwis are getting bored with the global warming debate March 26, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming, New Zealand
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Climate change: Natural cycle or man-made phenomenon?
From the New Zealand Herald, March 25, 2009
Kiwis are getting bored with the global warming debate, at least our enthusiasm for leading the world in the fight against it is falling as the predicted doom and gloom doesn’t seem to turn up here.
An article in the Herald the other day talked about many New Zealanders being “cooler on global warming”. A ShapeNZ survey issued the other day by the Sustainable Business Council shows the number of New Zealanders who want to outpace the rest of the world has fallen by a third since just 2007.
We’re used to being told to ‘prepare for the worst’. Whether it’s Y2K, bird fu, SARS, tsunami or even the recession – humans, and some in the media are good at working us up into a right state.
I was certain bird flu would get me. The other night I had a couple of friends over for dinner. While cleaning up afterwards one of them opened up a drawer and saw two or three sealed face masks. “What are these?” she asked…big long silence while I try to think of an excuse…”Oh…um…well…it’s part of my old bird flu kit”. “You had a bird flu kit?” she says in disbelief. I lower my head, followed by the two of them laughing at me to the point of tears. I felt like a complete idiot – to think I’d be wiped out by bird flu.
So, are humans idiots for fearing that global warming will one day “get us all”?
I get tired of hearing every severe weather event being blamed on global warming. A storm is a storm. They have always been around and they always will be. When you look back at New Zealand’s record extremes, most happened last century not in the last 10 years. So if so many scientists around the world are saying this is going to happen – why doesn’t it seem to be happening here in New Zealand?
Read the rest here
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