Climategate: Who are the ‘deniers’ now? December 15, 2009
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, Climategate, global warming
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Climategate: Who are the ‘deniers’ now?
By E. THOMAS McCLANAHAN
The Kansas City Star, December 12, 2009
A couple of years ago, supporters of global warming theory began referring to skeptics as “deniers” — implying that anyone who doubted climate change should be lumped with Holocaust deniers.
Now the shoe is on the other foot, thanks to the eye-popping e-mail dump that hit the Internet recently and quickly became known as “Climategate.” The response of much of the global-warming “community” has been … denial.
A New York Times story on the Copenhagen climate summit declared, “In Face of Skeptics, Experts Affirm Climate Peril.” The U.S. negotiator at Copenhagen, Jonathan Pershing, said the hacked e-mails have “no fundamental bearing” on the summit. Al Gore waved off the controversy as so much “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency went right ahead with its “endangerment finding,” laying the basis for the regulatory equivalent of a tax on greenhouse gases.
The e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, however, raise serious questions about the theory of anthropogenic global warming, or AGW.
Read the rest here
An Honest Climate Debate 
The ‘deniers’ now are those greens in Copenhagen who refuse to read the Climategate emails or check their facts properly. It all seems rather pointless to a coastal dweller like me. You see, I live on the picturesque east coast of England where house prices go through the roof. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about so I started reading up on what Al Gore and the United Nations’ IPCC had to say. Apparently, the story goes that the ice caps and glaciers are melting so fast that in the next 50 years sea levels may rise up to 30 feet. Wow! But hold on a minute, I have never seen any evidence for it in my back yard. Oh dear! Apparently, I’m now a ‘flat earth denier’ for being sceptical of good old Al.
Not being one to like being called names I did some reading what oceanographers – not climatologists or Al Gore – had to say about sea level rises.
Here is what I found. Apparently, the most reliable data on sea levels comes from a set of the world’s tidal gauges. There is a very good web site on this by the University of Colorado where they present two graphs, Jason-1 Calibration and TOPEX Calibration. That’s funny, I thought, when I looked at it. Because those measurements say very similar things to what I read on other web sites. It seems a lot of oceanographers agree with the Colorado numbers. They include peer-reviewed papers by Antonov et al. (2005); Ishii et al. (2005) and Willis et al. (2005) who all report rises equal to seven inches per century.
I then looked closer to home and found that here in England we have Simon Holgate from the U.K.’s Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory. Holgate in 2007 produced a history of global sea level from 1904 to 2003 based upon a set of reliable, long-term observations from nine tide gauge stations scattered around the world. He also finds that the levels are rising by about 7 inches per century. Is this normal?
Well, apparently, yes because that’s exactly the rate of sea level rise we’ve been seeing naturally ever since the last ice age 11,000 years ago. Phew! Seems like the realtors in my area got their numbers right and Al Gore got his wrong. Maybe we won’t be paying all those climate taxes after all?
There might be global warming or cooling but the important issue is whether we, as a human race, can do anything about it.
There are a host of porkies and not very much truth barraging us everyday so its difficult to know what to believe.
I think I have simplified the issue in an entertaining way on my blog which includes some issues connected with climategate and “embarrassing” evidence.
In the pipeline is an analysis of the economic effects of the proposed emission reductions. Watch this space or should I say Blog
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
Please feel welcome to visit and leave a comment.
Cheers
Roger
PS The term “porky” is listed in the Australian Dictionary of Slang.( So I’m told.)