Facing The Facts, The Truth Be Told, Michael Crichton

The following speech is worthy of reprinting and saving. It takes great courage for a person in the public spotlight to tell the truth, just the pure simple, obvious truth, with no concern or need for personal profit. For this, Michael Crichton deserves our support and praise. Consider the following:
Peter


Pulled From The Vault: The Case for Skepticism on Global Warming (source)


Written by Michael Crichton

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CCF note: Occasionally we like to highlight an item from our
vault that provides exceptional insight into a particular issue. In this
speech by Mr. Crichton, given on January 25, 2005, to the National Press Club,
he "criticizes global warming scenarios. Using published UN data, he
reviews why claims for catastrophic warming arouse doubt; why reducing CO2 is
vastly more difficult than we are being told; and why we are morally unjustified
to spend vast sums on this speculative issue when around the world people are
dying of starvation and disease."
* * * * *

To be in Washington tonight reminds me that the only person to ever offer me a job in Washington was Daniel Patrick Moynihan. That was thirty years ago, and he was working for Nixon at the time. Moynihan was a hero of mine, the exemplar of an intellectual engaged in public policy. What I admired was that he confronted every issue according to the data and not a belief system. Moynihan could work for both Democratic and Republican presidents. He took a lot of flack for his analyses but he was more often right than wrong.

Moynihan was a Democrat, and I’m a political agnostic. I was also raised in a scientific tradition that regarded politics as inferior: If you weren’t bright enough to do science, you could go into politics. I retain that prejudice today. I also come from an older and tougher tradition that regards science as the business of testing theories with measured data from the outside world. Untestable hypotheses are not science but rather something else.
We are going to talk about the environment, so I should tell you I am the child of a mother who 60 years ago insisted on organic food, recycling, and energy efficiency long before people had terms for those ideas. She drove refrigerator salesmen mad. And over the years, I have recycled my trash, installed solar panels and low flow appliances, driven diesel cars, and used cloth diapers on my child—all approved ideas at the time.

I still believe that environmental awareness is desperately important. The environment is our shared life support system, it is what we pass on to the next generation, and how we act today has consequences—potentially serious consequences—for future generations. But I have also come to believe that our conventional wisdom is wrongheaded, unscientific, badly out of date, and damaging to the environment. Yellowstone National Park has raw sewage seeping out of the ground. We must be doing something wrong.

In my view, our approach to global warming exemplifies everything that is wrong with our approach to the environment. We are basing our decisions on speculation, not evidence. Proponents are pressing their views with more PR than scientific data. Indeed, we have allowed the whole issue to be politicized—red vs blue, Republican vs Democrat. This is in my view absurd. Data aren’t political. Data are data. Politics leads you in the direction of a belief. Data, if you follow them, lead you to truth.

When I was a student in the 1950s, like many kids I noticed that Africa seemed to fit nicely into South America. Were they once connected? I asked my teacher, who said that that this apparent fit was just an accident, and the continents did not move. I had trouble with that, unaware that people had been having trouble with it ever since Francis Bacon noticed the same thing back in 1620. A German named Wegener had made a more modern case for it in 1912. But still, my teacher said no.

By the time I was in college ten years later, it was recognized that continents did indeed move, and had done so for most of Earth’s history. Continental drift and plate tectonics were born. The teacher was wrong.

Now, jump ahead to the 1970s. Gerald Ford is president, Saigon falls, Hoffa disappears, and in climate science, evidence points to catastrophic cooling and a new ice age.Such fears had been building for many years. In the first Earth Day in 1970, UC Davis’s Kenneth Watt said, “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.” International Wildlife warned “a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war” as a threat to mankind. Science Digest said “we must prepare for the next ice age.” The Christian Science Monitor noted that armadillos had moved out of Nebraska because it was too cold, glaciers had begun to advance, and growing seasons had shortened around the world. Newsweek reported “ominous signs” of a “fundamental change in the world’s weather.”

But in fact, every one of these statements was wrong. Fears of an ice age had vanished within five years, to be replaced by fears of global warming. These fears were heightened because population was exploding. By 1995, it was 5.7 billion, up 10% in the last five years.
Back in the 90s, if someone said to you, “This population explosion is overstated. In the next hundred years, population will actually decline.” That would contradict what all the environmental groups were saying, what the UN was saying. You would regard such a statement as outrageous.

More or less as you would regard a statement by someone in 2005 that global warming has been overstated.

But in fact, we now know that the hypothetical person in 1995 was right. And we know that there was strong evidence that this was the case going back for twenty years. We just weren’t told about that contradictory evidence, because the conventional wisdom, awesome in its power, kept it from us.(This is a graph from Wired magazine showing rate of fertility decline over the last 50 years.)

I mention these examples because in my experience, we all tend to put a lot of faith in science. We believe what we’re told. My father suffered a life filled with margarine, before he died of a heart attack anyway. Others of us have stuffed our colons with fiber to ward off cancer, only to learn later that it was all a waste of time, and fiber.

When I wrote Jurassic Park, I worried that people would reject the idea of creating a dinosaur as absurd. Nobody did, not even scientists. It was reported to me that a Harvard geneticist, one of the first to read the book, slammed it shut when he finished and announced, “It can be done!” Which was missing the point. Soon after, a Congressman announced he was introducing legislation to ban research leading to the creation of a dinosaur. I held my breath, but my hopes were dashed. Someone whispered in his ear that it couldn’t be done.

But even so, the belief lingers. Reporters would ask me, “When you were doing research on Jurassic Park, did you visit real biotech labs?” No, I said, why would I? They didn’t know how to make a dinosaur. And they don’t.

So we all tend to give science credence, even when it is not warranted. I will show you many examples of unwarranted credence tonight. But here’s an example to begin. This is the famous Drake equation from the 1960s to estimate the number of advanced civilizations in the galaxy.

Where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet’s life during which the communicating civilizations live.
The problem with this equation is that none of the terms can be known. As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. The mathematical appearance is deceptive. In scientific terms—by which I mean testable hypotheses—the Drake equation is really meaninglessness.

And here’s another example. Most people just read it and nod:“How Many Species Exist? The question takes on increasing significance as plants and animals vanish before scientists can even identify them.”

Now, wait a minute…How could you know something vanished before you identified it? If you didn’t know it existed, you wouldn’t have any way to know it was gone. Would you? In fact, the statement is nonsense. If you were never married you’d never know if your wife left you.
Okay. With this as a preparation, let’s turn to the evidence, both graphic and verbal, for global warming. As most of you have heard many times, the consensus of climate scientists believes in global warming. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

And furthermore, the consensus of scientists has frequently been wrong. As they were wrong when they believed, earlier in my lifetime, that the continents did not move. So we must remember the immortal words of Mark Twain, who said, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

So let’s look at global warming. We start with the summary for policymakers, which is what everybody reads. We will go into more detail in a minute, but for now, we assume the summary has all the important stuff, and turning to page three we find what are arguably the two most important graphs in climate science in 2001.The top graph is taken from the Hadley Center in England, and shows global surface warming. The bottom graph is from an American research team headed by Mann and shows temperature for the last thousand years.
Of these two graphs, one is entirely discredited and the other is seriously disputed. Let’s begin with the top graph.

I have redrawn the graph in Excel, and it looks like this. Now the first thing to say is that there is some uncertainty about how much warming has really occurred. The IPCC says the 20th century temperatures increase is between .4 and .8 degrees. The Goddard Institute says it is between .5 and .75 degrees. That’s a fair degree of uncertainty about how much warming has already occurred.

But let’s take the graph as given. It shows a warming of .4 degrees until 1940, which precedes major industrialization and so may or may not be a largely natural process. Then from 1940 to 1970, temperatures fell. That was the reason for the global cooling scare, and the fears that it was never going to get warm again. Since then, temperatures have gone up, as you see here. They have risen in association with carbon dioxide levels. And the core of the claim of CO2 driven warming is based on this thirty-five year record.

But we must remember that this graph really shows annual variations in the average surface temperature of the earth over time. That total average temperature is ballpark sixteen degrees. So if we graph the entire average fluctuation, it looks like this:So all the interest is in this little fluttering on the surface. Let’s be clear that I am graphing the data in a way that minimizes it. But the earlier graph maximizes it. If you put a ball bearing under a microscope it will look like the surface of the moon. But it is smooth to the touch. Both things are true. Question is which is important.

Since I think the evidence is weak, I urge you to bear this second graph in mind.
Now the question is, is this twentieth-century temperature rise extraordinary? For that we must turn to the second graph by Michael Mann, which is known as the “hockey stick.”This graph shows the results of a study of 112 so-called proxy studies: tree rings, isotopes in ice, and other markers of relative temperature. Obviously there were no thermometers back in the year 1000, so proxies are needed to get some idea of past warmth. Mann’s findings were a centerpiece of the last UN study, and they were the basis for the claim that the twentieth century showed the steepest temperature rise of the last thousand years. That was said in 2001. No one would say it now. Mann’s work has come under attack from several laboratories around the world.

Two Canadian investigators, McKitrick and McIntyre, re-did the study using Mann’s data and methods, and found dozens of errors, including two data series with exactly the same data for a number of years. Not surprisingly, when they corrected all the errors, they came up with sharply differing results.But still this increase is steep and unusual, isn’t it? Well, no, because actually you can’t trust it. It turns out that Mann and his associates used a non-standard formula to analyze his data, and this particular formula will turn anything into a hockey stick---including trendless data generated by computer.Physicist Richard Muller called this result “a shocker…” and he is right. Hans von Storch calls Mann’s study “rubbish.” Both men are staunch advocates of global warming. But Mann’s mistakes are considerable. But he will get tenure soon anyway.

But the disrepute into which his study has fallen leaves us wondering just how much variation in climate is normal. Let’s look at a couple of stations.Here you see that the current temperature rise, while distinctive, is far from unique. Paris was hotter in the 1750s and 1830s than today.Similarly, if you look at Stuttgart from 1950 to present, it looks dramatic. If you look at the whole record, it is put into an entirely different perspective. And again, it was warmer in the 1800s than now.

Now, these are graphs taken from the GISS website at the time I did my research for the book. For those of you think the science is all aboveboard, you might contemplate this. The data have been changed.

I have no comment on why the Goddard Institute changed the data on their website. But it clearly makes the temperature record look more consistently upward-trending and more fearsome than it did a few months ago.
All right. With the second graph demolished, it is time to return to the first. Now we must ask, if surface temperatures have gone up in the twentieth century, what has caused the rise? Most people have been taught that the increase is caused by carbon dioxide, but that is by no means clear.

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Two factors that were previously not of concern have recently come to the renewed attention of scientists. The first is the sun. In the past it was imagined that the effect of the sun was fairly constant and therefore any rise in temperature must be caused by some other factor. But it is now clear from work of scientists at the Max Planck institute in Germany that the sun is not constant, and is right now at a 1,000 year maximum. The data comes from sunspots.

According to Solanki and his associates,This shows that solar radiation and surface temperature are correlated until recent times. Solanki says that the sun is insufficient to explain the current temperatures, and therefore another factor is also at work, presumably greenhouse gases. But the question is whether the sun accounts for a significant part of twentieth-century warming. Nobody is sure. But it is likely to be some amount greater than was previously thought.
Now we turn to cities:Another factor that could change the record is heat from cities. This is called the urban heat bias, and as with solar effects, scientists tended to think the effect, while real, was relatively minor. That is why the IPCC allowed only six hundredths of a degree for urban heating. But cities are hot: the correction is likely to be much greater. We now understand that many cities are 7 or 8 degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside. (A temperature chart from a car driving around Berlin. The difference between city and country is 7 degrees.)

Some studies have suggested that the proper adjustment to the record needs to be four or five times greater than the IPCC allowance.
Now what does this mean to our record? Well remember, the total warming in the 20th century is six tenths of a degree.If some of this is from land use and urban heating (and one studies suggests it is .35 C for the century), and some is solar heating (.25 C for century), then the amount attributable to carbon dioxide becomes less. And let me repeat: nobody knows how much is attributable to carbon dioxide right now.
But if carbon dioxide is not the major factor, it may not make a lot of sense to try and limit it. There are many reasons to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and I support such a reduction. But global warming may not be a good or a primary reason.
So this is very important stuff. The uncertainties are great.

And now, we turn to the most important issue. WHAT WILL HAPPEN IN THE FUTURE?
To answer this, we must turn to the UN body known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC, the gold standard in climate science.
In the last ten years, the IPCC has published book after book. And I believe I may be the only person who has read them. I say that because if any journalist were to read these volumes with any care they would come away with the most extreme unease---and not in the way the texts intend.

The most recent volume is the Third Assessment Report, from 2001. It contains the most up-to-date views of scientists in the field. Let’s see what the text says. I will be reading aloud.
Sorry, but these books are written in academic-ese. They are hard to decipher, but we will do that.

Starting with the first section, The Climate System: An Overview, we turn to the first page of text, and on the third paragraph read:Climate variations and change, caused by external forcings, may be partly predictable, particularly on the larger, continental and global, spatial scales. Because human activities, such as the emission of greenhouse gases or land-use change, do result in external forcing, it is believed that the large-scale aspects of human-induced climate change are also partly predictable. However the ability to actually do so is limited because we cannot accurately predict population change, economic change, technological development, and other relevant characteristics of future human activity. In practice, therefore, one has to rely on carefully constructed scenarios of human behaviour and determine climate projections on the basis of such scenarios.

Take these sentence by sentence, and translate into plain English. Starting with the first sentence. It’s really just saying:
Climate may be partly predictable.
Second sentence means:
We believe human-induced climate change is predictable.
Third sentence means:
But we can’t predict human behavior.
Fourth sentence:
Therefore we rely on “scenarios.”

The logic here is difficult to follow. What does “may be partly predictable” mean? Is it like a little bit pregnant? We see in two sentences we go from may be predictable to is predictable. And then, if we can’t make accurate predictions about population and development and technology… how can you make a carefully-constructed scenario? What does “carefully-constructed” mean if you can’t make accurate predictions about population and economic and other factors that are essential to the scenario?

The flow of illogic is stunning. Am I are making too much of this? Let’s look at another quote:“The state of science at present is such that it is only possible to give illustrative examples of possible outcomes.”

Illustrative examples. The estimates for even partial US compliance with Kyoto---a reduction of 3% below 1990 levels, not the required 7%---has been predicted to cost almost 300 billion dollars a year. Year after year. We can afford it. But if we are going to spend trillions of dollars, I would like to base that decision on something more substantial than “illustrative examples.”
Let’s look at another quote.My concerns deepen when I read “Climate models now have some skill in simulating changes in climate since 1850…” SOME SKILL? This is not skill in predicting the future. This is skill in reproducing the past. It doesn’t sound like these models really perform very well. It would be natural to ask how they are tested.

NEXT QUOTE
While we do not consider that the complexity of a climate model makes it impossible to ever prove such a model “false” in any absolute sense, it does make the task of evaluation extremely difficult and leaves room for a subjective component in any assessment.
Now, the term “subjective” ought to set off alarm bells in every person here. Science, by definition, is not subjective. I will point out to you that this is precisely the kind of issue that has Americans furious about the EPA. We know you can’t let a drug company manufacture a drug and also test it---that’s unreliable, and everybody knows it. So why in this high stakes climate issue do we allow the same person who makes a climate model to test it?
The flaws in this process are well known. James Madison, our fourth President:
No man is allowed to be judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and not improbably, corrupt his integrity.
Madison is right.
Climate science needs some verification by outsiders.

NEXT QUOTE
Again, am I making too much of all this? It turns out I am not. Late in the text, we read:“The long term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
Surely it should lead us to close the book at this point. If the system is non-linear and chaotic—and it is—then it can’t be predicted, and if it can’t be predicted, what are we doing here? Why are we worrying about the year 2100?

All right, you may be saying. Perhaps this is the state of climate science, as the IPCC itself tell us. Nevertheless we read every day about the dire consequences of global warming. What if I am wrong? What if a major temperature rise is really going to happen? Shouldn’t we act now and be safe? Don’t we have a responsibility to unborn generations to do so?

NEXT CHART – Act Now or Later?Here is again the IPCC chart of predictions for 2100. As you see, they range from a low of 1.5 degrees to a high of 6 degrees. That is a 400% variation. It’s fine in academic research. Now let’s transfer this to the real world.
In the real world, a 400% uncertainty is so great that nobody acts on it. Ever.If you planned to build a house and the builder said, it will cost somewhere between a million and a half and six million dollars, would you proceed? Of course not, you’d get a new builder. If you told your boss you were going on vacation and would be gone somewhere between 15 and 60 days, would he accept that? No, he’d say tell me exactly what day you will be back. Real world estimation has to be much, much better than 400%.

When all is said and done, Kyoto is a giant global construction project. In the real world nobody builds with that much uncertainty.
Next, we must face facts about the present. If warming is a problem, we have no good technological solutions at this point. Everybody talks wind farms, but people hate them. They’re ugly and noisy and change the weather and chop birds and bats to pieces, and they are fought everywhere they are proposed. Here is the wind farm at Cape Cod, which has aroused everyone who lives there, including lots of environmentalists who are embarrassed but still…they don’t want them. Who can blame them? A very large anti-wind faction has grown up in England, partly because the government are trying to put farms in the Lake District and other scenic areas.

But whether we like the technology or not, do we really have the capability to meet the Kyoto Protocols? Reporting in Science magazine, a blue-ribbon group of scientists concluded that we do not: So, if we don’t have good technology perhaps we should wait. And there are other reasons to wait. If in fact we are facing a really expensive construction job, we can afford it better later on. We will be richer. This is a 400 year trend.Finally, I think it is important to recognize that we can adapt to the temperature changes that are being discussed. We are told that catastrophe will befall if we increase global temperature 2 degrees. But that is the difference in average temperature between New York and Washington DC. I don’t think most New Yorkers think a move to Washington is balmy. Similarly, a move to San Diego is an increase of 9 degrees.

Of course this is not a fair comparison, because a local change is not the same as a global change. But it ought at least to alert you to the possibility that perhaps things are not as dire as we are being told. And were told thirty years ago, about the ice age.
Last, I want you to think about what it means to say that we are going to act now to address something 100 years from now. People say this with confidence; we hear that the people of the future will condemn us if we don’t act. But is that true?

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We’re at the start of the 21st century, looking ahead. We’re just like someone in 1900, thinking about the year 2000. Could someone in 1900 have helped us?
Here is Teddy Roosevelt, a major environmental figure from 1900. These are some of the words that he does not know the meaning of:
airport
antibiotic
antibody
antenna
computer
continental drift
tectonic plates
zipper
nylon
radio
television
robot
video
virus
gene
proton
neutron
atomic structure
quark
atomic bomb
nuclear energy
ecosystem
jumpsuits
fingerprints
step aerobics
12-step
jet stream
shell shock
shock wave
radio wave
microwave
tidal wave
tsunami
IUD
DVD
MP3
MRI
HIV
SUV
VHS
VAT
whiplash
wind tunnel
carpal tunnel
fiber optics
direct dialing
dish antennas
gorilla
corneal transplant
liver transplant
heart transplant
liposuction
transduction
maser
taser
laser
acrylic
penicillin
Internet
interferon
nylon
rayon
leisure suit
leotard
lap dancing
laparoscopy
arthroscopy
gene therapy
bipolar
moonwalk
spot welding
heat-seeking
Prozac
sunscreen
urban legends
rollover minutes

Given all those changes, is there anything Teddy could have done in 1900 to help us? And aren’t we in his position right now, with regard to 2100?

Think how incredibly the world has changed in 100 years. It will change vastly more in the next century. A hundred years ago there were no airplanes and almost no cars. Do you really believe that 100 years from now we will still be burning fossil fuels and driving around in cars and airplanes? The idea of spending trillions on the future is only sensible if you totally lack any historical sense, and any imagination about the future.
If we should not spend our money on Kyoto, what should we do instead? I will argue three points.

First, we need to establish 21st century policy mechanisms. I want to return to those pages from the IPCC. The fact is if we required the same standard of information from climate scientists that we do from drug companies, the whole debate on global warming would be long over. We wouldn’t be talking about it. We need mechanisms to insure a much, much higher standard of reliability in information in the future.

Second, we need to deal correctly with complexity of non-linear systems. The environment is a complex system, a term that has a specific meaning in science. Beyond being complicated, it means that interacting parts that modify each other have the capacity to change the output of the system in unexpected ways. This fact has several ramifications. The first is that the old notion of the balance of nature is thoroughly discredited. There is no balance of nature. To think so is to share an agreeable fantasy with the ancient Greeks. But it is also a shocking change for us, and we resist it. Some now talk of “balance in nature,” as a way to keep the old idea alive. Some claim there are multiple equilibrium states, but this is just a way of pretending that the balance can attained in different ways. It is a misstatement of the truth. The natural system of inherently chaotic, major disruption is the rule not the exception, and if we are to manage the system we are going to have to be actively involved.

This represents a revision of the role of mankind in nature, and a revision of the perception of nature as something untouched. We now know that nature has never been untouched. The first white visitors to the New World didn’t understand what they were looking at. In California, Indians burned old growth forest with such regularity that there is more old growth today than there was in 1850. Yellowstone was a beauty spot precisely because the Indians hunted the elk and moose to the edge of extinction. When they were prevented from hunting in their traditional grounds, Yellowstone began its complex decline.

We now have research to help us formulate strategies for management of complex systems. But I am not sure we have organizations capable of making these changes. I would also remind you that to properly manage what we call wilderness is going to be stupefyingly expensive. Good wilderness is expensive!

Finally, and most important—we can’t predict the future, but we can know the present. In the time we have been talking, 2,000 people have died in the third world. A child is orphaned by AIDS every 7 seconds. Fifty people die of waterborne disease every minute. This does not have to happen. We allow it.What is wrong with us that we ignore this human misery and focus on events a hundred years from now? What must we do to awaken this phenomenally rich, spoiled and self-centered society to the issues of the wider world? The global crisis is not 100 years from now—it is right now. We should be addressing it. But we are not. Instead, we cling to the reactionary and antihuman doctrines of outdated environmentalism and turn our backs to the cries of the dying and the starving and the diseased of our shared world.

And if we are going to remain too self-involved to care about the third world, can we at least care about our own? We live in a country where 40% of high school graduates are functionally illiterate. Where schoolchildren pass through metal detectors on the way to class. Where one child in four says they have seen a murdered person. Where millions of our fellow citizens have no health care, no decent education, no prospects for the future. If we really have trillions of dollars to spend, let us spend it on our fellow human beings. And let us spend it now. And not on our impossible fantasies of what may happen one hundred years from now.
Thank you very much.

Source About the author:
Michael Crichton is the best-selling author of State of Fear, which takes the reader from the glaciers of Iceland to the volcanoes of Antarctica, from the Arizona desert to the deadly jungles of the Solomon Islands, from the streets of Paris to the beaches of LosAngeles. The novel races forward on a roller-coaster thrill ride, all the while keeping the brain in high gear. Gripping and thought provoking, State of Fear is Michael Crichton at his very best.
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Book Review: "The Deniers"

This book should open a few eyes about the MYTH of man-caused global warming. It should be very sobering, if not frightening for people to realize how badly the general public has been misled about the realities of global warming and climate change. This is serious; billions, if not trillions of dollars are at stake, as well as the health and well-being of everyone on Earth. For more information on global warming, climate change, and related issues, go here. Note that you can also do a search to quickly find what interests you.
Peter

BOOK REVIEW OF "The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud" By Lawrence Solomon
Review by Jay Lehr, Ph.D
Lawrence Solomon, a longtime environmental activist, began wondering a few years ago how it could be that some scientists were questioning the apparently solid consensus that humans are causing a global warming crisis. He began seeking them out, and interviewing them on the topic. Before long, Solomon came to realize a substantial number of the world's leading scientists are making a very strong case that humans are not causing any sort of global warming crisis.In 2006 he began publishing his interviews with these leading scientists in Canada's National Post newspaper.

In his outstanding new book, The Deniers, Solomon presents the best of these interviews, while sharing additional insights for which his newspaper columns did not have room. Solomon's book breaks new ground in the global warming discussion, presenting the most important scientific evidence in the words of the scientists themselves.The Deniers is not just a series of interviews and vignettes, however. Solomon carefully divides the information gleaned from his prestigious dissenters into chapters asking the very questions most of us have on our minds, and he allows the scientists' own words to answer the questions collectively.

All of the "dissenters" profiled in the book are recognized leaders in their fields, with many even active in the official body that oversees most of the world's climate change research, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Thus the book provides absorbing insight into both the scientific issues and the ferocious political and media battles being waged about global warming. Solomon shows how noble scientists have suffered for their integrity and how attack dogs have mounted an all-out campaign against these scientists, portraying them as hacks bought by profit-mad oil companies or as non-credentialed cranks and lunatics.

The book offers well-written brief biographies of each of their illustrious careers. Here is a sample of the dozens of scientists the author interviewed, with a very condensed indication of who they are and what they believe:

Claude Allegre, Ph.D.: A member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and French Academy of Science, Allegre was among the first scientists to sound the alarm on potential dangers from global warming. His view now: "The cause of this climate change is unknown."

Richard Lindzen, Ph.D.: A professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the National Research Council Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Lindzen says global warming alarmists "are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right."

Habibullo Abdussamatov, Ph.D.: Head of the space research laboratory of the Russian Academy of Science's Pulkova Observatory and head of the International Space Station's Astrometria Project, Abdussamatov reports, "the common view that man's industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from misinterpretation of cause and effect relations."

Richard Toi, Ph.D.: Principal researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies at Vrije Universiteit and adjunct professor at the Carnegie Mellon University Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change, Toi calls the IPCC reports "preposterous ... alarmist and incompetent."

Sami Solanki, Ph.D.: Director and scientific member at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, Solanki argues changes in the sun's state, not human activity, may be the principal cause of global warming. Says Solanki, "The sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures."

Freeman Dyson, Ph.D.: A professor at Princeton University and one of the most eminent physicists in the world, Dyson reports the models used to justify global warming are "full of fudge factors" and "do not begin to describe the real world."

Eigil Friis-Christensen, Ph.D.: Director of the Danish National Space Center and vice president of the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy, Friis-Christensen argues changes in the sun's behavior could very well account for most of the warming during the past century.

Necessary Second Opinion
Global warming has become a critical question for citizens who must decide whether the cures being bandied about are not in fact worse than the disease. In matters of health, most intelligent citizens seek a second opinion before undergoing a serious medical procedure, but in the case of global warming, a second opinion is exactly what global warming activists do not want you to seek, for fear it will reduce the effectiveness of their fear-mongering. Therefore, we are treated to a continuous drumbeat of the words, "the science is settled."All the scientists Solomon interviews in his book are prominent in climate science and are not just nitpicking over the interpretation of some small piece of data. Throughout the book Solomon artistically includes boxes of highlighted quotes from his subjects, taken from their own publications.

Here is one from Lindzen:
"How can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes? The answer has much to do with misunderstanding the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism. "Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policymakers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes."

In his interview, Dyson points out from long experience that models packed with numerous "fudge factors" are worthless. As a mathematician and physicist, Dyson is known for the unification of three versions of quantum electrodynamics, as well as for contributions to space flight and the development of a safe nuclear reactor used today by hospitals and universities around the world. But today he is known more widely as a scientific heretic for disagreeing with claims of a central human role in global warming.

In his 2005 winter commencement address at the University of Michigan, Dyson said the mathematical computer models on which the alarmist claims are based "do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry, and the biology of fields, farms, and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in."

In Solomon's interview with Friis-Christensen, the scientist states he was originally optimistic about the work IPCC would do in studying the sun's influence on climate change. To his surprise, however, IPCC refused to consider the sun's effect on the Earth's climate as a topic worthy of investigation. IPCC conceived its task only as investigating potential human causes of climate change.That is a huge omission, Abdussamatov points out. He notes there has been global warming on other planets and moons in the solar system, and this demonstrates other forces may be at work regarding the Earth's moderate recent warming. "Mars has global warming, but without a greenhouse and without the participation of Martians," he observes.

Abdussamatov, at the pinnacle of Russia's scientific establishment, is one of the world's most eminent critics of the notion carbon dioxide is driving global warming. He argues these "parallel global-warmings observed simultaneously on Mars and on Earth--can only be a straight line consequence of the effect of the one same factor: a long-time change in solar irradiance."Abdussamatov believes the recent global warming will be short-lived and that we are actually on the brink of a global cooling, and likely a severe one. He argues Earth has hit its temperature ceiling, demonstrated by cooling currently occurring in the upper layers of the world's oceans. In addition, Abddussamatov notes, solar irradiance has begun to fall, likely ushering in a protracted cooling period beginning in 2012-2015.

The lowest depth of the solar irradiance reaching Earth will occur around 2041 (plus or minus 11 years), Abdussamatov estimates, and will inevitably lead to a deep freeze around 2055-60. The freeze will last into the twenty-second century before temperatures rise again. For now, he says, "we continue to bask in the remains of heat that the planet accumulated over the twentieth century."

This is an excellent book. It is written for non-scientists, and I guarantee you will understand every word. It will inspire you as you witness the courage of the deniers to take a stand and endure the wrath of global warming activists for having the audacity to report sound science.
Source

Kommando Kat Protecting Truth

A series of amazing and apparently real photos of a rare white Bengal Tiger named "Odin". Who says cats dont like water?
Peter

Training the new Kommando Kat...

Swimming is part of his lesson.....

Underwater stealth.....

and aggression........

All Kommando Kats are trained to promote and defend the Fellowship Of Scientific Truth.


A series of incredible photographs of a swimming and diving white Bengal Tiger....named Odin.

The Greatest Hoax Of All Time: Man-Caused Global Warming

The following article is long, but worth saving and re-publishing.

Peter

source

The Greatest Hoax ever Perpetrated
June 2008 Eric Creed

GOOGLE "RECORD HEAT" and you will get 3,180,000 hits. Google "record cold" and you will get 5,110,000. Yes, that’s right; and it’s just the tip of the proverbial (not melting) iceberg. You see, the convenient truth about the theory of global warming is that you can blame anything on it. Record snows and snow cover in North America, record cold in Asia, snow falling in Baghdad. That’s right. Snow in the desert. Clearly more signs of catastrophic global warming. Not so fast. Pull up a chair, put your feet up, expel some evil CO2, and let’s talk about how "settled" the issue of global warming really is.

Patron Saint Gore
I know full well that writing this piece will cause me to be labeled a "global warming denier" and be lumped in with those that Al Gore said in March are, along with Dick Cheney, "in such a tiny minority view now with their point of view, they’re almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the world is flat." Seriously?

I can’t question the people who are incapable of telling me what the weather is going to be for my tee-time this Saturday, but claim to know exactly how much warmer the entire globe will be, how much the sea will rise, how much the snow cover will recede, and how much the ice caps will melt in 100 years? You’re really going to implicitly equate me with a holocaust denier because I don’t believe that your faulty computer models (designed by James Hanson, et al., a liberal NASA scientist with an agenda) prove that the globe is warming, or if it is, that it’s our fault? You swear by the models, why don’t you swear by the corrections that NASA very quietly released last summer that show the warmest year on record was not 1998, but in fact is 1934, and that five of the top 10 hottest years on record were all before World War II?

The Pope once had a problem with a "denier." His name was Galileo, and he thought that the earth was round and that it was not the center of the universe; that it actually revolved around the sun, not the other way around. The Pope did the same thing that Al Gore is doing now. With faulty data and conjecture, the Pope declared that the debate was over and that anybody who disagreed would be burned at the stake. While we don’t burn people at the stake these days, Gore claims we will all die in a ball of fire if we don’t rally around this theory and devote all of our time, energy (both fossil and kinetic), and money to it.

OK, I am a skeptic. When every lunatic liberal leftist on the face of the planet says we need to close down the carbon emissions of industry (carbon caps) and spend trillions of dollars trying to fix something that (1.) we don’t know if we caused it (the factual evidence says we didn’t), and (2.) if we did cause global warming, is it really in our power to fix (reverse) it, red flags go up.

Many leading scientists firmly believe that more CO2 in the atmosphere is actually good for the planet. David Archibald, PhD, at the Biology Department of San Diego State University, is one of those leading scientists. In a lecture given at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, Dr. Archibald said that more CO2 in the atmosphere will give us a lusher environment and actually increase plant growth rates in addition to increasing the sustainability of crops in arid regions.

If you believe that liberal bastion of policy wonks and diplomats (and a couple of decent, and many not-so-decent, scientists), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we cannot reverse it. The IPCC closed its Fourth Assessment Report’s (AR4) Summary for Policymakers with this: "[B]oth past and future anthropogenic (man-made) carbon dioxide emissions will continue to contribute to global warming and sea level rise for more than a millennium, due to the time scales required for removal of this gas from the atmosphere."

For those of you who do not know, the IPCC is more than just Gore’s co-conspirator in the global warming fraud, they are co-recipients of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. And what does climate change have to do with peace anyway?

Back to our favorite global warming alarmist, Al Gore. He recently announced that his Alliance for Climate Protection will embark on a mission to better educate the public on the dangers of man-made global warming and the dire necessity to make drastic (and prohibitively costly) changes in order to stop it. Oh yeah, he’s spending $300 million to do it. Maybe Gore subscribes to Gallop. A recent Gallop poll revealed that about the same percentage of people believe in man-made global warming as did when they first took the poll in 1989.

Ironically, the propaganda machine that is Nobel Laureate Gore bans the media from his lectures. An odd contradiction for a man that wants the world to adopt his doomsday outlook and invest in his "green" funds. Gore’s lecture contract, handled by The Harry Walker Agency, Inc., in New York, in addition to requiring non-disclosure of the terms and conditions of the agreement, says in section 9(a) that "the press is not invited or permitted to cover the event unless express written permission is granted by the Harry Walker Agency, Inc." Section 9(c) reads, "Vice President Gore will accept no interview requests." Maybe if he allowed the press into his lectures, or gave an interview or two, he wouldn’t have to spend $300 million on public awareness.

In case you are wondering, yes, I have a copy. Are you at least a little bit curious why the free press is not allowed to attend his lectures? Read on, my friend.

GLOBAL WARMING HAS BECOME QUITE THE INDUSTRY. The U.S. alone spends over $4 billion per year on climate change research. That seems like a lot of money to spend on something that is so well settled and agreed upon by all but a few "flat-earthers."

Gore has started giving a disclaimer during his lectures. Gore, and Global Investment Management, LLP (GIM), the London-based private equity firm of which Gore is the founder and Chairman, stand to benefit in untold riches if we invest in the companies he recommends in his lectures. His disclaimers are no different than those of a stock broker or insurance agent. Gore is basically saying, yes, I own stock in these companies, but you should too if you want to save the planet from certain doom. Doom-and-gloom has served Gore well.

Like the other two shysters from his administration, he is reported to be worth north of $100 million. If you missed the media’s passing mention last month, Clinton finally released her income tax returns. Turns out she’s worth about $109 million. Civil servants, huh? Servants never had it so good. All the past presidents and vice presidents combined probably don’t have the wealth of the Gores and Clintons.

As a side note, Gore closed GIM’s second "green" fund, Climate Solutions Fund, in April at $683 million. The first fund, Global Equity Strategy Fund, has invested $2.2 billion in large companies judged to have, from an environmental, social and economic viewpoint, a "sustainable" business. I wonder, can any of the companies that Gore is investing billions in help him and his Nashville mansion use less than 10 times the amount of energy the average American household uses? But don’t worry, he’s using compact fluorescents in his house, so it’s ok to use 10 times as much energy as everyone else.

Speaking of Gore’s waste and gluttony, I wonder how ginormous his carbon footprint was while he was jetting around the world promoting his lie/movie and trying to convince everyone to invest in his companies.It was reported in April that An Inconvenient Truth used computer-generated footage from the movie The Day After Tomorrow to show a crumbling ice shelf. Those are the kinds of deceptions necessary when trying to convince the world of a lie. Just as Nazi Propaganda Chief Joseph Goebbels said, "[T]ell a lie enough and it becomes accepted as truth."

As well as that has worked for Gore, support for his "planet in peril" mantra is eroding faster than he claims the ice caps are. In 2007 a British court held that, in order for his lie/movie to be shown to school children, "eleven inaccuracies have to be specifically drawn to the attention of the [students]." Among those inaccuracies, the court ruled, was that rises in CO2 lagged behind temperature rises by 800-2,000 years; that despite the movie’s claim, it is a scientific impossibility for global warming to cause the Gulf Steam to stop flowing; and that, while the movie claims sea levels could rise 23 feet, the evidence showed sea levels are expected to rise 15 inches over the next 100 years.

If you believe Gore, we shouldn’t even bother buying green bananas, the end is so close at hand. Gore should have won his Oscar for the best mockumentary, not documentary, of 2007.The idea of exposing the lies behind global warming in courtrooms is catching on in the U.S. also. John Coleman, founder of The Weather Channel, published an article in ICECAP last year in which he called global warming the greatest scam in history. Coleman added, "[S]ome dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long-term scientific data to create in [sic] allusion of rapid global warming.

Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the ‘research’ to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus." Coleman didn’t stop there. On March 3, while attending the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York he said the following: "I have a feeling this is the opening. If the lawyers will take the case – sue the people who sell carbon credits, that includes Al Gore – that lawsuit would get so much publicity, so much media attention. And as the experts went to the witness stand and testified, I feel like that could become the vehicle to finally put some light on the fraud of global warming." Well, it worked in Britain.

Another famous Albert (Einstein), this one with a background in math and science, however, once noted that the consensus of a 100 scientists is undone by one fact. Steve McIntyre and a team of volunteers noticed some inconsistencies and an unusual discontinuity in the US temperature data used for climate modeling. When they asked NASA’s Hanson for the algorithm, he refused. (All in the name of science and consensus, I’m sure.) McIntyre and his team reverse-engineered it. What they found was a jump in many locations, all occurring around January 2000. As previously noted, NASA has released corrected data. Hanson can’t even fix the Y2K glitch in his climate model, and we’re supposed to radically change global lifestyles and economics based on his numbers?

Joseph D’Alea, the first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chief of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecast, says that "carbon dioxide (CO2) is 0.000383 of our atmosphere by volume. . . Only 0.0275 of atmospheric CO2 is [man-made] in origin. . . We are responsible for 0.00001 of this atmosphere. If the atmosphere were a 100-story building, our [man-made] CO2 contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor." Do we really want to spend a trillion dollars on linoleum?

"We’ve been warming up about a degree per century since the Little Ice Age (LIA) in about 1600. We’ve been warming for 400 years, long before human-generated CO2 could have anything to do with the climate," says Dr. Don Easterbrook, Professor Emeritus Geology, Western Washington University. Dr. Easterbrook is not alone in his opinion.

Reid Bryson, founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, opines "[O]f course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the LIA, not because we are putting more carbon dioxide into the air."

On December 13, 2007, 100 scientists (often referred to as the Bali-100) wrote an open letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, His Excellency Ban Li-Moon, in New York, NY. Among other things, the letter made three significant declarations: 1. "[R]ecent observations of phenomena such as glacial retreats, sea-level rise and the migration of temperature-sensitive species are not evidence for abnormal climate change, for none of these changes has been shown to lie outside the bounds of known natural variability. 2. The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century fall within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years. 3. Leading scientists, including some senior IPCC representatives, acknowledge that today’s computer models cannot predict climate. Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998. That the current temperature plateau follows a late 20th-century period of warming is consistent with the continuation today of natural multi-decadal or millennial climate cycling."

The letter continued, "In stark contrast to the oft repeated assertion that the science of climate change is ‘settled,’ significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming. But, because these IPCC working groups were generally instructed to consider work published only through May 2005, these important findings are not included in their reports; i.e., the IPCC assessment reports are already materially outdated." In case you are wondering, these are not some lunatic-fringe, pseudo-scientists. Of the 100 signatories to that letter, 85 hold a PhD. They closed the letter by saying, "[A]ttemps to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity’s real and pressing problems."

On March 4, at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, more than 500 scientists closed the conference with what is referred to as the Manhattan Declaration. In short, they declared that "global climate has always changed and always will, independent of the actions of humans, and that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant but rather a necessity for all life. . . There is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change. . . Now, therefore, we recommend that world leaders reject the view expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as popular, but misguided, works such as An Inconvenient Truth." How many of you heard or read about these declarations in the mainstream media? Is this the consensus that Saint Gore and his co-conspirators in the media speak of?

On April 14, 2008, a group of scientists (Hans Schreuder, Piers Corbyn, Dr. Don Parkes, Svend Hendriksen*), including a former Nobel Peace Prize recipient*, sent a letter to the IPCC. The letter opens with "[W]e are writing to you and others associated with the IPCC position – that man’s CO2 is a driver of global warming and climate change – to ask that you now in view of the evidence retract support from the current IPCC position and admit that there is no observational evidence in measured data going back 22,000 years or even millions of years that CO2 levels (whether from man or nature) have driven or are driving world temperatures or climate change."

They close the letter by asking that the IPCC "and all those whose names are associated with the IPCC policy accept the scientific observations and renounce current IPCC policy."Do you still think there is consensus? Try this on: between 1999 and 2001 a petition (commonly referred to as the Oregon Project) was attached to a 12 page paper and circulated within the scientific community.

The petition reads, in its entirety: "We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing, or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth." This petition was signed by nearly 20,000 scientists. More than 7,000 are PhDs. Of the 263 signatories from Tennessee, more than 53% hold a PhD or MD.

While critics of the petition have pointed to fake signatures (e.g., Janet Jackson, Perry Mason, etc.), no doubt put there by those wanting to discredit it, none have attacked the science and evidence cited in the paper. The paper this petition was attached to was written by three scientists at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. They wrote that the "average temperature of the Earth has varied within a range of about 3 degrees C during the past 3,000 years. It is currently increasing as the Earth recovers from a period known as the Little Ice Age. . . Atmospheric temperature is regulated by the sun; by the greenhouse effect, largely caused by atmospheric water vapor (H2O); and by other phenomena that are more poorly understood." (Imagine a needle scratching across a record.)

Stop. Back up. The Earth’s temperature is regulated by the sun? Absolutely ground-breaking. What will they think of next? The paper’s summary continues, "While major greenhouse gas H2O substantially warms the Earth, minor greenhouse gases such as CO2 have little effect. The 6-fold increase in hydrocarbon use since 1940 has had no noticeable effect on atmospheric temperature or on the trend in glacier length.""Comprehensive surveys of published temperature records confirm the fact that the current Earth temperature is approximately 1 degrees C lower than that during the Medieval Climate Optimum 1,000 years ago. Surface temperatures in the United States during the past century reflect this warming trend and its correlation with solar activity. . .

Predictions of catastrophic global warming are based on computer modeling, a branch of science still in its infancy. The empirical evidence – actual measurements of Earth’s temperature and climate – shows no man-made warming trend. Indeed, during four of the seven decades since 1940 when average CO2 levels steadily increased, U.S. average temperatures were actually decreasing. . . The temperature of the Earth is continuing its process fluctuation in correlation with variations in natural phenomena.

Mankind, meanwhile, is moving some of the carbon in coal, oil, and natural gas from below ground to the atmosphere and surface, where it is available for conversion into living things. We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result."Those that will attack me for my views and call me a "denier," or worse, a Republican, will also likely claim that the scientists I have cited are in the pocket of Big Oil.

Very few scientists have taken money from Big Oil, simply because they don’t give that much out. True, they have given $20 million to fund climate change research over the past two decades. However, over that same period of time proponents of the theory of global warming have received $50 billion in funding. For those of you not mathematically inclined, $20 million is 0.004 of $50 billion. Who’s in whose pocket?

So what have the doomsday predictions gotten us? An ethanol mandate. And we can, once again, thank Al Gore for that. As vice president, Gore cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate in 1994 mandating the use of ethanol. Well, that’s good, right? It lessens our dependence on foreign oil, doesn’t it? Not so much. Until we get past the environmentalist whackos and actually tap our own vast oil reserves, we are stuck buying it on the world market. Recent studies have indicated that corn ethanol creates more greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline.

But, there is a larger concern regarding the use of ethanol. "It takes 400 pounds of corn to produce 25 gallons of ethanol," says Benjamin Senauer, Professor of Applied Economics and Co-director of the Food Industry Center at the University of Minnesota. While that diet leaves a lot to be desired, it’s enough to feed an adult male for one year. An IPCC member and Nobel Peace Prize winner with Gore in 2007, Rajendra Pachauri, is also concerned. "We should be very, very careful about coming up with biofuel solutions that have major impact on production of food grains and may have an implication for overall food security, " says Pachauri.

That’s an understatement. Riots have broken out around the world as the effects of this mandate are being felt globally. An estimated 30% of America’s corn crop is now being allocated for fuel, not food. The riots in Haiti, Indonesia, and Afghanistan are someone else’s problem, right? Not necessarily. Sam’s Club and Costco have already started rationing rice. Vietnam and Cambodia have stopped exporting it all together. In 2008 alone the price of rice has increased 68%. Milk and bread prices are up 11 – 25%, and global food prices are up 83%. The International Food Policy Research Institute has released a study that indicates 25 – 33% of the rise in commodities are due to biofuels.

I wonder, how many of Gore’s companies are in the biofuel business? The UN high commission on refugees has said that the American and European mandates on biofuels are a crime against humanity. It pains me to say it, but I agree with the UN.

The world stopped warming in 1998. In fact, the cooling that has taken place since then has all but erased the small temperature increase of the 20th century. How is that possible, especially since each year China increases its output of CO2 equal to that of Germany? As previously noted (with shock and dismay), the sun sets the thermostat on Earth, not the evil, SUV-driving Republicans. And UN meteorologists have said that 2008 will be colder than last year.

The US National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) recently reported that the average temperature of the global land surface in January 2008 was below the 20th century mean (-0.02 degrees F / -0.01 degrees C) for the first time since 1982. Based on data from the NCDC, the UK Telegraph reported in February that "[T]emperatures were also colder than average across large swathes of central Asia, the Middle East, the western US, western Alaska and southeastern China." "The peak U.S. temperature was 1934, at much the same time that Total Solar Irradiance peaked," says Dr. Archibald.

He continues, "[A]t its simplest, the relationship between the solar magnetic field strength and the Earth’s climate is this: lower magnetic field strength means few sunspots, fewer sunspots means less solar wind, less solar wind means more galactic cosmic rays, more galactic cosmic rays means more low level cloud formation, more low level clouds means more sunlight reflected back into space, which in turn means less heating of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere." Dr. Archibald is far from alone.

Dr. Tapping, solar researcher and project director for Canada’s National Research Council, says "[S]olar activity comes in regular cycles, but the latest one is refusing to start. Sunspots have all but vanished, and activity is suspiciously quite. The last time this happened was about 400 years ago – and it signaled a solar event known as the ‘Maunder Minimum,’ along with the start of what we now call the ‘Little Ice Age.’"

Looking at real, quantifiable data, and not faulty computer modeling, retired engineer P eter Harris has reached similar conclusions. Harris says, "[T]here is abundant archeological evidence to show that global temperature is closely correlated with solar activity. . . The data is based on analysis of carbon 14, which varies in concentration according to the level of solar activity. Solar activity over the past 70 years has been greatest for 8,000 years, and is the most likely cause of the recent trend through 1998 that has wrongly been attributed to CO2 warming.

"Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming," explains Phil Chapman, a geophysicist, astronautical engineer and NASA astronaut, "the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or declined during the past decade, despite continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.

All four agencies tracking Earth’s temperature (the Hadley Climate Research unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy Group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems, Inc. in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7 degrees C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

"In the next decade or so the global warming fraud will be exposed for what it is, a massive power and money grab by those who seek to rule over us and redistribute wealth, all the while bringing us to socialism. That day will be a dark day indeed for all the alarmists. What will be said of the great crusader, Academy Award and Nobel Prize winner Albert Gore? If I were to write it, it would say: "Al Gore: the man who invented the Internet later conned the world out of billions of dollars."

For those of you not willing to swallow the methane-producing manure that is shoveled at you everyday by a liberal and biased media, and would like to educate yourself, there are a seemingly countless number of websites and papers to read on this subject. I recommend starting your education by going to www.climatedebatedaily.com and www.climatepolice.com. Another great resource for "exposing liberal media bias" is www.newsbusters.org. Look at the science, not the dogma. Trust in what they can prove, not what they predict.

Penn and Teller..Being Green?

Brilliant, insightful and profane, but a "must watch".
Peter

Penn & Teller's Bullsh**!:"Being Green"

United Nations IPCC Uncertainties About Man-Caused Global Warming

This information is buried in the back pages of the latest United Nations report on global warming and climate change. It is overlooked by most and ignored by the mainstream media. However, it is recorded by one of our ever-vigilant members of "The Fellowship Of Scientific Truth". The point is, is this the kind of scientific "consensus" that we should be spending BILLIONS of dollars on trying to control global warming and climate change, by the United Nations own admission?

Thanks to "Grillednutria" published here.
Peter

From Technical Papers, Chapter 8 IPCC report.

8.2.1 Understanding and projecting climate change
Major uncertainties in understanding and modelling changes in climate relating to the hydrological cycle include the following [SYR; WGI TS.6]:

• Changes in a number of radiative drivers of climate are not fully quantified and understood (e.g., aerosols and their effects on cloud properties, methane, ozone, stratospheric water vapour, land-use change, past solar variations).

• Confidence in attributing some observed climate change phenomena to anthropogenic or natural processes is limited by uncertainties in radiative forcing, as well as by uncertainty in processes and observations. Attribution becomes more difficult at smaller spatial and temporal scales, and there is less confidence in understanding precipitation changes than there is for temperature. There are very few attribution studies for changes in extreme events.

• Uncertainty in modelling some modes of climate variability, and of the distribution of precipitation between heavy and light events, remains large. In many regions, projections of changes in mean precipitation also vary widely between models, even in the sign of the change. It is necessary to improve understanding of the sources of uncertainty.

• In many regions where fine spatial scales in climate regenerated by topography, there is insufficient information on how climate change will be expressed at these scales.

• Climate models remain limited by the spatial resolution and ensemble size that can be achieved with present computer resources, by the need to include some additional processes, and by large uncertainties in the modelling of certain feedbacks (e.g., from clouds and the carbon cycle).

• Limited knowledge of ice sheet and ice shelf processes leads to unquantified uncertainties in projections of future ice sheet mass balance, leading in turn to uncertainty in sealevel rise projections.

An Addition To The Hall Of Shame

Thanks to a founding member of "The Fellowship".......a brilliant illustration of how the true believers of man-caused global warming accept critical modern science.

Source


Grillednutria
Message #300908/02/08 10:04 PM

Here are the alarmists Sky, jon and HOOS...shame on them..