Lies, Damned Lies and Global Warming

THE WEATHER CHANNEL (today): Recent cold weather in parts of the country has caused some people to wonder about global warming. But are all cold days the same? For more on that, we turn to the Weather Channel's resident climatologist Tom Durrow. Tom?

“That's a good question, Cynthia. Folks in Cleveland are probably thinking that if their team can't play on opening day because of snow, maybe global warming has gone away. Not so. In fact, Cynthia, Ohioans may have forgotten that Cleveland posted a record high 77 degrees on January 14. So did a number of other cities during the first month of 2007. Climatologists say there is more significance to warm weather in January than cold weather in April. So much so, in fact, that beginning this year, the Department of Meteorology at Harvard University will weight certain days of 2007 differently from others.

“So, on the one hand this year so far ranks as only the 26th warmest winter since 1950 calculated on an absolute basis of temperature averaging. However, according to climatologists at Harvard and other respected universities, this year is actually the second warmest winter ever if you assign the necessary historic weights to the warm days and cold days of 2007. This weighting, “or atmospheric reconfiguration modeling,” gets pretty complicated.

Forgetting the complex mathematics, let's take two days for illustration. On January 14, with its temperature in Cleveland of 77 degrees, scientists have assigned a weighted temperature of 77 plus 14 which equals 91 degrees. Meanwhile, April 3, which had a low temperature of 19, receives a weighted temperature of 19x3, bringing the day's low to an almost balmy 57. So while you may think it was cold this past month, the weather scientists say even the coldest days were actually pretty warm. Cynthia?”

OK, Bill, it is apocryphal... but did I have you going for just a minute?
Greg

Thanks to my good friend Greg who is smarter than your average bear. But is it more outrageous than the lies and hyperbole contained in Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, that “foofaraw of pseudo-science, exaggerations, and errors, now being peddled to innocent schoolchildren worldwide.” Britain's Lord Moncton has challenged Gore to a televised debate? Moncton suggested for a venue the Oxford Museum of Natural History, site of the famous debate between T.H. Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, because “I hope that in this lofty atmosphere the caution and scepticism of true science will once again prevail, this time over the shibboleths and nostrums of the false, new religion of climate alarmism.” Gore declined.

I could spend a day listing the lies in Gore’s movie and his public statements, as well as the alarmist subterfuge in the latest UN report. (See my post “Anthropogenic or Au-Natural?” 11/24/06)

For example, look at the hysteria over carbon dioxide, that satanic gas. Last week the US Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision demonstrated that they possess superior intellect in ALL matters (including atmospheric chemistry and physics), deciding that carbon dioxide is indeed a pollutant which is helping to cause global alarming, ...er, warming. Therefore, the EPA is now vested with the mandate to control the amount of that substance that is released into the atmosphere by human activity.

Most of us are aware that we, and our animal friends, “exhaust” carbon dioxide as the culmination of the O2/CO2 exchange in the lungs. The EPA, reacting swiftly, has already announced that, effective July 1st, new regulations will require that all American citizens take one less breath per minute in order to curb the generation of this pollutant. The President has requested that all Americans “make this sacrifice for the safety of the earth,” and has implored the international community to follow our lead.

Sorry,.. I couldn’t resist another spoof.

In actual fact, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is quite low relative to levels in geologic times. One hundred million years ago the level was six times higher than now and the previous low, equal to the current level, was three hundred million years ago. Before that was a peak 18 times the current level about 500 millions years ago. Those much higher levels of carbon dioxide had nothing to do with automobile exhaust. And of our current carbon loading, humans cause less than 4 percent of it. Volcanoes and wild fires cause much, much more and guess how accurately those events can be modeled.

The sad thing about all the lies, damn lies is how many good-intentioned people are sucked in by them. Yesterday at Starbucks a nice lady approached our posse with a pile of New York Times newspapers. She asked if we wanted some, but said that she had removed the Home sections since her article was in there.

Under the headline “To Fight Global Warming, Some Hang Clothes,” there was a picture of Kathy’s house in Rolling Hills with several clothes lines hanging in the back yard. Kathy said she was appalled by her $1100 monthly electric bill last summer so she decided to begin hanging out her wash. She became a clothesline activist and credits the drop of her electric bill to $575 in March as due largely to her (mostly) abandoning the electric dryer.

Poor Kathy is so deluded. The cost of drying a typical load of laundry in an electric dryer is 35 cents compared to 18 cents in a gas dryer. The typical gas dryer costs about $85 to operate annually. Unless, as Dr. Dave says, she is paying illegals to blow dry her wash, there is no way that Kathy could be spending more than about $15 monthly, assuming she has an electric dryer. Unfortunately, Kathy has not been able to get rid of her dryer. Her husband refuses to use the line-dried bath towels since they feel like sandpaper. Oh, and Kathy refuses to apply for the required clothesline permit from the Rolling Hills Community Association. Liberals don’t have to obey the law, because, in the words of her 13 year old daughter, “It looks beautiful; It looks like we care for the Earth.”

Global Warming Boils Over

From Bulgarian brothels to Australian cockroaches, with a pinch of Johnny Edwards thrown in for sweetening, the global warming hysteria brew is boiling over.

You heard it right. Brothel owners in Bulgaria are blaming global warming for staff shortages. Petra Nestorova claims her best girls are working in ski resorts because the lack of snow has forced tourists to seek other pleasures. “We have hired students, but they are temps and nothing like our elite girls.”

Down Under, global warming is being blamed for a changing of the guard among Sydney's cockroach population. The most common roach-species was the German cockroach until it disappeared about seven years ago, now replaced by the Australian house cockroach, methana marginalus, which likes warmer climates.

Then in a hissy-fit on national television, Johnny Edwards exclaimed: “This is an emergency. It's a frightening thing. It'll make world war look like heaven.”

And if all that is not bizarre enough, PETA has warned Al Gore about the most “Inconvenient Truth”: According to UN, animals raised for food generate more Greenhouse Gases than all cars and trucks combined. PETA sent a letter to Al explaining that the best way to fight global warming is to go vegetarian and offering him a faux “fried chicken” introduction to meat-free meals. Researchers have determined that switching to a vegan diet is more effective in countering global warming than switching from a standard American car to a Toyota Prius.

And that’s not the end of the troubles for Uncle Al. In his documentary, the former Veep calls on Americans to conserve energy by reducing electricity consumption at home. But the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has found that Gore deserves a gold statue for hypocrisy. Gore’s mansion consumes more than 20 times the electricity of the average American home. The reaction from the Gore camp is instructive. Spokesperson Kalee Kreider told ABC News: “I think what you're seeing here is the last gasp of the global warming skeptics.” The Gores are rich, and rich people are not going to let their belief in global warming crimp their lifestyles.

Yet, there is some hope for sanity. Except amongst the silly people, the tide seems to be turning.

Claude Allegre, one of France's most celebrated scientists (and a leading socialist) has recanted his views on global warming. Allegre is a scientist of the first order, the architect of isotope geodynamics and renowned for his research on the geochemical evolution of the Earth. To his surprise, Allegre found that the many climate models and studies failed dismally in establishing a man-made cause of catastrophic global warming. Meanwhile, increasing evidence indicates that most of the warming comes of natural phenomena. Allegre now sees global warming as over-hyped and an environmental concern of second rank.

In England, a television documentary aired last week condemned man-made global warming as a myth that has become “the biggest scam of modern times.” The program titled “The Great Global Warming Scandal” dismisses claims that high levels of greenhouse gases generated by human activity causes climate change. “Solar activity is far more likely to be the culprit.”

The program featured an impressive collection of experts including professors in climatology, oceanography, meteorology, biogeography and paleoclimatology. The truth is that global warming “is a multibillion-dollar worldwide industry, created by fanatically anti-industrial environmentalists, supported by scientists peddling scare stories to chase funding, and propped up by compliant politicians and the media.”

Martin Durkin, the program’s producer said, “I think this is a turning point, and in five years the idea that the greenhouse effect is the main reason behind global warming will be seen as total bunk.” Paul Reiter of Paris' Pasteur Institute calls the U.N. report a “sham” because, he says, it included the names of scientists -- including his own -- who disagreed with the report and who resigned from the panel. Some sued to get their names removed.

Environmentalism is a religion that is based more on political ambitions than science, the president of the Czech Republic warned. President Vaclav Klaus, said that environmentalists who clamor for policy change to combat global warming “only pretend” to be promoting environmental protection, and are actually being driven by a political agenda. “Environmentalism should belong in the social sciences,” much like the idea of communism or other “-isms” such as feminism, Klaus said, adding that “environmentalism is a religion” that seeks to “reorganize the world order as well as social behavior and value systems worldwide.”

Even the New York Times is starting to see the light. In a piece called “From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype,” William Broad declared that Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth.” But his scientific audience is uneasy, many claiming that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.

Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the University of Colorado, said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration.

Gore claims that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change. But a report by the National Academies contradicts Gore’s portrayal of recent temperatures as the highest in the past millennium. Instead, the report said, current highs appear to be the highest since only 1600, the tail end of a temperature rise known as the medieval warm period, long before the industrial revolution.

Don Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology, hotly disputed Gore’s nonsense. Easterbrook showed the crowded session at a recent Geological Society convention a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”

In January, Paul Reiter, director of the insects and infectious diseases unit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, faulted Gore for his portrayal of global warming as spreading malaria. “For 12 years, my colleagues and I have protested against the unsubstantiated claims,” Dr. Reiter wrote in The International Herald Tribune. “We have done the studies and challenged the alarmists, but they continue to ignore the facts.”

Some scientists have sacrificed their integrity for politics. In Science magazine Richard Kerr warned that “Climate modelers have been ‘cheating’ for so long it’s almost become respectable.”

And some in the movement are becoming downright hostile. The debate on global warming has been hijacked by a powerful alliance of politicians, scientists and environmentalists who have stifled all questioning about the true environmental impact of carbon dioxide emissions. Some scientists who question mankind's impact on climate change have even received death threats.

Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five death threats by email since raising concerns about the degree to which man was affecting climate change.

“Western governments have pumped billions of dollars into careers and institutes and they feel threatened,” said the professor. “I can tolerate being called a sceptic because all scientists should be sceptics, but then they started calling us deniers, with all the connotations of the Holocaust. That is an obscenity. It has got really nasty and personal.”

Myles Allen, from Oxford University, agreed. “The Green movement has hijacked the issue of climate change. It is ludicrous to suggest the only way to deal with the problem is to start micro managing everyone, which is what environmentalists seem to want to do.”

Even thought FDR wasn't my favorite president, his famous quote, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” should help us realize what these wackos are doing to the public.

Global Warming Hysteria is Child Abuse

Global warming concerns are keeping children awake at night was the headline. In England, half of young children are anxious about the effects of global warming, often losing sleep because of their concern, according to a new report today.

One in seven of the little darlin’s said their own parents were not doing enough to improve the environment. They feared the possible submergence of entire countries. Thanks very much, Al Gore!

“By raising awareness amongst today's young, hopefully we are improving our chances of reaching a solution” explained Pete Williams, a spokesman for the survey. “While many adults (even Brits) may look the other way, this study shows that global warming is not only hurting the children of the future, it's affecting the welfare of kids now.” Thank you, Pete, keep scarin those kids.

Meanwhile, the Hollywood mafiosa are poised, that’s the word, to bestow an Oscar or two on Al and his science fiction movie. And those rascally Asians are finding a way to make a buck or two zillion.

Andy Mukherjee in Bloomberg reports: “Governments in rich nations are spending billions of dollars to buy a clearer conscience over climate change. Are they getting their money's worth?”

If you are one of those who stay awake at nights wondering what you can do to prevent the polar caps from melting, there’s a growing menu of choices for your largesse.

Easy Being Green Co. says it will mitigate your cat's flatulent contribution to global warming for $8 per year. The same company could also make your granny carbon-neutral at $10 a year, according to a report in The Australian.

Then there's Carbon Planet Co. If you’re hopping a flight between Sydney and Canberra, and feeling bad about the damage you are doing to the ecosystem, you can buy carbon credits worth $23, for which the company will guarantee to keep a ton of carbon dioxide out of the air for 100 years.

Now for the serious stuff. Michael Wara of Stanford U. explained in an article in the journal Nature this month: “Countries that must purchase emission credits to atone for their higher-than-mandated production of carbon dioxide are paying a tiny group of chemical manufacturers in China and India massive sums to reduce industrial gases and methane.”

China and India are getting a prize for producing lots of hydrofluorocarbon-23, one of the greenhouse gases under the Kyoto Protocol. Six Chinese companies have consented to be paid $986 million by Euro countries to destroy the HFC-23 they are producing and only spending $31 million on incinerators, thanks to the elaborate trading mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol. DuPont Co. in the USA does it for free.

Gujarat Fluorochemicals Ltd., the first company from India to join the game, reported that it had tripled its revenue in the last quarter and shareholders have earned 662 percent on the stock since March 2005, when Japan, Italy, the UK and Netherlands agreed to pay the company to destroy HFC-23. (Attention, son John) Italy alone may pay 12.8 billion euros over the next four years to buy emission credits. The UN loves this subsidy from the developed to the developing world to get them to clean up their industrial byproducts.

I do not think that Americans should love it. Now there is something we can do about it. The PatriotPost has launched an important petition to “Stop Albert Gore and Reject the UN's Global Warming Treaty.” Gore is trying to re-energize the Clinton-era movement advocating Kyoto compliance -- the biggest UN power-grab in history. Sign this petition, please!

They already have over 30,000 electronic signatures and want to deliver 100,000 signatures to the Senate by the time Al Gore reaches the podium at this Sunday's Academy Awards.

The petition reads as follows:

We urge the United States Senate to reject the 1997 United Nations Kyoto Protocols Treaty purporting to address global warming by constraining economic growth in the United States while allowing unmitigated growth in 129 other nations, including two of the largest world economies in China and India.

We reject the Orwellian solutions proposed by Albert Arnold Gore and others who claim that the Kyoto Protocols must be adopted to stop global warming. The science of climate change is very imprecise, and current trends in climate change may have little or nothing to do with production of so-called "greenhouse gasses" such as carbon dioxide.

Albert Gore's solutions will only impede the advancement of scientific and technological innovation, and would impoverish hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Friends, send this to your friends -- let's flood the site with our signatures.

Game Over: the Science is Settled

“Action would have to be radical -- but climate change can be slowed” wrote Alan Zarembo, Times Staff Writer on Feb. 5, 2007. House Democrats have responded with a joint solution to the global warming crisis and the global war on terror with the roll-out their new weapon.

The Pelosi Fighting Vehicle (thanks Ted) was named in honor of the new House Majority Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who is leading the way for effective change in government. Al Gore championed the effort claiming it a victory for both our military and the environment due to anticipated reductions in global warming and dependency on foreign oil. Sources quoted Mr. Gore as stating “This is the most important technological advancement since I invented the Internet.”

Mr. Zarembo cautioned that, however laudatory the Democrat initiative, even more will have to be done to avert a global cataclysm. The recently released UN report warns that there is so much CO2 in the atmosphere that even if concentrations held at current levels, the effects of global warming would continue for centuries. And to stabilize atmospheric levels, CO2 emissions would have to drop by 70-80%.

And how are we to do that, exactly?

“All truck, all trains, all airplanes, cars, motorcycles and boats in the United States — that's 7.3% of global emissions” said Gregg Marland of Oak Ridge National Lab. The Pelosi Fighting Vehicle will help, but all motorists will need to switch to bicycles to have a measurable effect. And Nancy Pelosi will have to forget about her B757-class plane for her coast-to-coast junkets.

Closing all fossil-fuel-powered electricity plants worldwide and replacing them with windmills, solar panels and nuclear power plants would make a serious dent — a 39% reduction globally, Marland said. His calculation doesn't include all the fossil fuels that would have to be burned to build the greener facilities, though. Let’s add that up: 7.3% + 39% = 46.3%. Sadly, not enough.

If the world returned to the Stone Age, CO2 concentrations would still rise. In fact, Robert Socolow of Princeton University said that even if the entire world stopped burning fossil fuels altogether, atmospheric carbon wouldn't approach pre-Industrial levels for several hundred years. Undeterred, Socolow declared: “The U.S. is going to have to decarbonize.”

J.R. Dunn noted in The American Thinker that “the apocalyptic vision of global warming serves a deep need of the environmentalist credo, the dominant pseudo-religious tendency of our age in the prosperous West. In fact, the apocalyptic is the major fulcrum of environmentalism, the axis around which everything else turns.”

G.K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, explained the phenomenon: “A man who ceases to believe in God does not believe in nothing; he believes in anything.” Western Civilization’s secular left needs the demon of global warming to go along with its horde of devils.

In his fine (and scary) new book America Alone, Mark Steyn talks about the “Great Satin” myth. If America were a conventional superpower, the world would worry about it as a threat to France or China or Gabon. “But because it’s so obviously not that kind of power the world has to concoct a thesis that the hyperpower is a threat not to merely this or that rinky-dink nation state but to the entire planet, if not the entire galaxy.”

Of course, American lefties fall into line with their global brethren. Recall Al Gore’s accusation: “We are altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the UNIVERSE.” Well gollleee! John Kerry calls the US a “pariah.” Democrats really don’t like us, but they surely like that good ole religion, environmentalism.

National Journal has released a new “Congressional Insiders Poll” which asked members of Congress this question: Do you think it’s been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made problems? The results were interesting. Only 13% of congressional Republicans say they believe that human activity is causing global warming (down 10% from a year ago), compared to 95% of congressional Democrats. You want to talk about religious faith!

So crucial is the apocalypse to environmentalism that there has been a whole string of them, one after the other. In the 1960s various forms of pollution from car exhausts, household plastics, power generation and DDT were leading to a promised chemical doomsday.

In the 1970s overpopulation was predicted to overstress the Earth's carrying capacity, use up all available resources, and lead to the collapse of civilization before the end of the 20th century.

The 1980s saw a reprise of fears of nuclear destruction in the guise of a “nuclear winter” when firestorms created by a nuclear strike would generate smoke so thick as to block out the sun, causing a collapse of the Earth’s ecology.

Ozone depletion was the next environmentalist flurry, coming along around the same time there were predictions of a looming Ice Age and serious proposals to coat the entire polar caps with soot.

The predictive ability of the environmental religion seeems to be rather poor.

But important lessons learned from previous environmental panics have been carefully applied by the enviro-wackos to the global warming campaign. A skilled cadre of scientists, activists, and publicists has devoted entire careers to nothing else. It has become an industry that, with financial elements such as “carbon offsets,” can easily support itself. (Did you hear about the Chinese hydro-fluorocarbon scam?)

As intensity gathers for action, there is no telling how much mischief the global warmistas will cause. The DDT ban resulting from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring places her in an exclusive circle shared only by Karl Marx as a writer whose work alone caused vast amounts of human misery.

The universal famine predicted by Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb led to a “triage” proposal wherein certain “failed” nations would be completely isolated from the rest of the world to bring about a “die-off” of their “excess” population, a process that would have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions. This was a serious policy issue discussed in the New York Times and by the elite. The most popular “failed” nation always seemed to be India, one of our rising economic powerhouses.

I have had recent unnerving discussions with several acquaintances who still believe in Ehrlich's nightmare world. Lord protect us from the new religion.