I thought these were pretty good reading.

Interesting story of how ethanol (the wine of the religion of global warming) will starve the world.
http://www.nysun.com/news/f…eclipsing-climate-change

Another reason why I won’t vote at the 2008 presidential election (we have three pussy democrats running).
http://www.reuters.com/article/mark…2535509420080425

I just can’t resist this. In what world does it make sense to save the planet and refuse to burn too much carbon dioxide, by cutting down trees, which–last time I checked–breathe in carbon dioxide.

Associated Press story.

My favorite quote from a man who spent $70,000 on solar panel equipment and THEN went next door to demand his neighbor cut down his redwoods (Apparently he never thought about it or talked about it with his neighbor BEFORE investing $70,000):

“I think it’s unfair that a neighbor can take away this source of energy from another neighbor,” he said.

Wow…take away? The real trick here is that when I was younger I thought I remember redwood trees being absolutely sacred in California. Turns out this law that says it’s illegal to block solar panels with your trees was written in the 70s.

The tree-owner’s defense?

Treanor and Bissett, who drive a hybrid Toyota Prius, argue that trees absorb carbon dioxide, cool the surrounding air and provide a habitat for wildlife.

But the solar panel investor counters:

Vargas, who recently bought a plug-in electric car, counters it would take two or three acres of trees to reduce carbon dioxide emissions as much as the solar panels that cover his roof and backyard trellis.

Only in California would you have a “I’m greener than you” pissing contest in a court of law. And, I have to say, this is the problem I have with the religion of global warming: That is that it completely sacrifices common sense conservationism on the altar of “reducing our carbon footprint” and completely dismisses the whole “act local” part of the equation.

The REALLY neat thing is that it makes the “classical” environmentalist concept downright reasonable and logical.  So maybe after all of this trend of global warming becoming “mainstream” and scientific fact by scientific consensus, might drive yours truly to be a real rebel and become a tree hugger.

Well, I finally had to make the call to the school today. My daughter came home and said that she watched the first 10 minutes of An Inconvenient Truth today in honors science class, and that she would be watching the rest of the movie tomorrow, and writing a paper on the movie. I called the school and spoke to her science teacher, who had a “f*** you” attitude and said that the movie was educational and taught kids how to save the wetlands…and then she admitted that she had never actually seen the movie.

I then told her that I didn’t want my daughter watching the movie and that she was not going to write the required (indoctrination) paper about the movie. Nella and I will be enrolling her in a good private school at the end of this year. Below is the letter that she is carrying to school tomorrow to give to her teacher (not into having her name all over the Internet, so the name has been changed in the letter):

February 20, 2008

Dear Ms. Nick

Please excuse “A” from watching Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and from writing a paper about this movie. This movie is overtly political, and it has been proven inaccurate and purposefully misleading by many climatologists and weather experts. In fact, this movie amounts to little more than liberal propaganda designed to scare people, and I expected more from a Meisler education. Outside of a political science class, this movie is entirely inappropriate for a twelve year old student. In the future, please contact me if you plan on requiring “A” to watch any film that is remotely political. Should you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me at (504) 555-5555.

Sincerely,

Michael W. Gahagan, Esq.

Got a link to this in my email the other day…and finally had a chance to glance at it the other night. Obviously, I’ve never been convinced that man-made carbon dioxide output is the principle cause of global warming. So I was biased upon watching it; as I was biased before watching Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, It didn’t take a lot of clicks on the Internet to find the flaws in that.

From a scientific standpoint I’ve always been suspicious that the sun had more to do with it…(and being a former amateur–very amateur–student of stellar evolution I’ve always known the sun had more control over our lives than most people really understand). The component that this plugs in is cosmic radiation and clouds and how sunspot activity interacts with these to affect temperature.

From a political standpoint, it’s pretty well documented on this site that I’m extremely suspicious of anything that comes out of the U.N., and that would include, of course, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).

Now, although, I’m obviously being paid by the “Sun Lobby” to spread this sort of propoganda. I recommend taking the 85 minutes to watch the whole thing through. A couple of notes, though:

A very critical part (unfortunately) is the section from about 30 minutes to 37 minutes in where some very impressive charts show correlation between sunspot activity and temperature, and cosmic rays and temperature. It takes an equal number of clicks as it did for Truth to find the flaws in these charts. It appears the numbers have been manipulated and the charts have been manipulated and this came out years ago. It’s very sad when agendas (even ones I tend to align with) get in the way of facts.

Speaking of, there are a couple critiques of this documentary: here’s one. and here’s another. The former only critiques one part of the film (the aforementioned manipulation of charts) and then ignores almost all of the rest. It’s basically a “these guys aren’t real scientists, so nothing to see here” critique. The second one is a video of a Powerpoint of a lecture (yep) by a non-climatologist, which basically goes through all of the scientific sections of the film and dissects the logical fallacies. Although I’m a big fan of dissecting logical fallacies, it was sort of incomplete. Neither of the critiques addressed many of the social and political issues and scientifically usually they refer the reader to the same document that’s being critiqued in the film: the IPCC Summary for Policy-Makers. This one attempts towards the very end but falls short. Here are some of the sociopolitical issues talked about in the film that have an element of truth in them (and no critique I’ve read has addressed them):

1) The connection between the Global Warming movement and Margaret Thatcher’s fight with the and coal and oil industries.
2) The hypocrisy of expecting Africa to use more expensive sustainable energy when even the richest countries are unwilling to take on the extra expense.
3) “Green Language” and anti-capitalism (the best spokesperson for that in the film was Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace who knew things had gotten bad when “outlawing chlorine worldwide” became the in-thing–”Chlorine is on the periodic table; I’m not sure that’s in your jurisdiction.” Anti-humanism is a term he uses.
4) research–even the anti-capitalist kind–is not free of monetary interest. $170 million/yr to $2 billion/year funding for climatology since global warming became the key issue.
5) media is exceedingly capitalist, and their ratings are more successful
6) models assume carbon dioxide output of double the current carbon dioxide increases.
7) long-term prediction lack consequences for the predictors, but the short-term benefits of media fury are undeniable.
precautionary principle–risks of using a technology without looking at risks of NOT using technology.

Either way, creative editing seems to rule the day in this documentary. Although it does a great job of showing Truth for what it was, it turns around and does similar things and thus fails in proving it’s core alternative theory. A better documentary is this one. It leaves out most of the political implications, focuses on the science, however it doesn’t try to prove an alternative theory other than that natural forces (the sun, clouds, etc.) have decidedly more sway than man-made ones.

Forget global warming, if we don’t stop polluting the air with CO2, then we’ll be taken over by monster mutant poison ivy.

That should get people listening. Finally.

Science News Online

This article provides a profile of a long-tenured authority on the hot topic (no pun intended) of global warming and presents a few of his very logical arguments (which have unsurprisingly been overlooked by mainstream media). A few excerpts follow:

Bryson is a believer in climate change, in that he’s as quick as anyone to acknowledge that Earth’s climate has done nothing but change throughout the planet’s existence. In fact, he took that knowledge a big step further, earlier than probably anyone else. Almost 40 years ago, Bryson stood before the American Association for the Advancement of Science and presented a paper saying human activity could alter climate.

“I was laughed off the platform for saying that,” he told Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News.

We ask Bryson what could be making the key difference:

Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?

A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?

Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor…

A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.

This begs questions about the widely publicized mathematical models researchers run through supercomputers to generate climate scenarios 50 or 100 years in the future. Bryson says the data fed into the computers overemphasizes carbon dioxide and accounts poorly for the effects of clouds—water vapor. Asked to evaluate the models’ long-range predictive ability, he answers with another question: “Do you believe a five-day forecast?”

Bryson says he looks in the opposite direction, at past climate conditions, for clues to future climate behavior. Trying that approach in the weeks following our interview, Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News soon found six separate papers about Antarctic ice core studies, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1999 and 2006. The ice core data allowed researchers to examine multiple climate changes reaching back over the past 650,000 years. All six studies found atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations tracking closely with temperatures, but with CO2 lagging behind changes in temperature, rather than leading them. The time lag between temperatures moving up—or down—and carbon dioxide following ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand years.

EU & UN do-gooders worried about global warming? Tell it to the Chinese.

Hopefully Mr. Moon is going to finally take leadership on an issue that has long needed leadership. As I mentioned in a previous post, the former Secretary General was very good about providing benefits for his continent of Africa, but was lacking in his ability to accomplish anything of substance in Darfur.

Apparently, Mr. Moon (Mr. Ki Moon?), after only five months in office, is finally getting peacekeeping forces in Darfur via a joint agreement with the African Union.

Despite that he manages to blame it all on global warming:

Two decades ago, the rains in southern Sudan began to fail. According to U.N. statistics, average precipitation has declined some 40 percent since the early 1980s. Scientists at first considered this to be an unfortunate quirk of nature. But subsequent investigation found that it coincided with a rise in temperatures of the Indian Ocean, disrupting seasonal monsoons. This suggests that the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming.

Seems a stretch to me, particularly because there are at least 16 countries that border the Indian Ocean, neither of which have been doing quite the degree of ethnic cleansing that the Sudan has. Conflict almost always occurs over resources and indeed it’s no surprise that a drought spurred the conflict, but many countries have gone through longer droughts without mindless genocide.

washingtonpost.com

This is intriguing. It looks like the new Prime-Minister elect of the UK is pushing for Nuclear energy (eight plants within 15 years). A predictable response from the environmentalist factor:

Greenpeace last night condemned his plans. A spokesman said: ‘Reaching for nuclear power to solve climate change is like taking up smoking to lose weight. Is it a simple answer? Yes. Is it an effective answer to the climate change crisis? Absolutely not.’

However, Alistair Darling, the Trade and Industry Secretary stated:

A strong opponent of nuclear power when he was first elected to parliament 20 years ago, Darling says he now believes that Britain has no option but to remain nuclear. ‘I respect the views of someone who says they don’t want nuclear in any circumstances whatsoever. Fair enough. Right, tell me what the alternative is. If there was an easy answer that had low carbon, no cost, no eyesores somebody would have found it. And we haven’t found it yet… Yes we need to consult. [But] at the end the government has got to make a decision.’

You have to admit one thing about nuclear energy; it’s low in carbon emissions.

The Observer

OK, reducing greenhouse emissions is a noble goal and I can certainly see why the other members of the G8 summit might not like the idea of the US wanting to leave greenhouse emissions out completely.

However, setting a cap on temperature increase? At what point did we determine we have that much control on global temperatures? None of this global “consensus” on climate change has determined exactly how much temperature increase is contributed by carbon emissions, they have simply come to the conclusion that we are somehow contributing to certain measurements, with terms like “likely”, “somewhat likely”, “very likely,” etc.

Do they intend to simply treat it like a thermostat? Lower emissions and the temperature will automatically stop going up?

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature