Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

[Journeyman]

I can't help but notice the scarcity of the site's global warming cheerleaders.    op:


They're almost as rare as the "F-35 can do no wrong" crowd.

      :stirpot:

 

[ArmyRick]

Nah, we just stop wasting our time. I do not like the term Global warming anyways and prefer global climate disruption or Global Energy atmospheric compensation. As previously stated, I don't blame trains, planes and automobiles for the problem. But enough, I gave up trying to make my point here. Stir pot away.

 

[Kirkhill]

From yesterday's Telegraph

Convenient timing for the Europeans.  The IPCC declares "there ain't nuthin' we can do abaht it - and it ain't gonna cost to do nuthin' in any case"  (my apologies to hooziers everywhere).

Climate change: the debate is about to change radically
By Andrew Lilico Economics Last updated: March 25th, 2014


The latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is due out next week. If the leaked draft is reflected in the published report, it will constitute the formal moving on of the debate from the past, futile focus upon "mitigation" to a new debate about resilience and adaptation.
The new report will apparently tell us that the global GDP costs of an expected global average temperature increase of 2.5  degrees Celsius over the 21st century will be between 0.2 and 2 per cent. To place that in context, the well-known Stern Review of 2006 estimated the costs as 5-20 per cent of GDP. Stern estimates the costs of his recommended policies for mitigating climate change at 2 per cent of GDP – and his estimates are widely regarded as relatively optimistic (others estimate mitigation costs as high as 10 per cent of global GDP). Achieving material mitigation, at a cost of 2 per cent and more of global GDP, would require international co-ordination that we have known since the failure of the Copenhagen conference on climate change simply was not going to happen. Even if it did happen, and were conducted optimally, it would mitigate only a fraction of the total rise, and might create its own risks.
And to add to all this, now we are told that the cost might be as low as 0.2 per cent of GDP. At a 2.4 per cent annual GDP growth rate, the global economy increases 0.2 per cent every month.
So the mitigation deal has become this: Accept enormous inconvenience, placing authoritarian control into the hands of global agencies, at huge costs that in some cases exceed 17 times the benefits even on the Government's own evaluation criteria, with a global cost of 2 per cent of GDP at the low end and the risk that the cost will be vastly greater, and do all of this for an entire century, and then maybe – just maybe – we might save between one and ten months of global GDP growth.
Can anyone seriously claim, with a straight face, that that should be regarded as an attractive deal or that the public is suffering from a psychological disorder if it resists mitigation policies?
The 2014 Budget recognised reality, with the Government now introducing special measures to keep energy prices low for energy intensive firms – abandoning what little pretence remained that it was attempting to prevent climate change by limiting energy use so as to limit CO2 emissions. The new IPCC report – though it remains as robust as ever in saying that there will be climate change and its effects will be material (points that relatively few mitigation policy sceptics deny) – has a marked change of focus from the 2007 report.
Whereas previously the IPCC emphasised the effects climate change could have if not prevented, now the focus has moved on to how to make economies and societies resilient and to adapt to warming now considered inevitable. Climate exceptionalism – the notion that climate change is a challenge of a different order from, say, recessions or social inclusion or female education or many other important global policy goals – is to be down played. Instead, the new report emphasised that adapting to climate change is one of many challenges that policymakers will face but should have its proper place alongside other policies.
Quite so. It has been known since the late 1970s that there would be material warming during the 21st century and we will need to adapt to it. At present, though, in the UK we still carry the legacy of a panoply of enormously expensive but futile policies that were designed to be pieces of a global effort to mitigate that is just not going to happen.
Our first step in adapting to climate change should be to accept that we aren't going to mitigate it. We're going to have to adapt. That doesn't mean there might not be the odd mitigation-type policy, around the edges, that is cheap and feasible and worthwhile. But it does mean that the grandiloquent schemes for preventing climate change should go. Their day is done. Even the IPCC – albeit implicitly – sees that now.

This gives the Euros carte blanche to sideline Russian gas and use whatever resources are available to them as interim measures as they work towards utopia. 

Fracking, In-Situ Coal Gas and Brown Coal will all be back in play (with

Thorium being the next play)

 

[a_majoor]

And a look at what REAL climate change does (and given the decline in Solar output, this may be the future for ourselves and our children):

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/opinion/sunday/lessons-from-the-little-ice-age.html?_r=1

Lessons From the Little Ice Age

By GEOFFREY PARKERMARCH 22, 2014

COLUMBUS, Ohio — CLIMATOLOGISTS call it the Little Ice Age; historians, the General Crisis.

During the 17th century, longer winters and cooler summers disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests across Europe. It was the coldest century in a period of glacial expansion that lasted from the early 14th century until the mid-19th century. The summer of 1641 was the third-coldest recorded over the past six centuries in Europe; the winter of 1641-42 was the coldest ever recorded in Scandinavia. The unusual cold that lasted from the 1620s until the 1690s included ice on both the Bosporus and the Baltic so thick that people could walk from one side to the other.

The deep cold in Europe and extreme weather events elsewhere resulted in a series of droughts, floods and harvest failures that led to forced migrations, wars and revolutions. The fatal synergy between human and natural disasters eradicated perhaps one-third of the human population.

There are two ways to consider the impact of climate change. We can predict the future based on current trends or we can study a well-documented episode of the past.

What happened in the 17th century suggests that altered weather conditions can have catastrophic political and social consequences. Today, the nation’s intelligence agencies have warned of similar repercussions as the planet warms — including more frequent but unpredictable crises involving water, food, energy supply chains and public health. States could fail, famine could overtake large populations and flood or disease could cross borders and lead to internal instability or international conflict.

Earth scientists have discerned three factors at work globally during the 17th century: increased volcanic eruptions, twice as many El Niño episodes (unusually warm ocean conditions along the tropical west coast of South America), and the virtual disappearance of sunspots, reducing solar output to warm the Earth).

The 17th century saw a proliferation of wars, civil wars and rebellions and more cases of state breakdown around the globe than any previous or subsequent age. Just in the year 1648, rebellions paralyzed both Russia (the largest state in the world) and France (the most populous state in Europe); civil wars broke out in Ukraine, England and Scotland; and irate subjects in Istanbul (Europe’s largest city) strangled Sultan Ibrahim.

Climate alone did not cause all the catastrophes of the 17th century, but it exacerbated many of them. Outbreaks of disease, especially smallpox and plague, tended to be more common when harvests were poor or failed. When an uprising by Irish Catholics on Oct. 23, 1641, drove the Protestant minority from their homes, no one had foreseen a severe cold snap, with heavy frost and snow at a time and in a place that rarely has snow. Thousands of Protestants died of exposure, turning a political protest into a massacre that cried out for vengeance. Oliver Cromwell would later use that episode to justify his brutal campaign to restore Protestant supremacy in Ireland.

But the cold did take a more direct toll. Western Europe experienced the worst harvest of the century in 1648. Rioting broke out in Sicily, Stockholm and elsewhere when bread prices spiked. In the Alps, poor growing seasons became the norm in the 1640s, and records document the disappearance of fields, farmsteads and even whole villages as glaciers advanced to the farthest extent since the last Ice Age. One consequence of crop failures and food shortages stands out in French military records: Soldiers born in the second half of the 1600s were, on average, an inch shorter than those born after 1700, and those born in the famine years were noticeably shorter than the rest.

Few areas of the world survived the 17th century unscathed by extreme weather. In China, a combination of droughts and disastrous harvests, coupled with rising tax demands and cutbacks in government programs, unleashed a wave of banditry and chaos; starving Manchu clansmen from the north undertook a brutal conquest that lasted a generation. North America and West Africa both experienced famines and savage wars. In India, drought followed by floods killed over a million people in Gujarat between 1627 and 1630. In Japan, a mass rebellion broke out on the island of Kyushu following several poor harvests. Five years later, famine, followed by an unusually severe winter, killed perhaps 500,000 Japanese.

No human intervention can avert volcanic eruptions, halt an El Niño episode or delay the onset of drought, despite the possibility that each could cause starvation, economic dislocation and political instability. But, unlike our ancestors who faced these changes 350 years ago, today we possess both the resources and the technology to prepare for them.

Britain’s chief scientific officer has warned, for instance, that in the face of a seemingly inexorable rise in sea levels, “We must either invest more in sustainable approaches to flood and coastal management or learn to live with increased flooding.” In short, we have only two choices: pay to prepare now — or prepare to pay much more later.

The experience of Somalia provides a terrible reminder of the consequences of inaction. Drought in the region between 2010 and 2012 created local famine, exacerbated by civil war that discouraged and disrupted relief efforts and killed some 250,000 people, half of them under the age of 5.

In the 17th century, the fatal synergy of weather, wars and rebellions killed millions. A natural catastrophe of analogous proportions today — whether or not humans are to blame — could kill billions. It would also produce dislocation and violence, and compromise international security, sustainability and cooperation.

So while we procrastinate over whether human activities cause climate change, let us remember the range of climate-induced catastrophes that history shows are inevitable — and prepare accordingly.

Geoffrey Parker is a history professor at Ohio State University and the author of “Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century.”

 

[Journeyman]

Link

Thick Great Lakes ice thwarts ice breakers, delays shipping
CBC News Posted: Mar 31, 2014

The ice on the Great Lakes is so thick this year the Canadian Coast Guard says ice breakers are having trouble getting through.  The superintendent of the Coast Guard operations centre for the central and arctic region reports that, in many areas, the ice is more than half a meter thick — and in some spots it is stacked up 1.5 meters thick.

“In some areas the flat ice is up to 28 inches thick. But that doesn't include ice that has been piled up with heavy ridges that can be 4- to 5-feet high and sometimes higher,” Andre Maillet said.

Great Lakes are nearly frozen over

“So these are pretty extreme conditions for the Great Lakes, especially at this time of year.”  The Coast Guard is ramping up efforts to get the shipping season going, and will bring in extra ice breaking ships to help in the effort to clear passageways for ships.  However Maillet said it is expected the shipping season on the Great Lakes will be delayed.

 

[Old Sweat]

I grew up about twenty miles from Journeyman in the Niagara Peninsula. When I was a kid, people were still cutting ice from Lake Erie and strong it in heavy insulated ice houses as many homes had ice boxes instead of refrigerators. Our farm house had an "ice room" where ice was stored.

 

[a_majoor]

Freeman Dyson, one of the "Grand old men" of science, weighs in on the side of the sckeptics, and explains why:

http://www.wired.com/2014/03/quanta-freeman-dyson-qa/

At 90, Freeman Dyson Ponders His Next Challenge
By Thomas Lin, Quanta Magazine 
03.31.14  | 

Freeman Dyson — the world-renowned mathematical physicist who helped found quantum electrodynamics with the bongo-playing, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman and others, devised numerous mathematical techniques, led the team that designed a low-power nuclear reactor that produces medical isotopes for research hospitals, dreamed of exploring the solar system in spaceships propelled by nuclear bombs, wrote technical and popular science books, penned dozens of reviews for The New York Review of Books, and turned 90 in December — is pondering a new math problem.

Original story reprinted with permission from Simons Science News, an editorially independent division of SimonsFoundation.org whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

“There’s a class of problem that Freeman just lights up on,” said the physicist and computational biologist William Press, a longtime colleague and friend. “It has to be unsolved and well-posed and have something in it that admits to his particular kind of genius.” That genius, he said, represents a kind of “ingenuity and a spark” that most physicists lack: “The ability to see further in the mathematical world of concepts and instantly grasp a path to the distant horizon that’s the solution.”

Press said he’s posed a number of problems to Dyson that didn’t “measure up.” Months and years went by, with no response. But when Press asked a question about the “iterated prisoner’s dilemma,” a variation of the classic game theory scenario pitting cooperation against betrayal, Dyson replied the next day. “It probably only took him a minute to grasp the solution,” Press said, “and half an hour to write it out.”

Together, they published a much-cited 2012 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The next year, Press traveled to Princeton, N.J., for a two-day celebration of Dyson at the Institute for Advanced Study, Dyson’s intellectual home for the past six decades. In honor of Dyson’s 90th birthday, there was seemingly boundless cake, a forest of long, white candles, 350 guests — including his 16 grandchildren — and lectures recognizing his eclectic achievements in math, physics, astronomy and public affairs.H. T. Yau of Harvard University commenced the math section, launching into Dyson’s work on the universality of random matrices. George Andrews of Pennsylvania State University and Kathrin Bringmann of the University of Cologne followed with the implications of Dyson’s early contributions to number theory, which he began contemplating in high school. William Happer, a physicist at Princeton University and a fellow skeptic of the perils of anthropogenic climate change, closed day one with a talk provocatively titled “Why Has Global Warming Paused?”

Dyson admits to being controversial when it comes to climate science. But during an hour-long interview with Quanta Magazine in December, he said: “Generally speaking, I’m much more of a conformist.” Still, he has written fondly of science as an act of rebellion. In his 2006 anthology of essays and reviews, “The Scientist as Rebel,” Dyson writes, “I was lucky to be introduced to science at school as a subversive activity of the younger boys.” With characteristic concern for social issues, he goes on to advise parents: “We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.”

On the second day of the 2013 celebration in Princeton, after numerous speakers had recounted past collaborations with Dyson, alternately feting and roasting his brilliance, Press took a different tack. Referring to their collaboration on the prisoner’s dilemma, Press — a professor at the University of Texas, Austin — said he “thought it would be a little extreme to reminisce with Freeman about a paper that was just published.” Instead, he described his own recent result on safer “adaptive” clinical trials, adding that although he had solid computational data, the mathematical analysis proved too formidable. “I wish I had worked on it with Freeman — and maybe still will get the chance to do so,” he said slyly.

Press’ comment proved prescient. After the celebration, Dyson began mulling over the problem — unbeknownst to Press, who didn’t find out until Quanta contacted him in March about the new “collaboration.” “I’m glad to know it’s on his stack of things to do!” he said. “I’m looking forward to seeing what he comes up with.”

Quanta Magazine interviewed Dyson at the institute, just days after his 90th birthday. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows.

QUANTA MAGAZINE: Technically, you retired from the Institute for Advanced Study 20 years ago. What are you working on now?

FREEMAN DYSON: I used to be a scientist and did a lot of calculations. It was a competitive world, and when I got older, I decided I wouldn’t compete with the bright, young people anymore, so I write books instead. And now I’ve become a book reviewer for The New York Review of Books. About once a month, I write a review, and then I get a lot of response and correspondence, people who are finding things I said which aren’t true.

What did you do prior to writing book reviews?

I was trained as a mathematician, and I remain a mathematician. That’s really my skill, just doing calculations and applying mathematics to all kinds of problems, and that led me into physics first and also other fields, such as engineering and even a bit of biology, sometimes a little bit of chemistry. Mathematics applies to all kinds of things. That’s one of the joys of being a mathematician.

Why math?

I think the decisive moment was reading the book “Men of Mathematics” by Eric Temple Bell. Bell was a professor at Caltech, and he wrote this book, which is actually just a wonderful collection of biographies of mathematicians. Historians condemn it as romanticized. But what was wonderful about this book is that he showed the mathematicians as being mostly crooks and people of very mixed kinds of qualities, not at all saints, and many of them quite unscrupulous and not very clever, and still they managed to do great mathematics. So it told a kid that “if they can do it, why can’t you?”

What are some of the big questions that have guided your career?

I’m not a person for big questions. I look for puzzles. I look for interesting problems that I can solve. I don’t care whether they’re important or not, and so I’m definitely not obsessed with solving some big mystery. That’s not my style.

What kinds of puzzles first intrigued you?

I started out as a pure mathematician and found problems that just arise out of the very nature of numbers, which are amazingly subtle and difficult and beautiful. That was when I was about 17 or so, just at the end of high school. I was interested in numbers before I was interested in the real world.

“I translated Feynman’s ideas into mathematics so it became more accessible to the world, and, as a result, I became famous.”

What is it about numbers that made you want to figure them out?

It’s just like asking, “Why does a violinist like to play the violin?” I had this skill with mathematical tools, and I played these tools as well as I could just because it was beautiful, rather in the same way a musician plays the violin, not expecting to change the world but just because he loves the instrument.

You’re known for your work in quantum electrodynamics — which describes interactions between light, matter and charged particles — and in solving the renormalization problem — which helped rid the mathematics of unwanted infinities. How did that work come about?

When I arrived in Cornell in 1947, there just had been done a beautiful experiment at Columbia on the hydrogen atom. The hydrogen atom is the simplest atom, and you ought to be able to understand it if you understand atoms at all. So, these experiments were done by Willis Lamb and his student Robert Retherford at Columbia, observing for the first time the very fine behavior of hydrogen using microwaves to examine the hydrogen atoms, and Lamb got very precise results. The problem was the quantum theory wasn’t good enough to explain his results. Dick Feynman, who was an absolute genius, had understood more or less how to explain it but couldn’t translate his ideas into ordinary mathematics. I came along and had the mathematical skill, making it possible to calculate precisely what the hydrogen atom was doing, and the amazing thing was that my calculations all agreed with the experiment, so it turns out the theory was right.

I didn’t invent anything new — I translated Feynman’s ideas into mathematics so it became more accessible to the world, and, as a result, I became famous, but it all happened within about six months.

Did it lead to other questions that you wanted to explore?

I got job offers from everywhere in America and also in England, but the problem was that I didn’t actually want to settle down yet and become an overburdened professor with lots of students. So I escaped to England and had two happy years at Birmingham without any responsibilities and continued working on other problems.

I was very much interested in space travel, and so the next exciting thing I did was to work with a company in California called General Atomics for a couple of years building a spaceship. In those days, people were willing to take all kinds of risks, and all kinds of crazy schemes got supported. So there was this bunch of crazy, young people — the leader was Freddie de Hoffmann, who had been at Los Alamos [National Laboratory] and knew all about nuclear bombs — and we decided we would go around the solar system with a spaceship driven by nuclear bombs. We would launch the ship into space — “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb,” about four bombs per second — going up all the way to Mars and then afterwards to Jupiter and Saturn, and we intended to go ourselves.
 
What happened to Project Orion?

I spent two wonderful years in San Diego having grand dreams of spaceships. We not only did calculations, we also flew little models about a meter in diameter with chemical explosives, which actually went “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb” a few times a few hundred feet up. It was amazing we never got hurt. I think we didn’t even have to buy the explosives. We had some Navy friend who stole it from the Navy. Anyhow, we certainly borrowed the test stand from the Navy where we did these little flight tests. That lasted for two years. By that time, it was clear that the competition was actually going to win, the competition being Wernher von Braun and the Apollo program, which was going to go with ordinary rockets to the moon.

The Orion spaceship sounds like something a child might dream up. How disappointed were you that this “grand dream” wasn’t realized?

Of course we were very disappointed when it turned out that the Orion never flew, but it was clear that it would make a horrible mess of the landscape. These bombs were producing radioactive fallout as they went up through the atmosphere, and although at that time we were exploding bombs in the atmosphere for military purposes, which were much bigger than the ones we proposed to use, still we would have made a contribution to the general contamination, and that was the reason why the project failed, and I think it was a good reason.

You’ve developed a reputation as a maverick scientist with contrarian views. Where do you think that comes from?

I think the notion that I always like to oppose the consensus in science is totally wrong. The fact is there’s only one subject that I’ve been controversial, which is climate. I spend maybe 1 percent of my time on climate, and that’s the only field in which I’m opposed to the majority. Generally speaking, I’m much more of a conformist, but it happens I have strong views about climate because I think the majority is badly wrong, and you have to make sure if the majority is saying something that they’re not talking nonsense.

With a majority of scientists on the other side of this issue, what would it take to convince you to switch sides?

What I’m convinced of is that we don’t understand climate, and so that’s sort of a neutral position. I’m not saying the majority is necessarily wrong. I’m saying that they don’t understand what they’re seeing. It will take a lot of very hard work before that question is settled, so I shall remain neutral until something very different happens.

You became a professor at Cornell without ever having received a Ph.D. You seem almost proud of that fact.

Oh, yes. I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all.

I was lucky because I got educated in World War II and everything was screwed up so that I could get through without a Ph.D. and finish up as a professor. Now that’s quite impossible. So, I’m very proud that I don’t have a Ph.D. and I raised six children and none of them has a Ph.D., so that’s my contribution.

Looking back at your career, how has your approach to science changed over the decades?

I’ve now been active for something like 70 years, and still I use the same mathematics. I think the main thing that’s changed as a result of computers is the magnitude of databases. We now have these huge amounts of data and very little understanding. So what we have now — I forget who it was who said this — are small islands of understanding in a sea of information. The problem is to enlarge the islands of understanding.

What scientific advance do you see on the horizon that will have a big impact on society?

People are often asking me what’s going to happen next in science that’s important, and of course, the whole point is that if it’s important, it’s something we didn’t expect. All the really important things come as a big surprise. There are many examples of this, of course, dark energy being the latest example. Anything I mention will be something that, obviously, is not a surprise.

Are you currently working on a math problem?

The question of what I do with my time is a delicate one. I’m not really doing science competitively, but I like to have a problem to work on. I’m very lucky to have a friend, Bill Press, who is an expert on clinical trials, which actually turns out to be an interesting mathematical problem.

He published a paper explaining how to do clinical trials in a really effective way with a minimum loss of life. He’s a computer expert, so everything he does is worked out just with numbers, and so I have taken on as my next task to translate what he did into equations, the same way I did with Feynman. I’m not sure whether it will work, but that’s what I’m thinking about at the moment.

What does it mean for someone with so many intellectual pursuits to be retired?

When I retired as a professor of the institute, I kept all the privileges. The only thing that changed is the paychecks stopped coming. I still have an office and all the secretarial help I need, plus a place at the lunch table. One more advantage is not having to go to faculty meetings.

 

[a_majoor]

Global warming alarmists as a coalition of eco freaks and grifters? Works as well as any other explanation:

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/07/are-global-warming-alarmists-just-a-conglomerate-of-eco-radicals-and-third-world-grifters/

Are global warming alarmists just a conglomerate of eco radicals and third world grifters?

posted at 6:41 pm on April 7, 2014 by Bruce McQuain

While doing a  review of Rupert Darwall’s book “The Age of Global Warming”, Charles Moore does an excellent job of succinctly identifying the alarmist movement’s core origins and core identity:


The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government. It involves a fondness for predicting that energy supplies won’t last much longer (as early as 1909, the US National Conservation Commission reported to Congress that America’s natural gas would be gone in 25 years and its oil by the middle of the century), protest movements which involve dressing up and disappearing into woods (the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the Mosleyite Blackshirts who believed in reafforestation) and a dislike of the human race (The Club of Rome’s work Mankind at the Turning-Point said: “The world has cancer and the cancer is man.”).

These beliefs began to take organised, international, political form in the 1970s. One of the greatest problems, however, was that the ecologists’ attacks on economic growth were unwelcome to the nations they most idolised – the poor ones. The eternal Green paradox is that the concept of the simple, natural life appeals only to countries with tons of money. By a brilliant stroke, the founding fathers developed the concept of “sustainable development”. This meant that poor countries would not have to restrain their own growth, but could force restraint upon the rich ones. This formula was propagated at the first global environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972.

Indeed, the resulting grouping was a natural one.  Eco radicals out to ‘save the world’ from evil capitalism (and man) and poor countries looking for a way to extort billions from rich countries.

The G7 Summit in Toronto in 1988 endorsed the theory of global warming. In the same year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up. The capture of the world’s elites was under way. Its high point was the Kyoto Summit in 1998, which enabled the entire world to yell at the United States for not signing up, while also exempting developing nations, such as China and India, from its rigours.

The final push, brilliantly described here by Darwall, was the Copenhagen Summit of 2009. Before it, a desperate Gordon Brown warned of “50 days to avoid catastrophe”, but the “catastrophe” came all the same. The warmists’ idea was that the global fight against carbon emissions would work only if the whole world signed up to it. Despite being ordered to by President Obama, who had just collected his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, the developing countries refused. The Left-wing dream that what used to be called the Third World would finally be emancipated from Western power had come true. The developing countries were perfectly happy for the West to have “the green crap”, but not to have it themselves. The Western goody-goodies were hoist by their own petard.

The UN was the natural forum for this push and the IPCC, headed by an railway engineer, the natural “scientific” instrument.  We know how that story has turned out to this point.  No global warming registered for 17 years and 6 months despite all the dire, but apparently scientifically groundless, predictions.  The irony, of course, is it is those who have been skeptical of all of this are the one’s called “deniers”.  And the alarmists have become so bankrupt and shrill that some of them are calling for the arrest of “deniers.”  One supposes since the alarmist cause most closely resembles a religious cult, the call for arrest is on the grounds of heresy … or something.

Meanwhile, “green energy” – the eco radical solution to all – continues to not be ready for prime time, while fossil fuel becomes cheaper and more plentiful.

Yet somehow, the so-called “elites” have decided – based on what, one isn’t sure – that the threat to the globe is real.  More irony.  On the one hand, the eco radicals don’t care at all if it costs lives since they’ve been convinced for decades that it is man that’s the problem.  Less of us is a “good thing” in their world.  On the other hand you have the elites, aka, politicians, who see an opportunity to both expand government power and create revenue literally out of thin air. The fight is over who will get the money.

Meanwhile the reputation of science – real science – will suffer because of this very political cause and the actions of some scientists to serve it.

Scientists, Rupert Darwall complains, have been too ready to embrace the “subjectivity” of the future, and too often have a “cultural aversion to learning from the past”.

And that is a complete disservice to science.

 

[GAP]

El Nino's return could change everything

KIYOSHI ANDO, Nikkei senior staff writer
June 12, 2014 12:00 am JST
http://asia.nikkei.com/magazine/20140612-BORDERLESS-ASEAN/Tech-Science/El-Nino-s-return-could-change-everything

TOKYO -- Indications from the tropical Pacific suggest that the first El Nino event in five years is happening. And this looks to be not any normal El Nino, but one that could rival the abnormal conditions from the spring of 1997 to the spring of 1998. Experts also note that global warming could accelerate if this year's El Nino triggers a "regime shift," the term used for a sudden, massive change in the global climate.

The trade winds in the equatorial Pacific normally blow from east to west. But two strong westerly bursts were recorded in January and February, and two slightly less powerful westerly bursts occurred in March and April.

    "The trigger for an El Nino has been pulled. If these westerly bursts continue, it could develop into a powerful event," said Shuhei Maeda, senior coordinator for El Nino information at the Japan Meteorological Agency.

    The warm ocean-surface waters carried to the western Pacific by the trade winds can get pushed back eastward by these strong winds. El Nino conditions could develop if this causes ocean temperatures to rise higher than normal across the eastern part of the tropical Pacific and off the waters of Peru.

    "The way the westerly winds are blowing and the resulting changes in ocean temperatures resemble what took place in 1997," said Kentaro Ando, a group leader at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (Jamstec).

Cooler Japan?

Heat in large amounts accumulates in relatively shallow ocean waters south of Japan and moves eastward along the equator. Ocean water temperatures in the eastern Pacific usually begin rising several months after the amount of heat has reached its maximum in the tropical Pacific.
more on link

 

[Edward Campbell]

According to this Canada accounts for about 2.49% of global GDP but, accorsding to this:

        ... we do it while producing only 1.58% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

I'd say we are making good, productive use of the energy, etc, we burn.

 

[ModlrMike]

I'd say we are making good, productive use of the energy, etc, we burn.

Heresy! Stone the non-believer!

 

[a_majoor]

Thunder from the land down under....

http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/07/17/carbon-tax-torn-asunder-down-under/

AXING THE TAX
Carbon Tax Torn Asunder Down Under

Did you hear that last night? The sound of a million green activists crying out in terror? Australia just abolished its tax on carbon on a 39 to 32 vote. Prime Minister Tony Abbott campaigned on this repeal, and after two years of debate, he can now claim victory on the issue. The FT reports:

The senate voted by 39 to 32 on Thursday to repeal carbon pricing following months of bitter wrangling between opposition parties and the government over the measure, which was introduced two years ago.

“What’s gone today is not a policy to reduce emissions. What’s gone today is the world’s biggest carbon tax,” said Mr Abbott, who campaigned in last year’s election to “axe the tax”.

The green agenda was toxic for the government that brought it in and materially contributed to Abbott’s victory. The biggest consequence for the green movement won’t be the relatively trivial amount of carbon emissions that repeal of the law entails; it’s the political shadow over the green agenda worldwide. The core green strategy is to tax and harass “bad” energy sources ranging from coal to oil and so forth, while showering subsidies on “good” energy technologies like solar and wind. This will drive investment away from “bad” (but relatively efficient) methods of energy generation to “good” (but inefficient and expensive) ones.

What the aborted Australian experiment with this system shows is that consumers really, really hate the higher energy bills that this approach involves. Very affluent voters may not notice the size of their energy bills, but the hard pressed middle and lower middle classes emphatically do. That (and the effects on job creation of higher taxes and energy prices) made opposition to the Australian green program a huge vote winner for Abbott’s party.

That suggests that the green agenda in developed countries worldwide is in deep trouble—that Europe isn’t a trendsetter but an outlier. And it suggests that Canada and the U.S., two other large energy producing economies whose politics and culture aren’t all that dissimilar from Australia’s, could be heading the same way. Without the energy titans of the English speaking world on board, the conventional global green program is DOA.

From our point of view, this strengthens the case we’ve been making all along: Greens who seriously care about the future of the planet need to shift their ground, embrace the information revolution, and look for ways to help a new and more energy efficient economy to emerge. That, in turn, will accelerate the world’s transition to a more sustainable—and more affluent and faster growing—economy.

 

[a_majoor]

Buzz Aldrin steps up to the plate. I doubt that he has any issues with using real science to study an issue...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2814701/I-sceptical-humans-causing-global-warming-says-Buzz-Aldrin-thinks-people-sent-DIE-Mars.html

‘I am sceptical humans are causing global warming’: Buzz Aldrin says more research - and less politics - is needed
Buzz Aldrin reveals his views on climate change, Mars and space exploration
Second man on the moon was speaking exclusively to MailOnline from LA
Dr Aldrin says he is unconvinced humans are causing climate change
And he also followed up on comments made the other day that the first manned missions to Mars should be one-way trips
He wants the first people on Mars to stay there and create a colony
They would live out the rest of their days on Mars until their death 
'I want people to think very carefully; what can we possibly do with those people back on Earth?'
And he also wants to see more cooperation between the US and other countries - including China - when it comes to space exploration

ByJonathan O'Callaghan for MailOnline

Published: 11:11 GMT, 31 October 2014 | Updated: 13:24 GMT, 31 October 2014

The second man on the moon has revealed his thoughts on climate change, one-way missions to Mars and the state of space exploration.

He says he is ‘sceptical about the claims that human produced carbon dioxide is the direct contributor to global warming.’

And following up on comments made the earlier in the week, he says the first Martian explorers should be sent there for the rest of their days - so that they might be the first colonists in a permanent settlement.

Buzz Aldrin (pictured) reveals his views on climate change, Mars and space exploration. The second man on the moon was speaking exclusively to MailOnline from LA. He is pictured here speaking on the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday

In recent years Dr Aldrin, who holds a doctorate of science in Astronautics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, has been outspoken on a wide range of issues.

He has been a huge proponent of sending humans to Mars to colonise the red planet, outlined by his book ‘My Vision for Space Exploration’ released last year.

And he told MailOnline it should not necessarily be just to further our exploration efforts, but also to ensure the survival of the human race.

BUZZ ALDRIN'S BIOGRAPHY

Edwin ‘Buzz’ Eugene Aldrin, Jr was born on 20 January 1930 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey.

He has a bachelor of science degree from the US Military Academy at West Point, New York and a doctorate of science from the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology for a thesis titled ‘Guidance for Manned Orbital Rendezvous’.

Dr Aldrin is one of very few early astronauts to have a background in science. This earned him the nickname ‘Dr Rendezvous’ during the Apollo programme.

The nickname ‘Buzz’ comes from his youngest sister repeatedly calling him ‘buzzer’ instead of ‘brother’. In 1988, he legally changed his name to Buzz.

On 11 November 1966 he set a record for the longest spacewalk at the time, five and a half hours, during the Gemini 12 mission. He solved many of the problems that had plagued previous spacewalks, notably using handrails and footrests to prevent over-exertion.

On 20 July 1969, he became the second man to walk on the moon after Neil Armstrong. The first words from the lunar surface were actually spoken by Dr Aldrin when their spacecraft touched down, when he said: ‘Contact light’.

He resigned from Nasa in July 1971 and later the Air Force. Since then he has remained an advocate of space exploration, penning papers and books including ‘Return to Earth’ and the recent ‘Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration’.
.
This inevitably leads to questions about our own planet - for example, are humans causing global warming that will render our world uninhabitable?

‘In the news today I hear about the large solar flares, which is an indication of the power of the sun to influence Earth and our climate,’ Dr Aldrin said.

‘My first inclination is to be a bit sceptical about the claims that human-produced carbon dioxide is the direct contributor to global warming.

‘And if there is that doubt, then I think an unbiased non-politically motivated group of people worldwide, representing us instead of creating taxes like the carbon tax, should examine the output of different nations that might contribute to the very large cycles of warming and cooling that have taken place long before we started to have humans producing emissions.

‘In a short period of time it appears to some people [that humans are] the cause of global warming - which is now called climate change - [but] climate change has certainly existed over time.’

It's a position that will no doubt strike a chord with Nasa, who have been performing extensive climate missions in recent years to find out the impact humans are having on the climate.

‘You can tell I’m not too bashful about some of my feelings,’ he says,’But I try and limit them to areas that I feel my development of innovations and thinking can be brought to bear on challenges that are facing civilisation here on Earth.’

He also bemoans some of the excessive funding that is allocated to climate change research, saying: ‘Space is not as enthusiastically supported by the world and by the American people anywhere near as much as it was during the pioneering years of the 60s and 70s.

‘The society of life on Mars, or the challenge of making Mars more liveable, will have significant benefits on our attempts to modify and change in some ways the environment here on Earth.

Dr Aldrin says he is 'a bit sceptical about the claims that human-produced carbon dioxide is the direct contributor to global warming.' He believes that Earth's climate (stock image shown) is perhaps more influenced by the sun than it is by humans

And it's not just the attitude towards climate that Dr Aldrin disagrees with when it comes to Nasa - he also doesn't make much of their roadmap to to Mars.

Nasa’s plan to get to Mars currently involves sending humans to an asteroid in the 2020s before putting boots on the red planet in the 2030s.

But this is a route that Dr Aldrin vehemently opposes.

‘I rather strongly object to the asteroid retrieval mission,’ he says. This is because he wants Nasa to take a more direct route to Mars, getting people their sooner rather than later.

Rather than wasting time with an asteroid mission, he wants to see a mission to Mars in the works as soon as possible, perhaps with a return to the moon first to test some of the technologies needed.

He says the first humans on Mars should be the first inhabitants of a long-term colony that will create a permanent settlement there.

Beginning with six people on the surface, he wants to see six more added repeatedly on further missions.

‘It sounds complicated but it’s the result of my working with Purdue University to develop transportation systems that cycle from Earth to Mars and back to Earth again,’ he says.

‘I do believe that until we attain a sufficient number of people on the surface, and I don’t know what that number is - 60, 80 or 100 - the first people to land on the surface of Mars are indeed the most difficult people to bring back to Earth.

‘We haven’t established the procedures of fuel, the vehicles on Mars to bring them back.

‘To do so is more expensive, and it delays the landing of more people.

‘Keeping people on Mars is cheaper than if they come back.’

And it’s for this reason Dr Aldrin thinks they should be kept on Mars.

With regards to Mars, Dr Aldrin says the first explorers to land there should remain permanently (stock image of Mars One colony shown). He says they can arrive in groups of six and eventually build a settlement on the red planet that up to 100 people could inhabit

‘I do believe that until we attain a sufficient number of people on the surface, and I don’t know what that number is - 60, 80 or 100 - the first people to land on the surface of Mars [stock image shown] are indeed the most difficult people to bring back to Earth,' says Dr Aldrin

‘These people have been trained and given the great historical value of being the first human beings in history to occupy another planet and people want to bring them back?' he continues.

‘Let me ask those people who want to bring them back, what are you going to do with them back here on Earth that will in any way

the billions and billions of dollars that have been invested in those human beings to put them on Mars?

‘If they come back we’re leaving Mars empty.

‘I say to you, from Mars they can do more to inspire people about space travel by transmitting images, messages and video from the surface of Mars.

‘And they can help settle the next and the next and the next numbers of people that get there.

‘I want people to think very carefully; what can we possibly do with those people back on Earth?

‘Do we have a parade for them?

‘They can do more of value from the surface of Mars than they can by bringing them back to Earth.’

But with this proposal comes an obvious question, namely does that mean Dr Aldrin thinks the first people sent to Mars should remain there for the rest of their lives?

‘Yes, that’s the short answer,’ he says.

One interesting aspect of people living on Mars that Dr Aldrin brings up is how people might have a shorter life expectancy. Perhaps their stay there, although for the rest of their lives, might not be as long as on Earth.

‘The life expectancy of people going to Mars may be decreased by the higher level of radiation that they receive,’ he explains.

Their lives would likely be shortened by about 10 or 20 years, but Dr Aldrin says any potential Mars explorer would be more than willing to live a shorter life if it meant starting the first Mars colony.

But he adds: ‘You ask anyone who’s been to the moon if you would rather have stayed back here than having pioneered the first humans to reach our very nearby object in space.'

To make such a mission possible, Dr Aldrin calls for more international cooperation with regards to space exploration.

He alludes to the culmination of the Apollo missions, themselves somewhat of a show of strength from the US to Russia, as the dawn of the age of cooperation.

‘If you want my honest opinion, the demonstration of the industrial might behind the Apollo programme demonstrated to the Soviets that they could not match the development of missiles with nuclear warheads [in the US].

‘That brought about a re-evaluation by President Gorbachev of just what the Soviet Union should be doing, and I believe that had a major effect on the outcome of the Cold War.

‘We have new threats today, and I believe the English speaking nations of the world will be prominent in resisting those threats to the freedom and liberty that was extended around the world by the British Empire.'

To make a mission to Mars possible, Dr Aldrin calls for more international cooperation (ISS shown) with regards to space exploration. He alludes to the culmination of the Apollo missions, themselves somewhat of a show of strength from the US to Russia, as the dawn of the age of cooperation

He continues: ‘In 1975 when the Cold War was still quite contested, with missiles pointed at each other, the US and Soviet Union conducted a joint mission in space called Apollo-Soyuz,’ he continues.

‘Next July is the 40th anniversary of that, and I believe that we should take advantage of that event in history and make an announcement or make a strong effort towards bringing the Chinese space programme to the ISS.

‘America’s return to leadership [in space] should be by not competing with other nations that want to land their people on the moon; we can help them considerably as we develop the transportation systems required to get large numbers of human beings to the surface of Mars permanently.'

However Dr Aldrin says he is ‘disappointed’ at the progress made in space exploration since he set foot on the moon.

But he has  remained a huge advocate of space exploration, penning papers and books including ‘Return to Earth’ and the recent ‘Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration’been a huge proponent of space exploration

Dr Aldrin now runs a charity for veterans of previous conflicts and war-like activities to help them deal with post-traumatic stress disorder.

He admits he has been ‘a little lonesome’ at times but has enjoyed working with a team internationally on various matters dealing with space and science.

And he hopes humanity will ultimately see the fruits of his efforts to continue exploring space.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2814701/I-sceptical-humans-causing-global-warming-says-Buzz-Aldrin-thinks-people-sent-DIE-Mars.html#ixzz3Hkl2E9Qt
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
​

​

 

[a_majoor]

The science is settled. You don't want to be a science denier, do you?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewables_engineers/

Renewable energy 'simply WON'T WORK': Top Google engineers
Windmills, solar, tidal - all a 'false hope', say Stanford PhDs
By Lewis Page, 21 Nov 2014
273
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Comment Two highly qualified Google engineers who have spent years studying and trying to improve renewable energy technology have stated quite bluntly that renewables will never permit the human race to cut CO2 emissions to the levels demanded by climate activists. Whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilisation: such a thing is impossible.

Both men are Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein having trained in aerospace engineering and David Fork in applied physics. These aren't guys who fiddle about with websites or data analytics or "technology" of that sort: they are real engineers who understand difficult maths and physics, and top-bracket even among that distinguished company. The duo were employed at Google on the RE<C project, which sought to enhance renewable technology to the point where it could produce energy more cheaply than coal.


RE<C was a failure, and Google closed it down after four years. Now, Koningstein and Fork have explained the conclusions they came to after a lengthy period of applying their considerable technological expertise to renewables, in an article posted at IEEE Spectrum.

The two men write:

At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope ...

Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

One should note that RE<C didn't restrict itself to conventional renewable ideas like solar PV, windfarms, tidal, hydro etc. It also looked extensively into more radical notions such as solar-thermal, geothermal, "self-assembling" wind towers and so on and so forth. There's no get-out clause for renewables believers here.

Koningstein and Fork aren't alone. Whenever somebody with a decent grasp of maths and physics looks into the idea of a fully renewables-powered civilised future for the human race with a reasonably open mind, they normally come to the conclusion that it simply isn't feasible. Merely generating the relatively small proportion of our energy that we consume today in the form of electricity is already an insuperably difficult task for renewables: generating huge amounts more on top to carry out the tasks we do today using fossil-fuelled heat isn't even vaguely plausible.

Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms - and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.

In reality, well before any such stage was reached, energy would become horrifyingly expensive - which means that everything would become horrifyingly expensive (even the present well-under-one-per-cent renewables level in the UK has pushed up utility bills very considerably). This in turn means that everyone would become miserably poor and economic growth would cease (the more honest hardline greens admit this openly). That, however, means that such expensive luxuries as welfare states and pensioners, proper healthcare (watch out for that pandemic), reasonable public services, affordable manufactured goods and transport, decent personal hygiene, space programmes (watch out for the meteor!) etc etc would all have to go - none of those things are sustainable without economic growth.

So nobody's up for that. And yet, stalwart environmentalists like Koningstein and Fork - and many others - remain convinced that the dangers of carbon-driven warming are real and massive. Indeed the pair reference the famous NASA boffin Dr James Hansen, who is more or less the daddy of modern global warming fears, and say like him that we must move rapidly not just to lessened but to zero carbon emissions (and on top of that, suck a whole lot of CO2 out of the air by such means as planting forests).

So, how is this to be done?

Renewable energy 'simply WON'T WORK': Top Google engineers
Windmills, solar, tidal - all a 'false hope', say Stanford PhDs
By Lewis Page, 21 Nov 2014
273
RELATED STORIES
Alex Salmond's fantasy of a tidal-powered Scotland washed away
Google shakes up US utility with green power tariff
Google charms Greenpeace with wind powered data center deal
Google Energy gets OK
Google's 'Smart Grid' idea? Get the govt to pay for it
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Revealed: The disruptive new energy technology that could save the human race
Koningstein and Fork say that humanity's only hope is a new method of energy generation which can provide power - ideally "dispatchable" (can be turned on and off) and/or "distributed" (produced near where it's wanted) - at costs well below those of coal or gas. They write:

What’s needed are zero-carbon energy sources so cheap that the operators of power plants and industrial facilities alike have an economic rationale for switching over within the next 40 years ...

Incremental improvements to existing technologies aren’t enough; we need something truly disruptive.


Unfortunately the two men don't know what that is, or if they do they aren't saying. James Hansen does, though: it's nuclear power.

As applied at the moment, of course, nuclear power isn't cheap enough to provide a strong economic rationale. That's because its costs have been forced enormously higher than they would otherwise be by the imposition of cripplingly high health and safety standards (in its three "disasters" so far - Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima - the scientifically verified death tolls from all causes have been and will be zero, 56 and zero: a record which other power industries including renewables can only envy*).

Nuclear costs have also been artificially driven up by the non-issue of "waste". In the UK for instance, all "higher activity nuclear waste" must be kept expensively stored in a secure specialist facility and can only ever - perhaps - be finally disposed of in a wildly expensive geological vault. No less than 99.7 per cent of this "waste" is actually intermediate-level, meaning that it basically isn't radioactive at all: you could theoretically make half a tonne of ordinary dirt into such "intermediate level nuclear waste" by burying a completely legal luminous wristwatch in it. (If you did that inside the boundaries of a licensed nuclear facility, the dirt really would then become ridiculously costly "waste".)

The remaining 0.003 of "nuclear waste" actually is dangerous, but it can almost all be reprocessed into fuel and used again. So waste really doesn't need to be an issue at all.

There can't be any doubt that if nuclear power had been allowed to be as dangerous per unit of energy generated as, say, the gas industry* - let alone the terribly dangerous coal business - it truly would be too cheap to meter and Messrs Koningstein and Fork's problem would have been solved for them decades ago: by now, nobody with access to uranium would be bothering with fossil fuels except for specialist purposes - and there's no reason why nations "of concern" couldn't be kept safely supplied. Would we run out of uranium? Not until the year 5000AD.

Cheap power solves a lot more problems than just carbon emissions, too. If power is cheap, so is fresh water (the fact is we're really at that point already, though a lot of people refuse to admit it and prefer to treat fresh water as some sort of scarce and finite resource). If fresh water is cheap, an awful lot more of the planet is habitable and/or arable than is the case if it's expensive: and that is truly game-changing stuff for the human race.

And as a side benefit we'd by now have actual useful spacecraft which could actually go to places in reasonable amounts of time carrying reasonable amounts of stuff at reasonable costs. We'd be able to establish viable bases on other planets - for instance to mine uranium there, should we ever find ourselves running low.

Even if you aren't terribly convinced about the looming menace of carbon-driven warming, the fact that we have decided of our own free will not to have cheap, abundant energy and all the miracles it would bring with it ... that's a terrible human tragedy. Nobody knows how much misery might result from climate change in the future, but one can say with certainty that a lot of misery has been caused by the absence of cheap energy, water, food and decent places to live over the last sixty-plus years.

Anyway the truth is that the disruptive new technology which Koningstein and Fork are dreaming of already exists: but it's been stolen from us by our foolish fears, inflated in many cases by dishonest activists. Even if someone could come up with some other way of making terrifically cheap energy, there's no guarantee that the ignorant fearmongers of the world wouldn't manage to suppress that too. There would almost certainly be a powerful application in weapons, just as there is in nuclear; this is, after all, energy we're talking about.

Koningstein and Fork believe that the answer to the carbon menace is a reallocation of R&D spending, to seek out high-risk disruptive technologies. But the fact is it would probably make more sense to spend money on making sure that people don't reach voting age without understanding basic mathematics and facts about risk and energy.

You wouldn't need to take that money from R&D. You could instead repurpose some of the huge and growing amounts of money that are currently being diverted into the purchase of tiny amounts of ridiculously expensive renewable energy.

After all, no matter the wider issues, we now have it on the best and unimpeachably environmentalist of authorities that renewable energy can't achieve its stated purpose. So - no matter what - there can't be any point in continuing with it.

None of this is new, of course. These realities have been wilfully ignored by the British governing class and others for many years. But the British/American governing classes, so fatally committed to renewables, often seem willing to listen to Google even if they won't listen to anyone else.

So, just maybe, this time the message will have some impact. ®

Bootnote
*The Piper Alpha gas rig explosion of 1988 on its own caused three times as many deaths as the nuclear power industry has in its entire history. Bizarrely though, no nations ceased using gas.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

Just when I thought this thread was dead ;D

 

[ModlrMike]

This may cost them more in good will than in money:

Peru moves to sue Greenpeace

 

[daftandbarmy]

Climategate, the sequel: How we are STILL being tricked with flawed data on global warming

Something very odd has been going on with the temperature data relied on by the world's scientists, writes Christopher Booker


Although it has been emerging for seven years or more, one of the most extraordinary scandals of our time has never hit the headlines. Yet another little example of it lately caught my eye when, in the wake of those excited claims that 2014 was “the hottest year on record”, I saw the headline on a climate blog: “Massive tampering with temperatures in South America”. The evidence on Notalotofpeopleknowthat, uncovered by Paul Homewood, was indeed striking.

Puzzled by those “2014 hottest ever” claims, which were led by the most quoted of all the five official global temperature records – Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) – Homewood examined a place in the world where Giss was showing temperatures to have risen faster than almost anywhere else: a large chunk of South America stretching from Brazil to Paraguay.

Noting that weather stations there were thin on the ground, he decided to focus on three rural stations covering a huge area of Paraguay. Giss showed it as having recorded, between 1950 and 2014, a particularly steep temperature rise of more than 1.5C: twice the accepted global increase for the whole of the 20th century.

But when Homewood was then able to check Giss’s figures against the original data from which they were derived, he found that they had been altered. Far from the new graph showing any rise, it showed temperatures in fact having declined over those 65 years by a full degree. When he did the same for the other two stations, he found the same. In each case, the original data showed not a rise but a decline.

Homewood had in fact uncovered yet another example of the thousands of pieces of evidence coming to light in recent years that show that something very odd has been going on with the temperature data relied on by the world's scientists. And in particular by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has driven the greatest and most costly scare in history: the belief that the world is in the grip of an unprecedented warming.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11367272/Climategate-the-sequel-How-we-are-STILL-being-tricked-with-flawed-data-on-global-warming.html

 

[jeffb]

So because there is a flaw in three data stations, the other 4,500 to 7,000 data points (depending on which dataset it used) are flawed? Unless this article is suggesting that The UK Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Sciences, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Japan Meteorological Agency are all conspiring to manipulate raw data for - wait, what exactly would their purpose be? The other possibility is that the data was manipulated due to readings with more accurate equipment as all of these data sets are checked against spaced based sensors that measure temperature in the troposphere. This to me seems a case of anecdote trying to trump evidence.

 

[SeaKingTacco]

The problem is- some of the raw data (at least) has been manipulated. This is established fact.

Where that leads is: which of the data sets can some trusted? Some? All? None?

That is what happens when you frig around with the raw data and then hide that fact- suddenly, no one trusts you...

 

[a_majoor]

Patrick Moore on the issue of "climate change". The figures for CO2 are alarming, but not for the reasons the climate hysterics suggest. Look at the ideal amount of C02 needed for optimum plant growth, compared to the atmospheric concentration in the current epoch, for example. And of course, common sense interpretation of historic data turns the alarmists versions of reality on their heads: Were the Romans and Vikings idling their SUV's outside Tim Horton's to keep the climate so warm during the periods of their great expansions?

http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2015/03/20/why-i-am-climate-change-skeptic

Why I am a Climate Change Skeptic
March 20, 2015
Patrick Moore
Dr. Patrick Moore is the co-founder, chair, and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies, a... (read full bio)

[Editor’s Note: Patrick Moore, Ph.D., has been a leader in international environmentalism for more than 40 years. He cofounded Greenpeace and currently serves as chair of Allow Golden Rice. Moore received the 2014 Speaks Truth to Power Award at the Ninth International Conference on Climate Change, July 8, in Las Vegas. Watch his presentation about this piece at the video player to the left.]

I am skeptical humans are the main cause of climate change and that it will be catastrophic in the near future. There is no scientific proof of this hypothesis, yet we are told “the debate is over” and “the science is settled.”

My skepticism begins with the believers’ certainty they can predict the global climate with a computer model. The entire basis for the doomsday climate change scenario is the hypothesis increased atmospheric carbon dioxide due to fossil fuel emissions will heat the Earth to unlivable temperatures.

In fact, the Earth has been warming very gradually for 300 years, since the Little Ice Age ended, long before heavy use of fossil fuels. Prior to the Little Ice Age, during the Medieval Warm Period, Vikings colonized Greenland and Newfoundland, when it was warmer there than today. And during Roman times, it was warmer, long before fossil fuels revolutionized civilization.

The idea it would be catastrophic if carbon dioxide were to increase and average global temperature were to rise a few degrees is preposterous.

Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced for the umpteenth time we are doomed unless we reduce carbon-dioxide emissions to zero. Effectively this means either reducing the population to zero, or going back 10,000 years before humans began clearing forests for agriculture. This proposed cure is far worse than adapting to a warmer world, if it actually comes about.

IPCC Conflict of Interest

By its constitution, the IPCC has a hopeless conflict of interest. Its mandate is to consider only the human causes of global warming, not the many natural causes changing the climate for billions of years. We don’t understand the natural causes of climate change any more than we know if humans are part of the cause at present. If the IPCC did not find humans were the cause of warming, or if it found warming would be more positive than negative, there would be no need for the IPCC under its present mandate. To survive, it must find on the side of the apocalypse.

The IPCC should either have its mandate expanded to include all causes of climate change, or it should be dismantled.

Political Powerhouse

Climate change has become a powerful political force for many reasons. First, it is universal; we are told everything on Earth is threatened. Second, it invokes the two most powerful human motivators: fear and guilt. We fear driving our car will kill our grandchildren, and we feel guilty for doing it.

Third, there is a powerful convergence of interests among key elites that support the climate “narrative.” Environmentalists spread fear and raise donations; politicians appear to be saving the Earth from doom; the media has a field day with sensation and conflict; science institutions raise billions in grants, create whole new departments, and stoke a feeding frenzy of scary scenarios; business wants to look green, and get huge public subsidies for projects that would otherwise be economic losers, such as wind farms and solar arrays. Fourth, the Left sees climate change as a perfect means to redistribute wealth from industrial countries to the developing world and the UN bureaucracy.

So we are told carbon dioxide is a “toxic” “pollutant” that must be curtailed, when in fact it is a colorless, odorless, tasteless, gas and the most important food for life on earth. Without carbon dioxide above 150 parts per million, all plants would die.

Human Emissions Saved Planet

Over the past 150 million years, carbon dioxide had been drawn down steadily (by plants) from about 3,000 parts per million to about 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution. If this trend continued, the carbon dioxide level would have become too low to support life on Earth. Human fossil fuel use and clearing land for crops have boosted carbon dioxide from its lowest level in the history of the Earth back to 400 parts per million today.

At 400 parts per million, all our food crops, forests, and natural ecosystems are still on a starvation diet for carbon dioxide. The optimum level of carbon dioxide for plant growth, given enough water and nutrients, is about 1,500 parts per millionnearly four times higher than today, . Greenhouse growers inject carbon-dioxide to increase yields. Farms and forests will produce more if carbon-dioxide keeps rising.

We have no proof increased carbon dioxide is responsible for the earth’s slight warming over the past 300 years. There has been no significant warming for 18 years while we have emitted 25 per cent of all the carbon dioxide ever emitted. Carbon dioxide is vital for life on Earth and plants would like more of it. Which should we emphasize to our children?

Celebrate Carbon Dioxide

The IPCC’s followers have given us a vision of a world dying because of carbon-dioxide emissions. I say the Earth would be a lot deader with no carbon dioxide, and more of it will be a very positive factor in feeding the world. Let’s celebrate carbon dioxide.

Patrick Moore (pmoore@allowgoldenricenow.org) was a cofounder and leader of Greenpeace for 15 years. He is now chair and spokesman for Allow Golden Rice.