Back to Basics

What is it with the “warmists”, Al Gore and his clones who keep insisting the Earth is warming, that too much carbon dioxide (CO2) will be the death of us, and that we have to immediately stop burning “fossil fuels” if we are to save the planet? They are the most relentless liars on the face of the planet.

They want us to cover the surface of the U.S. with solar panels and the mountains with wind turbines to generate the energy needed for everything we do. These Green energy alternatives are so wonderful they are producing a mere three percent of our current needs, require government subsidies and loan guarantees to exist, and tend not to be all that great when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.

So why are we still hearing from this discredited and disgraced bunch of charlatans and buffoons? In early May, The New York Times published “Game Over for the Climate” by a major offender of the truth, Dr. James Hansen, who for some reason is still the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), despite having pocketed big bucks beyond his humble government salary. In 2007 he split a million dollar Dan Davis Prize with someone else and in 2001, received a $250,000 Heinz Award. Former GISS employees want him fired.

As debased as The Times is, in 2006 the American Association for the Advancement of Science selected Hansen to receive their Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility. I cite this as a warning that even a Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper and formerly respected science organization have long since gone over to the dark side when it comes to global warming. Nothing they have to say on the subject should be regarded as more than pure propaganda.

Suffice to say that Dr. Hansen’s opinion article cited every global warming lie we have been hearing since 1988 when he first gained famed testifying before a congressional committee that we were doomed. In his Times article, he predicted that the “semi-permanent drought” would turn the Midwest into “a dust bowl.” Like every other global warming prediction (that hasn’t come true) this will happen “over the next several decades.” Time enough for Dr. Hansen to pick up a few more awards and fatten his bank account.

The face of the global warming hoax, Al Gore, will not shut up. He made news in August 2011 when he totally lost it while speaking at the Aspen Institute. Anyone, noted climatologists, meteorologists, and mere science writers like myself were the target of his rant for actually citing things such as the fact that the Earth has been in a natural COOLING cycle since 1998 and other inconvenient facts about the climate.

“And some of the exact same people” said Gore, frothing at the mouth, “I can go down a list of their names—are involved in this. And so what do they do? They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message. ‘This climate thing, it’s nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn’t trap heat. It may be volcanoes’ Bullshit! ‘It may be sun spots.’ Bullshit! ‘It’s not getting warmer.’ Bullshit!”

The climate is not cooperating. The Church of Global Warming is crumbling around them. People are making fun of them.

THIS HAS BEEN AN EXTREME WINTER FOR SEA ICE IN THE BERING SEA AND NOW
WE HAVE BROKEN THE RECORDS FOR MOST NUMBER OF DAYS WITH ICE AT BOTH
SAINT PAUL ISLAND AND SAINT GEORGE ISLAND.

Th discussion at the DSIDC changes daily so I took this screen shot:

As with any U.N. climate conference, standard “hold on to your wallet” rules apply. While you’re doing that, try and predict the size of this carbon footprint:

Some of the main proposals in a draft text for negotiation at a U.N. sustainable development conference next month are being watered down at informal talks in New York, observers said on Tuesday, heightening fears the summit will fail to deliver.

The Rio+20 summit in Brazil from June 20-22 is expected to draw more than 50,000 participants from governments, companies and environmental and lobby groups.

It will try to hammer out sustainable development goals across seven core themes including food security, water and energy but is not expected to produce mandatory targets.

After watching how many summits around the world these jet-set people travel to, I can solve Al Gore’s “climate crisis” with a two word recommendation: Web conferencing.

I’ve always thought that history would record the shamtastic effort to stave off “global warming” as a self-fulfilling prophecy of the most idiotic kind, and it’s starting to happen:

Large wind farms might have a warming effect on the local climate, research in the United States showed on Sunday, casting a shadow over the long-term sustainability of wind power.

Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels contribute to global warming, which could lead to the melting of glaciers, sea level rise, ocean acidification, crop failure and other devastating effects, scientists say.

In a move to cut such emissions, many nations are moving towards cleaner energy sources such as wind power.

The world’s wind farms last year had the capacity to produce 238 gigawatt of electricity at any one time. That was a 21 percent rise on 2010 and capacity is expected to reach nearly 500 gigawatt by the end of 2016 as more, and bigger, farms spring up, according to the Global Wind Energy Council.

Researchers at the State University of New York at Albany analysed the satellite data of areas around large wind farms in Texas, where four of the world’s largest farms are located, over the period 2003 to 2011.

The results, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, showed a warming trend of up to 0.72 degrees Celsius per decade in areas over the farms, compared with nearby regions without the farms.

“We attribute this warming primarily to wind farms,” the study said. The temperature change could be due to the effects of the energy expelled by farms and the movement and turbulence generated by turbine rotors, it said.

All I can really say is…

It’s a pleasant fiction that think tanks are places where scholars spend time in dusty libraries. They are places of great intellectual ferment, but one hardly thinks of them of places were battles rage with infiltrators and propagandists, but The Heartland Institute, a 28-year-old national non-profit organization, is doing that right now.

Having been victimized by a leading advocate of global warming and other environmental inventions, Dr. Peter H. Gleick, who misrepresented himself as a member of its board in order to secure confidential information about Heartland’s donors and then took it a step further by creating a phony “memo” misrepresenting its mission has led Heartland to consider legal proceedings against him.

On April 1, I wrote about “Fakegate”, the name Heartland has applied to L’Affair Gleick.

“One leading voice among the global warming advocates was Dr. Peter H. Gleick whose work in the field of hydroclimatology catapulted him into the top ranks of the scientific community. In 2003 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and in 2006 he was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In 2011 he led a new task force on “scientific ethics and integrity” for the American Geophysical Union.

On February 16, 2012 he resigned from the task force citing “personal, private reasons” but the reasons would become very public. On February 20, 2012, Dr. Gleick admitted to having fraudulently obtained documents of a board meeting of The Heartland Institute “under someone else’s name” for the purpose of making known its donors.

Dr. Gleick had also allegedly forged a two-page “strategy memo” purporting that the Institute was engaged in a variety of efforts to fraudulently undermine the claims of global warming scientists. The Institute did not have to, nor ever did engage, in any such efforts. The truth about the global warming claims was sufficient to undermine them.”

One might think the exposure of Dr. Gleick’s effort to slander Heartland would end there, but Heartland understands that it has taken decades of effort to undo the damage done by the global warming hoax and the necessity to take off the gloves in combating the fascist tactics of environmentalists.

Earlier this month, when Oxford University offered Dr. Gleick a prestigious platform to lecture on April 24—despite his confession of improper, unethical and illegal behavior. Heartland called on Oxford to deny him this honor. Oxford declined.

The environmental propaganda machine has been in full throes to “spin” Dr. Gleick’s misdeeds and, most recently, when a group called Forecast the Facts engaged in the tactics of misdirection and deception so common to the Left, Heartland fought back.

As Anthony Watts, a meteorologist and editor of Watts Up With That, noted on April 16th “The Center for American Progress aka Think Progress, a front organization for all things left and ‘progressive’…let it slip (whether by design or accident we don’t know) that they are behind this ‘Forecast the Facts’ outfit.” The Center has a $30 million+ annual budget.

“We always wondered,” said Watts, “who was funding (a) “hate campaign against a local television meteorologist” they deemed a “denier” of the global warming hoax.” Typically, Forecast the Facts attributed perfectly natural weather events, tornadoes, to global warming or climate change.

Rev. Austin Miles Welcomes Guest Jerry Newcombe, a favorite card-carrying columnist, to give his take on Earth Day.

On Religion and Climate Change
by Jerry Newcombe
4/21/12

Earth Day is around the corner, and next week a religious group dedicated to the environment will be meeting in Washington, DC.

The Interfaith Moral Action on Climate (IMAC) declares itself to be “a collaborative initiative spanning faiths, spiritual traditions and people of good will.”

Their goal for their DC meeting next week will include “urging elected officials to decisively act on the greatest moral crisis of our time.”

In their opinion, “climate change is a moral issue” that should be “a priority for the faithful nationwide.”

Protecting the environment is surely a worthy goal. But as a layman, I don’t understand how the scientists invoked could always be sure of these things. Things like the notion that man’s activities (more exactly, man’s activities in developed countries) are what supposedly cause various catastrophes in nature.

Thirty five years ago, many scientists warned of the catastrophe of the earth cooling. In the short span since, it heated up so much so that we’re now at risk for global warming?

As I read the Bible, I see disasters in nature as a given in this fallen world. It’s a curse because of man’s sin. We can do much through science to limit the damage of these catastrophes. But in one sense, we’re powerless to prevent them from happening.

Yet the bigger question is this: Are some of our activities, such as burning fossil fuels, actually causing global warming? According to many scientists, that assertion is unproven at best.

It used to be just “global warming” that was condemned. But that didn’t sell well during terrible snow storms, such as the one that shut down a prominent presentation Al Gore was going to give against global warming. During such storms, people up north are probably thinking, “We could use a little global warming right now.”So somewhere along the line, “global warming”got morphed into “climate change.” But…isn’t there always climate change? How convenient.

Like the poor that are always with us, so also is climate change.

If there are specific, proven things we do that harm the environment, like polluting rivers that cause illness for those down river, then such criminal acts should be halted, investigated, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

I also think that respect for nature improves life for most people. Whenever I visit Central Park, I’m so glad for those with the foresight to not let all of NYC be developed.

Appreciation for nature is one thing. But sometimes the environmentalists worship nature for all practical purposes. Whatever happened to the first commandment—-“I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before Me”?

Cal Beisner is the spokesperson for Cornwall Alliance, a conservative group opposed to climate change alarmism. The Cornwall slogan is, “For the stewardship of creation.”

I sent him an email about this upcoming interfaith meeting described above.

Predicting the future is much harder than simply running a regression that explains the past.  The whole point of a regression is to fit a line to data.  Presumably they must have used past data at some point to get their idea of what causes climate to change.  If they can’t go back then and explain the changes, it probably means that their models deviated then from the results that they had previously gotten.  The whole thing is pretty troublesome.  From Watts Up with that:

One of the main points of criticism of the CO₂-dominated climate models is that they fail to reproduce the temperature fluctuations over the last 10,000 years. This surprises no one as these models assign scant climate impact to major factors, i.e. the sun. As numerous IPCC-ignored studies show, the post-Ice Age temperature curve for the most part ran synchronously with solar activity fluctuations. The obvious discrepancy between modeled theory and measured reality has been brought up time and again.
The journal Climate of the Past Discussions has published a new paper written by a team led by Gerrit Lohmann of the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in Bremerhaven, Germany. The group compared geologically reconstructed ocean-temperature data over the last 6000 years to results from modeling. If the models were indeed reliable, as is often claimed, then there would be good agreement. Unfortunately in Lohmann’s case, agreement was non-existent.
Lohmann et al plotted the geologically reconstructed temperatures and compared them to modeled temperature curves from the ECHO-G Model. What did they find? The modeled trends underestimated the geologically reconstructed temperature trend by a factor of two to five. Other scientists have come up with similar results (e.g. Lorenz et al. 2006, Brewer et al. 2007, Schneider et al. 2010). . . .

Editor’s Note: All this week in the run-up to Earth Day, this blog will post commentaries exposing environmentalism as the totalitarian ideology it has always been.

By Alan Caruba

As the nation and the world closes in on Earth Day, April 22nd, a tsunami of Green propaganda will overwhelm us with all the usual lies about global warming—now called climate change—and calls to reduce the use of all fossil fuels in order to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions.

This Big Lie ignores the fact that there is no relationship between carbon dioxide (CO2) and the climate. CO2 reacts to climate change. It does not drive it. The Big Lie ignores the fact that the Earth has been cooling for fourteen years.

The past three and a half years of the having Barack Obama as President have been filled with constant crisis, not the least of which was the nation’s financial crisis which he constantly reminds us he “inherited.” He has not, however, solved it with proven ways to put millions back to work and turn around a stagnant economy.

Instead he devoted his best efforts to a takeover of one-sixth of the nation’s economy, the healthcare industry. His administration has waged a steady war on access to energy reserves vital to the nation’s economy. The result of these policies are being felt at the gas pump as prices rise to historic highs while billions of barrels of oil in the U.S. remain underground.

His devotion to all the eco-lies was seen in the millions wasted on “green jobs” with his failed “stimulus” and loans to “green industries”, primarily wind and solar power. Other schemes included high-speed trains where none are needed or wanted. To this day Amtrak has never made a profit. And electric cars remain impractical and unaffordable.

His environmental commitment was perhaps best seen and heard when Obama attended a United Nations Conference of Parties in Copenhagen in March 2010. His speech to the delegates and world press contained all the lies associated with “climate change” and the failed policies he was pursuing two years ago and earlier.

“We come together here in Copenhagen because climate change poses a grave and growing danger to our people. You would not be here unless you—like me—were convinced that this danger is real. This is not fiction, this is science,” said Obama.

Aside from the fact that the climate has always been in a state of change for Earth’s 4.5 billion years, the science employed to frighten people about such change does not bear any resemblance to real science which is an impartial blend of data based on replicable experiments.

Real science does not have a political agenda. The bogus science of global warming was revealed in November 2009 when the world learned that a handful of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “scientists” had systematically distorted the scientific process, conjuring up false computer models that ignored significant elements of climate history. The revelations would be dubbed “Climategate.”

Never one to not criticize America, Obama reminded the delegates that America was “the world’s second largest emitter” of greenhouse gases even though such gases do not function as a greenhouse, trapping and holding heat. If they did, how would one explain the fact that the Earth has been in a natural cooling cycle since around 1998?

If CNN ever needs a guest meteorologist, they’ve found their man:

Sen. Dick Durbin reacts to the tornadoes in Dallas, Texas earlier this week. Durbin calls for more laws regulating carbon output while he sends a dire warning that we must convert to hybrid cars or lose our life. Durbin says we must spend money now to fix the problem.

“It’s your money or your life,” he said a press conference. “We are either going to dedicate ourselves to a cleaner, more livable planet and accept the initial investment necessary or we’re going to pay a heavier price in terms of loss of human life, damage and costs associated with it.”

Language that makes the forced funding of a “clean energy future to be named later but paid for now” sound like a mugging at gunpoint is actually one of Durbin’s more honest moments. Big-spending “clean energy” politicians armed with junk science are the highwaymen of the 21st century.

Click the pic to roll tape at RCP:

From Dick Durban’s book of facts: At the beginning of the movie The Wizard of Oz, if you listen closely as the tornado approaches the house, Dorothy can be heard to say “this wouldn’t be happening if we’d have bought a Volt, Toto!”