Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

[a_majoor]

Looking for the guilty:

http://psu.campusreform.org/group/events/2010-02-08/rally-for-academic-integrity

Rally for Academic Integrity
   
Date:
Friday, February 12, 2010 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
US/Eastern

Location:
Hetzel Union Building (HUB)--Pollock Road entrance
University Park, PA, 16802
United States
See map: Google Maps

Contact Info:
814-862-2931 or settle@psu.edu

Event Creator:
samuelsettle
samuelsettle

Students, residents and community leaders will join together on Friday, February 12, to demand a fair and independent investigation of Michael Mann and Climategate. The University has a conflict of interest, and should not conduct an internal investigation without external oversight. The Rally for Academic Integrity will take place in front of the Hetzel Union Building (HUB) on Penn State’s University Park Campus (Pollock Road entrance) at 12:00. This Rally for Academic Integrity is jointly sponsored by PSU Young Americans for Freedom and The 9-12 Project of Central PA.

Background:

Penn State's internal inquiry into Michael Mann's alleged scientific misconduct concluded with the virtual exoneration of his behavior, and ignored key evidence in the Climategate scandal. As feared, this inquiry was little more than a whitewash—an assault on academic integrity.

First, the university's internal review consisted of three Penn State employees who have strong incentives to protect the school's reputation and the millions of dollars it receives from global warming research grants. There was no external oversight.

Second, the review consisted of looking at a mere 47 emails (out of thousands in question), interviewing Mann, analyzing materials he submitted, and asking only two biased sources about his credibility.  Penn State hardly conducted a "thorough investigation" of alleged wrongdoing by Mann.

Consider the following extract:
“•He [Mann] explained that he had never falsified any data, nor had he had ever manipulated data to serve a given predetermined outcome;
“•He explained that he never used inappropriate influence in reviewing papers by other scientists who disagreed with the conclusions of his science;
“•He explained that he never deleted emails at the behest of any other scientist, specifically including Dr. Phil Jones, and that he never withheld data with the intention of obstructing science; and
“•He explained that he never engaged in activities or behaviors that were inconsistent with accepted academic practices.”

In short, Mann’s own claim of innocence is taken as proof of his innocence. Moreover, parts of the report are almost fawning in their description of Mann (e.g. “All were impressed by Dr. Mann’s composure and his forthright responses”). “This type of language would be more appropriate in a letter of recommendation than in a serious investigation,” commented Penn State sophomore, and YAF chair, Samuel Settle.

Third, Penn State's internal review ignored key passages in the emails under scrutiny.  While the committee examined the use of the word "trick" in correspondence between Mann and colleague Phil Jones, it failed to explore the purpose of Mann's "trick" to "hide the decline [in global temperatures]," which clearly suggests a manipulation of  the data.

Penn State's internal review of a few emails by vested interests inspires no confidence that Mann did not engage in scientific misconduct—which is precisely why an independent and external investigation of Michael Mann and Climategate is essential in order to reach a credible conclusion.


For further information contact:

Samuel Settle
Young Americans for Freedom
Telephone: 814-862-2931
Email:  settle@psu.edu

 

[zipperhead_cop]

Is this just a protest, or is there anything that would compel the faculty in actually revisiting the matter?

 

[a_majoor]

Follow the money:

http://bigjournalism.com/otockfield/2010/02/12/climategate-uk-edition-following-the-money-all-e4-trillion-of-it/

Climategate, UK Edition: Following the Money, All €4 Trillion of It

There’s a question oft-posed by the proponents of global warming… or of “climate change,” as the new term of art has it, thus allowing warmists to claim both the snowstorm now blanketing America’s East Coast, as well as the melting of that snow, as evidence for their theory.

“To what end?” the warmists ask the skeptics.  Or, in the lingua franca of conspiracy theorists everywhere: “Cui bono, my friend, cui bono?”

Well, lots of people are benefiting from the practical implications of this theory. There’s Nobel Laureate Al Gore for one, who is on track to become the first green billionaire:

Then, at the UN there is the organization that shared Gore’s Nobel Prize, the IPCC, and its controversial director Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, a railway engineer with no back ground in climate science who lives what has been described as a lavish lifestyle in Delhi.  Publicly he oversaw a report issued with the imprimatur of the UN that the Himalayan glaciers that feed India’s rivers will have melted by 2035.  Privately he has been acting as a director or advisor to a score of companies, including Pegasus Capital Advisors, GlorOil, Toyota, and Deutsche Bank, as revealed by Christopher Booker of the Telegraph here and here.

But hard-core warmists, intent on skepticizing the skeptics, invariably ask: “why would the media go along with this poppycock?”

Yes, why are the media so invested in the warming notion, given the countervailing evidence, the fact that the last climate theory (the global cooling scare of the 1970s) was so quickly disproven, and that it is self-evident that CO2, that most persecuted of molecules, is essential for life… for plant life.  (When an elephant sighs, a tree smiles.)

Well, the BBC, a prime proponents of warming theory, or AGW, has heavily invested its pension fund in the theory, and thus have had a major non-Scientific reason for their bias.  As revealed this weekend in The Express:

    The corporation is under investigation after being inundated with complaints that its editorial coverage of climate change is biased in favour of those who say it is a man-made phenomenon. The £8billion pension fund is likely to come under close scrutiny over its commitment to promote a low-carbon economy while struggling to reverse an estimated £2billion deficit. Concerns are growing that BBC journalists and their bosses regard disputed scientific theory that climate change is caused by mankind as “mainstream” while huge sums of  employees’ money is invested in companies whose success depends on the theory being widely accepted. The BBC is the only media organisation in Britain whose pension fund is a member of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, which has more than 50 members across Europe.

The IIGCC is an interesting group.  As their website explains:

    The IIGCC is a forum for collaboration on climate change for European investors. The group’s objective is to catalyse greater investment in a low carbon economy by bringing investors together to use their collective influence with companies, policymakers and investors. The group currently has over 50 members, including some of the largest pension funds and asset managers in Europe, and represents assets of around €4 trillion.

Wait… I hate to be a skeptic, but did they just say… “Four Trillion Euros”?

They did.

The Chairman of IIGCC investment group is Peter Dunscombe, who also happens to be the BBC’s Head of Pensions Investment.

Cui bono, my friend, cui bono?

 

[zipperhead_cop]

Looks like a great idea to me!

http://celebedge.ca/Bang/ContentPostingSplash3column?newsitemid=SPLTXT20198&feedname=SPLASH_NEWS&show=False&number=0&showbyline=True&subtitle=&detect=&abc=abc&date=False

Donald Trump says Al Gore should be stripped of Nobel prize

The former US Vice President was the co-winner of the award in 2007 for his work on climate change.

Donald Trump has called for Al Gore to be stripped of his Nobel Peace prize.

The former US Vice President was the co-winner of the award in 2007 for his work on climate change.

But property tycoon Trump doesn't appear to believe in global warming, citing a cold winter as evidence. And he claimed that policies promoted by Gore (pictured) are actually damaging the American economy.

"With the coldest winter ever recorded, with snow setting record levels up and down the coast, the Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back from Al Gore," the 63-year-old mogul told members of his Trump National Golf Club in Westchester, New York, in a recent speech.

"Gore wants us to clean up our factories and plants in order to protect us from global warming, when China and other countries couldn't care less. It would make us totally noncompetitive in the manufacturing world, and China, Japan and India are laughing at America's stupidity."

The crowd of 500 stood up and cheered, the New York Post reported.

Too bad The Donald chimes off about way too many things.  He actually has a really good point on this one. 

 

[ArmyRick]

I agree with the Trump-eter on this one.

Global climate change has been a constant condition. Ask any paleontoligist. Our world has always been in a constant state of change.

Follow the money, look at Al Gore as he makes his billions and putting out that sham of a movie. No it was propaganda.

 

[a_majoor]

The climate scam is collapsing even faster. From the WSJ:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703630404575053781465774008.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t

The Continuing Climate Meltdown
More embarrassments for the U.N. and 'settled' science.

It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the "settled science" of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.

First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.

Since the climategate email story broke in November, the standard defense is that while the scandal may have revealed some all-too-human behavior by a handful of leading climatologists, it made no difference to the underlying science. We think the science is still disputable. But there's no doubt that climategate has spurred at least some reporters to scrutinize the IPCC's headline-grabbing claims in a way they had rarely done previously.

Take the rain forest claim. In its 2007 report, the IPCC wrote that "up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state."

But as Jonathan Leake of London's Sunday Times reported last month, those claims were based on a report from the World Wildlife Fund, which in turn had fundamentally misrepresented a study in the journal Nature. The Nature study, Mr. Leake writes, "did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning."

The IPCC has relied on World Wildlife Fund studies regarding the "transformation of natural coastal areas," the "destruction of more mangroves," "glacial lake outbursts causing mudflows and avalanches," changes in the ecosystem of the "Mesoamerican reef," and so on. The Wildlife Fund is a green lobby that believes in global warming, and its "research" reflects its advocacy, not the scientific method.

The IPCC has also cited a study by British climatologist Nigel Arnell claiming that global warming could deplete water resources for as many as 4.5 billion people by the year 2085. But as our Anne Jolis reported in our European edition, the IPCC neglected to include Mr. Arnell's corollary finding, which is that global warming could also increase water resources for as many as six billion people.

The IPCC report made aggressive claims that "extreme weather-related events" had led to "rapidly rising costs." Never mind that the link between global warming and storms like Hurricane Katrina remains tenuous at best. More astonishing (or, maybe, not so astonishing) is that the IPCC again based its assertion on a single study that was not peer-reviewed. In fact, nobody can reliably establish a quantifiable connection between global warming and increased disaster-related costs. In Holland, there's even a minor uproar over the report's claim that 55% of the country is below sea level. It's 26%.

Meanwhile, one of the scientists at the center of the climategate fiasco has called into question other issues that the climate lobby has claimed are indisputable. Phil Jones, who stepped down as head of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit amid the climate email scandal, told the BBC that the world may well have been warmer during medieval times than it is now.

This raises doubts about how much our current warming is man-made as opposed to merely another of the natural climate shifts that have taken place over the centuries. Mr. Jones also told the BBC there has been no "statistically significant" warming over the past 15 years, though he considers this to be temporary.
***

All of this matters because the IPCC has been advertised as the last and definitive word on climate science. Its reports are the basis on which Al Gore, President Obama and others have claimed that climate ruin is inevitable unless the world reorganizes its economies with huge new taxes on carbon. Now we are discovering the U.N. reports are sloppy political documents intended to drive the climate lobby's regulatory agenda.

The lesson of climategate and now the IPCC's shoddy sourcing is that the claims of the global warming lobby need far more rigorous scrutiny.

 

[Journeyman]

I guess he figures he's gotten all the money out of the UN that he can.

Article Link

UN climate change chief to resign

The top climate change official at the United Nations is resigning after nearly four years on the job, and five months before a meeting in Mexico to discuss a global pact on greenhouse gas emissions.

Former Dutch civil servant and climate negotiator Yvo de Boer told The Associated Press Thursday he was stepping down July 1 from his post to give UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon a chance to find his successor ahead of the Mexico conference.

Copenhagen failure 'a pity'
De Boer said delegates at a late-night plenary session agreed to "take note" of the document, which he said was "a way of recognizing that something is there but not going so far as to directly associate yourself with it."

De Boer said on Thursday the deal was "was very significant" and said it was "a pity" it couldn't go further.

"We were about an inch away from a formal agreement. It was basically in our grasp, but it didn't happen," he said.

[Complete article at Link]

How tenuous a grasp on reality do you have to have to concurrently believe the truth of his two sentences highlighted above? If people don't want to associate themselves with even a lame, toothless pronouncement, you're nowhere near "an inch from a formal agreement."

With that sort of spin, his background must be with Holland's version of the NDP (given their belief in how close they were to winning the last Federal election)

I see he is, however, going to keep on the UN gravy-train until 1 July -- and I'm guessing his salary is somewhat higher than mine.  :

 

[zipperhead_cop]

I wonder if his luggage gets sent to Val-d'or Airport, Quebec, by accident when he flies?  ;D

 

[GAP]

Obama's going to have a tough time pulling Cap & Trade out of the fire......
Cap and fade
Terence Corcoran, Financial Post  Published: Thursday, February 18, 2010
Article Link

It's hard to tell right now which part of global warming policy is in the fastest free fall -- the economics, the politics or the science. The politics seemed to be winning the race yesterday. At least five major U.S. corporations have pulled out of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, an agglomeration of business and green groups lobbying Washington for climate legislation. High on USCAP's agenda is a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions.

The withdrawal of BP,  Conoco Phillips and Caterpillar from USCAP is widely seen as another sign that cap and trade, which would allow corporations to buy and sell emissions credits, is losing ground politically. Another political sign that a major climate bill containing a cap-and trade regime was unlikely came recently when President Barack Obama announced he might be willing to carve out the cap-and-trade elements from climate legislation as a separate bill. Since a stand-alone tax carbon plan surrounded with a corporate trading system would be political dynamite for the adminstration, Mr. Obama's comments triggered speculation that cap-and trade would never see daylight.
More on link

 

[Edward Campbell]

But …

There’s always a but, as evidenced in this column, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the Financial Post web site:

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2010/02/20/lawrence-solomon-faith-in-fission.aspx

Lawrence Solomon: Faith in fission
Posted: February 20, 2010

Environmentalism is the religion of the left, but many on the right blindly follow a misguided dogma of their own

By Lawrence Solomon

Environmentalism is the religion of the left, commentators often pronounce: “The Church of the Environment,” as conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer puts it.

I have no argument with them here. Many environmentalists have taken leave of their senses, making a ritual of recycling and a demon of carbon dioxide, a colourless, odourless and tasteless gas that is indispensable to all life on Earth. By conducting mystical inquisitions into our imagined carbon footprints instead of focusing on core issues such as protecting our air and water, environmentalists hurt their cause.

But those on the right, particularly in the U.S., have their own dogma, one that is equally irrational and that also hurts their cause. The religion of the right is Nuclear Power.

“Go nuclear,” urges Charles Krauthammer. “The nation should generate much more than the one-fifth of its electricity nuclear power currently produces”, urges conservative columnist George Will. Build 50 more nuclear plants, urges William Kristol of The Weekly Standard. “Senate Republicans support building 100 new plants as quickly as possible,” maintains Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate Minority Leader.

All these defenders of the right preach the virtues of competition and free markets, of fiscal restraint, of small government, of innovations born of the entrepreneurial spirit. All preach the fallacy of thinking the government should be in the business of picking winners. Yet such is their faith that none are troubled by nuclear power’s role as the antithesis of everything their secular selves believe.

Not one nuclear plant, anywhere in the world, has ever been built without government subsidies of some kind. The only country that has enthusiastically embraced nuclear power — France, which obtains close to 80% of its electricity from its state-owned reactors — drove its power sector to financial ruin: “Catastrophic,” in the frank words of the president of Electricite de France, the state-owned power company. The only privately owned nuclear generating company that operated in a competitive environment — British Energy, which inherited the best reactors in the U.K. fleet after the U.K.’s state-owned monopoly was broken up and privatized — soon went bankrupt and was taken back by the U.K. government at taxpayer expense.

Commercial nuclear power is the most heavily subsidized industry in the history of the world and the single biggest money-loser in the history of business.

But, but, but, some conservatives might protest, nuclear power would be economic if not for the regulatory burden placed on it by environmentalists. Or on irrational consumer fears. Or on its association with the nuclear weapons industry.

They forget that in its early days, nuclear power was welcomed by environmentalists as a clean alternative to coal. That it was Ban the Bomb peaceniks, Einstein among them, who argued that nuclear weapons technology should be turned to peaceful uses. That it was the private sector insurance industry that refused to underwrite commercial nuclear technology because of the potential for a catastrophic accident. That it was the early private sector nuclear manufacturers — GE and Westinghouse — that likewise refused to stand behind their product to spare their shareholders the prospect of ruin: They sought and got government exemption from liability. 

Most of all, conservatives forget that the commercial nuclear industry was a creation of government, launched in 1953 by the Eisenhower administration’s Atoms for Peace program. As early as 1957, Eisenhower learned through a report for the government’s Atomic Energy Commission that nuclear power was not commercially viable. Eisenhower then decided to push commercial nuclear power on foreign policy grounds, hoping that international regulation of the commercial nuclear power industry would discourage states from independently building reactors for military use.

Fifty years on and the industry remains commercially unviable, as everyone on the right knows. Urges Senator McConnell: “We hope Democrats will join us in [aggressively pushing nuclear power] ... the president could start by moving forward on the nuclear loan guarantee program.”

This hope of McConnell, and of every other true-believing conservative, is gaining traction, and — miraculously — under the auspices of the most liberal U.S. government in memory.  This week, the Obama administration announced a loan guarantee of $8.33-billion to build the first new U.S. reactors in nearly 30 years.  “This is only the beginning,” Obama declared, in expressing his desire to kick-start a nuclear renaissance by tripling to $54.5-billion the subsidies that the Bush administration had introduced.

Only the beginning, indeed. If those loan guarantees prove sufficient to bring nuclear power back from the dead, electric utility ratepayers face surcharges that could exceed $40-billion per reactor over the reactor’s life, according to a study last year by the Institute for Energy and the Environment at the Vermont Law School. But even these sums wouldn’t be enough to make nuclear power commercially viable. According to a 2007 letter from Wall Street’s largest investment banks to the U.S. Administration, the private sector would require a 100% unconditional guarantee before risking its own money on the nuclear industry.

Krauthammer, Will, Kristol et al. know that nuclear power is uneconomic. That larding the nuclear technology undercuts more deserving technologies, present and future. That the government’s Congressional Budget Office and General Accounting Office both rate as high the chances that the government will need to make good on its loan guarantees.

But these conservatives have a faith that conquers all, a faith in nuclear power that sweeps aside their lesser faith in the marketplace.

LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

There is, indeed, a price for green power or for green anything or, for that matter, for anything at all.

 

[Kirkhill]

Me, I kind of like Coal.  Leaves a wonderful tang in the air as it burns merrily in the hearth.  Combined with Eurasian Milfoil I reckon we might have a winner.

Coal to boiler  - happy miners

Boiler yields heat and power and lots of luvverly CO2  - happy consumers

CO2 and heat in a stagnant slough infested with Eurasian Milfoil equals lots of easily harvested rapidly reproducing fibre - happy workers

Fibre yields paper (using power and heat from boiler) - more happy workers

Paper yields reports - happy bureaucrats

Reports yield filled filing cabinets fully of sequestered Carbon - happy librarians and environmentalists

Secret reports to burn  - recycle as boiler fuel - happy spooks and more happy environmentalists

You might even e able to use that CO2 to grow cucumbers and tomatoes in Afghanistan and Darfur ...... not that they need  the food there.

But that all assumes that CO2 is something more than a noxious fume that contributes nothing to life as we know it - and EPA knows otherwise.

 

[zipperhead_cop]

Just cuz....

 

[a_majoor]

Viscount Monckton of Brenchley answers the AGW fanatics in a long and detailed post here:

http://sppiblog.org/news/answer-to-a-global-warming-fanatic

Perhaps the best paragraph in the entire post shows how real scientific evidence trumps "consensus":

Thirdly, during the pre-Cambrian era CO2 concentration was 300,000 parts per million, or 30% of the atmosphere, 773 times the 388 parts per million (<0.04%) in today’s atmosphere. Yet at that time glaciers came and went, twice, at the Equator and at sea level. The appearance of glaciers in this way could not have happened if CO2 had the exaggerated warming effect, derived by modelling rather than by measurement, that the IPCC imagines.

Read the rest, and pass it on....

 

[Antoine]

Beat the clock, another Carbon credit crazy idea!  ;D or  : ?

Carbon credits proposed for whale conservation by Richard A. Lovett, NatureNews, 26 February 2010:

www.nature.com/news/2010/100226/full/news.2010.96.html

Stopping whale hunting could help sequester millions of tonnes of carbon.

Biological oceanographer Andrew Pershing wants carbon credits for whale conservation. That's because whales, he says, are like trees. "Like any animal or plant, they are made out of carbon. And whales are so big they each store a lot of carbon," he says.

Pershing, of the University of Maine in Orono and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland, Maine, calculates that even though some whale species are now recovering from the effects of factory whaling, total whale biomass today is less than one-fifth of what it was in 1900, before whaling decimated the population. Letting the whale population recover, he said on 25 February at the American Geophysical Union's 2010 Ocean Sciences meeting in Portland, Oregon, could eventually sequester 9 million tonnes of carbon in their combined biomass.

He compares it to planting trees. "In a forest, trees remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and accumulate that as biomass. Whales take carbon out of the system through their food, then incorporate that carbon in their tissues."

Whaling, by contrast, is like cutting down trees for firewood. "You're taking whales out of the population and putting their carbon somewhere else." In the early days of whaling, Pershing explains, that carbon was going straight into the atmosphere through the burning of whale oil in lamps, for example. More recently, he says, the carbon is released through the consumption of whale meat by humans, "but you're still taking carbon out of the whale and putting it into something that's going to respire it".

Furthermore, when whales die naturally, they usually sink to the bottom of the ocean, carrying their carbon with them. Back in 1900, when whale numbers were high, that would have totalled about 200,000 tonnes of carbon per year, Pershing estimates. Even though benthic creatures eventually eat the whale carcasses (see 'Bone-devouring worms discovered'), the carbon will remain in the depths, Pershing says, staying "out of the atmosphere for potentially hundreds of years".

Carbon consumers

By comparison, 9 million tonnes is only a small fraction of the 7 billion tonnes of carbon entering the atmosphere each year from human activities, Pershing says, but it's still a lot. It's equivalent to 11,000 square kilometres of temperate forest, or 11,000 Hummers driving for 100 years, says Pershing.

It's also comparable to the amount of carbon involved in forest-management schemes being proposed for buying and selling carbon credits, he said. "People would pay a lot to preserve an area of forest that big."

If whales increase in numbers, other species that compete for the same food might decline. But even if ocean food supplies are limited, there could still be a substantial increase in total biomass owing to the difference in size between whales and the organisms they could displace. Because large animals require less food per unit mass than smaller animals, any given food source (such as krill) can support a lot more biomass in a whale than in a small animal such as a penguin.

Rebuilding stocks

Other scientists greeted Pershing's presentation with enthusiasm. "It's exciting," says Daniel Costa, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "It means that whales are important not just because they're charismatic, but because they play an important role in the carbon cycle."

Furthermore, he says, Pershing's research may actually understate the degree to which whales could sequester carbon. The iron in whale faeces is an important micronutrient that is often in short supply in waters such as the Southern Ocean, and it can help boost algal growth — which ultimately means more food for everything, including whales. "In order to drive these large algal blooms you need iron," says Costa. In fact, he says, the indirect benefits of iron fertilization from whale faeces might remove more carbon from the atmosphere by boosting algal growth than the growth of the whales themselves.

Pershing adds that the same analysis applies to other large ocean animals whose populations have been drastically reduced, such as bluefin tuna and some species of shark. "These guys are huge," he says.

And even though all of these animals' biomass combined represents a small fraction of total human carbon emissions, they could still sequester many tonnes of carbon. "You could use carbon as one of the incentives to rebuild the stores of these large organisms," Pershing says.

Corrected:
An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that letting whale biomass recover would sequester 105 million tonnes of carbon. Andrew Pershing has since recalculated this figure as 9 million tonnes of carbon.

 

[Kirkhill]

Same logic

People are made of carbon.

Make more people ........ then charge them for the privilege of sewing them in a blanket (also made of carbon) with a shot at their feet and sending them to Davy Jones.

 

[Antoine]

I think their point was that

Because large animals require less food per unit mass than smaller animals, any given food source (such as krill) can support a lot more biomass in a whale than in a small animal such as a penguin.....the indirect benefits of iron fertilization from whale faeces might remove more carbon from the atmosphere by boosting algal growth than the growth of the whales themselves

But they fall in the typical Scientific Reductionism trap. I am always surprised how scientists can be naive when they leave their ivory tower.

Nothing new but The Global Warming "compagny" and its products such as carbon credit are going to be used by everyone to sell you anything and everything, even to support the Whale Savers !

 

[zipperhead_cop]

People are made of carbon.

And soyalent green is made of people.  So we should be able to buy it with our carbon credits. 

 

[mariomike]

soyalent green is made of people. 

"It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. Next thing they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them!"

 

[Antoine]

And soyalent green is made of people.  So we should be able to buy it with our carbon credits. 

That was un-politically correct and I like it  ;D

 

[a_majoor]

The numbers tell all that you need to know:

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2835581.htm

The money trail

Joanna Nova

Somehow the tables have turned. For all the smears of big money funding the "deniers", the numbers reveal that the sceptics are actually the true grassroots campaigners, while Greenpeace defends Wall St. How times have changed.

Sceptics are fighting a billion dollar industry aligned with a trillion dollar trading scheme. Big Oil's supposed evil influence has been vastly outdone by Big Government, and even those taxpayer billions are trumped by Big-Banking.

The big-money side of this debate has fostered a myth that sceptics write what they write because they are funded by oil profits. They say, follow the money? So I did and it's chilling. Greens and environmentalists need to be aware each time they smear with an ad hominem attack they are unwittingly helping giant finance houses.

FOLLOW THE MONEY
Money for Sceptics: Greenpeace has searched for funding for sceptics and found $23 million paid by Exxon over 10 years (which has stopped). Perhaps Greenpeace missed funding from other fossil fuel companies, but you can be sure that they searched. I wrote the Climate Money paper in July last year, and since then no one has claimed a larger figure. Big-Oil may well prefer it if emissions are not traded, but it's not make-or-break for them. If all fossil fuels are in effect "taxed", consumers will pay the tax anyhow, and past price rises in crude oil suggest consumers will not consume much less fuel, so profits won't actually fall that much.

But in the end, everyone spends more on carbon friendly initiatives than on sceptics-- even Exxon: (how about $100 million for Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project, and $600 million for Biofuels research). Some will complain that Exxon is massive and their green commitment was a tiny part of their profits, but the point is, what they spent on sceptics was even less.

Money for the Climate Industry: The US government spent $79 billion on climate research and technology since 1989 - to be sure, this funding paid for things like satellites and studies, but it's 3,500 times as much as anything offered to sceptics. It buys a bandwagon of support, a repetitive rain of press releases, and includes PR departments of institutions like NOAA, NASA, the Climate Change Science Program and the Climate Change Technology Program. The $79 billion figure does not include money from other western governments, private industry, and is not adjusted for inflation. In other words, it could be…a lot bigger.

For direct PR comparisons though, just look at "Think Climate Think Change": the Australian Government put $13.9 million into just one quick advertising campaign. There is no question that there are vastly more financial rewards for people who promote a carbon-made catastrophe than for those who point out the flaws in the theory.

Ultimately the big problem is that there are no grants for scientists to demonstrate that carbon has little effect. There are no Institutes of Natural Climate Change, but plenty that are devoted to UnNatural Forces.

It's a monopsony, and the main point is not that the scientists are necessarily corrupted by money or status (though that appears to have happened to a few), but that there is no group or government seriously funding scientists to expose flaws. The lack of systematic auditing of the IPCC, NOAA, NASA or East Anglia CRU, leaves a gaping vacuum. It's possible that honest scientists have dutifully followed their grant applications, always looking for one thing in one direction, and when they have made flawed assumptions or errors, or just exaggerations, no one has pointed it out simply because everyone who could have, had a job doing something else. In the end the auditors who volunteered — like Steve McIntyre and AnthonyWatts — are retired scientists, because they are the only ones who have the time and the expertise to do the hard work. (Anyone fancy analysing statistical techniques in dendroclimatology or thermometer siting instead of playing a round of golf?)

Money for the Finance Houses: What the US Government has paid to one side of the scientific process pales in comparison with carbon trading. According to the World Bank, turnover of carbon trading reached $126 billion in 2008. PointCarbon estimates trading in 2009 was about $130 billion. This is turnover, not specifically profits, but each year the money market turnover eclipses the science funding over 20 years. Money Talks. Every major finance house stands to profit as brokers of a paper trade. It doesn't matter whether you buy or sell, the bankers take a slice both ways. The bigger the market, the more money they make shifting paper.

BANKS WANT US TO TRADE MONEY...
Not surprisingly banks are doing what banks should do (for their shareholders): they're following the promise of profits, and urging governments to adopt carbon trading. Banks are keen to be seen as good corporate citizens (look, there's an environmental banker!), but somehow they don't find the idea of a non-tradable carbon tax as appealing as a trading scheme where financial middlemen can take a cut. (For banks that believe in the carbon crisis, taxes may well "help the planet," but they don't pay dividends.)

The stealthy mass entry of the bankers and traders poses a major force. Surely if money has any effect on carbon emissions, it must also have an effect on careers, shareholders, advertising, and lobbying? There were over 2,000 lobbyists in Washington in 2008.

Unpaid sceptics are not just taking on scientists who conveniently secure grants and junkets for pursuing one theory, they also conflict with potential profits of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, and every other financial institution or corporation that stands to profit like the Chicago Climate Exchange, European Climate Exchange, PointCarbon, IdeaCarbon (and the list goes on… ) as well as against government bureaucracies like the IPCC and multiple departments of Climate Change. There's no conspiracy between these groups, just similar profit plans or power grabs.

Tony Abbot's new policy removes the benefits for bankers. Labor and the Greens don't appear to notice that they fight tooth and nail for a market in a "commodity" which isn't a commodity and that guarantees profits for big bankers. The public though are figuring it out.

THE LARGEST TRADEABLE "COMMODITY" IN THE WORLD?
Commissioner Bart Chilton, head of the energy and environmental markets advisory committee of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), has predicted that within five years a carbon market would dwarf any of the markets his agency currently regulates: "I can see carbon trading being a $2 trillion market." "The largest commodity market in the world." He ought to know.

It promises to be larger than the markets for coal, oil, gold, wheat, copper or uranium. Just soak in that thought for a moment. Larger than oil.

Richard L. Sandor, chairman and chief executive officer of Climate Exchange Plc, agrees and predicts trades eventually will total $10 trillion a year." That's 10 thousand billion dollars.

ONLY THE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE MATTERS
Ultimately the atmosphere is what it is regardless of fiat currency movements. Some people will accuse me of smearing climate scientists and making the same ad hominem attacks I detest and protest about. So note carefully: I haven't said that the massive amount of funding received by promoters of the Carbon Catastrophe proves that they are wrong, just as the grassroots unpaid dedication of sceptics doesn't prove them right either. But the starkly lop-sided nature of the funding means we'd be fools not to pay very close attention to the evidence. It also shows how vapid the claims are from those who try to smear sceptics and who mistakenly think ad hominem arguments are worth making.

And as far as evidence goes, surprisingly, I agree with the IPCC that carbon dioxide warms the planet. But few realise that the IPCC relies on feedback factors like humidity and clouds causing a major amplification of the minor CO2 effect and that this amplification simply isn't there.

Hundreds of thousands of radiosonde measurements failed to find the pattern of upper trophospheric heating the models predicted, (and neither Santer 2008 with his expanding "uncertainties" nor Sherwood 2008 with his wind gauges change that). Two other independent empirical observations indicate that the warming due to CO2 is halved by changes in the atmosphere, not amplified.[Spencer 2007, Lindzen 2009, see also Spencer 2008]

Without this amplification from water vapor or clouds the infamous "3.5 degrees of warming" collapses to just a half a degree — most of which has happened.

Those resorting to this vacuous, easily refutable point should be shamed into lifting their game. The ad hominem argument is Stone Age reasoning, and the "money" insult they throw, bounces right back at them — a thousand-fold.