posted July 23, 2011 12:18 AM            

We both have the numbers of the man made global warming con artists like Algore and the faux scientists of the global warming religion.

posted July 23, 2011 09:46 AM            

I like that Randall...has real zinnnng!

Are you seriously worried about the earth becomming one gigantic shopping center katatonic?

posted July 23, 2011 11:43 AM            

no i'm not worried about 100% asphalt surface - and i'm not suggesting breaking up what we have - but i think it is a little blase to say that the huge swathes of concretized surface we do have make NO difference. they influence large portions of the planet WHERE THE PEOPLE LIVE, and so they influence the people's lives. i am not so HOT (jk!) on global warming as i am on having fresh air to breathe, fresh water to drink, and someplace to let go of the urban anxiety that comes with dirty air and water, breathing car and AC fumes and what-all else, eating crops that are not really food for the human body, etc etc etc!

i agree that legislation is a **** -poor way to deal with these things, but i also see that most people are still happy to strew their trash anyold where, run cars that belch burning oil, and generally consider the earth to be their garbage dump. i don't think we can continue down this road forever, and if it takes a period where legislation makes it necessary to be conscious, well, i can think of worse things to use it on. and i know plenty of english people who say it is noticeably, measurably warmer there these days than it was in 95 when i left. when i lived in new york state the hudson river was DANGEROUS to swim in because of years of toxic dumping. in the 70s REGULATION was passed to clean it up, and it is better now despite being the waterway for one of our biggest cities. there's just been a huge new sewage spill there, and the responsible parties will have to pay to clean it up. would they if there were not regs? doubtful.

posted July 27, 2011 11:11 AM            

A quick roundup of the latest in global warming lunacy and thuggery, and its consequences:
Climate change is not responsible for civil wars in Africa, according to a new study that found droughts and heat waves played no role in triggering unrest.

We could have told them the same thing, had they asked. And we would have charged them probably less than half what they had to pay those researchers at the Peace Research Institute Oslo’s Centre for the Study of Civil War. Next time you’re thinking of paying big bucks for obvious answers, give us a call. We accept personal checks.

Mongolian government officials wore baseball caps reading “Save our planet” and set up chairs and tables in the Gobi desert to hold a Cabinet meeting to draw attention to global warming.

These 12 guys sat in scorching heat Friday about 415 miles (670 kilometers) south of Ulan-Bator, the country’s capital, wearing suits and ties, after traveling the desert in jeeps for 15 hours so they could dramatize how climate change had resulted in (ready for this?) the harshest winter in decades. You can’t make this stuff up.

OK, enough of the loons. Now the goons. A new school will open in Los Angeles named after Al Gore and Rachel Carson, the woman who single-handedly persuaded the world to ban perfectly harmless, utterly useful DDT.

Why goons, you ask? If Gore’s cap-and-trade is adopted, millions worldwide will be denied inexpensive carbon-based energy. No refrigeration. No air conditioning. Death from deprivation and exposure to the elements. By the way, do you think Al goes a day without air conditioning, food preserved with refrigeration or any of the other every-day amenities provided by inexpensive carbon-based fuel?

Even so, Gore will have a long way to go to out-do Carson, whose own pseudo-science has denied the Third World poor the most effective, cheapest protection from malaria.

Loons and goons. On reflection, it seems too kind a description.

Oh, by the way. The school named after Gore and Carson sits on polluted soil, which had to be carted away at great expense. How fitting, no?

What do you say?
http://orangepunch.ocregister.com/2010/09/08/global-warming-loons-and-goons/33667/

posted July 27, 2011 11:26 AM            

Hundreds of United Nations global warming scientists just met in France via Earth-destroying air travel, ironically at a time of unseasonably cool temperatures across France, to once again justify their funding. Apparently the overall temperature of Earth is set to maybe rise 4 degrees Fahrenheit within the next hundred years. And you can bet that when climate scientists get together to discuss "solutions" to these hypothetical "problems," they're going to come up with ways to make humans suffer for being jerks to the planet.

According to the website for the group -- known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- its newest assessment report is focused on "risk management and the framing of a response through both adaptation and mitigation." It's a modified focus compared with previous reports. A sign, perhaps, that the IPCC has given up on stopping livestock from passing flatulence -- the primary source of climate change gas -- and accepted our pending doom at the hands of our farting overlords.

I'd like to make a contribution to the cause with my own recommendations of how we can all better contend with an apparently devastating temperature rise of probably less than one degree over our lifetimes.

Because it's hard to justify doing anything differently for something so logically insignificant, I'll pretend, as climate scientists do, that I'll lose my funding and livelihood if I can't make something out of nothing. So I'll be exaggerating a bit and pretending that a one-degree rise is really more like a hundred. Let's start in Europe, where this lunacy always catches on easiest before spreading like a plague to North America.

First, if it's going to heat up, we all need to have access to glacial air-conditioning. I'm looking at you, France, where old folks die in summer heat waves because for whatever reason people can't embrace technology-bestowed climate management. The 2007 French decree recommending that no interior with a temperature under 80 degrees Fahrenheit ever be air-conditioned is already outdated. Humans need refuge somewhere from this apparently imminent spontaneous combustion.

Preferably everything everywhere should be air-conditioned between now and the day we're set to spontaneously combust. If we could somehow manage to air-condition the sidewalks as well, then maybe we could eliminate noticing the problem altogether.

Another adaptation I'd like to suggest is better hygiene. If we're going to be increasingly hot and sweaty in the future, we should start making laws curtailing olfactory assault. Specifically, these laws should target people who don't wash either themselves or their clothes often enough in hot weather. Encouraging greater use of water, deodorant and washing/drying machines would go a long way in making us all more comfortable during this inevitable slide into inferno. I suggest imposing stink-fines, and building stink-prisons for the worst offenders.

Oh, and drink lots of water. Guzzle it like we have oceans full of it -- which we do. And we'll have more when the glaciers melt, right?

That's all I've got -- simple and people-centric -- because no one's paying me U.N. money to come up with impractical nonsense. Now let's see what the French environment minister, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet (NKM), has come up with. Wow, it looks like she has 230 ideas, at an estimated total cost of 550 million Euros -- none of which will require a popular vote in French parliament. I bet my suggestion of air-conditioning all the sidewalks would cost less than that.

NKM claims to want to reduce water consumption by 20 percent by 2020 (I'm already thirsty), recycle used water (gross), "diversify the genetic resources of trees" to better adapt parks to forest fires (yay for trees), and adapt things like "trains and roads" to produce less carbon dioxide (yay for trains, bad for plants, which use CO2 as food). What about the humans? Who will represent the interest of non-bureaucrats and non-profiteers in the global-warming debate?

posted August 10, 2011 03:57 PM            

Emily Finn, MIT News Office
August 10, 2011

The Arctic — a mosaic of oceans, glaciers and the northernmost projections of several countries — is a place most of us will never see. We can imagine it, though, and our mental picture is dominated by one feature: ice.

Yet the Arctic sea ice is changing dramatically, and its presence shouldn’t be taken for granted, even over the course of our lifetimes.

According to new research from MIT, the most recent global climate report fails to capture trends in Arctic sea-ice thinning and drift, and in some cases substantially underestimates these trends. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, released in 2007, forecasts an ice-free Arctic summer by the year 2100, among other predictions. But Pierre Rampal, a postdoc in the Department of Earth, Atmosphere, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), and colleagues say it may happen several decades earlier.

It’s all in the mechanics

Established in 1988 by the United Nations, the IPCC issues reports that represent an average of many findings, and is sometimes criticized for forecasting according to the “lowest common denominator” of climate research. Still, many policymakers put large stock in its predictions, so Rampal says it is important to continuously evaluate and improve their accuracy.

After comparing IPCC models with actual data, Rampal and his collaborators concluded that the forecasts were significantly off: Arctic sea ice is thinning, on average, four times faster than the models say, and it’s drifting twice as quickly.

The findings are forthcoming in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Oceans. Co-authors are Jérôme Weiss and Clotilde Dubois of France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique/Université Joseph Fourier and Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques, respectively, and Jean-Michel Campin, a research scientist in EAPS.

Part of the problem, Rampal says, may be inadequate modeling of mechanical forces acting on and within the ice in the Arctic basin. Thus far, the IPCC models have largely focused on temperature fluctuations, which are one way to lose or gain ice. But according to Rampal, mechanics can be just as important: Forces such as wind and ocean currents batter the ice, causing it to break up. Ice that’s in small pieces behaves differently than ice in one large mass, which affects its overall volume and surface area.

“If you make a mistake at this level of the model, you can expect that you are missing something very important,” Rampal says.

The seasonal tug of war

Rampal says mechanical forces can play a significant role in winter, when little melting occurs but when strong winds and ocean currents can wreak drastic effects on the ice’s shape and movement.

Traditionally, in winter, most of the Arctic Ocean was covered with a thick sheet of ice. But today’s winter ice cover is thinner, meaning it breaks up more easily under the influence of winds and currents. It eventually looks like an “ensemble of floes,” Rampal says, instead of one large mass. In summer, natural melting due to warmer temperatures opens the door to even more breakup. (Scientists refer to these patches of floes as “pancake ice,” because the small circular pieces look like — yes — pancakes on a griddle.)

During both seasons, ice in this state is prone to escaping from the Arctic basin, most commonly through the Fram Strait, a wide swath of ocean between Greenland and the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. The smaller the floes, the more likely they are to be lost through the Fram Strait, where they melt on contact with warmer waters to the south.

So, several factors are connected in a positive feedback loop: Thinner ice breaks more easily; smaller chunks of ice drift more quickly; and drifting ice is more prone to export and melting at lower latitude. But Rampal also cites examples of negative feedback loops, which may counteract some of the ice loss. For example, large cracks in winter’s ice cover help create new ice, since the extremely cold air in contact with the liquid ocean promotes refreezing, which leads to a sheet with greater surface area than before.

‘You’d better start now’

Because “everything is coupled” in these intricate feedback loops, “it’s hard to predict the future of Arctic sea ice,” Rampal says. Doing so will require more thorough modeling and real-world observations, especially of mechanical forces and other ice phenomena that have been poorly understood. Rampal is now working on a project with researchers at MIT and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose goal is to combine models and observations for a more accurate picture of the state of the world’s oceans.

Bruno Tremblay, an associate professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at McGill University, agrees that “the dynamic of sea ice is really important,” and inadequate modeling of mechanical forces is “part of the reason [the IPCC report] can’t predict correctly the future of sea ice decline.” Still, he cautions against jumping to overly grim conclusions, citing a need to consider subtle changes in the Arctic atmosphere: At some point, for instance, “maybe the wind no longer aligns itself with the Fram Strait, and that reduces ice export,” he says.

Although it’s impossible to say for sure when we might see an ice-free Arctic, the IPCC itself has acknowledged that its 2007 report may have painted too rosy a picture. “If you look at the scientific knowledge things do seem to be getting progressively worse,” said Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC chair, in an interview reported by The New York Times shortly after the report’s release. “So you’d better start with the interventions even earlier. Now.”
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/arctic-ice-melt-0810.html

posted August 10, 2011 11:40 PM            

Drifting sea ice is nothing new. Neither are ice shelves breaking off and drifting south in the Atlantic.

RMS 'Carpathia' in harbour at Halifax, Nova Scotia, c1912.

posted August 11, 2011 01:32 PM            

Sea ice drift is a function of ocean currents. Further, sea ice has, in the past, drifted across the equator into the Southern Hemisphere.

When the evidence is examined, we find fraud upon fraud upon fraud coming out of the man made global warming religion.

Global Warming Link to Drowned Polar Bears Melts Under Searing Fed Probe
08/11/2011
Audrey Hudson

posted August 11, 2011 04:48 PM            

quote:

---

No, but the thrust of the article is that Arctic sea ice is thinning and "drifting twice as quickly".

---

Right, and that it's actually WORSE than stated in the IPCC report. The models failed to predict this increase.

quote:

---

Global Warming Link to Drowned Polar Bears Melts Under Searing Fed Probe
08/11/2011
Audrey Hudson

---

posted August 11, 2011 06:29 PM            

In the last two decades there has been increasingly strident noise about global warming purportedly due to human activity. This insane hysteria by doomsday eco-chondriacs, eco-alarmists and other such nut-jobs, is not supported by facts. Global temperatures have actually fallen in the last one and half decade, with the current winter in Europe and North Eastern United States being particularly severe leading to dozens of fatalities and disruption of air, road & rail transport. In North East USA, government and business activities were grounded for a whole week because of the severe winter.

Last April, the British Antarctic Survey reported that the Antarctic ice sheet is increasing. Hear them: “Satellite images show that since the 1970s the extent of Antarctic sea ice has increased at a rate of 100,000 square kilometres a decade." Furthermore, recent NASA satellite images disclosed by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), reveal that the supposedly endangered polar ice caps have now recovered. Gilles Langis, a senior ice forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service affirms that parts of the Artic ice are now thicker than usual.

Just last month (Jan 2010) in a scandal dubbed glacier-gate, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reversed its erroneous prediction that the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. Dr Murari Lal, the IPCC scientist behind the falsehood admitted it wasn't based on any sound scientific research, but was an alarmist ruse to bamboozle world leaders into precipitous action.

Glacier-gate isn't the only scandal exposing the falsehoods feeding the global warming hysteria. Climate-gate was another such scandal in November last year at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of University of East Anglia. Hacked e-mails revealed CRU climate “scientists” manipulating and cooking scientific data, as well as an orchestrated conspiracy to silence scientists skeptical of global warming by refusing to publish or cite their papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Data from CRU are a major input to IPCC climate projections.

London Telegraph newspaper dubs Climate-gate the greatest scandal of the century, and the British weather service is investigating the fraud including full review of 160 years of temperature data used by the University of East Anglia's CRU.

The conspiracy of crooked CRU scientists to thwart publications by global warming dissenters in peer-reviewed scientific journals is just one of the plots to intimidate and frustrate global warming skeptics. Way back in 1990, a British Channel Four TV documentary The Greenhouse Conspiracy, exposed discriminatory blockage research funds to scientists skeptical of global warming.

In a 2007 interview with Investor's Business Daily, Professor William Gray of the Atmosphere department, Colorado State University lamented that “fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong. Because they know that they'd never get any grants if they spoke out”.

Media badmouthing of dissenters is yet another weapon in the arsenal of global warming propagandists, with CBS News' Scott Pelley equating global warming critics to “holocaust deniers”.

Threats are also on the table, as global warmists like Weather Channel's climatologist Dr. Heidi Cullen advocate withdrawal of American Meteorological Society approval from skeptical TV weathermen.

Nonetheless, undaunted critics like the Canadian mathematician Steve McIntyre have taken up the gauntlet against global warming conspirators. He and his colleague Ross McKitrick successfully debunked the scary Hockey stick curve - a graphical representation purportedly showing marked rise in global temperatures between the 19th and 20th century supposedly due to human industrialization.

Never mind that the Medieval Warm Period (1000-1400AD) when there were no carbon dioxide emitting power stations or SUVs, was warmer than today's industrialized world. Even much warmer was the Holocene Thermal Maximum some 6000-8000 years ago when there was virtually no human civilization.

In a seminal treatise published in 2003, “M&M” - as the duo of McIntyre and McKitrick have come to be known in global warming circles - demonstrated flaws in the data samples and computer models used by Micheal Mann et al (1998) to concoct the phony Hockey stick. The computer model used was programmed to always produce the frightening Hockey Stick regardless of data input. This is the kind of wish-washy dubious “science” on which anthropogenic (man-caused) global warming is based.

In 2006, a US Congress commissioned investigation team led by Edward Wegman not only debunked the Hockey stick curve and other faulty climate presumptions, they concluded that global warming “cannot be supported” by scientific facts.

An audit of NOAA temperature monitoring stations - used to collate temperature data - by meteorologist Anthony Watts and Colorado state University climatologist Robert Peilke found that contrary to US National Weather Service guidelines, 89% of the temperature stations were sited less than 30 metres from a heat source, resulting in spuriously high temperature data.

In another recent study, Kester Green and Scott Armstrong of the US National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) audited the global warming climate forecasts in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report and discovered that the IPCC violated 60 of the 127 principles relevant in assessing climate predictions.

The intellectual dishonesty of the global warming propagandists knows no bounds. In 2002, a UK court ruled that former US Vice President Al-Gore's global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth contained numerous falsehoods.

Proponents of anthropogenic global warming falsely ascribe it to increase carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from combustion of fossil fuels for energy. So much so that the Obama administration even got the United States EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) to declare CO2, which we all exhale a danger to public health.

Thus the cap & trade nonsense might well apply to we humans and other animals in order to stop us from polluting the atmosphere with the CO2 we breathe out, which plants require to grow.

As Craig Idso of the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change rightly points out, increased atmospheric CO2 is actually a boon for plant life that can help boost agricultural output for the growing human population. In a 2002 New Phytologist review of over 150 scientific studies involving 79 plant species, Jablonski et al affirmed that extra CO2 boosts plant production of flowers, fruits and seeds.

Human activity accounts for less than 3.4% of global CO2 emissions, nature being responsible for the remaining 96.6%. In other words even if there were no human activity, 96.6% of global CO2 production would continue unabated.

Furthermore, CO2 constitutes a meagre 0.038% of all atmospheric gases and is not even the major greenhouse gas - water vapour is, accounting for up to 90% of greenhouse effect.

Add to this the much more important non-greenhouse factors influencing global climate - solar variation, ocean currents, volcanoes, earth's axis tilt & orbit, atmospheric aerosols etc - then the fallacy of the human generated greenhouse gases causing global warming becomes even more spurious.

Several scientific reports even disconnect global warming from atmospheric CO2. Nature online asserts that the polar ice caps were formed when atmospheric CO2 was 760ppm (parts per million), and the present CO2 is just 380ppm. Furthermore as Dr. Holly Fretwell of George Mason University rightly points out, data from the last 650,000 years tell us that temperatures changes actually precede changes in atmospheric CO2.

So CO2 emissions can't be causing global warming. Even an IPCC scientist, Dr Vincent Gray agrees - “There is no relationship between warming and the level of gases in the atmosphere.”

Other dissenting IPCC scientists include Yuri Izrael, the IPCC Vice Chair who in February 2007 wrote that the “the panic over global warming is totally unjustified…there is no serious threat to the climate”.

Following release of the IPCC 2001 report, its lead author, Dr. John Christy rebuked media sensationalism, “The world is in much better shape than this doomsday scenario paints … the worst-case scenario is not going to happen.”

No more than 50 CRU-type “scientists” of IPCC's inflated 2500 figure are responsible for its misleading alarmist reports about CO2 emissions from human industry. On the contrary, over 4000 scientists including 72 Nobel laureates have signed on the Heidelberg Appeal (1992) calling for an end to the irrational scare-mongering about human industry.

The eminent scientists noted: "We are…worried at the emergence of an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress and impedes economic and social development…Humanity has always progressed by increasingly harnessing nature to its needs and not the reverse.”

Global warming is part of regular cyclical change that began long before humans evolved on this planet. In the last 1 billion years, there has been at least four ice ages interspersed with warming periods. During previous warming periods between ice ages, the earth was much warmer than today with no ice sheets even at the poles.

At that time humanity didn't even exist. It is therefore preposterous for today's eco-alarmists to claim that humanity is responsible for global warming. Presently we are in the interglacial period of an ice age that began some 2 million years ago in the Pleistocene epoch, as evidenced by the prominent Antarctic & Arctic ice sheets. So apocalyptic global warming is way off.

Perhaps because of the aforementioned widely reported global cooling events, the apocalyptic global warming doomsayers have now switched gears and now talk of anthropogenic “climate change”, as if climate was static prior to human industrialization.

Under this new rubric of "climate change”, all manner of climate related disasters are now attributed to man-caused greenhouse gas emissions. These include hurricanes like Katrina and the advancing Sahara desertification. Never mind that the Sahara was desertified from the thriving savannah it once was thousands of years ago when there was no human industrial activity.

US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data debunk any connection between hurricanes and human industrialization. In a recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters (Jan' 2008), the NOAA actually documents a decrease in hurricane activity over the last century. Last year there were no major hurricane scares even though human CO2 production has not declined.

Here in Naija, the Climate Action Network even includes gully erosion as a global warming issue. Really? Do the follow-follow egg-heads there really believe reducing CO2 emissions will stop gully erosion in the South East? Instead of chasing shadows at recently concluded climate summit in Copenhagen, they should go after our thieving politicians and bureaucrats who steal and misappropriate Ecology funds meant to solve the problem.

Thankfully Copenhagen was a flop, and hopefully all other such idiotic machinations by climate change wackos will also come to naught.

This of course is not to deny that there are pressing environmental challenges that need to be addressed; such as wanton deforestation, advancing Sahara and drying up of Lake Chad. Drastic innovative solutions are required not unrealistic idiocy of shutting down industries that are required to cater for growing human population.

Need we remind these climate change nut-jobs that de-industrialization of the Nigerian economy is largely responsible for our astronomical unemployment rate with attendant increased crime wave – kidnapping, armed robberies, ethno-religious clashes etc?

Switching power production to “green energy” sources (solar, wind etc) is totally unrealistic as their low power output is grossly inadequate for growing industrialized economies. Nuclear power is currently the major greenhouse gas free energy source that can easily rival or even replace dependence on fossil fuels, but this option is completely abhorrent to the global warming crowd. The Eco-wackos also often object to hydroelectric power on the grounds of adverse environmental impact.

With regards to the advancing Sahara, the technology already exists to afforest the entire Sahara and eliminate the desert even if it means constructing desalination plants and piping fresh water through the desert.

There are already tens of thousands of kilometers of pipelines for crude oil and natural gas, so why not for freshwater which is a much more sustainable resource of much greater long term benefit? The Sahara's underground water reserves would also be useful in this regard.

There is therefore an urgent need for a Sahara Afforestation Commission whose membership should include all the affected West & North African Countries.

Current piecemeal efforts of planting a few hundred or thousand trees on several acres won't stop the world's largest desert which is larger than Europe. Neither would shutting down all industries, grounding all aircraft, scrapping all SUVs and switching to green energy that are cost ineffective and can't meet global energy needs. http://www.modernghana.com/newsp/265609/1/pagenum/the-global-warming-hoax.html#continue