June 3 in
Amsterdam; June 4,5 Briefings in Delft,
Rotterdam, Wageningen
June 6 Press
briefing on NIPCC in Dusseldorf, Germany>
June 7 Cologne,
informal meeting of skeptics in Mainz
June 9 Briefings
in Frankfurt, Stuttgart
June 13,14
Vienna. Luncheon talk at Hayek
Institute
June 15 Venice and Padova
June 16 Visit to Brixen
June 17, 18
Milan. Seminar at Politecnico.
Luncheon talk (Istituto Bruno Leoni)
Visits to
Cenacolo and Museo della Scienza
June 19-22
Paris. Discussion at IPGP,
Univ-Paris-7, Jussieu, and with Pierre Morel
Meeting
with Skeptics Group at Procope
June 23 Brussels.
Seminar at Royal Observatory;
Briefing at
EU Parliament (Roger Helmer, MEP)
Briefing of
EU Commissioner Stavros Dimas
June 24-26
London. Talk to ‘Sceptics in the
Pub’
Luncheon
talk on NIPCC at CPS (Lord Lawson)
Meetings
with Lord Blackwell and MPs
*******************************
"A man with a conviction is a hard man to change.
Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he
questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.”
-----Leon Festiger
********************************************
1. Debunking Al Gore (and Hansen) Greenland
collapse hype
2. Four policy choices – but only IF one assumes
that GW is a problem
3. How Cap
& Trade was defeated in the US Senate
4.
Carbon Cemeteries are a dead loss for everyone
5. Britain’s coming energy crisis
6.
Responding to critics of NIPCC conclusion
7. Twenty Years of GW Demagoguery
8. Global Warming as a Mass Neurosis
9. NIPCC Report is now available as an
E-Book.
NEWS YOU CAN USE
Jim Hansen
unhinged:
http://www.ilgiornale.it/a.pic1?ID=273762 (in Italian)
**************************************
US CAP: The lobbying group US
Climate Action Partnership (www.us-cap.org) is led by GE. The group
includes Duke Energy, several oil companies, good old DuPont and Dow, and
several environmental groups. This is
good old Mercantilism whereby groups sought economic privilege from political
powers to give them advantage over competitors.
In Wealth of Nations Adam Smith devoted a great deal of space
exposing the weaknesses of the system.
He considered it a fraud perpetrated by the business class on the
public. Rather than the king, now the politicians select winners and losers. The winners will be those who deliver the
most goods to the politicians, the losers those who deliver the most goods to
the consumers.
***********************************
Japan rues
Kyoto climate experience http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7490165.stm
The Kyoto Protocol
on climate change negotiated in 1997 was unfair to Japan, one of the nation's
chief climate negotiators has told BBC News.
Jun Arima, lead negotiator for Japan's energy ministry, said the 1990
baseline for CO2 cuts agreed at Kyoto was arranged for the convenience of the
UK and Germany.
*********
Nobelists
express doubts about Global Warming (Courtesy Prof Philip Stott)
Johann Deisenhofer
(Germany: Chemistry, 1988); Ivar Giaever (Norway: Physics, 1973); Hartmut
Michel (Germany: Chemistry, 1988); Douglas Osheroff (USA: Physics, 1996); Carlo
Rubbia (Italy: Physics, 1984); Jack Steinberger (US-Germany: Physics, 1988);
and Klaus von Klitzing (Germany: Physics, 1985
**********************************
Most Britons
doubt cause of GW
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/22/climatechange.carbonemissions
*********************************
Message from Australia: Our government has just been delivered a commissioned report
by Prof Garnaut, which has been described as the longest suicide note ever
written for an economy. It is a plan for carbon trading and how to deal with
the consequences. We are being lead on a mindless journey to economic oblivion
based entirely on the false premise that CO2 is causing global warming (now
called global climate change) --- Peter
Harris
***************************************************
“The
Norwegian Parliament awarded half of the
2007 Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the other half to the IPCC -- as a
purely political gesture. Previous
awardees have included “peace-loving” Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat –
which should tell you something about the award process and the people who
control it. The IPCC has always
proclaimed a “consensus” of 2500
scientists -- a gross exaggeration, and
also untrue. At most 500 can claim to be
scientists, and many of these, like me, are reviewers of the IPCC report who
disagree profoundly with the IPCC conclusion, unsupported by any real evidence,
that global warming is human-caused. I
claim my tiny little part of the Nobel Prize, not to enhance my CV but just to
show how silly the whole process is.” --- (Prof.) S Fred Singer
Letter
submitted July 2 http://www.publicservice.co.uk/feature_feedback_complete.asp?id=9867
***********************
SHS
(Second-Hand Smoke): I don’t like it but this should
not be allowed to affect the science:
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=23399&CFID=3892739&CFTOKEN=86028232
James E. Enstrom and Geoffrey C. Kabat, "Environmental tobacco smoke and
tobacco related mortality in a prospective study of Californians,
1960-98," British Medical Journal, May 2003: http://www.heartland.org/article.cfm?artId=23332.
*******************************************
BELOW THE BOTTOM
LINE:
PARIS (AFP) The
head of the UN's Nobel-winning panel of climate scientists said only seven
years remained for stabilising emissions of global-warming gases at a level
widely considered safe. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), delivered the bleak warning at a gathering of
European Union ministers where he pleaded with the EU to take the lead in
global talks on tackling climate change. The UN negotiations "must progress
rapidly, otherwise I am afraid that not only future generations but even this
generation will treat us as having been irresponsible," said Pachauri.
"The EU has to lead. If the EU does not lead, I am afraid that any attempt
to bring about change and to manage the problem of climate change will
collapse." http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jGxKw2XS4_IHH6Xc7RVAY02dkNBg
############################################
1.
SEASONAL FACTOR SEEN IN MELTING AND ICE SHIFTS IN GREENLAND
By Andrew C.
Revkin, July 4, 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/04/science/earth/04greenland.html?ref=science
One of the most
vivid symbols of global warming is the torrents of melt water that drain from
the lakes that form each summer on Greenland's ice sheet. Recent studies have shown that this water,
which flows deep into the ice through natural drainpipes called moulins, allows
the ice to slide faster over bedrock toward the ocean. And the faster the ice
flows, the faster sea levels rise. But a Dutch study using 17 years of
satellite measurements in western Greenland suggests that the movement
associated with the meltwater is not as rapid as had been feared. The
acceleration appears to be a transient summer phenomenon, the researchers said,
with the yearly movement actually dropping slightly in some places.
"The positive-feedback mechanism
between melt rate and ice velocity," says the report, published July 4 in
the journal Science, "appears to be a seasonal process that may have only
a limited effect on the response of the ice sheet to climate warming over the
next decades."
====================
My response to
Revkin:
One does not have
to be an expert glaciologist in order to support the conclusion of van de
Wal. We have the historic record to draw
on. Greenland temperatures were warmer
than today’s in the Middle Ages, 1000 years ago – and much warmer during the
‘Holocene Optimum’ 8000 – 5000 years BP
(before present) (see the data of Dahl-Jensen et al, Science 1998). The ice cap did not disappear and data from
corals show no unusual rise in global sea level – just the same steady rise of
18 cm per century that’s been measured during the past 3000 years (see NIPCC report “Nature – Not Human
Activity – Rules the Climate” http://www.sepp.org/publications/NIPCC_final.pdf
) SFS
************************************
2. FOUR
WAYS OF LOOKING AT GLOBAL WARMING POLICY
Assume man-made
global warming is a big problem, says Reason. What should we do about
it?
The four general
policies currently in play are (1) cap-and-trade; (2) carbon taxes; (3)
encourage economic growth and allow richer future generations to deal with any
problems; and (4) massive government-funded low carbon energy research.
These policies all
involve the invention and deployment of new low-carbon energy technologies, says
Reason:
o The first two proposals do it by raising the
price of carbon-based energy relative to low-carbon energy technologies.
o The third one implicitly melds the
two-century-long trend toward progressive decarbonization of our energy
supplies with a strategy of adaptation.
o The fourth one aims to accelerate
technological innovation by stimulating the research and engineering pipeline.
Cap-and-trade is a
rent-seeking disaster, carbon taxes are a political pipe dream, and furthering
economic growth and adaptation doesn't require any specific global warming
policy, says Reason. After excluding
those three proposals, that leaves us with low carbon energy research.
Michael
Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, authors of "Break Through: From the Death
of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility," want to dedicate the
revenues from a modest carbon tax to funding their low carbon energy research
scheme.
As an alternative,
H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis,
has proposed a twofer -- would Shellenberger and Nordhaus support oil drilling
on the outer continental shelves?
Drilling could supply energy in the short to medium term while leasehold
monies and royalties could be committed to low carbon energy research.
Which of the four
policies is likely to be adopted? Given
that both John McCain and Barack Obama favor cap-and-trade, get ready for an
orgy of rent-seeking on Capitol Hill in 2009, says Reason.
----------------------------------------
Source: Ronald
Bailey, "Four Ways of Looking at Global Warming Policy," Reason, July
1, 2008.
http://reason.com/news/show/127279.html [Courtesy
NCPA]
*******************************************
3. HOW CAP & TRADE WAS DEFEATED: OPPOSITION TO
ENERGY-RATIONING BILL WAS BI-PARTISAN
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121296724450055721.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Lieberman-Warner
Postmortem
By Myron Ebell, CEI
Last week, I summarized what happened to the Lieberman-Warner-Boxer (hereafter L-W-B) energy-rationing bill on the Senate
floor. This week I want to begin discussing what can be learned from it
that might be useful as we prepare to fight cap-and-trade in the next
Congress. What strikes me most strongly is that while the push for
reducing emissions is coming from environmental pressure groups, the push for
cap-and-trade as the means to do so is coming from big businesses that hope to
make a lot of money in the short term. The battle is therefore really between
special interests and consumers (that is, the public). Special interests
are organized to exert considerable pressure on Congress, while consumers are
not. That is usually bad news for consumers. (The 2005 and 2007 ethanol
mandates and the new farm bill are good examples of how things usually turn out
in Washington.)
However, L-W-B crashed in less than a
week. Why? First, the environmental pressure groups were
divided. Friends of the Earth led a ‘Fix It or Ditch It’ grassroots
campaign, while the big Wall Street establishment groups, Natural Resources
Defense Council and Environmental Defense Fund, supported the bill.
Second, there was no way to pay off all the special interests. Some big
companies didn’t do so well. Thus James Rogers, Chairman, President, and
CEO of Duke Energy, has been the biggest promoter of cap-and-trade in the
business community, but he lobbied actively against it because he felt that
Duke wasn’t getting its fair cut (that is, more than its share of the
loot). Now, Rogers
has come out in favor of a carbon tax, which may or may not be a strategic
ploy.
The fact that big business was divided meant
that there was room for the public to make their views heard in
Washington. Since Kyoto hasn’t been a live issue since it was negotiated
in 1997, most conservative groups haven’t paid much attention to it -- and
understandably so: there are many other important issues and resources are
limited. But in the weeks leading up to the debate, many conservative
grassroots groups got active. Talk radio paid a lot of attention to
L-W-B, and listeners started to light up the phone lines. I don’t know
how many people called or wrote their Senators, but I did notice in the debate
that quite a few Senators who support cap-and-trade suddenly felt obliged to
express concern about the costs to consumers.
My preliminary conclusion is that the public can be heard when cap-and-trade
comes up again in 2009 or 2010 and therefore it can be defeated in Congress,
but only if we can keep the special interests divided and pushing and shoving
each other to get to the trough. If the proponents figure out a way to
pay everybody off, then it will become very difficult to save ourselves from
energy rationing.
********************
4. CARBON CEMETERIES ARE A DEAD LOSS FOR
EVERYONE
A Submission from: The Carbon Sense Coalition www.carbon-sense.com
to the Parliamentary Enquiry into
Greenhouse Gas Storage, 30 June 2008
1. The Facts of the Matter
The Carbon Sense Coalition
(“Carbon Sense”) has looked in detail at the costs and benefits of
carbon geo-sequestration as a
guide to what should be in any legislation establishing property
rights in carbon burial grounds.
In summary our findings are:
The basis for
legislation requiring the burial of carbon dioxide (CO2) rests wholly on
one proposition – that increasing
emissions of CO2 from man’s activities will cause
dangerous global warming. This
proposition is false.
There is no
evidence and no scientific proof that CO2 is the key driver of world
temperature. World climate and
temperature have been changing for millions of years.
Today’s atmospheric conditions
and temperature are not unusual and not threatening –
in fact they are very beneficial
to all life.
The case against
carbon dioxide rests solely on complex computer models which are
manipulated to produce scary
forecasts of climate change resulting from carbon
emissions. There is no proof that
these models have any forecasting ability beyond
about 5 days, yet they are being
used as justification for massive economic dislocations
including destruction of capital
and a huge increase in taxes and red tape on every
human activity.
Despite all the
colourful hysteria, carbon dioxide is quite boring. It is a colourless,
odourless, non-toxic gas
occurring in trace amounts in today’s atmosphere. However
what is not shouted in the media
is that CO2 is the basic food source for all life on
earth. The earth, the oceans and
earth’s life processes have a huge ability to extract and
stabilise CO2 in the atmosphere.
But even if man’s activities did manage to increase
CO2 levels significantly, the
change would be very beneficial for food production and
for all life on earth.
There is no
guarantee that Carbon Capture and Storage will ever become a reality. It
will never be possible to capture
even a small percentage of man’s total CO2 emissions.
The process will be horrendously
expensive (it could double the capital cost per unit of
energy produced) and the main
cost must be borne by those associated with coal power
stations – shareholders,
electricity consumers or taxpayers - probably all three. Finally,
when the final carbon accounting
is done properly, the extra energy consumed in
separating, compressing,
pipelines, drilling and storage may result in negligible net CO2
reduction.
The conclusion is
inescapable – there are NO BENEFITS in legislation forcing people
to bury the gas of life in carbon
cemeteries. In fact there are big potential costs in
reduced food production.
Therefore carbon funeral activities should not be allowed to
disrupt in any way beneficial
activities such as producing oil, gas, water, electricity or
food.
2. Government should not mandate,
subsidise or give priority to Geosequestration
Activities.
Injecting carbon dioxide into oil
fields in order to stimulate or enhance the production of oil is
a sensible productive activity.
Carbon Sense has no objection to this -- providing no element of
taxpayer subsidy is involved.
Moreover, we do not denigrate
people who fear the Greenhouse religion and wish to be seen
burying their CO2 at private
expense. The state should not interfere in any such private
religious ceremonies. However,
should shareholders’ funds be involved, directors can expect to
be called to account as the waste
of their funds becomes obvious.
The Parliamentary committee
should thus ensure that geo-sequestration should not be
mandated by law, it should not be
subsidised by taxpayers and it should not be allowed to
prevent or disrupt other economic
activities such as exploration for or production of oil, gas,
water or coal.
3. Governments should protect
Existing Property Rights.
4. Detailed Comments.
5. Conclusions – Carbon Capture
& Storage will be a Dead Loss
In summary, carbon cemeteries are
a dead loss for everyone.
They will have a huge cost, zero climate
benefits and, if the process is successful, it will reduce
world plant growth and food
production. However, when all the accounting is done, we may
find that the extra energy needed
for CO2 separation, compression, pipelines and storage may
result in there being negligible
net removal of CO2 anyway.
Therefore, there is no
justification for a huge new complex piece of legislation to allow carbon
dioxide burial parties to disrupt
more productive activities.
The activity should be allowed,
but should not devalue the rights of any existing owner of land,
petroleum, coal or water.
Moreover, the Commonwealth as
guardian of one of the world’s great food producing regions,
should not encourage, mandate or
subsidise burial of part of the world’s supply of aerial plant
fertiliser.
The Carbon Sense Coalition is
happy to appear before the committee or answer questions
posed by this submission or the
proposed legislation.
Authorised by:
Viv Forbes BSc App, FAIMM, FSIA
Chairman
The Carbon Sense Coalition
*******************************************
5. LOOK
OUT, MR CAMERON, OR WE'LL ALL BE IN THE DARK
By
Christopher Booker, The Sunday Telegraph, 29 June 2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/06/29/do2910.xml
Since [UK Prime
Minister] Gordon Brown on Thursday launched what he called "the greatest
revolution in our energy policy since the advent of nuclear power",
centred on building thousands of new wind turbines, let us start with a simple
fact.
Nothing conveys the
futility of wind power more vividly than this: that all the electricity
generated by the 2,000 wind turbines already built in Britain is still less
than that produced by a single medium-sized conventional power station. There are nearly 50 nuclear, gas or
coal-fired power plants in Britain today each of which produces more
electricity in a year than all those 2,000 turbines put together.
I make no apology
for returning to this subject because the "100 billion green energy
strategy" published last week, by what is now laughably known as the
Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), contains not
only many smaller deceptions and self-deceptions but one so great that almost
everyone has fallen for it.
The starting point
is the EU's requirement that, to combat the "threat of climate
change", we must drastically reduce our CO2 emissions, chiefly by building
thousands more wind turbines. It is
quite clear from the paper that BERR's officials know we haven't the faintest
hope of meeting our EU target in this way. So its number-crunchers have been
working overtime to squeeze down the amount of energy we source from wind to
the lowest figure it thinks can be made to sound plausible.
Until last week
BERR had been claiming that our EU requirement meant that we must generate 38
per cent of our electricity from renewables, the largest contribution coming
from 11,000 offshore turbines, representing 33 gigawatts (GW) of capacity. But
all this has changed dramatically. They
now talk only about the need to meet 32 per cent of our total EU renewables
target through our methods of electricity generation, with only 32 per cent of
that needing to come from wind - and that, they say, can be done with a mere
7,000 new offshore and onshore turbines.
However, our present generating capacity is 76GW. By 2020, on projected
demand, to replace one third of one third of our capacity with wind power would
mean generating an average of 10GW.
And herein lies the
central misconception which bedevils the entire debate. Because of the wind's
intermittency, turbines generate on average at less than a third of their
capacity. Thus to contribute 10GW would need 30GW of capacity, which would
require up to twice as many turbines as ministers are talking about - needing
to be erected at a rate of more than four every working day between now and
2020. In practical terms, even if they
grossly bend the planning rules (as MPs voted for last week), there isn't the
remotest chance that anything like this number of turbines could be built in
time to meet their target.
For instance, the
world only has five of the giant barges that can install monster turbines
offshore - and for more than half the year our weather conditions make
installation impossible anyway. But in
addition we should also need to build at least 20 new conventional power
stations simply to provide back-up for all the times when the wind is not
blowing - at a time when, within seven years, we already stand to lose 40 per
cent of our existing generating capacity through the closure of almost all our
ageing nuclear power plants and half our major coal and oil-fired power
stations (due to the crippling cost of complying with an EU anti-pollution
directive).
It is a total mess.
The reality is that, thanks to the dithering and wishful thinking of our
politicians, it may already be too late to avert that breakdown of our
electricity supply which would be one of the most serious disasters Britain has
ever faced. And, ironically, no one at
present looks more likely to inherit this mess than David Cameron - whose only
response to last week' s pie-in-the-sky from Gordon Brown was to say that the
Government should have been building all those useless windmills years ago.
Warming
denial a 'high crime'
James Hansen, the
head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), is to ask Congress
for the chief executives of US energy companies to face trial for the
"high crime" of denying global warming.
Since his historic
speech to Congress in July 1988, Mr Hansen and his close ally Al Gore have done
more than anyone else to promote the warming scare which has since swept the
world. Yet this is the man who last summer was forced to correct erroneous temperature
figures on his influential GISS website, to show that the highest recorded US
surface temperatures were not in the last 10 years, as Hansen claimed, but in
the 1930s. His latest outburst is only
one of many recent signs of desperation in the warmist lobby, as falling global
temperatures threaten to undermine the central tenet of their orthodoxy.
Far from continuing
to rise in sync with CO2 levels, as the theory says they should, temperatures
have not only been dropping but are now lower than when Hansen and Gore set the
scare in train in 1988. (For latest graph see the Watts Up With That
website.) Even fanatical upholders of
the dogma are having to admit that warming seems "temporarily" to
have stopped (along with the sunspot activity they try to ignore), although
they weakly claim, on no plausible evidence, that in 10 years' time it will
somehow return worse than ever.
Such delusions
might be viewed as no more than a comical instance of human folly, were it not
for the fact that almost every politician in the Western world has fallen for
them, and is now blindly supporting such crazed initiatives as that launched in
Britain last week by Gordon Brown, at fathomlessly destructive cost to us all.
*********************************
6.
RESPONDING TO CRITICS OF NIPCC CONCLUSION
By S Fred
Singer, Letter to Australian colleague, July 2
I read the comment
by Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics.
I don't know what discipline he represents but it sounds like a lot like
theology. And my mother warned me, long
ago, never to argue about religion.
As an atmospheric
physicist, I deal with facts: many independent measurements published by
recognized experts and the published results from some two dozen climate models
run by scientists who have specialized in this subdiscipline. The IPCC and nearly all scientists also
accept these same facts -- although the measurements are never perfect and the
model results are based on many assumptions.
All I claim is that
the observations disagree significantly with these model results. No one really disputes this claim but there
are different interpretations of what this disparity implies. Some IPCC scientists, mainly modelers, say: "Maybe
there's something wrong with the data."
Others claim that there is no real disagreement -- if one takes account
of all possible uncertainties and stretches the error bars sufficiently to get
an "overlap" between observations and model results.
Maybe so --
although very few would find such arguments convincing. Even professors of public ethics would see
the obvious disagreements; lawyers certainly would. But once one accepts that the models don't
represent reality, then "all the rest is only commentary" -- to quote a biblical sage.
It means that the
human-caused greenhouse effect is much smaller than the models calculate -- and
not significant compared to natural factors that rule the climate and are
beyond human control. All this has
important policy consequences, which I don’t need to belabor here. Suffice it to say that CO2 is not a pollutant
--in reality and in any legal sense.
Some interesting
questions remain but they are purely scientific and have little significance
for current policies:
· Why and how do climate models exaggerate the
manmade greenhouse effect? What's been
left out?
· What are the natural mechanisms that control
the climate? How well can they be
predicted?
All of these
matters are more fully discussed in the NIPCC report Nature Not Human Activity
Rules the Climate http://www.sepp.org/publications/NIPCC_final.pdf
I hope that Mr
Hamilton will take the time to look at it.
****************************
7. TWENTY
YEARS OF DEMAGOGUERY
John
Brignell, 29 June 2008
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/2008%20June.htm#twenty
He made a
prediction and it did not happen. Fair enough, that is how science progresses,
but any relationship between the Hansen phenomenon and science is rather
remote. His latest calling down of fire and brimstone is upon the wicked oil
executives, who are allegedly stoking up infidel opposition to the true gospel
of the global warming catastrophe to come. That this is not true is evident
from the greener-than-thou advertisements put out by that industry. They know a
good racket when they see one -- and if there are a few billion taxpayers'
dollars on offer, they want their share of them. They are, however, likened to
the tobacco giants who so misled the public.
Yes those were
liars; but so were their opponents, led by the EPA, and they turned out to be
better at it. The current big lie is that all the sceptical commentators are in
the pay of the nefarious industry. Hansen's answer to it all is to call for an
inquisition (he is a bit late into that game, by about five years). "May
you have what you wish for" is an ancient curse and it would be satisfying
to see Hansen have his day in court.
The reason that
Monty Python's dead parrot so rapidly became a dead metaphor is that it
encapsulates the modern political phenomenon of lying with a straight face,
when all parties involved know that it is a lie (It's not a [EU] constitution,
it is just a treaty). So now, when we are told that Global Warming isn't dead,
it's just restin', we accept it as just a normal part of the political process.
Formerly it would have been regarded as an example of the fifth of Langmuir's
laws of bad science.
It is quite
extraordinary that this sort of activity should fester within the world's most
notable scientific and engineering organisation. Anyone who has had the
misfortune to have been reluctantly involved with such a weirdo will feel the
embarrassment for all those genuine professionals whose ingenuity, among many
other achievements, put a man on the moon. They obviously tried to subject him
to some sort of control, quite properly in a tax-funded, non-academic
institution, which led to his wild claim to being censored. He must be the
least censored person on the planet, thanks to his friends in high places.
Perhaps the world
will one day be grateful to the brave band of volunteers, who have at last got
together to provide an audit of the activities of such fanatics. Owing to the
efforts of the likes of Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts, we have been able to
penetrate the unscientific veil of secrecy behind which they brew their spells
and hokum. Not only are the standards of software production and maintenance
way, way below the standards officially embraced by NASA, some of the procedures
are unbelievably bizarre, including even the Orwellian process of
systematically rewriting the past.
A phenomenon
indeed!
************************************************
8. GLOBAL
WARMING AS A MASS NEUROSIS
By Bret
Stephens, Wall Street Journal, 1 July
2008
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121486841811817591.html?mod=todays_columnists
Last week marked
the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming.
Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it's time for political
scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in. What, discredited?
Thousands of scientists insist otherwise, none more noisily than NASA's Jim Hansen,
who first banged the gong with his June 23, 1988, congressional testimony
(delivered with all the modesty of "99% confidence").
But Mother Nature
has opinions of her own. NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year
on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934,
and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000
scientific robots in the world's oceans show there has been slight cooling in
the past five years, never mind that "80% to 90% of global warming
involves heating up ocean waters," according to a report by NPR's Richard
Harris.
The Arctic ice cap
may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for
years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere's
coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal
Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not
not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in
2020.
This last item is,
of course, a forecast, not an empirical observation. But it raises a useful
question: If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming,
what isn't evidence of global warming? What we have here is a nonfalsifiable
hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God.
This doesn't mean God doesn't exist, or that global warming isn't happening. It
does mean it isn't science.
So let's stop
fussing about the interpretation of ice core samples from the South Pole and
temperature readings in the troposphere. The real place where discussions of
global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives
for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations.
The first is as a
vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic
theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the
consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism.
Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore -- population
control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic
redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations -- and global warming
provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific
"consensus" warning that some looming environmental crisis could only
be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to
"patriarchal" science; curtains to the species.
A second
explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal
catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely
it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical
in their critique of the depredations of modern society: "And it repented
the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his
heart." That's Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen. And surely it is in
keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the "solutions"
chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior,
all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk
lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the
21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.
Finally, there is a
psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists,
and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a
large dose of penance. What's remarkable is the extent to which penance sells
among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about? As it
turns out, a lot, at least if you're inclined to believe that our successes are
undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect. In this view, global warming
is nature's great comeuppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience
for our worldly success.
In "The
Varieties of Religious Experience," William James distinguishes between
healthy, life-affirming religion and the monastically inclined,
"morbid-minded" religion of the sick-souled. Global warming is
sick-souled religion.
************************
9. NIPCC REPORT IS
NOW IN A SPECTACULAR E-BOOK FORMAT
The electronic book "Nature, Not Human Activity Rules
the Climate" is now available in DNL format. To view it you need a Windows operating system and have a
DNL Reader installed (similar to Acrobat Reader for a PDF file). If you already have the DNL Reader installed
on your computer, go to www.nzcpr.com and simply click the "Nature rules"
pix – or download directly from the NZCPR website: http://www.nzcpr.com/ebookNIPCC.htm
If you don't have the Reader, click on www.digitalwebbooks.com/reader and download the small file, which installs very quickly. You will then be able to read any other electronic books in DNL format.”
Please note that if you don’t have a WINDOWS operating system, you may have difficulty with the DNL format, in which case you can use the PDF version http://www.sepp.org/publications/NIPCC_final.pdf