NO ADVERTISEMENTS ACCEPTED ON THIS
SITE
Fred Singer speaking on March 30 noon
at the Georgetown Presbyterian Church 3115 P St, Wash, DC
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The trouble with the world is that the stupid
are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
--Bertrand Russell
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The 2008 International Conference on Climate
Change (NY City, March 2-4, 2008), organized by the Heartland Institute was a
smashing success: 100 skeptics spoke; attendance of 500, incl many media
http://www.heartland.org/NewYork08/ConferenceProgram.pdf
NIPCC report is released to wide acclaim [ITEM #1 and 2].
Download text: http://sepp.org/publications/NIPCC-Feb%2020.pdf
Lord Monckton comments on Conference papers
[ITEM #4]
A crucial EPA decision on CO2 threatens economy
[ITEM #5]
Polar bears caught in a heated eco-debate [ITEM
#6].
Big corn and ethanol
hoax: Walter Williams [ITEM #8]
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Roy Spencer -- on WV and climate incl his ppt
from the NY Climate Conference
http://www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm
Global warming may be happening. But the extent
of the potential danger is such that doing nothing is the best strategy of
all. http://westernstandard.ca/website/article.php?id=2753
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Maggi’s blog: http://www.theclimatescam.com/
Prof Peter Friedman
essay <pfriedman@umassd.edu>
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080311/OPINION/803110318
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1. NIPCC REPORT:
NATURE, NOT HUMAN ACTIVITY, RULES THE CLIMATE
Summary for Policymakers of the Report of the
Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change
Edited by S. Fred Singer, Ph.D.
Publication Date: March 2, 2008
Publisher: Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change / The
Heartland Institute
NIPCC is an
international coalition of scientists convened to provide an independent
examination of the evidence available on the causes and consequences of climate
change in the published, peer-reviewed literature – examined without bias and
selectivity. It includes many research
papers ignored by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), plus
additional scientific results that became available after the IPCC deadline of
May 2006.
The IPCC is
pre-programmed to produce reports to support the hypotheses of anthropogenic
warming and the control of greenhouse gases, as envisioned in the Global
Climate Treaty. The 1990 IPCC Summary
completely ignored satellite data, since they showed no warming. The 1995 IPCC report was notorious for the
significant alterations made to the text after it was approved by the
scientists – in order to convey the impression of a human influence. The 2001 IPCC report claimed the twentieth
century showed ‘unusual warming’ based on the now-discredited hockey-stick
graph. The latest IPCC report, published
in 2007, completely devaluates the climate contributions from changes in solar
activity, which are likely to dominate any human influence.
The foundation for
NIPCC was laid five years ago when a small group of scientists from the
Full text: http://sepp.org/publications/NIPCC-Feb%2020.pdf
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2.
A REALLY INCONVENIENT TRUTH
Brad Macdonald, Columnist,
March 13, 2008 |
http://www.thetrumpet.com/print.php?q=4940.3199.0.0
The most
inconvenient truth for climate alarmists is the burgeoning number of
influential scientists with dissenting opinions on global warming.
Excerpt: The real truth is that the theory of
man-made global warming despite being virtually canonized in the UN and the
minds of a slew of politicians and celebrities, and naturally in the mainstream
media remains one of the most contentious issues in science.
That contention was on full display in
Those who depend solely on the mainstream newsmedia to keep them informed might
have missed the headlines about the 2008
International Conference on Climate Change, sponsored by the Heartland
Institute and featuring nearly 100 speakers and 500 attendees skeptical of man-made
global warming. The highly successful three-day conference occurred in the wake
of recent reports
of global cooling and the release of a blockbuster
U.S. Senate minority report featuring over 400 prominent scientists disputing
the theory of man-made global warming.
Last week's conference testified to one towering truth in the world of science:
Debate within the scientific community over global warming is far from dead and
buried.
The high-water mark of the conference was the presentation of a report
produced by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC)
claiming nature, not human activity, was the cause of climate change.
The NIPCC is comprised of international scientists and was formed as a
counterforce to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
International scientists, climate experts and policymakers at the event
listened to lectures and panel discussions exposing the fraud of the global
warming "truth," perused studies and reports showing stark
division in the scientific community over global warming, and swapped
stories about how they'd been "denied tenure, shut out of scientific
conferences and rejected by academic journals because no matter how scrupulous
their research," their conclusions contradicted the truth espoused by the
climate change pharisees (National Post, March
10). Many attendees spoke of colleagues too afraid to attend the conference
for fear of losing their jobs.
Many of the details at the conference can be found in this piece
from the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Those who take
the time to investigate the links therein will experience an eye-opening expos
of the staggering scale of the global warming scam. Take funding
for global warming research, for example. Over the past decade, research
intended to prove the veracity of man-made global warming has been funded to
the tune of $50 billion, while global warming skeptic research has
received a comparatively measly $19 million.
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By John
Lettice 10th March 2008
A group of dissenting scientists and climate researchers has
affirmed that there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern
industrial activity cause climate change, and has called on world leaders to
abandon all efforts to reduce emissions "forthwith." Issued last week
at the close of the International Conference on Climate Change in
The Declaration stems from the work
of the Nongovermental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), which one
might term the evil twin of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), which published a closely-argued report
on the subject this month. The report takes the form of a critique of the
IPCC's Fourth Assessment
Report, which last year helped win the organisation a joint Nobel Peace
Prize with Al Gore.
The report's arguments, however,
probably deserve more than satirical remarks in response. The NIPCC, set up by
a group of scientists at a workshop in Vienna last year, sets out to provide a
"second opinion" on the data used by the IPCC and on its conclusions,
factoring in 'inconvenient' research that it claims the IPCC has missed or
ignored, and seeking to disrupt the widely-held global consensus that the questions
surrounding climate change are settled. "The IPCC seems to be aware of...
contrary evidence," says the report, "but has tried to ignore it or
wish it away."
The report states that climate change
has always happened and always will, and accepts that man-made CO2 emissions are growing, but
argues that the effect on climate is insignificant.. Solar activity, which it
says has been pretty much ignored as a possible factor by the IPCC, is in the
NIPCC's view the most likely cause of climate change.
It further argues that the fatal flaw
in the IPCC lies in its brief. It is "pre-programmed to produce reports to
support the hypotheses of anthropogenic [man-made] warming and the control of
greenhouse gases, as envisioned in the Global Climate Change Treaty." The
evidence supporting the consensus, effectively, is being sought after its
establishment - scientists are being hired to support a hypothesis, rather than
to conduct a broad examination of the possible causes of climate change.
The NIPCC's conclusions so far are
that the global warming trend is less significant than claimed, as is the case
with sea level rises, that the models used by the IPCC do not establish human
activity as the main cause, and that this is possibly explained by their failure
to take into account negative feedback. Accordingly, efforts spent on tackling
CO2 emissions will
have no significant effect on the 'problem', and will take resources away from
more pressing issues.
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4. GLOBAL WARMING - THE SCARE IS OVER - 8 HOURS
AGO
Comment by Christopher Monckton, The Viscount
Monckton of Brenchley
http://news.google.com/news?btcid=b73baacbf071cf86
Scientific evidence presented by leading
climatologists at the
Professor Ross McKitrick, who had previously
demolished the shank of UN's "hockey-stick" graph that had falsely abolished
the mediaeval warm period, has now destroyed the blade as well. Global
temperature, he said, had risen by only half as much since 1980 as the official
records showed. The UN, in its 2007 climate assessment, has been unable to find
a single scientific paper refuting this conclusion.
Dr. Bill Gray showed that changes in the deep
oceans over the decades accounted for two-thirds of the warming that has
recently been observed.
Dr. Willie Soon, of the
Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's
climate-change panel, has noticed that global temperature is not rising
anything like as fast as its climate assessments in 1990, 1995, 2001, and 2007
had predicted. He has said that the UN's calculations now need to be reviewed.
My own short presentation at the
In my presentation, I showed that the UN's
statement of the value of a key variable to one rather than three decimal
places had led to a 50% overstatement of the effect of all greenhouse gases on
temperatures. I also demonstrated that the UN, without justification or
explanation, had increased the value of the temperature-feedback multiplier by
71% in little more than a decade. Removing these and other embarrassing errors
and exaggerations on the part of the UN, I calculated that global temperature
would be likely to rise by less than an entirely harmless 1 degree Celsius (2
F) in response to a doubling of CO2 concentration.
But it was Vaclav Klaus, the President of the
Czech Republic, who brought the conference to its feet with an elegant speech
that accurately presented the "global warming" alarmists as the latest
in a series of political movements whose real ambition is to take away our
prosperity and our liberty. "It's not about climatology," he
concluded: "It's about freedom."
Where now? As the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice
spread simultaneously to cover more millions of square meters than at any time
since records began, it is not only poor Dr. Pachauri who is beginning to
realize that the politicians and bureaucrats who dominate the UN's
climate-change panel have gotten their sums wrong. Ordinary voters, faced with
absurd intrusions into their private lives in the form of compulsory
poison-filled light-bulbs and fraudulent "carbon trading" schemes,
are beginning to ask the searching questions that the news media would have
asked if they had not been so mesmerized by the circulation increases that
their original stories of doom and disaster had engendered. Now, the hype is
wearing off, and the media that are winning the ratings war are those who give
a more careful and balanced presentation of the facts. It's only a matter of
time before a leading investigative journalist earns himself a Pulitzer by
exposing the (very unsavory) financial and political links between the dozen
scientists who are chiefly responsible for the "global warming" scare
and certain national and international politicians, most of them on the
near-Communist left.
The voters now sense that the "global
warming" scare is indeed over. As always, it will take the politicians
rather longer to catch up. But those who have been most sedulous in peddling
the false prospectus of climate alarm will in due time find themselves flung
out of office, perhaps forever. As the Good Book says, "Great is truth,
and truth prevaileth."
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5. CARBON FIAT
WSJ editorial, March 14, 2008; Page A18
Combine the Bush White House, global warming,
and a policy conclusion that environmentalists don't like, and the dudgeon is
bound to be high. Even so, it's been stratospheric since the Environmental
Protection Agency denied
Not to spoil the party, but this is the outrage
of sore winners. True, the EPA's ruling is a minor setback for the global
warmists. But it may pour the bureaucratic foundation for their larger policy
goal, which is economy-wide regulation of carbon dioxide. Worse, the Bush EPA
may do so by rewriting current environmental law, with little or no political
debate.
The fracas concerns
The reason the EPA has never included CO2 with
pollutants restricted by the Clean Air Act, like NOX or SOX, is that it is
fundamentally different. It does not contaminate the air or make it unhealthy
to breathe. It is natural: Think human respiration. Because there's no
technology that can limit its release as carbon fuel combusts, it is
unavoidable. Plus, when the Act was amended in 1990, Congress specifically rejected
provisions for greenhouse gases.
Unfortunately, the EPA didn't mention any of
this when it refused
The EPA avoided a bad precedent, but conceded a
lot. Legally, Mr. Johnson concludes that "warming of the climate system is
unequivocal . . . very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG
concentrations" and refers to climate change as "a fundamentally
global air pollution problem" and CO2 as "a global pollutant."
These assumptions matter as the agency lurches toward the larger
"endangerment finding." If CO2 is classified as a
"pollutant," it triggers a long sequence of regulatory booby traps,
and the EPA staff, by law, is granted limited discretion as to enforcement or
cost.
For instance, an endangerment finding must apply
beyond cars and trucks to "stationary sources," i.e., buildings. The
floor for EPA permitting rules is 250 tons of a Clean Air Act pollutant per
year, sometimes as few as 100. Those limits might be reasonable for sulfur
dioxide. But it's nothing for CO2. A midsized office building that uses fossil
fuels for heating easily exceeds the threshold. So do almost all factories,
farms, restaurants, schools, hospitals . . .
Another section of the Clean Air Act requires
the EPA to reduce the concentration of a pollutant to an "adequate margin
of safety." Even if the
In an interview last week, Mr. Johnson assured
us that his decision was "not a determination of endangerment" and
was "based on the facts and the law." But the real issue is his
interpretation of the law, and his mistake was thinking he could appease the
anticarbon lobby by accepting its premises while still denying the
The Supreme Court did not require the EPA to
change its position on CO2, only to justify it within the scope of the Clean
Air Act. In fact, the Court said the agency could defer a judgment because the
science is complex and still evolving. But Mr. Johnson's waiver decision welds
shut that escape hatch -- and he's still getting pounded by Democrats.
Given the political climate and Presidential
contenders, a new warming policy is likely in 2009. But a change this momentous
should be made by Congress, and only after a public debate in which the costs,
benefits and risks can be aired and weighed. It should not be imposed by
bureaucratic fiat in the waning days of a Presidency.
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6. POLAR BEARS CAUGHT IN A HEATED ECO-DEBATE.
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2008-03-09-polar-bears_N.htm
Excerpt:
Eskimos in
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7.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-captrade10mar10,0,4094570.story
An editorial from the Los Angeles Times shows remarkable
economic and political acumen when it comes to so called global warming
solutions like cap-and-trade legislation.
The paper noted that
To spur the needed changes, regulators are designing a cap-and-trade
program, in which carbon emissions are capped and power generators can trade
carbon credits -- permits to pollute -- among themselves. This is a
staggeringly complex undertaking that will once again create opportunities for
dishonest traders to manipulate the market. In other words, unless the
cap-and-trade program is designed extraordinarily well, we could be looking at
deregulation deja vu. And the consequences won't just be higher power bills. If
The paper further declared that cap-and-trade legislation won't work in
The editorial concluded:
Carbon taxes are a simpler, harder to manipulate and less economically
damaging way to make polluters pay the costs of their environmental damage than
cap and trade. Yet because taxes have so little political support,
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Hat tip to Marc Morano
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8.
BIG CORN AND ETHANOL HOAX
One of the many mandates
of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 calls for oil companies to increase the amount
of ethanol mixed with gasoline. Unfortunately, there will be many unexpected
consequences when we use ethanol as a replacement for gasoline, says Walter E.
Williams, Professor of Economics at
For example, ethanol contains water that distillation cannot remove:
o As such, it can cause major damage to automobile engines not specifically designed to burn ethanol.
o The water content of ethanol also risks pipeline corrosion and thus must be shipped by truck, rail car or barge.
o These shipping methods are far more expensive than pipelines.
Other issues:
o Ethanol is 20 to 30 percent less efficient than gasoline, making it more expensive per highway mile.
o It takes 450 pounds of corn to produce the ethanol to fill one SUV tank. That's enough corn to feed one person for a year.
o Plus, it takes more than one gallon of fossil fuel -- oil and natural gas -- to produce one gallon of ethanol.
o 1,700 gallons of water are needed to produce one gallon of ethanol.
o On top of all this, if our total annual corn output were put to ethanol production, it would reduce gasoline consumption by 10 or 12 percent.
Ethanol is so costly that it wouldn't make it in a free market, says Williams. That's why Congress has enacted major ethanol subsidies:
o $1.05 to $1.38 a gallon, which is no less than a tax on consumers.
o In fact, there's a double tax -- one in the form of ethanol subsidies and another in the form of handouts to corn farmers to the tune of $9.5 billion in 2005 alone.
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Source: Walter E. Williams, "Big Corn and Ethanol Hoax," March 12, 2008 [Hat tip NCPA]
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2008/03/12/big_corn_and_ethanol_hoax
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