Earth has not been warming for a decade, but a lot of IPCC scientists are starting to feel the heat!
---Anon.
*************************
The President’s GW speech: what does it mean? [ITEM #1]
Tony Blankley decries the political effect of the speech
[ITEM #2]
Pat Michaels on the miserable state of the climate data
and some strange revisions [ITEM #3]
Richard Rahn:
Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 may make Ethanol illegal
[ITEM #4]
IPCC coming back in 2014. But won’t that be too late – after the world will have reached
Jim Hansen’s ‘tipping point’? And who
needs IPCC anyway? [ITEM #5]
Al Gore says any scientist who disagrees with him on
Global Warming is a kook, or a crook.
Guess he never met these guys
[ITEM #6]
SEPP editorial: Good news and bad news. When will the GW bubble burst? Gore vs McCain? [ITEM #7]
*************************************************************
Wind
turbines: Even with economic incentives, payback is 20 years
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/science/earth/15wind.html
***************************************
Jeroen
van der Veer, the chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell, has given warning that
a proposed European Union scheme to force companies to pay for carbon
emissions permits previously handed out free threatens to destroy
Europe’s petrochemicals and refining industry. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article3746878.ece The Times (London), 15 April 2008
******************************************
In
accepting an appeal on the role of cost-benefit analysis in establishing Clean
Water Act standards, the Supreme Court set the stage for an environmental
policy debate.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/washington/15scotus.html?th&emc=th
************************
From
the States:
· Gov. Kathleen Sebelius has received a second, bipartisan bill from the
Kansas Legislature allowing two coal-fired power plants. She will have until
April 24 to decide whether to sign it.
·
California’s Public Utilities Commission has decided to impose a 25- or 30-cent
surcharge on customers' electrical and gas bills to create a $600 million think tank to fight global warming
******************************************************************************
'Global
warming' scores a ZERO in the latest ABC News poll
Voters were asked: What is the single most important issue in your choice for
President? http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2008/04/global-warming-scores-zero-in-latest.html
Looks
like Gore may need to double his $300-million-dollar climate fear campaign to
counter the big fat zero in these polling numbers.
**************************
News
from ABC: Strong viewer reactions to ABC interview of Fred
Singer. Sample some of the 200+
comments at
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Technology/GlobalWarming/comments?type=story&id=4506059
Response (4/3/08) to a
complainant’s letter by Dick Wilde (perhaps some kind of ABC ombudsman):
…“Our review of the broadcast
story did not find basis for the concerns you raise in your letter about our
report. Thank you for your
consideration in bringing this matter to our attention. Sincerely,”
[signed] Dick Wilde, News Practices [212-456-4587; cell 718-689-2021; e-mail dick.wilde@abc.com]
##################################################################################################
1.
THE PRESIDENT WARMS
http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/20080417/EDITORIAL/817637969/1013
WASHINGTON TIMES EDITORIAL, April 17, 2008
We are all global-warming
alarmists now. President Bush's speech yesterday outlining the goal of halting
the growth of greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States by 2025 runs the
unusual gauntlet of promising something the private sector will probably
deliver on its own witness the spontaneous rise of "carbon offsets"
and green investing while also kicking the intellectual legs out from under a
defensible conservative position on climate change.
To be sure, the president's
position is parsimonious by Al Gore's standards. It omits a cap-and-trade scheme;
it is much less ambitious than the coming Senate proposal, which targets 2012
for the same emissions goals; it shuns tax increases; it strives to remain
technologically feasible on today's terms, unlike many others; and it urges
Congress, not bureaucrats, to hash out national policy on the subject.
But it also guts what remains of
the executive branch's conservative possibilities on the subject of global
warming. The strongest conservative position on global warming is as follows:
Climate change is happening, always has happened and always will; humans
contribute to it to some unknown degree; a hysterical U.N. Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change has leapt far ahead of the science, and, in its
politicized discredit, should be ignored; climate policy is to be determined by
elected officials, not unaccountable technocrats; it is surely worth society's
efforts to fund, study and develop realistic alternatives to fossil fuels in
the event that the man-made impact turns out to be significant this is advisable
for security reasons also; the leading liberal proposals are simply too
expensive; and, crucially, forcible mandates are harmful. Productive government
attention to technical and scientific problems always more readily resembles
the efforts of the National Institutes of Health, ARPANET (the Internet
precursor) or the Manhattan Project than mere decrees. Technological research
and innovation are the best means of harnessing ingenuity to solve mankind's
technical, scientific and environmental problems.
The administration has ceded this
intellectually and morally defensible high ground by acting as though the
alarmists are correct on first principles while also declining to deliver the
platform suggested by those principles. It is weak and tepid. Since this
president could easily be the last Republican occupant of the Oval Office for
some time and the viable presidential candidates are all global-warming
alarmists that is significant.
As the Bush administration seems
to regard things, the aim is to build a system with this last point in mind:
One that does not bankrupt the economy or harm consumers unduly. Some kind of
greenhouse-gas emissions framework is needed now, spokesmen argue, to ward off
an economically disastrous plan under a President Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama
or John McCain.
We're glad to hear that
Republicans still consider spending restraint and a working economy to be
governing priorities. But we've already seen the results of such an approach.
Over the last several years, key industries and their lobbyists have endorsed
and helped develop various global-warming schemes on the premise that this
train has already left the station. They must get on board, or they will be
left behind. This may be true in the most immediate short-term self-serving
sense for a given industry or company. It is to be expected as lobbyists
maximize influence in Washington. But this simply fast-forwards the debate
ahead of unresolved scientific and economic questions where it belongs and
drives it prematurely into public policy, where it threatens disaster.
The new Bush initiative doesn't
fit well in the final months of a conservative White House administration
seeking to solidify its legacy.
**************************************
2.
BUSH RAISES TEMPERATURE ON GLOBAL WARMING
By Tony Blankley, Wash Times,
April 16, 2008
http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/20080416/EDITORIAL01/192044535/1013
The last months of a presidential administration are often dangerous. Presidents looking to their legacy go to desperate lengths to try to enhance their reputation for posterity. A pungent example of such practices by the Bush administration was reported above the fold on the front page of The Washington Times Monday: "Bush prepares global warming initiative."
Oh dear. Just as an increasing number of scientists are finding their courage to speak out against the global warming alarmists, and just as a building body of evidence and theories challenge the key elements of the human-centric carbon-based global warming theories President Bush takes this moment to say in effect: "We are all global alarmists now."
It reminds me of the moment back in 1971, when Richard Nixon proclaimed, "We are all Keynesians now" eight years after Milton Friedman had published his book "A Monetary History of the United States 1867-1960," and about an hour-and-half before a consensus built that Mr. Friedman's work consigned Keynes to the dustbin of economic history.
Now it is Mr. Bush's turn to be the last man to join a losing proposition. How many ways is this proposal unuseful? First of all, as Chris Horner, the author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming," has shrewdly pointed out: The Democrats desperately want Mr. Bush and the Republicans "to take ownership" of the global alarmists' issues before he goes.
This is important. Whatever restraint likely to be exercised by the Democratic Party majority next year will be induced by the political fear that the Republicans would be able to say I told you so, if their policies contract the economy and put yet more people out of work. That will give them political cover for the entire program, which, whatever it may try to do regarding "global warming," will certainly give governments and international organizations vastly more regulatory and tax control of the U.S. economy.
Of course, the proposed carbon taxes will subtract hundreds of billions (or trillions) of dollars from productive private-sector economic activity and transfer it to "our friend the government" to spend "beneficially" for us all. Beyond even confiscatory taxation, reduced economic output and higher unemployment we have hints of other things to come with the talk of connecting private homes into the central electricity grid.
In its benign form, it is described in an Op-Ed in the Washington paper The Hill: "As demand for energy services grows, the nation's outdated grid is showing signs of strain due to congestion, sometimes resulting in large-scale outages, such as the blackouts and brownouts experienced in New York, California, and my home state of Texas during summertime heat waves in recent years. One solution to this problem would be to build scores of new power plants and thousands of miles of new transmission lines to increase overall grid capacity. A better way is to change how we manage electric power, by deploying smart-grid technologies. A smart grid uses information technology to transform a simple 'pipe' into an interactive energy-management system. Streams of real-time information are exchanged between users, producers, and the grid itself to allow dynamic power management that increases both efficiency and stability."
But one can well imagine what the global-warming fanatics might wish government to do with "interactive dynamic power management." Energy pigs (for example people like me who want to run air conditioning on hot days) will not be permitted to destroy the planet. Our energy use can easily be "capped" by the dynamic system. One bureaucrat will be empowered to turn our electricity on or off according to the dictates of the current politically correct judgment.
Equally frightening is the emerging strategy of using global warming policy to crush the economies of the West, but not of the "developing" nations. Also reported Monday on the front page of The Washington Times was the story of Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. climate-treaty secretariat. This dangerous U.N. official stated that he wants to exempt China and India from carbon emission regulation and taxation. In an example of suicidal liberal guilt, this blithering nitwit argued that the United States and Europe have "a historic responsibility" for emitting carbons and thus should pay the price now.
Albeit, Mr. Bush doesn't intend all the catastrophic consequences of his simple decision to offer legislation to regulate carbon emission. But then, by this point he should be quite familiar with the concept of unintended consequences. And he needs to recognize that he cannot pass "sensible "legislation. (I have serious doubts that any legislation on this topic could be sensible.)
All he can do is set the stage for next year's legislation, by giving away the rhetorical store and weakening the already modest backbone of Republican legislators. The liberal world order will not let go of their global-warming assault on free economies until hell freezes over by which point, obviously, the global-warming theory will be visibly disproven.
**************************************************
3.
OUR CLIMATE NUMBERS ARE A BIG OLD MESS
By Patrick Michaels, WSJ, April 18, 2008
http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120847988943824973.html
President George W. Bush has just announced his goal to stabilize greenhouse-gas emissions by 2025. To get there, he proposes new fuel-economy standards for autos, and lower emissions from power plants built in the next 10 to 15 years.
Pending legislation in the Senate from Joe Lieberman and John Warner would cut emissions even further – by 66% by 2050. No one has a clue how to do this. Because there is no substitute technology to achieve these massive reductions, we'll just have to get by with less energy. Compared to a year ago, gasoline consumption has dropped only 0.5% at current prices. So imagine how expensive it would be to reduce overall emissions by 66%.
The earth's paltry warming trend, 0.31 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the mid-1970s, isn't enough to scare people into poverty. And even that 0.31-degree figure is suspect.
For years, records from surface thermometers showed a global warming trend beginning in the late 1970s. But temperatures sensed by satellites and weather balloons displayed no concurrent warming. These records have been revised a number of times, and I examined the two major revisions of these three records. They are the surface record from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the satellite-sensed temperatures originally published by University of Alabama's John Christy, and the weather-balloon records originally published by James Angell of the U.S. Commerce Department.
The two revisions of the IPCC surface record each successively lowered temperatures in the 1950s and the 1960s. The result? Obviously more warming – from largely the same data.
The balloon temperatures got a similar treatment. While these originally showed no warming since the late 1970s, inclusion of all the data beginning in 1958 resulted in a slight warming trend. In 2003, some tropical balloon data, largely from poor countries, were removed because their records seemed to vary too much from year to year. This change also resulted in an increased warming trend. Another check for quality control in 2005 created further warming, doubling the initial overall rate.
Then it was discovered that our orbiting satellites have a few faults. The sensors don't last very long and are continually being supplanted by replacement orbiters. The instruments are calibrated against each other, so if one is off, so is the whole record. Frank Wentz, a consulting atmospheric scientist from California, discovered that the satellites also drift a bit in their orbits, which induces additional bias in their readings. The net result? A warming trend appears where before there was none.
There have been six major revisions in the warming figures in recent years, all in the same direction. So it's like flipping a coin six times and getting tails each time. The chance of that occurring is 0.016, or less than one in 50. That doesn't mean that these revisions are all hooey, but the probability that they would all go in one direction on the merits is pretty darned small.
The removal of weather-balloon data because poor nations don't do a good job of minding their weather instruments deserves more investigation, which is precisely what University of Guelph economist Ross McKitrick and I did. Last year we published our results in the Journal of Geophysical Research, showing that "non-climatic" effects in land-surface temperatures – GDP per capita, among other things – exert a significant influence on the data. For example, weather stations are supposed to be a standard white color. If they darken from lack of maintenance, temperatures read higher than they actually are. After adjusting for such effects, as much as half of the warming in the U.N.'s land-based record vanishes. Because about 70% of earth's surface is water, this could mean a reduction of as much as 15% in the global warming trend.
Another interesting thing happens to the U.N.'s data when it's adjusted for the non-climatic factors. The frequency of very warm months is lowered, to the point at which it matches the satellite data, which show fewer very hot months. That's a pretty good sign that there are fundamental problems with the surface temperature history. At any rate, our findings have not been incorporated into the IPCC's history, and they probably never will be.
The fear of a sudden loss of ice from Greenland also makes a lot of news. A year ago, radio and television were ablaze with the discovery of "Warming Island," a piece of land thought to be part of Greenland. But when the ice receded in the last few years, it turned out that there was open water. Hence Warming Island, which some said hadn't been uncovered for thousands of years. CNN, ABC and the BBC made field trips to the island.
But every climatologist must know that Greenland's last decade was no warmer than several decades in the early and mid-20th century. In fact, the period from 1970-1995 was the coldest one since the late 19th century, meaning that Greenland's ice anomalously expanded right about the time climate change scientists decided to look at it.
The mechanism for the Greenland disaster is that summer warming creates rivers, called moulins, which descend into the ice cap, lubricating a rapid collapse and raising sea levels by 20 feet in the next 90 years. In Al Gore's book, "An Inconvenient Truth," there's a wonderful picture of a moulin on page 193, with the text stating "These photographs from Greenland illustrate some of the dramatic changes now happening on the ice there."
Really? There's a photograph in the journal "Arctic," published in 1953 by R.H. Katz, captioned "River disappearing in 40-foot deep gorge," on Greenland's Adolf Hoels Glacier. It's all there in the open literature, but apparently that's too inconvenient to bring up. Greenland didn't shed its ice then. There was no acceleration of the rise in sea level.
Finally, no one seems to want to discuss that for millennia after the end of the last ice age, the Eurasian arctic was several degrees warmer in summer (when ice melts) than it is now. We know this because trees are buried in areas that are now too cold to support them. Back then, the forest extended all the way to the Arctic Ocean, which is now completely surrounded by tundra. If it was warmer for such a long period, why didn't Greenland shed its ice?
This prompts the ultimate question: Why is the news on global warming always bad? Perhaps because there's little incentive to look at things the other way. If you do, you're liable to be pilloried by your colleagues. If global warming isn't such a threat, who needs all that funding? Who needs the army of policy wonks crawling around the world with bold plans to stop climate change?
But as we face the threat of massive energy taxes – raised by perceptions of increasing rates of warming and the sudden loss of Greenland's ice – we should be talking about reality.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Michaels is senior fellow in
environmental studies at the Cato Institute and professor of environmental
sciences at University of Virginia.
***********************************************
http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080416/COMMENTARY/982402072
What would you think if members of
Congress voted to require the U.S. military to forgo purchases of most of
Canada's oil and thus be forced to increase their dependency on Saudi Arabian
produced oil? As bizarre as it may seem, this is not a hypothetical question
but precisely what Congress did in passing the falsely named "Energy
Independence and Security Act of 2007."
Chairman Henry Waxman of the House
Oversight and Government Reform Committee wrote a letter to Chairman Jeff
Bingaman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on March 17 of
this year, detailing the "proper interpretation" of the Act. Mr. Waxman said section 526 of the Act
prohibits U.S. government agencies, including the military, from purchasing
"fuels derived from tar sands." Mr. Waxman also said the Act
prohibits the Air Force from developing "coal-to-liquid fuels."
Most of the oil and gasoline
produced from tar sands comes from our friendly neighbor, Canada, which has
enormous petroleum reserves in the form of tar, or more correctly, "oil
sands." And the prohibition of using coal-to-liquid fuels precludes the
United States from using its several hundred years of coal reserves to replace
dependence on oil produced in the Middle East and other volatile and unreliable
regions.
When members of Congress vote for
such destructive legislation, it is difficult to know if they do so because
they (and their staffers) have not read the bill, or they do not understand the
consequences of their actions, or they just want to undermine the U.S. economy.
The rationale for the provision in
the Act was to prohibit the acquisition of fuels that have "higher
life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions" (CO2) than traditional fuels.
However, since passage of the Act, scientists have determined producing
corn-based ethanol creates more CO2 than pumping oil out of wells.
Thus, it now appears the Energy
Independence Act, as interpreted by the author (Mr. Waxman) of section 526,
contradicts some of the provisions of the ethanol mandates also passed by the
same Congress. As crazy as it seems, there may now be almost no legal way for
oil companies to supply many U.S. government agencies, including the military,
with the full range of products they need.
This, of course, will give the highly partisan, mean-spirited, and
TV-camera-addicted Henry Waxman another excuse to drag oil company executives
before Congress to more ritual beatings.
Even members of Congress who are
not overly partisan or mean-spirited, such as Sens. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut
Independent Democrat, and John Warner, Virginia Republican, inadvertently can
engage in destructive overreaction. They have proposed a bill "America's
Climate Security Act of 2007" (S. 2191) that would enforce a nationwide
cap and trade program for the emissions of greenhouse gases and require a major
reduction in CO2 emissions over the next 40 years. However, a new study by SAC,
using the National Energy Modeling System (EMS), and just released by the
American Council for Capital Formation and the National Association of
Manufacturers, indicates that by 2030 there is likely to be a much bigger
impact on jobs (up to 4 million lost) and household income (down almost
$7,000), and much greater increases in gasoline and electricity prices than
originally estimated.
Some study critics have complained
it did not deal with the "costs of inaction," is a fair point,
provided these costs are estimated correctly.
Even though most climatologists
believe the Earth is getting warmer as it has for last couple of hundred years
there is no consensus about the rate of warming. (Note: It now appears the
average global temperature this past year was not only one of the coldest on
record, but is a continuation of a cooling trend that started about 1998, which
may or may not continue, and no one knows for sure.)
Most plants and animals — and most
notably, humans have been adapting well to the gradual warming in recent
centuries, so the "cost of inaction" is minimal at the present rates
of warming. Unless all the major global CO2 emitters join in the reduction
program, it is economic suicide for one, or even several, countries to move to
highly expensive CO2 reduction programs and China and India have given no
indication that they will join in. (Chinese skepticism is likely to grow after
having just experienced a record cold winter.)
Most European nations are already
missing their Kyoto targets and hence are now backing off because of the
economic costs. Scientists have now determined that the Earth has had much
higher CO2 concentrations in the past, and these periods have been associated
with both higher and lower temperatures.
We do know for certain that in the
two decades since the global warming "crisis" became highly
publicized many of the original assumptions, models and predictions
(temperature and hurricane forecasts, et al.) have already been proven
incorrect.
We also know for certain that rich countries and rich people can adjust to climate change much easier than can the poor who have fewer options. So it is prudent to try to make more people in more countries more prosperous so they can deal with climate changes, rather than spend large amounts of money on dubious climate change programs, whose only known certain result is to make many people poorer.
-------------------------------------
Richard W. Rahn is a senior fellow
at the Cato Institute and chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth.
*************************************
5.
FURTHER REPORTS ANNOUNCED BY CLIMATE-CHANGE PANEL
Published online 16 April 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/452796b
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080416/full/452796b.html
The fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report will
be out by 2014, IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri announced last week in Budapest.
The report from the first working group will come out in 2013, however, so that
its findings can be incorporated more fully into the reports from the second
and third working groups.
At its planning meeting, the IPCC also released a smaller report on the
effects of climate change on water supplies worldwide. In addition, the agency
plans to produce a special report on renewable energy, which is expected to be
released in 2010.
========================================================
Comment: The
Kyoto Protocol has been around for just over 10 years. In these ten years global emissions of CO2
have risen from just under 25 to over 31 gigatonnes of CO2 -- over 30% above the Kyoto target of 1990
emissions levels. In spite of this, the
global temperature record has shown absolutely no warming in the last 10 years
and 2008 appears to be following this trend.
On February 2, 2007 the IPCC
Fourth Assessment Report stated explicitly that the world was still warming and
that there was a 90-99% certainty this was being caused by human CO2
emissions. The date of this release
coincides with dropping global temperatures and continuous rise in CO2
levels contradicting both assertions of the IPCC.
Since the IPCC is the sole
reference for the political action taken on this issue, it is critical for
governments to address this misrepresentation of fact before continuing on the
current course of action -- and even more important, it is the job of the media
to publish the actual graph to demonstrate this to the public.
*************************
6. AL GORE SAYS ANY SCIENTIST WHO DISAGREES
WITH HIM ON GLOBAL WARMING IS A KOOK, OR A CROOK.
Guess he never met these
guys
From Richard Vigilante Books. publisher of “The Deniers” by
Lawrence Solomon
Dr. Edward Wegman--former chairman
of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the National Academy
of Sciences--demolishes the famous "hockey stick" graph that launched
the global warming panic.
Dr. David Bromwich--president of the International Commission on Polar
Meteorology--says "it's hard to see a global warming signal from the
mainland of Antarctica right now."
Prof. Paul Reiter--Chief of Insects and Infectious Diseases at the famed
Pasteur Institute--says "no major scientist with any long record in this
field" accepts Al Gore's claim that global warming spreads mosquito-borne
diseases.
Prof. Hendrik Tennekes--director of research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological
Institute--states "there exists no sound theoretical framework for climate
predictability studies" used for global warming forecasts.
Dr. Christopher Landsea--past chairman of the American Meteorological Society's
Committee on Tropical Meteorology and Tropical Cyclones--says "there are
no known scientific studies that show a conclusive physical link between global
warming and observed hurricane frequency and intensity."
Dr. Antonino Zichichi--one of the world's foremost physicists, former president
of the European Physical Society, who discovered nuclear antimatter--calls
global warming models "incoherent and invalid."
Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski--world-renowned expert on the ancient ice cores used in
climate research--says the U.N. "based its global-warming hypothesis on
arbitrary assumptions and these assumptions, it is now clear, are false."
Prof. Tom V. Segalstad--head of the Geological Museum, University of Oslo--says
"most leading geologists" know the U.N.'s views "of Earth
processes are implausible."
Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu--founding director of the International Arctic Research
Center, twice named one of the "1,000 Most Cited Scientists," says
much "Arctic warming during the last half of the last century is due to
natural change."
Dr. Claude Allegre--member, U.S. National Academy of Sciences and French
Academy of Science, he was among the first to sound the alarm on the dangers of
global warming. His view now: "The cause of this climate change is
unknown."
Dr. Richard Lindzen--Professor of Meteorology at M.I.T., member, the National
Research Council Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, says global warming
alarmists "are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the
models were right."
Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov--head of the space research laboratory of the
Russian Academy of Science's Pulkovo Observatory and of the International Space
Station's Astrometria project says "the common view that man's industrial
activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a
misinterpretation of cause and effect relations."
Dr. Richard Tol--Principal researcher at the Institute for Environmental
Studies at Vrije Universiteit, and Adjunct Professor at the Center for
Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change, at Carnegie Mellon
University, calls the most influential global warming report of all time
"preposterous . . . alarmist and incompetent."
Dr. Sami Solanki--director and scientific member at the Max Planck Institute
for Solar System Research in Germany, who argues that changes in the Sun's
state, not human activity, may be the principal cause of global warming:
"The sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be
affecting global temperatures."
Prof. Freeman Dyson--one of the world's most eminent physicists -- says the
models used to justify global warming alarmism are "full of fudge
factors" and "do not begin to describe the real world."
Dr. Eigil Friis-Christensen--director of the Danish National Space Centre,
vice-president of the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy,
who argues that changes in the Sun's behavior could account for most of the
warming attributed by the UN to man-made CO2.
-------------------------------
And many more, all in Lawrence
Solomon's devastating new book, The Deniers
****************************
7. EDITORIAL: GOOD NEWS AND
BAD NEWS ABOUT GW
S.
Fred Singer, April 19, 2008
I’ve got good news and bad
news. The good news is that the science
is settled – but not the way Al Gore imagines it. The IPCC concluded that global warming is anthropogenic, and they
are 90 to 99 percent sure of it. But
they don’t have any evidence that will stand up to scrutiny. None whatsoever. NIPCC, however, has firm evidence against AGW and we are more
than willing to defend our result:
Carbon dioxide growth does not contribute significantly to climate
change. CO2 is not a pollutant. On the contrary, it make plants grow faster
and is beneficial. We need more of it. Since climate change is natural, any attempt
to control CO2 is pointless, hugely expensive, and counterproductive. The irrational fear of global warming is
distorting energy policy and hurting our economy. It raises the cost of energy, food, and everything else.
And now the bad news. Some people have figured out how to profit
from global warming fears, are making billions, and will continue to make even
more money – and this includes industries,
not just lawyers, brokers and politicians. There are now many vested interests that want to keep global
warming fears alive – at the expense of the rest of the population. How long can this go on?
I’m sure that the bubble
will burst but I don’t know when. I
hope it will be soon. I don’t know what
will trigger the collapse. It will
probably not be just the science. Maybe
it will be a few really cold years, failed harvests, and general misery. Or maybe true consumer advocates and
public-spirited groups will become wise to the global warming scam.
The White House has just
announced a new initiative but no one seems to be quite sure what it
means. I hope they will concentrate on
energy intensity i.e. CO2 emission per GNP.
In essence this means improved energy efficiency – which is all to the
good. I hope we can avoid punitive
energy taxes or the even worse cap-and-trade schemes. I hope we can avoid more ethanol and other biofuels, vast
investments in “renewable” energies like wind and solar – which are still
uneconomic. Above all, I hope we can
avoid schemes for carbon capture and sequestration – which go contrary to
efficiency of energy use.
I don’t know what will come
after the Bush administration. All of
the current candidates, both Democrats and Republicans, are considered to be
“global warmers.” With Hillary Clinton
and Barack Obama battling each other, seemingly to the finish, the wiser heads
of the Democratic Party may retire to their “smoke-filled room” and draft Al
Gore – who is eminently electable. It
would be interesting to watch him battle John McCain, who proposed the first
cap-and-trade legislation. It will make
life for climate skeptics, like myself, very exciting, to say the least. Maybe, McCain, if elected, will give up his
global warming enthusiasm rather than see the US economy go down the
drain.
If Gore is nominated, I’m
thinking of setting up a “Climate Skeptics for McCain” group to get him
elected.