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Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

"Haletown, do you have a link for that?"


here    http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/14/bali-high-but-beware-the-hangover/?hp

comment 17
 
This is an old one but I just found it today.  The source is particularly interesting to me. My perception of that publication is that it is no friend to conservatives.

From Der Spiegel via Rightinaleftworld and RealClearPolitics


GLOBAL WARMING Not the End of the World as We Know It
By Olaf Stampf

How bad is climate change really? Are catastrophic floods and terrible droughts headed our way? Despite widespread fears of a greenhouse hell, the latest computer simulations are delivering far less dramatic predictions about tomorrow's climate.


Svante Arrhenius, the father of the greenhouse effect, would be called a heretic today. Far from issuing the sort of dire predictions about climate change which are common nowadays, the Swedish physicist dared to predict a paradise on earth for humans when he announced, in April 1896, that temperatures were rising -- and that it would be a blessing for all.

Arrhenius, who later won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, calculated that the release of carbon dioxide -- or carbonic acid as it was then known -- through burning coal, oil and natural gas would lead to a significant rise in temperatures worldwide. But, he argued, "by the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates," potentially making poor harvests and famine a thing of the past.

Arrhenius was merely expressing a view that was firmly entrenched in the collective consciousness of the day: warm times are good times; cold times are bad.

During the so-called Medieval Warm Period between about 900 and 1300 A.D., for example, the Vikings raised livestock on Greenland and sailed to North America. New cities were built all across Europe, and the continent's population grew from 30 million to 80 million.

The consequences of the colder temperatures that plunged civilization into the so-called Little Ice Age for several centuries after 1300 were devastating. Summers were rainy, winters cold, and in many places temperatures were too low for grain crops to mature. Famines and epidemics raged, and average life expectancy dropped by 10 years. In Germany, thousands of villages were abandoned and entire stretches of land depopulated.

The shock produced by the cold was as deep-seated it was long-lasting. When temperatures plunged unexpectedly once again in the 1960s, many meteorologists were quick to warn people about the coming of a new ice age -- supposedly triggered by man-made air pollution. Hardly anyone at the time believed a warming trend could pose a threat.

It was not until the rise of the environmental movement in the 1980s that everything suddenly changed. From then on it was almost a foregone conclusion that global warming could only be perceived as a disaster for the earth's climate. Environmentalists, adopting a strategy typical of the Catholic Church, have been warning us about the horrors of greenhouse gas hell ever since -- painting it as a punishment for the sin of meddling with creation. What was conveniently ignored, however, is that humanity has been reshaping the planet for a very long time, first by clearing forests and plowing fields, and later by building roads, cities and factories.....

More on the Der Spiegel link.


 
this guy

    http://www.climate-skeptic.com/

often writes on how stupid/biased it is to claim any and all climate change is a bad thing.

Good site for daily ckecking and I commend him for his video series. 

He is the same dude that runs the Coyote Blog
 
Here is an interesting thought from Orson Scott Card and his book "Empire". One of his characters (one of the heroes so far) says:

"...the Left had the Unabomber, though nobody seems to remember that his logic sounded just like Al Gore preaching about the environment - crazy as a loon, but full of all kinds of internal politically correct logic."

Well, at least Al doesn't blow people up?
 
Lets here a real scientist discuss climate change:

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/245692.php
 
what the eco-fascists really want  . . .  it's about them being smarter than us peons and they should be allowed to just be our Lord's & Masters

"Transport policy-makers should start preparing now for a dramatic reduction in motorised travel that will be brought about by carbon rationing, one of the country's leading environmental thinkers told LTT this week.

"Just start reading the runes because what's going to happen is the demand for road, rail and air travel is going to start falling away just as soon as we have rationing," says Mayer Hillman in an interview with the magazine.

Hillman, senior fellow emeritus at the Policy Studies Institute, says carbon rationing is the only way to ensure that the world avoids the worst effects of climate change. And he says that the problems caused by burning fossil fuels are so serious that governments might have to implement rationing against the will of the people.

"When the chips are down I think ]democracy is a less important goal than is the protection of the planet from the death of life, the end of life on it," he says. "This has got to be imposed on people whether they like it or not."


http://www.lttonline.co.uk/lttxtraarticle.php?uid=7064
 
More inconvenient truths for Der Goreacle

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/goreerrors.html
 
Haletown said:
"When the chips are down I think democracy is a less important goal than is the protection of the planet from the death of life,the end of life on it," he says. "This has got to be imposed on people whether they like it or not."

Nice. 
Once the economy is destroyed by not allowing transportation of goods, we'll all be living on farm communes to survive.  And what could be greener than that? 

Having just spent the last five hours shoveling out mine and my in-laws driveways of about three feet of drifted snow, I continue to hope for global warming.  Now I'm going to make a nice tire fire and burn some fridges.

a841_thumb.jpg

 
Oddly enough, the climate "scientists" who sounded the alarm about the coming Ice Age back in 1975 were far closer to being correct than todays alarmists; Global Cooling is a far more serious threat than warming. the disruption of agriculture due to global cooling may well have caused the collapse of the Bronze age empires, and possibly other civilizational catastrophes.

Since the hottest years on record were in the 1930's, you can see the alarmists could flip things pretty quickly.......................(did we say global warming? We meant cooling.....) 
 
Thucydides, I'm suddenly reminded of the boy who cried wolf.... The village believed him the first two times when there was no wolf.  When there was a wolf it seems to me they weren't so quick to react.
 
there's some big truths here .  . . its not really about the environment is it ?

Global Warming Trojan Horse

Investors Business Daily has a great article reinforcing the point many of us have been making for a while:  The Marxists and anti-globalization rioters and other left-wing extremists that have seemed awfully quiet of late have not disappeared;  they have repackaged themselves as global warming activists, but their goals are exactly the same.

    The driving force of the environmental movement is not a cleaner planet — or a world that doesn't get too hot, in the case of the global warming issue — but a leftist, egalitarian urge to redistribute wealth. A CO2 tax does this and more, choking economic growth in the U.S. and punishing Americans for being the voracious consumers that we are.

    Eco-activists have been so successful in distracting the public from their real intentions that they're becoming less guarded in discussing their ultimate goal.

    "A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources," Emma Brindal, a "climate justice campaign coordinator" for Friends of the Earth Australia, wrote Wednesday on the Climate Action Network's blog.

    In this case, redistribution would be handled by the Multilateral Adaptation Fund, an agency that would use the carbon tax receipts to help countries that are having to deal with climate change.

    Since the "complete list of things caused by global warming" now exceeds 600 (see our "Chilled By The Heat" editorial, Dec. 13), there would be few if any limits on the U.N.'s ability to move riches from countries that have created and earned them to those that have done neither.

    Still think this is all about halting climate change? We would go as far as to say that anyone who does is either naive or a dupe. Both the rhetoric and the behavior of the eco-activists back us up.

Protein Wisdom adds this:

    The “Greens” are no more interested in clean air and water today than the Soviets were in liberty when they rolled tanks into Prague in 1968. We dismiss them as “silly” at our own peril.


http://www.climate-skeptic.com/


 
Not Global Warming directly but Global Warming indirectly.

Global Warming led to the Biofuels scam.

Biofuels led to higher food, feed and fertilizer prices and more people not able to find tortillas and chapattis.

Now [urlhttp://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=213343=]this[/url]:

......A new crisis is emerging, a global food catastrophe that will reach further and be more crippling than anything the world has ever seen. The credit crunch and the reverberations of soaring oil prices around the world will pale in comparison to what is about to transpire, Donald Coxe, global portfolio strategist at BMO Financial Group said at the Empire Club's 14th annual investment outlook in Toronto on Thursday.

"It's not a matter of if, but when," he warned investors. "It's going to hit this year hard."

Mr. Coxe said the sharp rise in raw food prices in the past year will intensify in the next few years amid increased demand for meat and dairy products from the growing middle classes of countries such as China and India as well as heavy demand from the biofuels industry.

"The greatest challenge to the world is not US$100 oil; it's getting enough food so that the new middle class can eat the way our middle class does, and that means we've got to expand food output dramatically," he said.

The impact of tighter food supply is already evident in raw food prices, which have risen 22% in the past year.

Mr. Coxe said in an interview that this surge would begin to show in the prices of consumer foods in the next six months. Consumers already paid 6.5% more for food in the past year.

Wheat prices alone have risen 92% in the past year, and yesterday closed at US$9.45 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade.

At the centre of the imminent food catastrophe is corn - the main staple of the ethanol industry. The price of corn has risen about 44% over the past 15 months, closing at US$4.66 a bushel on the CBOT yesterday - its best finish since June 1996.

This not only impacts the price of food products made using grains, but also the price of meat, with feed prices for livestock also increasing.

"You're going to have real problems in countries that are food short, because we're already getting embargoes on food exports from countries, who were trying desperately to sell their stuff before, but now they're embargoing exports," he said, citing Russia and India as examples.

"Those who have food are going to have a big edge."

With 54% of the world's corn supply grown in America's mid-west, the U.S. is one of those countries with an edge.

But Mr. Coxe warned U.S. corn exports were in danger of seizing up in about three years if the country continues to subsidize ethanol production. Biofuels are expected to eat up about a third of America's grain harvest in 2007......


The experts can predict a .2C temperature rise by 2050 or whatever but they can't figure out that diverting a limited commodity (productive land) from supplying food to supplying fuel will result in food shortages, price increases and starvation........

Vomitous.

Betcha Branson feels like the proper humanitarian with his Green Fuel jet dreams.

 
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,318686,00.html

    Top 10 Climate Myth-Busters for 2007

    Thursday, December 27, 2007
    By Steven Milloy

    “I’ve made up my mind. Don’t confuse me with the facts.” That saying most appropriately sums up the year in climate science for the fanatic global warming crowd.

    As Al Gore, the United Nations, grandstanding politicians and celebrities, taxpayer-dependent climate researchers, socialist-minded Greens, climate profiteers, and other members of the alarmist railroad relentlessly continued their drive for greenhouse gas regulation in 2007, the year’s scientific developments actually pointed in the opposite direction. Here’s the round-up:

    1. Cracked crystal balls. Observed temperature changes measured over the last 30 years don’t match well with temperatures predicted by the mathematical climate models relied on by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), researchers reported.

    The models predict significantly warmer atmospheric temperatures than actually occurred, despite the availability of more and better quality data and improved modeling efforts since the late-1970s.

    “We suggest, therefore, that projections of future climate based on these models be viewed with much caution,” the researchers concluded. Read more…

            Related
            Column Archive
            o Top 10 Climate Myth-Busters for 2007
            o A Lightbulb Tea Party?
            o Will Al Gore Make Peace With Reality?
            o The Greenest Hypocrites of 2007
            o It's the Sun, Stupid

            Full-page Junk Science Archive

    2. The big yellow ball in the sky. The Sun may have contributed 50 percent or more of the global warming thought to have occurred since 1900, according to a new historical temperature reconstruction showing more variation in pre-industrial temperatures than previously thought.

    The researchers found that “the climate is very sensitive to solar changes and a significant fraction of the global warming that occurred during the last century should be solar induced.” Read more…

    3. Pre-SUV warming. Another new temperature reconstruction for the past 2,000 years indicates that globally averaged temperature 1,000 years ago was about 0.3 degrees Celsius warmer than the current temperature. Since that climatic "heat wave" obviously wasn’t caused by coal-fired power plants and SUVs, the current temperature is quite within natural variability, deflating alarmists’ rash conclusions about the warming of the past 50 years. Read more…

    4. A disciplined climate. Runaway global warming -- the alarmist fantasy in which a warmer global temperature causes climatic events that, in turn, cause more warming and so-on in a never-ending positive feedback loop -- was cornered by new data from researchers at the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH). The new research sheds light on the mechanism by which the atmosphere self-regulates. Read more…

    5. A gnarly wipeout. Climate alarmists gleefully surfed a 2005 study that claimed greenhouse gas emissions would slow Atlantic Ocean circulation and cause a mini ice age in Europe. But an international team of researchers reported that the intensity of the Atlantic circulation may vary by as much as a factor of eight in a single year. The decrease in Atlantic circulation claimed in the 2005 study falls well within this variation and so is likely part of a natural yearly trend, according to the new study. Read more…

    6. A pollution solution. A new study reported that the solid particles suspended in the atmosphere (called “aerosols”) that make up “brown clouds” may actually contribute to warmer temperatures -- precisely the opposite effect heretofore claimed by global warming alarmists.

    “These findings might seem to contradict the general notion of aerosol particles as cooling agents in the global climate system …,” concluded the researchers. Read more…

    7. Lazy temperature? Researchers reported that the rate of man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions was three times greater during 2000 to 2004 than during the 1990s. Since increasing atmospheric C02 levels allegedly cause global warming, the new study must mean that global temperatures are soaring even faster now than they did during the 1990s, right?

    Wrong. According to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Climatic Data Center, ever-changing global temperatures are in no way keeping pace with ever-increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Read more…

    8. Don’t plant that tree! Researchers reported that while tropical forests exert a cooling influence on global climate, forests in northern regions exert a significant warming influence on climate. Based on the researchers’ computer modeling, forests above 20 degrees latitude in the Northern Hemisphere -- that is, north of the line of latitude running through Southern Mexico, Saharan Africa, central India and the southernmost Chinese Island of Hainan -- will warm surface temperatures in those regions by an estimated 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100. Read more…

    9. The Tropical Arctic. Dutch researchers reported that during a period of intense global warming 55 million years ago -- when the Arctic Ocean was as warm as 73 degrees Fahrenheit -- there was a tremendous release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. But which came first, the warming or the greenhouse gases?

    It was the warming, according to the researchers. Read more…

    10. Much ado about nothing. In a report to Congress, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency revealed greenhouse gas regulation to be quite the fool’s errand. In estimating the atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases 90 years from now under both a scenario where no action is taken to reduce manmade emissions and a scenario where maximum regulation is implemented, the estimated difference in average global temperature between the two scenarios is 0.17 degrees Centigrade.

    For reference purposes, the estimated total increase in average global temperature for the 20th century was about 0.50 degrees Celsius.

    That’s what researchers have reported this year. And let’s not forget the spanking a British high judge gave Al Gore’s movie for all its scientific inaccuracies and the thrashing non-alarmist climate scientists gave to alarmist climate scientists in a debate sponsored by the New York debating society Intelligence Squared.

    Al Gore and the alarmist mob claim the debate about the science of global warming is “over.” Given the developments of 2007, it’s easy to see why they would want it that way.

    Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and DemandDebate.com. He is a junk science expert, an advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
 
The worst part of the food-for-fuel scam is that many farmers have switched form hops to corn because of the subsidies. The result is a hop shortage which means higher prices for beer.

The Law of Unintended Consequences hits home.  :P

 
For once I almost agree with Fidel Castro - converting food crops into fuel is a slippery slope.

An exception being, well, sugar cane, which maybe he SHOULD consider...
 
Despite the Canadian MSM, there is some clear thinking about the subject by HM Government:

http://phantomobserver.com/blog/?p=898

On the NREE’s 2050 Report: Why Government Doesn’t Like Carbon Taxes

Getting to 2050 reportThe National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy has released its report on how Canada should lower its greenhouse gases. Entitled Getting to 2050, it’s available in HTML format here, and in PDF format here.

The Toronto Star is presenting this report by focusing exclusively on one recommendation that goes against the government’s stated policy: implementation of a carbon tax. From the story’s tone, you’d think the panel was saying “carbon tax or fail”:

    Introducing a new charge on fossil fuels is the only way to ensure Canada succeeds in cutting its emissions, the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy said in a report yesterday.

    The new charge would mean Canadians would face higher costs to heat and light their homes and to pump gas into their cars, the panel says.

    “As long as … carbon can be emitted freely, it will be extremely challenging, to say the least, to achieve any significant reductions,” said Glen Murray, the former Winnipeg mayor who chairs the panel.

What the Star doesn’t mention is that the carbon tax is only one of several recommendations made by the report. What are the others? Let me quote from the report:

        * Develop complementary regulatory policies, in conjunction with the emission price signal, to address sectors of the Canadian economy that do not respond effectively to such a price signal or where market failures exist. Complementary policies should also provide support for research, development and demonstration of technologies, as well as strategic investments in infrastructure.
        * Establish a Canada-wide plan, in the earliest possible time frame, that leads to better coordination of complementary federal, provincial and territorial GHG emission reduction policies aimed at common or shared targets, time frames and actions.
        * Apply GHG emission reduction policies that incorporate adaptive management practices and have built-in monitoring and assessment mechanisms to allow for regular reviews to ensure efficiency and effectiveness. This approach will ensure that progress is monitored, compliance issues are addressed, and policies are adjusted to match the required level of abatement effort, and will minimize and mitigate unanticipated adverse outcomes.
        * Address GHG emission and air pollutant reductions concurrently to ensure maximum health benefits to Canadians and greater economic certainty for industry, by designing and implementing co-pollutant reduction policies in an integrated manner.
        * Implement, immediately, the development and design of market-based policy instruments, plus complementary policies, for Canadian environmental objectives, economic circumstances and technology needs, following broad consultation with industry, environmental and other stakeholders, experts, and all other levels of government, drawing upon international, national, regional and local knowledge and experiences.


The first one I listed is one that John Baird definitely likes; the others, for those who don’t talk bureaucratese, talk about establishing minimum standards and methods of enforcement.

The Panel is perfectly all right in assuming that hitting on the bottom line would be the quickest way to get businesses and consumers to reduce their green emissions. The big problem with a carbon tax is that unless you can offer significant reward for reducing emissions, all it will do is push up the cost of doing business, without necessarily affecting behaviour.

For example, if you look at Quebec’s carbon tax, it’s a penny per litre of gasoline. Have Quebec drivers reduced the amount of time they spend driving their cars, as a result? I don’t think so; gas prices are so high already that one more cent per litre (on top of those other gas taxes) wouldn’t really make that much of a difference to the pocketbook.

The other law that Quebec passed, the one requiring snow tires in winter, now that could potentially reduce traffic, if only because a lot of people own cars but don’t have the facilities to change the tires to winter, or change them back in the spring. That law would push the cost of driving a car up significantly, to the point where it’s a disincentive to drive when there’s lots of snow on the ground. That would be an example of the sort of regulation that the government is thinking about.

There’s another disincentive towards carbon taxes: with government spending habits now set on reduced surpluses and debt reduction, a higher tax is going to be very, very hard to justify. The only real justification for a carbon tax is if revenues from it are directed towards a specific project — say, funding development of alternative energy technology, and the government already has programs for that sort of thing.

In any case, we can expect some regulations announcement come the next budget. A carbon tax? Not likely, but given that some public servants at Environment may like the idea, you never know . . .
 
The concern is apparently CO2.

To prevent CO2 the desire is to tax C in order to reduce the production of C.

The C at issue is the C in fuels.

To reduce the production of C as CO2  therefore we need to reduce the consumption of C as fuels.

This is not a new requirement.  The government has been trying to get us to reduce for decades. To that end they imposed a sin tax on fuel... a Fuel Tax.

Ipso facto we already have Carbon Taxes.  They are called Fuel Taxes.

Political Solution:

Change the name of the The Fuel Tax to The Carbon Tax.

Rebate the user of the Fuel for every tonne/kg of Carbon converted into something - anything other than CO2 exhausted to atmosphere.   Pump it into the ground or supply it to greenhouses along with the heat, recycle it as dry ice, trees, cupboards.......whatever. 

That will effectively decrease the user's Fuel Tax. Every kilo of Carbon saved will reduce the taxes paid to the Government.  The users get the energy "tax-free".

Meanwhile the Government ends up taking in less taxes......

 
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