Here is an interesting email from Hans Schreuder - sent by Ronald Kitching - discussing the scientific fact that carbon dioxide cannot trap heat!
This issue is at the heart of the global warming hysteria. If CO2 physically cannot hold onto heat then it cannot be responsible for heating up the atmosphere!
Quote:
Some comments I wrote to a specialist email group, composed of mathematicians and various academics:
What I can say is that until such time that the scientific community comes to realise that their pet theory of a greenhouse effect (based as it is on greenhouse gases) is unreal, until that time will the climate alarm continue.
I know not what else to write to convince them of this fallacy.
Neither water vapour nor carbon dioxide are GHGs; if anything at all, they are superb anti-GHGs; they cool the atmosphere!
http://tech-know.eu/uploads/SUN_heats_EARTH.pdf
Monckton himself writes : "[...] The predicted phenomenon is startlingly and entirely absent from the observational record – No “greenhouse warming” signature is observed in reality" - from http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/image ... arming.pdf pg 7.
Yet he admonishes me for my "ignorance" with regard the basic radiative transfer formulae?!
All formulae relating to radiative transfer in our open-to-space atmosphere are chasing their own tail, but how can I prove it?
G&T did a splendid paper, now peer reviewed; my summary: www.tech-know.eu/uploads/Falsification_ ... ffects.pdf
Then I wrote the layman's guide to how the atmosphere works, with not one word of response by the RS.
Nobody listens, nobody wants to know.
www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/RS_science ... ail_02.pdf
The GHE and the concept of GHGs are sacrosanct. Period.
Fact of life: both GHE and GHGs are fantasmas; exactly the same as phlogiston in its day.
Fact of life: no evidence for any hot-spot has ever been observed.
Fact of life: such a hot-spot will never be observed because it can not exist in the open-to-space atmosphere; only in lab flasks can it exist.
Alan Siddons summarised the behaviour of carbon dioxide rather succinctly yesterday:
The problem all along, of course, is that people jump to conclusions. Sure, concentrated CO2 exposed to infrared will get somewhat warmer than everyday air. But this only proves that everyday air (99.96% of which is nitrogen, oxygen and argon) is more transparent to IR and less apt to be heated that way. Air molecules, CO2 included, initially acquire heat by contact with warmer surfaces. Via mutual collisions and convective transport, this heat gets spread around within an airmass.
To some slight degree, CO2 also has the option of acquiring heat by radiative transfer. But, rather ironically, it cannot radiatively transfer this heat to the nitrogen, oxygen and argon molecules which surround it because, as said, they are largely infrared-transparent. As a result, an excited CO2 molecule is obliged to share its heat just like the rest of them do, by bumping into other molecules. In short, there’s nothing special about CO2 in a real-world context. Outnumbered 2500 to 1, CO2’s energy is lost in a busy buzz of collisions, its radiative properties wasted.
Moreover, any heated gas radiates infrared — and in this case 99.96% of the gas consists of molecules other than CO2. Yet no one seriously imagines that back-radiation from 99.96% of the air has a role in raising the earth’s surface temperature. Only when CO2 comes up do we lose touch with reality.
Here’s a succinct point: Immersed in the vacuum of space, the earth has but one means of losing heat: radiation. And what does carbon dioxide do? It radiates.
It’s amazing that so few people have bothered to give this theory a second look.
So, there you have it. In just a few sentences Alan manages to point out how impossible it is for CO2 to make the atmosphere warmer.
Yet Professors of Physics and UK MPs who have degrees in Physics are happily proclaiming that the atmosphere is warmer because CO2 "traps" heat.
Best regards,
Hans
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Education Czar
By THE WASHINGTON TIMES
WARNING: This editorial includes discussion of topics that are sexually graphic. Under usual circumstances, we would never entertain these subjects or the rancid language involved. In this case, however, a very unusual exception must be made because the issues are central to the background of a senior presidential appointee at the U.S. Department of Education who is in a position to influence how and what our children are taught in our nation's schools. Thus far, out of fear or squeamishness, there has been public hesitance to examine closely the beliefs of this individual because many are afraid even to touch the risky content. Our scruples cannot be used against us when traditional moral precepts need to be defended. Simply, the deep level of depravity involved in this subject cannot be portrayed without providing a couple of examples to illustrate the inappropriate content. Please do not read any further if you will be offended by sexually graphic language.
The Obama administration is stonewalling serious inquiries about sexual filth propagated by a senior presidential appointee who is responsible for promoting and implementing federal education policy. Democrats clearly are terrified of ruffling the feathers of their activist homosexual supporters, who are an influential part of the Democratic party's base. This scandal, however, is not merely about homosexual behavior; it is about promoting sex between children and adults - and it's time for President Obama to make clear that abetting such illegal perversion has no place in his administration.
It is curious why White House officials and Education Secretary Arne Duncan believe it's worth it politically to continue taking arrows for defending Kevin Jennings, who is Mr. Obama's controversial "safe schools czar." The evidence suggesting he is unfit to serve as a senior presidential appointee is startling and plentiful. It was revealed this week that Mr. Jennings was involved in promoting a reading list for children 13 years old or older that made the most explicit sex between children and adults seem normal and acceptable. This brought up anew Mr. Jennings' past controversies, such as his seeming encouragement of sex between one of his high school students and a much older man as well as his praise for Harry Hay, a notorious supporter of the North American Man Boy Love Association.
But there is more. There are shocking new revelations this week of tape recordings from a youth conference involving 14-year-old students. The conference, billed as a forum to encourage tolerance of homosexuality, was sponsored by Mr. Jennings' organization and was held at Tufts University in March 2000. Mr. Jennings was executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) from its founding in 1995 until August 2008. The conference sessions appear to have had less to do with promoting tolerance and more to do with teaching children how to engage in sex.
Andrew Breitbart's Biggovernment.com provides tapes of some of the sessions. Describing the subject matter as smut would be putting it lightly. The conference discussions were very graphic and cannot be relayed in full detail in a family newspaper. A few examples are sufficient to describe the depravity of the subject matter. During one session about oral sex, a presenter asked the 14-year-old students: "Spit or swallow? Is it rude?" In another session, the 14-year-olds are taught about a gross practice called "fisting," in which "the man leading the discussion position[ed] his hand and show[ed] 14-year-olds how to insert their entire hand into the rectum of their sex partner."
Teaching children sexual techniques is simply not appropriate. Unfortunately, it is part of a consistent pattern by some homosexual activists to promote underage homosexuality while pretending that their mission is simply to promote tolerance for so-called alternative lifestyles. It is outrageous that someone involved in this scandal is being paid by the taxpayers to serve in a high-powered position at the Education Department, of all places. At some point, Mr. Duncan, Mr. Jennings, Obama administration spokesmen and the president himself are going to have to start answering questions about all this. Refusing to do so won't make the issue go away.
WARNING: This editorial includes discussion of topics that are sexually graphic. Under usual circumstances, we would never entertain these subjects or the rancid language involved. In this case, however, a very unusual exception must be made because the issues are central to the background of a senior presidential appointee at the U.S. Department of Education who is in a position to influence how and what our children are taught in our nation's schools. Thus far, out of fear or squeamishness, there has been public hesitance to examine closely the beliefs of this individual because many are afraid even to touch the risky content. Our scruples cannot be used against us when traditional moral precepts need to be defended. Simply, the deep level of depravity involved in this subject cannot be portrayed without providing a couple of examples to illustrate the inappropriate content. Please do not read any further if you will be offended by sexually graphic language.
The Obama administration is stonewalling serious inquiries about sexual filth propagated by a senior presidential appointee who is responsible for promoting and implementing federal education policy. Democrats clearly are terrified of ruffling the feathers of their activist homosexual supporters, who are an influential part of the Democratic party's base. This scandal, however, is not merely about homosexual behavior; it is about promoting sex between children and adults - and it's time for President Obama to make clear that abetting such illegal perversion has no place in his administration.
It is curious why White House officials and Education Secretary Arne Duncan believe it's worth it politically to continue taking arrows for defending Kevin Jennings, who is Mr. Obama's controversial "safe schools czar." The evidence suggesting he is unfit to serve as a senior presidential appointee is startling and plentiful. It was revealed this week that Mr. Jennings was involved in promoting a reading list for children 13 years old or older that made the most explicit sex between children and adults seem normal and acceptable. This brought up anew Mr. Jennings' past controversies, such as his seeming encouragement of sex between one of his high school students and a much older man as well as his praise for Harry Hay, a notorious supporter of the North American Man Boy Love Association.
But there is more. There are shocking new revelations this week of tape recordings from a youth conference involving 14-year-old students. The conference, billed as a forum to encourage tolerance of homosexuality, was sponsored by Mr. Jennings' organization and was held at Tufts University in March 2000. Mr. Jennings was executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) from its founding in 1995 until August 2008. The conference sessions appear to have had less to do with promoting tolerance and more to do with teaching children how to engage in sex.
Andrew Breitbart's Biggovernment.com provides tapes of some of the sessions. Describing the subject matter as smut would be putting it lightly. The conference discussions were very graphic and cannot be relayed in full detail in a family newspaper. A few examples are sufficient to describe the depravity of the subject matter. During one session about oral sex, a presenter asked the 14-year-old students: "Spit or swallow? Is it rude?" In another session, the 14-year-olds are taught about a gross practice called "fisting," in which "the man leading the discussion position[ed] his hand and show[ed] 14-year-olds how to insert their entire hand into the rectum of their sex partner."
Teaching children sexual techniques is simply not appropriate. Unfortunately, it is part of a consistent pattern by some homosexual activists to promote underage homosexuality while pretending that their mission is simply to promote tolerance for so-called alternative lifestyles. It is outrageous that someone involved in this scandal is being paid by the taxpayers to serve in a high-powered position at the Education Department, of all places. At some point, Mr. Duncan, Mr. Jennings, Obama administration spokesmen and the president himself are going to have to start answering questions about all this. Refusing to do so won't make the issue go away.
Monday, December 21, 2009
BBC Iraq WMD
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Friday, 2 March, 2001, 23:52 GMT
Saddam's bomb
In the wake of the US and British bombing of Iraq, investigative film maker Gwynne Roberts finds evidence that suggests that Iraq may already have developed its own nuclear weapons.
"Leone" emerged from out of the shadows outside my hotel in Suleimaniya, northern Iraq, on a bleak, misty night in January 1998 - just as the crisis between the United States and Iraq over arms inspection was reaching fever pitch.
Local Kurdish officials identified him as a nuclear scientist and when we talked, he seemed well informed.
Leone described himself as an engineer who was a member of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission - and a senior official in the secret Iraqi nuclear programme.
To prove his expertise, Leone worked throughout the night drawing detailed diagrams of nuclear weapons in his hotel room.
He said it worked on the principle of the Hiroshima-type bomb, in which high explosives drive pieces of highly enriched uranium together at high velocity. This triggers a nuclear explosion.
Then Leone made another staggering claim - that Iraq had actually conducted a nuclear test before the Gulf War.
Saddam threatened us with the death penalty if we told anybody about it
Leone
It was carried out at 1030 on 19 September 1989 at an underground site 150 kilometres south-west of Baghdad, he said.
"Saddam had threatened us with the death penalty if we told anybody about it."
The location was a militarised zone on the far shore of Lake Rezzaza, which used to be a tourist area. There is a natural tunnel there which leads to a large cavern under the lake.
"We went to a lot of trouble to conceal the test from the eyes of the outside world," said . "The Russians supplied us with a table listing US satellite movements. They were always helping us."
Late last year I turned to the most important defector to reach Europe - Abbas Jannabi, personal assistant to Saddam's son, Uday, for 15 years.
Abbas Jannabi: Appears to confirm the claims
He was imprisoned eight times by his former boss and routinely tortured. He finally fled the country with his family in 1998.
His cousin, Fadhil Jannabi, held a senior position in the Iraqi nuclear programme.
"It's true," he said. "A nuclear test was carried out in 1988 or 1989 in an underground site beside Lake Rezzaza."
Mr Jannabi pointed to the test site on a map of Iraq, and it was close to Leone's location.
"It is a military zone. I doubt whether UN inspectors ever visited it."
He himself had been to the site. He learned of the successful test from Uday, who, he said, was unable to conceal his jubilation.
"They were talking about the test, about their ability to produce a nuclear bomb. They were talking about a new powerful Iraq," said Mr Jannabi. "They had a celebration which was attended by senior officials and ministers."
South Africans 'supplied uranium'
I asked him if it was definitely a nuclear test. He said it was. I asked him who had supplied the uranium for the bomb. "South Africa," he said.
Mr Jannabi claimed that negotiations with the South Africans began in 1986, and the delivery was made in 1988.
So had South Africa really been selling off surplus stocks of highly enriched uranium?
I contacted a former intelligence official under the apartheid regime who had helped procure components for his country's nuclear weapons programme on the black-market.
"The story is true," he said. "About 50 kilograms were sold to the Iraqis. The Americans gave the green light for the deal."
Expert: Bhupendra Jasani
For the final stage of my investigation, I used the latest space technology to check out the Rezzaza test site. If Leone was telling the truth, there might be clues left behind - even though the test apparently happened almost 12 years ago.
I bought pictures of Lake Rezzaza taken in July 1989 - two months before the claimed test - by a French Spot Image satellite and compared them with images from the Indian IRS1D spacecraft, shot in September 2000.
Professor Bhupendra Jasani from King's College, London analysed these images of Lake Rezzaza, and made an important discovery - what looked like the tunnel Leone and Abbas Jannabi had told me about.
The images also showed an army base with some 40 buildings.
Each of the buldings were 40 by 70 metres in size, and a massive missile base was nearby. Sixty per cent of these buildings had been destroyed either in air attacks or by the Iraqis themselves.
"If you wanted to hide something, I guess this is exactly what you would do," said Professor Jasani.
Growing concern
There is growing concern that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction now threaten stability in the region as never before. But has Iraq already tested the atom bomb?
Since I first spoke to Leone, my investigation has come a long way. I have confirmed beyond doubt that UN inspectors missed a very large slice of the Iraqi nuclear weapons programme.
There is also evidence that the Iraqis tested a small nuclear device underground.
Saddam is now a hero in the Middle East because of his stand against Israel, Britain and America.
The tragedy is that the warnings of defectors like Leone have come to nothing. And that Iraq is now emerging as a nuclear power, causing the threat to peace to be far more real than ever before.
Saddam's Bomb: 1815 GMT, Saturday 3rd March on BBC 2.
Reporter: Gwynne Roberts
Deputy Editor: Farah Durrani
Editor: Fiona Murch
WATCH/LISTEN
ON THIS STORY
Gwynne Roberts:
"UN inspectors missed a very large slice of the Iraqi nuclear weapons programme"
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EDITIONS
Change to UK
Friday, 2 March, 2001, 23:52 GMT
Saddam's bomb
In the wake of the US and British bombing of Iraq, investigative film maker Gwynne Roberts finds evidence that suggests that Iraq may already have developed its own nuclear weapons.
"Leone" emerged from out of the shadows outside my hotel in Suleimaniya, northern Iraq, on a bleak, misty night in January 1998 - just as the crisis between the United States and Iraq over arms inspection was reaching fever pitch.
Local Kurdish officials identified him as a nuclear scientist and when we talked, he seemed well informed.
Leone described himself as an engineer who was a member of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission - and a senior official in the secret Iraqi nuclear programme.
To prove his expertise, Leone worked throughout the night drawing detailed diagrams of nuclear weapons in his hotel room.
He said it worked on the principle of the Hiroshima-type bomb, in which high explosives drive pieces of highly enriched uranium together at high velocity. This triggers a nuclear explosion.
Then Leone made another staggering claim - that Iraq had actually conducted a nuclear test before the Gulf War.
Saddam threatened us with the death penalty if we told anybody about it
Leone
It was carried out at 1030 on 19 September 1989 at an underground site 150 kilometres south-west of Baghdad, he said.
"Saddam had threatened us with the death penalty if we told anybody about it."
The location was a militarised zone on the far shore of Lake Rezzaza, which used to be a tourist area. There is a natural tunnel there which leads to a large cavern under the lake.
"We went to a lot of trouble to conceal the test from the eyes of the outside world," said . "The Russians supplied us with a table listing US satellite movements. They were always helping us."
Late last year I turned to the most important defector to reach Europe - Abbas Jannabi, personal assistant to Saddam's son, Uday, for 15 years.
Abbas Jannabi: Appears to confirm the claims
He was imprisoned eight times by his former boss and routinely tortured. He finally fled the country with his family in 1998.
His cousin, Fadhil Jannabi, held a senior position in the Iraqi nuclear programme.
"It's true," he said. "A nuclear test was carried out in 1988 or 1989 in an underground site beside Lake Rezzaza."
Mr Jannabi pointed to the test site on a map of Iraq, and it was close to Leone's location.
"It is a military zone. I doubt whether UN inspectors ever visited it."
He himself had been to the site. He learned of the successful test from Uday, who, he said, was unable to conceal his jubilation.
"They were talking about the test, about their ability to produce a nuclear bomb. They were talking about a new powerful Iraq," said Mr Jannabi. "They had a celebration which was attended by senior officials and ministers."
South Africans 'supplied uranium'
I asked him if it was definitely a nuclear test. He said it was. I asked him who had supplied the uranium for the bomb. "South Africa," he said.
Mr Jannabi claimed that negotiations with the South Africans began in 1986, and the delivery was made in 1988.
So had South Africa really been selling off surplus stocks of highly enriched uranium?
I contacted a former intelligence official under the apartheid regime who had helped procure components for his country's nuclear weapons programme on the black-market.
"The story is true," he said. "About 50 kilograms were sold to the Iraqis. The Americans gave the green light for the deal."
Expert: Bhupendra Jasani
For the final stage of my investigation, I used the latest space technology to check out the Rezzaza test site. If Leone was telling the truth, there might be clues left behind - even though the test apparently happened almost 12 years ago.
I bought pictures of Lake Rezzaza taken in July 1989 - two months before the claimed test - by a French Spot Image satellite and compared them with images from the Indian IRS1D spacecraft, shot in September 2000.
Professor Bhupendra Jasani from King's College, London analysed these images of Lake Rezzaza, and made an important discovery - what looked like the tunnel Leone and Abbas Jannabi had told me about.
The images also showed an army base with some 40 buildings.
Each of the buldings were 40 by 70 metres in size, and a massive missile base was nearby. Sixty per cent of these buildings had been destroyed either in air attacks or by the Iraqis themselves.
"If you wanted to hide something, I guess this is exactly what you would do," said Professor Jasani.
Growing concern
There is growing concern that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction now threaten stability in the region as never before. But has Iraq already tested the atom bomb?
Since I first spoke to Leone, my investigation has come a long way. I have confirmed beyond doubt that UN inspectors missed a very large slice of the Iraqi nuclear weapons programme.
There is also evidence that the Iraqis tested a small nuclear device underground.
Saddam is now a hero in the Middle East because of his stand against Israel, Britain and America.
The tragedy is that the warnings of defectors like Leone have come to nothing. And that Iraq is now emerging as a nuclear power, causing the threat to peace to be far more real than ever before.
Saddam's Bomb: 1815 GMT, Saturday 3rd March on BBC 2.
Reporter: Gwynne Roberts
Deputy Editor: Farah Durrani
Editor: Fiona Murch
WATCH/LISTEN
ON THIS STORY
Gwynne Roberts:
"UN inspectors missed a very large slice of the Iraqi nuclear weapons programme"
Home
Find us in the TV schedules
Send us your comments
Previous programmes
Full coverage
Key stories
US clerics oppose war
Saudi war warning
Iraq polio campaign
'New Europe' hits back
Analysis
Blair's political troubles
US and UK regroup
Blix tiptoes tightrope
CLICKABLE GUIDE
Global voices on Iraq
BBC WORLD SERVICE
News in Arabic
AUDIO VIDEO
Inspectors' report: Point by point
TALKING POINT
Your views on inspectors' report
Top Correspondent stories now:
USS Abraham Lincoln at war
The Real Dr Evil
Inside the mind of Kim Jong-il
Read your comments
Iraq: Whose country is it anyway?
The Ali Babas of Baghdad
Read your comments
Terror in the Philippines
Links to more Correspondent stories are at the foot of the page.
E-mail this story to a friend
Links to more Correspondent stories
In This Section USS Abraham Lincoln at war The Real Dr Evil Inside the mind of Kim Jong-il Read your comments Iraq: Whose country is it anyway? The Ali Babas of Baghdad Read your comments Terror in the Philippines The origins of 11 September? Read your comments
News Front Page | Africa | Americas | Asia-Pacific | Europe | Middle East |
South Asia | UK | Business | Entertainment | Science/Nature |
Technology | Health | Talking Point | Country Profiles | In Depth |
Programmes
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To BBC Sport>> | To BBC Weather>> | To BBC World Service>>
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Sunday, December 20, 2009
Who Pays the Piper? and Clips the Tickets
eo (21:12:50) :
Who cares about your penny contributions to wike. Party time to all the AGW crowd. Just think of all the money being thrown around after the sucessful meetings and lobbying at Copenhagen. Its billions going international organizations and NGOs( something like 10 to 15% administration fees of the $10 billions promised per year), then most of it some ( 70 to 80 per cent will be for consulting fees, purchases of SUV vehicles justified by the conditions of the roads in developing countries, trainings seminars, regional consultative meetings, capacity building, study tours, report preparations, public consultations and hearings, banquets, design and supervisions of demonstration projects, information dessimination, documentation. etc.) Whatever small amount left is the one for the tangible demonstration projects. Not to mention in developed countries the huge amount of taxpayer’s funded research and development for clean fuel, sequestration, renewable energy, etc that goes to the big oil companies and energy generators. This is the real stimulus to the economies of the developed countries. The truth is irrelevant. Science is irrelevant. It is the golden rule. He who holds the gold rules.
Who cares about your penny contributions to wike. Party time to all the AGW crowd. Just think of all the money being thrown around after the sucessful meetings and lobbying at Copenhagen. Its billions going international organizations and NGOs( something like 10 to 15% administration fees of the $10 billions promised per year), then most of it some ( 70 to 80 per cent will be for consulting fees, purchases of SUV vehicles justified by the conditions of the roads in developing countries, trainings seminars, regional consultative meetings, capacity building, study tours, report preparations, public consultations and hearings, banquets, design and supervisions of demonstration projects, information dessimination, documentation. etc.) Whatever small amount left is the one for the tangible demonstration projects. Not to mention in developed countries the huge amount of taxpayer’s funded research and development for clean fuel, sequestration, renewable energy, etc that goes to the big oil companies and energy generators. This is the real stimulus to the economies of the developed countries. The truth is irrelevant. Science is irrelevant. It is the golden rule. He who holds the gold rules.
Bill Board Tolerance,: Yeah Right ! !
From Kiwiblog
radvad (393) Says:
December 19th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Defacing destroying bill boards happens every election and does not draw such strong language from you David.
I don’t give a toss about the church’s silly billboad, nor do I get my knickers in a twist about its destruction. Churches frequently incur damage without complaining and in one recent case, I think in west Auckland, worked with the offenders. Sarah Palins church was destroyed in an arson attack over a year ago (with people inside) and still no arrests.
I however give a toss when people feed me pap. St Matthews claim they wanted to provoke discussion. Wrong. They wanted attention and did it by mocking a central Christian belief. If a similar bill board appeared mocking another religion’s beliefs they would be the first to cry for “tolerance” and “celebration” of diverse faiths. A tolerance they are not prepared to show themselves.
St M’s also claim some sort of moral high ground but seem to me to be long on confrontation and short of forgiveness, both very “unchristian”.
A pox on both the individuals who destroy private property and also those organisations that cause confrontation by mocking and then try to con us that their motives are pure. Bah humbug.
Popular. Like or Dislike: 55 : 11
andrei (484) Says:
December 19th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Censorship phttt that revolting image has gone viral.
Nor is it intolerance – let me just down the road from that Church Auckland’s elite have been guffawing at a play called Christ Almighty!!! which includes such things as St Joseph having sex with the donkey and transvestite angels huk yuk which reveals just how purile Aucklands glitterati are IMHO. And nobody said boo.
No beheadings – we just leave the morons enjoy their boorish entertainment knowing that it reveals how empty and shallow they really are.
I would have personally preferred that billboard remain to stand in condemnation of those who erected it but passions run high – assuming of course that those who erected it who aren’t also those behind the vandalism – always a distinct possibility when dealing with Liberal media whores.
But in no way was that Billboard anything other than a cheap attention grabbing stunt designed to sow discord and unhappiness during one of the Church’s Holy Festivals.
And in that it is mission accomplished
Popular. Like or Dislike: 43 : 12
the deity formerly known as nigel6888 (612) Says:
December 19th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
I cant agree
It was a deliberately stupid, provocative and frankly anti-christian billboard put up by a bloody vicar who thought he/she was being all edgy.
I am an atheist myself, but you dont go shitting on your parishoners.
If you want a real analogy, as opposed to the foolish strawmen that you put up. Try this one:
Imagine one of mohammed in bed with his second wife (yes the 9 year old one) put up by the imam just before ramadan, with some smart arse comment aout bedtime stories never having been the same since the marriage.
Thats the level of stupidity this church elevated itself to. A supposedly christian church thought it would be funny at christmas to mock christianity. oh yes, hardy hah hah, very cool, very edgy.
and now the vicar thinks its cool to call an offended parishioner a “fanatic”. If she threw a brick through a window at mcdonalds and burnt a couple of cars, he simply call her a social justice activist, and attempt to understand her point of view.
Yup, no wonder the anglicans are deservedly going down the toilet.
Popular. Like or Dislike: 52 : 7
TripeWryter (200) Says:
December 19th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
1 – St Matthew-in-the-City’s vicar is misguided. He doesn’t even believe a central tenet of Christian belief; that Jesus’ father was God himself. That’s like a revolutionary not believing in revolution.
2 – The billboard was attention-seeking. Nothing to do with getting people ‘thinking about Christmas’.
3 – It did, however, serve to provoke the religious, in the same way that Jesus provoked the religious of his time; they conspired to have him crucified.
4 – The religious took offence on behalf of God, despite there being no evidence that God was offended. Was he? Does he care? If the religious are his representatives, they must know what he thinks.
5 – The Bishop of Auckland seemed weak yesterday. He was deploring the billboard, but he didn’t seem to be doing anything more. Aren’t bishops of any stripe, any religion, sovereign in their own dioceses? Couldn’t he have just ordered the thing taken down? He gave the vicar at St Matthew a licence to practise and to preach. Couldn’t he had just withdrawn it? Put the vicar on the next plane out to wherever he came from?
6 – An online magazine headlined its story: ‘Christ, can’t you take a joke?’
Too true.
Vote: 25 5
krazykiwi (formerly getstaffed) (4565) Says:
December 19th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
[DPF: The extremists use the same justification for their actions - the difference is only scale]
Scale indeed. And the difference in that scale is so vast that to associate them one with another is ridiculous. Perhaps these actions are similar because the perpetrators were breathing, or were right handed, or had brown eyes, or … whatever.
In truth the perpetrators of religiously inspired acts are driven by a feeling that they doing what’s right. So too are Greenpeace protestors, MP’s at the trough, and me double parking when I think I’ll only be a minute.
Being driven by a feeling of doing what’s right is not a crime – actually it’s laudable. If a crime results from the feeling then the punishment is matched to the scale of that crime, not to the motivation itself.
Vote: 15 : 3
ZenTiger (189) Says:
December 19th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
It has been amazing to see the intolerance on display by some extremist Christians.
Yeah, I’m amazed extremists are so extreme, but I’m equally amazed that all the moderate people remain so moderate through this. What is it with the moderates anyway?
They have applauded the destruction of a church’s private property, because they don’t like the message on display.
Yes, but in fairness only the extremists applauded. The moderates thought it a stupid response to a stupid billboard.
It is only a small way removed from the Islamic extremists who burnt down an Embassy, because they didn’t like the cartoons of a newspaper in a country.
And consensual sex is really only a small way removed from rape. They both involve penetration. And National Party voters that deface a Labour Billboard is only a small step away from murder. And making jokes about Helen Clark’s looks is only a small step away from bad taste. And faux outrage at “Christian intolerance” is only a small step away from advocating them thrown to the lions.
Of course that was a more extreme act, but what they have in common is both sets of people think their God allows them to break the law to try and suppress a message or image they do not approve of. It is the thin end of theocratic rule.
Of course, anyone engaging in a political act is in open defiance of democracy and needs to be executed for treason. It’s the thin edge of a full blown fascist revolution, comrade.
There are many legitimate ways people could take action against the billboard of St Matthew-in-the-City. They include:
* Complain to the Advertising Standards Authority (as Family First did)
* Protest outside St Matthews
* Put up your own billboard with an alternative message
* Lobby for the leadership of St Matthews to be disciplined or sacked by the church hierarchy (if possible)
* Try and have the entire parish booted out of the Anglican Church
But for some reason, only the moderates only explore those avenues. Why are extremists so extreme?
But instead the nutters have won, with their campaign of destruction:
After the latest attack, by an elderly woman with a knife last night, the church said the billboard would not be replaced.
An elderly women with a knife and a pair of knitting needles has put them off, or the vast amount of negative reaction from “moderate” voices?? After the paint over, they were all for putting up another billboard (and maybe they have), but I wouldn’t be surprised if the implications of just how offensive their little media stunt actually is to many people.
The Vicar of St Matthew-in-the-City, Glynn Cardy, said the billboard was “attacked by a knife-wielding Christian fanatic who was then apprehended by a group of homeless people who care about our church. Later in the evening another group of fanatics ripped it down.
There go those fanatics again. Why are they so fanatical? Then again, a fanatic with money simply puts up an offensive billboard. Those sorts of fanatics are easy to spot (due to the size of the billboard and the content of the billboard), but they are fanatical within the law. It’s not illegal to offend people, but it’s ignorant to hide behind “freedom of speech” as the excuse to offend people.
I wonder how the fanatics would feel if someone threw bricks through all the windows at their local church, because someone doesn’t like their message.
We’ll have to catch them and see what they feel, if they go to church and if they realise how stupid they were. But a word of warning – fanatics can be fanatical about things.
It isn’t far removed from the morons who vandalise Jewish graves because they don’t like Judaism.
They weren’t morons David, they were extemist religious fanatics. Don’t hold back now, a vandal isn’t merely a vandal nowadays.
There is no right in New Zealand not to be offended by a religious message.
There is every right and freedom to be offended. You cannot think for one moment you can tell people what they are and are not “allowed” to think about something. There is no right to use ones offense as a justification for action outside the law. Subtle, but an important distinction.
If you are offended, then tough. Either take action under the law, or lump it. But you do not have the right to destroy private property of a church, because you are offended by their message.
Same goes for all lawbreakers, they should be caught and punished in a just manner. No surprises there.
But for all those who cheer on the extremists and vandals, well don’t cry out for sympathy when the same happens to your church.
OK, that’s a few people. What about the thousands of moderates you are now going to lump into your next point?
I mean if the Catholic Church beatifies Pope Pius XII, then it must be legitimate for Jewish activists to vandalise Catholic cathedrals to protest such an offensive move
Yeah right. First you argue that extremists have no right to break the law, now you are suggesting that a third party (the Church and all it’s moderate members) should expect whats coming to them. The Catholic Church has not condoned this vandalism, and it’s thousands of moderate members have not condoned this vandalism. This is a straw man argument you are setting up. Why assume these people are Catholics? Why assume they speak for the Church?
(Pius XII refused to publicly condemn the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews)
A controversial assertion, and you might want to look into this a bit further. : Soviet KGB falsly linked WW2 Pope with Nazis,
Vote: 25 : 4
Redbaiter (8181) Says:
December 19th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
“You don’t have a right to vandalise something which you find offensive”
Maybe you cede them that right by posting something designed to provoke such a reaction, and then being unable to defend it when the expected reaction occurs.
[DPF: That sounds like the arguments Muslim extremists used against the Danish cartoons. I believe the rule of law is paramount]
Vote: 7 13
Komata (196) Says:
December 19th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
As a Christian I personally found the poster offensive, but as it was St Matthew’s in the City that posted it, I am not surprised in the least.
Sadly that specific church has a very long record of being ‘trendy’, hip. cool, avant-garde and so out there, liberal and with it, (add whatever other ‘freeing’ words you may care to ) dating back to the late 1960’s when a parish priest (name sadly unrecalled – it was a little while ago – with what we would now call ‘liberal tendencies), decided to ‘get with it’ and engage with the flower people, presenting the gospel (as he perceived it) in a new and exciting way to embrace all and everyone – especially the homosexuals, lesbians and homeless.
(It was at the time that the same church was becoming a leader in anti-American and anti-Vietnam War protests, with the same priest being at the forefront of said protests)
The fact that he was diluting the essential Gospel message (that only through a personal acceptance of and relationship-with Jesus Christ as your personal saviour can you have eternal life) was irrelevant – cool was all and he fervently went all out to embrace the hippies, their culture and their ilk (pot, drug use – the whole circus) in the name of ‘Liberal’ and ‘Revolutionary’ theology – enthusiastically supported by his Bishop (Brown?).
His actions were totally acceptable to the new Zealand Anglican Synod since it was after all, another means of outreach and a chance to reach the ‘lost’. That, at least was the reason why the church (St Mathews) suddenly became a leader in liberal Christianity in New Zealand, and touted itself as being at the ‘cutting edge’ of Christianity in New Zealand. They were also totally ‘accepting’ (ie condoning-of) of the lifestyle of homosexuals and lesbians.
Predictably, with the accolades of liberals (mostly non-Christians, incidentally) St Matthews has since continued on that path with a succession of ‘liberal’ priests who have increasingly diluted the Christian message over the years, while still being supported by their local Bishop and moving even further away from the essential tenets of Christianity (along with the rest of the ‘Western’ Anglican church). All other faiths, especially Islam (a faith which is diametrically opposed-to and is always in confrontation-with Christianity) are of course welcome (as are Gays and Lesbians) and their beliefs incorporated into services (so that no-one feels left out)
Evidently, at least one member of the congregation has at last decided that ‘enough is enough’ and decided to take things into her own hands – the fact that she is 70-years plus being an indictment of the church, since evidently the ‘younger’ members are so happy with the diluted faith they are being fed that they don’t see there is a problem.
Others, evidently from other churches have also felt the same way, and have also defaced the poster, and since the ‘church’ hierarchy evidently doesn’t see that there is a problem, all power to the people concerned. But a ‘knife wielding Christian ‘FANATIC’? I think not – rather a devout, Bible-believing elderly Christian lady who has decided to take a stand. I wonder what she will be charged with?
Vote: 21 5
LiberalismIsASin (151) Says:
December 19th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
I have followed this debate and refrained from commenting, I mean what is the point? If you are a christian you are considered a legitimate target, liberals consider it a duty to denigrate the beliefs of all religions, epecially christians, or at least its a gallant protest. But seriously DPF is a hypocrite of the highest order. If a church put up a billboard that was as offensive to sodomites, who he champions, he would be lecturing us about the limits of free speech. St Matthews is the kind of church that can no longer be considered a church, everywhere and always they battle against the cause of Christ.
Vote: 15 1
malcolm (747) Says:
December 19th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
If you are a christian you are considered a legitimate target, liberals consider it a duty to denigrate the beliefs of all religions, especially christians, or at least its a gallant protest.
Please stop feeling sorry for yourself. If you want your religion to be respected, then make a case for why it deserves respect. No special pleading and no playing the victim card. There is no automatic respect for ideas just because they’re special to you. And be careful with the victim mentality; it stops you thinking about your faith in a rational way and helps to keep you inside the bubble.
Do you have automatic respect for Islam, Scientology, Church of LDS and witchdoctors? Of course not. You probably think they’re deluded or mad. And you’re most probably right.
Vote: 5 8
radvad (393) Says:
December 19th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Defacing destroying bill boards happens every election and does not draw such strong language from you David.
I don’t give a toss about the church’s silly billboad, nor do I get my knickers in a twist about its destruction. Churches frequently incur damage without complaining and in one recent case, I think in west Auckland, worked with the offenders. Sarah Palins church was destroyed in an arson attack over a year ago (with people inside) and still no arrests.
I however give a toss when people feed me pap. St Matthews claim they wanted to provoke discussion. Wrong. They wanted attention and did it by mocking a central Christian belief. If a similar bill board appeared mocking another religion’s beliefs they would be the first to cry for “tolerance” and “celebration” of diverse faiths. A tolerance they are not prepared to show themselves.
St M’s also claim some sort of moral high ground but seem to me to be long on confrontation and short of forgiveness, both very “unchristian”.
A pox on both the individuals who destroy private property and also those organisations that cause confrontation by mocking and then try to con us that their motives are pure. Bah humbug.
Popular. Like or Dislike: 55 : 11
andrei (484) Says:
December 19th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Censorship phttt that revolting image has gone viral.
Nor is it intolerance – let me just down the road from that Church Auckland’s elite have been guffawing at a play called Christ Almighty!!! which includes such things as St Joseph having sex with the donkey and transvestite angels huk yuk which reveals just how purile Aucklands glitterati are IMHO. And nobody said boo.
No beheadings – we just leave the morons enjoy their boorish entertainment knowing that it reveals how empty and shallow they really are.
I would have personally preferred that billboard remain to stand in condemnation of those who erected it but passions run high – assuming of course that those who erected it who aren’t also those behind the vandalism – always a distinct possibility when dealing with Liberal media whores.
But in no way was that Billboard anything other than a cheap attention grabbing stunt designed to sow discord and unhappiness during one of the Church’s Holy Festivals.
And in that it is mission accomplished
Popular. Like or Dislike: 43 : 12
the deity formerly known as nigel6888 (612) Says:
December 19th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
I cant agree
It was a deliberately stupid, provocative and frankly anti-christian billboard put up by a bloody vicar who thought he/she was being all edgy.
I am an atheist myself, but you dont go shitting on your parishoners.
If you want a real analogy, as opposed to the foolish strawmen that you put up. Try this one:
Imagine one of mohammed in bed with his second wife (yes the 9 year old one) put up by the imam just before ramadan, with some smart arse comment aout bedtime stories never having been the same since the marriage.
Thats the level of stupidity this church elevated itself to. A supposedly christian church thought it would be funny at christmas to mock christianity. oh yes, hardy hah hah, very cool, very edgy.
and now the vicar thinks its cool to call an offended parishioner a “fanatic”. If she threw a brick through a window at mcdonalds and burnt a couple of cars, he simply call her a social justice activist, and attempt to understand her point of view.
Yup, no wonder the anglicans are deservedly going down the toilet.
Popular. Like or Dislike: 52 : 7
TripeWryter (200) Says:
December 19th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
1 – St Matthew-in-the-City’s vicar is misguided. He doesn’t even believe a central tenet of Christian belief; that Jesus’ father was God himself. That’s like a revolutionary not believing in revolution.
2 – The billboard was attention-seeking. Nothing to do with getting people ‘thinking about Christmas’.
3 – It did, however, serve to provoke the religious, in the same way that Jesus provoked the religious of his time; they conspired to have him crucified.
4 – The religious took offence on behalf of God, despite there being no evidence that God was offended. Was he? Does he care? If the religious are his representatives, they must know what he thinks.
5 – The Bishop of Auckland seemed weak yesterday. He was deploring the billboard, but he didn’t seem to be doing anything more. Aren’t bishops of any stripe, any religion, sovereign in their own dioceses? Couldn’t he have just ordered the thing taken down? He gave the vicar at St Matthew a licence to practise and to preach. Couldn’t he had just withdrawn it? Put the vicar on the next plane out to wherever he came from?
6 – An online magazine headlined its story: ‘Christ, can’t you take a joke?’
Too true.
Vote: 25 5
krazykiwi (formerly getstaffed) (4565) Says:
December 19th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
[DPF: The extremists use the same justification for their actions - the difference is only scale]
Scale indeed. And the difference in that scale is so vast that to associate them one with another is ridiculous. Perhaps these actions are similar because the perpetrators were breathing, or were right handed, or had brown eyes, or … whatever.
In truth the perpetrators of religiously inspired acts are driven by a feeling that they doing what’s right. So too are Greenpeace protestors, MP’s at the trough, and me double parking when I think I’ll only be a minute.
Being driven by a feeling of doing what’s right is not a crime – actually it’s laudable. If a crime results from the feeling then the punishment is matched to the scale of that crime, not to the motivation itself.
Vote: 15 : 3
ZenTiger (189) Says:
December 19th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
It has been amazing to see the intolerance on display by some extremist Christians.
Yeah, I’m amazed extremists are so extreme, but I’m equally amazed that all the moderate people remain so moderate through this. What is it with the moderates anyway?
They have applauded the destruction of a church’s private property, because they don’t like the message on display.
Yes, but in fairness only the extremists applauded. The moderates thought it a stupid response to a stupid billboard.
It is only a small way removed from the Islamic extremists who burnt down an Embassy, because they didn’t like the cartoons of a newspaper in a country.
And consensual sex is really only a small way removed from rape. They both involve penetration. And National Party voters that deface a Labour Billboard is only a small step away from murder. And making jokes about Helen Clark’s looks is only a small step away from bad taste. And faux outrage at “Christian intolerance” is only a small step away from advocating them thrown to the lions.
Of course that was a more extreme act, but what they have in common is both sets of people think their God allows them to break the law to try and suppress a message or image they do not approve of. It is the thin end of theocratic rule.
Of course, anyone engaging in a political act is in open defiance of democracy and needs to be executed for treason. It’s the thin edge of a full blown fascist revolution, comrade.
There are many legitimate ways people could take action against the billboard of St Matthew-in-the-City. They include:
* Complain to the Advertising Standards Authority (as Family First did)
* Protest outside St Matthews
* Put up your own billboard with an alternative message
* Lobby for the leadership of St Matthews to be disciplined or sacked by the church hierarchy (if possible)
* Try and have the entire parish booted out of the Anglican Church
But for some reason, only the moderates only explore those avenues. Why are extremists so extreme?
But instead the nutters have won, with their campaign of destruction:
After the latest attack, by an elderly woman with a knife last night, the church said the billboard would not be replaced.
An elderly women with a knife and a pair of knitting needles has put them off, or the vast amount of negative reaction from “moderate” voices?? After the paint over, they were all for putting up another billboard (and maybe they have), but I wouldn’t be surprised if the implications of just how offensive their little media stunt actually is to many people.
The Vicar of St Matthew-in-the-City, Glynn Cardy, said the billboard was “attacked by a knife-wielding Christian fanatic who was then apprehended by a group of homeless people who care about our church. Later in the evening another group of fanatics ripped it down.
There go those fanatics again. Why are they so fanatical? Then again, a fanatic with money simply puts up an offensive billboard. Those sorts of fanatics are easy to spot (due to the size of the billboard and the content of the billboard), but they are fanatical within the law. It’s not illegal to offend people, but it’s ignorant to hide behind “freedom of speech” as the excuse to offend people.
I wonder how the fanatics would feel if someone threw bricks through all the windows at their local church, because someone doesn’t like their message.
We’ll have to catch them and see what they feel, if they go to church and if they realise how stupid they were. But a word of warning – fanatics can be fanatical about things.
It isn’t far removed from the morons who vandalise Jewish graves because they don’t like Judaism.
They weren’t morons David, they were extemist religious fanatics. Don’t hold back now, a vandal isn’t merely a vandal nowadays.
There is no right in New Zealand not to be offended by a religious message.
There is every right and freedom to be offended. You cannot think for one moment you can tell people what they are and are not “allowed” to think about something. There is no right to use ones offense as a justification for action outside the law. Subtle, but an important distinction.
If you are offended, then tough. Either take action under the law, or lump it. But you do not have the right to destroy private property of a church, because you are offended by their message.
Same goes for all lawbreakers, they should be caught and punished in a just manner. No surprises there.
But for all those who cheer on the extremists and vandals, well don’t cry out for sympathy when the same happens to your church.
OK, that’s a few people. What about the thousands of moderates you are now going to lump into your next point?
I mean if the Catholic Church beatifies Pope Pius XII, then it must be legitimate for Jewish activists to vandalise Catholic cathedrals to protest such an offensive move
Yeah right. First you argue that extremists have no right to break the law, now you are suggesting that a third party (the Church and all it’s moderate members) should expect whats coming to them. The Catholic Church has not condoned this vandalism, and it’s thousands of moderate members have not condoned this vandalism. This is a straw man argument you are setting up. Why assume these people are Catholics? Why assume they speak for the Church?
(Pius XII refused to publicly condemn the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews)
A controversial assertion, and you might want to look into this a bit further. : Soviet KGB falsly linked WW2 Pope with Nazis,
Vote: 25 : 4
Redbaiter (8181) Says:
December 19th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
“You don’t have a right to vandalise something which you find offensive”
Maybe you cede them that right by posting something designed to provoke such a reaction, and then being unable to defend it when the expected reaction occurs.
[DPF: That sounds like the arguments Muslim extremists used against the Danish cartoons. I believe the rule of law is paramount]
Vote: 7 13
Komata (196) Says:
December 19th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
As a Christian I personally found the poster offensive, but as it was St Matthew’s in the City that posted it, I am not surprised in the least.
Sadly that specific church has a very long record of being ‘trendy’, hip. cool, avant-garde and so out there, liberal and with it, (add whatever other ‘freeing’ words you may care to ) dating back to the late 1960’s when a parish priest (name sadly unrecalled – it was a little while ago – with what we would now call ‘liberal tendencies), decided to ‘get with it’ and engage with the flower people, presenting the gospel (as he perceived it) in a new and exciting way to embrace all and everyone – especially the homosexuals, lesbians and homeless.
(It was at the time that the same church was becoming a leader in anti-American and anti-Vietnam War protests, with the same priest being at the forefront of said protests)
The fact that he was diluting the essential Gospel message (that only through a personal acceptance of and relationship-with Jesus Christ as your personal saviour can you have eternal life) was irrelevant – cool was all and he fervently went all out to embrace the hippies, their culture and their ilk (pot, drug use – the whole circus) in the name of ‘Liberal’ and ‘Revolutionary’ theology – enthusiastically supported by his Bishop (Brown?).
His actions were totally acceptable to the new Zealand Anglican Synod since it was after all, another means of outreach and a chance to reach the ‘lost’. That, at least was the reason why the church (St Mathews) suddenly became a leader in liberal Christianity in New Zealand, and touted itself as being at the ‘cutting edge’ of Christianity in New Zealand. They were also totally ‘accepting’ (ie condoning-of) of the lifestyle of homosexuals and lesbians.
Predictably, with the accolades of liberals (mostly non-Christians, incidentally) St Matthews has since continued on that path with a succession of ‘liberal’ priests who have increasingly diluted the Christian message over the years, while still being supported by their local Bishop and moving even further away from the essential tenets of Christianity (along with the rest of the ‘Western’ Anglican church). All other faiths, especially Islam (a faith which is diametrically opposed-to and is always in confrontation-with Christianity) are of course welcome (as are Gays and Lesbians) and their beliefs incorporated into services (so that no-one feels left out)
Evidently, at least one member of the congregation has at last decided that ‘enough is enough’ and decided to take things into her own hands – the fact that she is 70-years plus being an indictment of the church, since evidently the ‘younger’ members are so happy with the diluted faith they are being fed that they don’t see there is a problem.
Others, evidently from other churches have also felt the same way, and have also defaced the poster, and since the ‘church’ hierarchy evidently doesn’t see that there is a problem, all power to the people concerned. But a ‘knife wielding Christian ‘FANATIC’? I think not – rather a devout, Bible-believing elderly Christian lady who has decided to take a stand. I wonder what she will be charged with?
Vote: 21 5
LiberalismIsASin (151) Says:
December 19th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
I have followed this debate and refrained from commenting, I mean what is the point? If you are a christian you are considered a legitimate target, liberals consider it a duty to denigrate the beliefs of all religions, epecially christians, or at least its a gallant protest. But seriously DPF is a hypocrite of the highest order. If a church put up a billboard that was as offensive to sodomites, who he champions, he would be lecturing us about the limits of free speech. St Matthews is the kind of church that can no longer be considered a church, everywhere and always they battle against the cause of Christ.
Vote: 15 1
malcolm (747) Says:
December 19th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
If you are a christian you are considered a legitimate target, liberals consider it a duty to denigrate the beliefs of all religions, especially christians, or at least its a gallant protest.
Please stop feeling sorry for yourself. If you want your religion to be respected, then make a case for why it deserves respect. No special pleading and no playing the victim card. There is no automatic respect for ideas just because they’re special to you. And be careful with the victim mentality; it stops you thinking about your faith in a rational way and helps to keep you inside the bubble.
Do you have automatic respect for Islam, Scientology, Church of LDS and witchdoctors? Of course not. You probably think they’re deluded or mad. And you’re most probably right.
Vote: 5 8
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Climate's Stubborn Facts
December 16, 2009
Climategate's Stubborn FactsBy Dexter Wright
Mark Twain once said, "Get your facts first, then distort them as much as you please." By contrast, he also exclaimed, "How empty is theory in the presence of fact!" This pretty well covers the recent controversy over the altered global temperature data from Dr. Jones at East Anglia University in Great Britain.
What are the facts? Well for starters, scientists at the Smithsonian Institution tell us that during what is known as the Medieval Optimum, the Vikings were growing grapes in Greenland. An agronomist at Virginia Tech suggest that if you are planning to start a vineyard, the roots of the vines cannot be exposed to temperatures below 25oF or the vine will die. Even though there were no thermometers at the time of Eric the Red, this gives us a benchmark for reference. There are no vineyards in Greenland today because it is too cold. In fact, the Smithsonian reports that there is evidence which supports the theory that the Viking colonies later collapsed as a result of a dramatically cooling climate.
Other facts seem to stand stubbornly in the way of the global warming theory. Paleoclimatological records show that after the last ice age -- about seven thousand years ago -- the climate on earth reached a very warm period (much warmer than now) known as the "climatic optimum," which resulted in green pastures covering what is now the Sahara Desert in Africa. This fact contradicts the popular mantra from former Vice President Al Gore that we are warmer now than ever before.
Geologists tell us that the earth's climate has changed many times from hot to cold and back again. The prevailing theories are that over the last billion years, there have been at least four major ice ages. Since the end of the last ice age, we have been in what these climatologist say is an interglacial period. In English, this means that the planet has not yet transitioned to a climate of either beach balls or snow balls.
But what about the curve balls in ClimateGate? The swirling controversy concerns the infamous e-mails about the Jones global temperature data set. The recent e-mails published on the internet suggest that the data was deliberately modified to reach a preconceived conclusion. This data was used in the reports generated by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has concluded that Carbon Dioxide (CO2) causes global warming by absorbing infrared radiation. The vast majority of the report documents the measured increase in CO2. The report also represents climate change model predictions as "evidence" of the effects of this increase in CO2. Climate models are computerized forecasting aids, not evidence.
Atmospheric chemists will tell you CO2 is a trace gas in the atmosphere and is measured in parts per million. It seems a bit of a stretch that the tail can wag the dog, especially when CO2 absorbs such a narrow portion of the infrared spectrum. According to Dr. Fred Singer of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, the global climate change models cannot "hindcast" known climatic changes such as the Medieval Optimum, when good, vintage, homegrown wines could be enjoyed in Greenland. As forecasters at the National Hurricane Center will tell you, if a model cannot hindcast, it cannot be relied upon for a forecast. Could it be that the data was tampered with to agree with the global climate models?
Is this an isolated incident of over-pressured scientists caving in to temptation? Well, the cracks in the global warming theory began appearing as far back as 1998. Dr. Sallie Baliunas published a study that linked global temperature fluctuations to solar activity. This theory is not a new one, but meteorologists have been very reluctant to accept this theory because the physical connection has been hard to determine. Dr. Baliunas suggested that solar wind was the physical connection. Dr. Baliunas was maligned by many scientists among the global warming crowd in an attempt to discredit her work.
More recently, Dr. Bill Grey of Colorado State University claimed that the university had cut his funding for hurricane research because of his outspoken opposition to the global warming theory.
Even NASA has been caught making exaggerated claims. Late in 2008, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies reported that October 2008 was the hottest on record. They "corrected" the statement after two meteorologists caught the "error" in the data and posted their findings on the internet.
Another "error" was admitted by the National Snow and Ice Data Center when they under-reported the amount of polar sea ice in the northern hemisphere. It seems they had a "sensor drift" which prevented the detection of ice coverage of more than 190,000 square miles -- roughly an area the size of California.
Mr. Gore insists that the debate on global warming is over. With so many questions concerning the validity of the data, how can anyone believe this? John Adams once said that "facts are stubborn things." But we need to establish the facts concerning the data before the debate can begin.
Will these questions concerning the facts affect the upcoming Senate debate on cap-and-trade? Probably not, because cap-and-trade is not about global warming. It's about money. Like everything else in Washington, follow the money. The political left sees all the money being made in the energy industry, and they want it...all of it! Carbon-based energy is so intertwined in our economy that if you control the energy industry, you control the world's economies. And that is the everlasting dream of the political left.
16 Comments on "Climategate's Stubborn Facts"
Climategate's Stubborn FactsBy Dexter Wright
Mark Twain once said, "Get your facts first, then distort them as much as you please." By contrast, he also exclaimed, "How empty is theory in the presence of fact!" This pretty well covers the recent controversy over the altered global temperature data from Dr. Jones at East Anglia University in Great Britain.
What are the facts? Well for starters, scientists at the Smithsonian Institution tell us that during what is known as the Medieval Optimum, the Vikings were growing grapes in Greenland. An agronomist at Virginia Tech suggest that if you are planning to start a vineyard, the roots of the vines cannot be exposed to temperatures below 25oF or the vine will die. Even though there were no thermometers at the time of Eric the Red, this gives us a benchmark for reference. There are no vineyards in Greenland today because it is too cold. In fact, the Smithsonian reports that there is evidence which supports the theory that the Viking colonies later collapsed as a result of a dramatically cooling climate.
Other facts seem to stand stubbornly in the way of the global warming theory. Paleoclimatological records show that after the last ice age -- about seven thousand years ago -- the climate on earth reached a very warm period (much warmer than now) known as the "climatic optimum," which resulted in green pastures covering what is now the Sahara Desert in Africa. This fact contradicts the popular mantra from former Vice President Al Gore that we are warmer now than ever before.
Geologists tell us that the earth's climate has changed many times from hot to cold and back again. The prevailing theories are that over the last billion years, there have been at least four major ice ages. Since the end of the last ice age, we have been in what these climatologist say is an interglacial period. In English, this means that the planet has not yet transitioned to a climate of either beach balls or snow balls.
But what about the curve balls in ClimateGate? The swirling controversy concerns the infamous e-mails about the Jones global temperature data set. The recent e-mails published on the internet suggest that the data was deliberately modified to reach a preconceived conclusion. This data was used in the reports generated by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has concluded that Carbon Dioxide (CO2) causes global warming by absorbing infrared radiation. The vast majority of the report documents the measured increase in CO2. The report also represents climate change model predictions as "evidence" of the effects of this increase in CO2. Climate models are computerized forecasting aids, not evidence.
Atmospheric chemists will tell you CO2 is a trace gas in the atmosphere and is measured in parts per million. It seems a bit of a stretch that the tail can wag the dog, especially when CO2 absorbs such a narrow portion of the infrared spectrum. According to Dr. Fred Singer of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, the global climate change models cannot "hindcast" known climatic changes such as the Medieval Optimum, when good, vintage, homegrown wines could be enjoyed in Greenland. As forecasters at the National Hurricane Center will tell you, if a model cannot hindcast, it cannot be relied upon for a forecast. Could it be that the data was tampered with to agree with the global climate models?
Is this an isolated incident of over-pressured scientists caving in to temptation? Well, the cracks in the global warming theory began appearing as far back as 1998. Dr. Sallie Baliunas published a study that linked global temperature fluctuations to solar activity. This theory is not a new one, but meteorologists have been very reluctant to accept this theory because the physical connection has been hard to determine. Dr. Baliunas suggested that solar wind was the physical connection. Dr. Baliunas was maligned by many scientists among the global warming crowd in an attempt to discredit her work.
More recently, Dr. Bill Grey of Colorado State University claimed that the university had cut his funding for hurricane research because of his outspoken opposition to the global warming theory.
Even NASA has been caught making exaggerated claims. Late in 2008, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies reported that October 2008 was the hottest on record. They "corrected" the statement after two meteorologists caught the "error" in the data and posted their findings on the internet.
Another "error" was admitted by the National Snow and Ice Data Center when they under-reported the amount of polar sea ice in the northern hemisphere. It seems they had a "sensor drift" which prevented the detection of ice coverage of more than 190,000 square miles -- roughly an area the size of California.
Mr. Gore insists that the debate on global warming is over. With so many questions concerning the validity of the data, how can anyone believe this? John Adams once said that "facts are stubborn things." But we need to establish the facts concerning the data before the debate can begin.
Will these questions concerning the facts affect the upcoming Senate debate on cap-and-trade? Probably not, because cap-and-trade is not about global warming. It's about money. Like everything else in Washington, follow the money. The political left sees all the money being made in the energy industry, and they want it...all of it! Carbon-based energy is so intertwined in our economy that if you control the energy industry, you control the world's economies. And that is the everlasting dream of the political left.
16 Comments on "Climategate's Stubborn Facts"
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Global Cooling
Thursday 10 December 2009
Same fears, different name?Maurizio Morabito uncovers a 1974 CIA report showing that the ‘scientific consensus’ then was that the world was cooling.
Maurizio Morabito
Panic about climate change is not an entirely contemporary phenomenon. In fact, 40 years ago, some scientists were similarly fearful about an impending climate catastrophe. The world would be harmed and life would become harsh, we were told. Policies were drawn up to deal with the coming change, and the scientists crossed their fingers. But there is one vital difference between the panic then and the panic now. It wasn’t global warming that was concerning scientists 40 years ago; it was global cooling.
This revelation comes from a recently unearthed 1974 CIA report. Because of this we now know that a large number of scientists really were convinced that world temperatures were on the way down. The only uncertainty centred around the strength and duration of the upcoming cooling of the planet. Yet this apparent consensus around global cooling, so prevalent during the 1970s, seems to have been erased from history. Why?
The principal reason is that awareness of this contrasting consensus threatens the current climate change edifice. Try to put yourself in the uncomfortable shoes of an advocate of climate change policies, determined to scare the wits out of the majority of voters and world leaders about global warming by presenting it as the consensus view amongst scientists. What would you do with a previous consensus that contradicts the current view? ‘If scientists in the 1970s were predicting an imminent ice age’, summarises John Fleck in the Skeptical Enquirer, ‘how can their forecasts of greenhouse warming today be trusted?’ (1)
It doesn’t take much effort to find ‘the world is cooling!’ articles in the online archives of the New York Times and the Washington Post, or on websites reporting what appeared in a famous Newsweek article from 1975, ‘The Cooling World’ (2). Written by science correspondents, many of them now dead, these pieces show plenty of scientists ready to depict a colder future in doom-laden words. There are even mentions of government agencies getting involved.
All of this seems incompatible with the contemporary view of catastrophic global warming. First of all, the phraseology used then to describe a cooling world of floods and droughts is identical to the phraseology used now to describe a warming world of flood and droughts. Worse, even the mere acknowledgement that climate change alarmism is not new would undermine fears being stoked around impending environmental, social and economic disasters due to unfavourable changes in temperatures.
Take, as an analogous example, the panic around Y2K or the ‘Millennium Bug’. Despite the predictions of a techno-meltdown, a cyber-geddon, computers the world over spectacularly failed to crash on 1 January 2000. With all of that very clear and fresh in most people’s memories, it would be very difficult to spread fears about a ‘Year 2100 Bug’. It’s because of experiences like this that scepticism has kept apace, despite a number of scares and panics in the British and worldwide print media over the past decade. Look at the reaction first to the problem of BSE (or Mad Cows’ Disease), then to SARS and now to swine flu: they tell a story of ever diminishing returns, of a general public becoming more immune to panics.
Likewise, if it becomes widely known that a number of scientists agreed that catastrophic cooling was happening little less than 40 years ago, current fears about climate changes will be seriously undermined. It might then be possible to view climate change as a set of possible scenarios to be investigated instead of panicked over.
That’s what has likely spurred some proponents of climate change to action. Take the Wikipedia entry on global cooling (3), which presents global cooling as ‘conjecture’, a ‘hypothesis’ that ‘never had significant scientific support’. Such a statement is just too easy to falsify (you only have to show it had significant scientific support, once). Tellingly, the Newsweek article (4) is left perfectly unexplained in Wikipedia; and, ironically, most of the global cooling entry appears to be about the surfacing of global warming concerns.
This rewriting of history isn’t confined to Wikipedia. Prominent examples include a couple of entries from January 2005 and October 2006 on the RealClimate blog (5, 6), an article in the Skeptical Enquirer by John Fleck called ‘The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus’ (7), and a piece in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society by Thomas Peterson together with William Connolley and John Fleck in September 2008.
In the Realclimate blog, Connolley points to a 1976 paper by BJ Mason stating that ‘there is no physical basis for predicting either the timing or magnitude of [climate] changes’. Connolley quotes a 1975 US National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council report that states ‘it does not seem possible to predict climate’. He then spends a lot of time talking about the timescale needed for an ice age to materialise, before labelling the Newsweek article ‘regrettable’, a ‘science stor[y] from the mass media’ (8).
Fleck’s Skeptical Enquirer article goes further, asserting that ‘scientists in the 1970s did not predict imminent global cooling or a looming ice age’. That is used as a springboard to explain how at the time ‘scientists began to look at the possible role of increased carbon dioxide emitted when fossil fuels are burned’.
Finally, in the piece from the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the authors declare that ‘There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then’. Time and again, they show evidence of a growing scientific consensus on global warming.
Is that the end of it? Is it really a myth that a large number of scientists believed the world was getting cooler? Not quite. Peterson’s, Connolley’s and Fleck’s first trick is to narrow the ‘myth’ to ‘an imminent ice age’, rather than simply ‘global cooling’. They then argue that for it be even approaching a consensus view amongst scientists, there would have to be ‘both the presence of many articles describing global cooling projections and the absence of articles projecting global warming’. Absence? As in not even one? Is that really possible, even in theory?
Peterson, Connolley and Fleck proceed to conduct a scientific literature survey, but they exclude, for example, geology-related works, which is ironic given that they argue that ‘the myth’s basis lies in a selective misreading of the texts’. They carry on even after admitting ‘most’ of the surveyed articles ‘do not… make clear predictions’. They manage also to find a feeble excuse for the 1975 Newsweek article, enlisting New York Times uber-warmist Andy Revkin to explain that ‘cooling’ could have been a ‘good peg’ for climate stories at the time. They also extend the temporal window of their search so wide (1965-1979, with citations counted up to 1983) that it would have been truly remarkable if a scientific consensus of any sort had been maintained without an IPCC-like body to sustain it, especially in a science as young as climatology.
This certainly doesn’t seem like a healthy way to look at, and understand, history. There simply was no IPCC in the 1970s, and there was still space for a number of new hypotheses. To go out looking for a 2008-style consensus, and perhaps even an IPCC-equivalent body in the 1970s, is to be anti-historical. It is a view analogous to those paintings from the Middle Ages that naively portrayed ancient Romans in contemporary garb.
But that’s not all. Peterson, Connolley and Fleck include this little gem: ‘By the early 1970s, when [Dr Murray] Mitchell updated his work (Mitchell 1972), the notion of a global cooling trend was widely accepted, albeit poorly understood.’ Is that the sound of somebody shooting themselves in the foot? Is it possible that a single paragraph undermines a whole article? After all, it does mention a ‘global cooling trend’, and uses an expression such as ‘widely accepted’ (the consensus that dare not speak its name perhaps). Continue now a few lines down the article and this is what you’ll find: ‘It was not long, however, before scientists teasing apart the details of Mitchell’s trend found that it was not necessarily a global phenomenon.’
A pattern is clearly emerging. We have a ‘widely accepted [by the scientific community]…global cooling trend’, at least judging from Mitchell’s work in 1972; doubts about that growing in the same scientific community from 1975/1976, as per Damon and Kunen’s paper; but not early enough to prevent Newsweek from publishing its 1975 article, one that even mentions a certain Dr Murray Mitchell. That means that pieces of the global cooling puzzle do suggest that cooling was a widely-held view in the 1970s.
Admittedly, such an agreed view did not last the whole decade: rather, it concerned the 1972 to 1975 period. Says who? Says the CIA, in a unique report I was recently able to re-discover in the British Library (9). It seems that even in the era of the internet and Google it is possible to unearth ‘lost files’.
Forgotten for 35 years, the CIA report, A Study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems frequently mentions a scientific acceptance of global cooling. It also reveals how most climate fears have never really left us, regardless of the underlying temperature trend.
Having seen the CIA report mentioned in a 1976 Washington Post piece, but with no copy of it on the internet, I obtained the microfiche document from the British Library. The content of the report’s 36 pages is striking. It may have been written in 1974, but the depictions are uncannily familiar: climate change, it says, will lead to floods and famines, and leaders in climatology are issuing stark warnings about threats to ‘the stability of most states’. The only thing to differentiate it from today’s scaremongering is the fact that the CIA in 1974 was concerned about global cooling, not warming. The report even mentions a ‘consensus’ among scientists.
The document is embarrasing to read. The ‘new climatic era’ is described in 1974 as a harbinger of famine, starvation, refugees, floods, droughts, crop failures, monsoons and the cause of all kinds of meteorological phenomena. As expected, potential benefits are downplayed and potential harms highlighted: the Sahara is expected to expand, and world grain reserves may last less than one month, the report claimed. There is even a cursory list of past civilisations destroyed by climatic episodes: The Indus, the Hittites, the Mycenaean and the Empire of Mali.
According to the CIA, these climate models are being refined (as always) and the energy balance of the atmosphere is perfectly explicable without a single reference to greenhouse gases. Thanks to government intervention (of course), many famous scientists, until then victims of ‘personality clashes’, have managed to establish a ‘scientific consensus’ about ‘global climate change’, including vague threats about a ‘greater variability’ in climate and serious economic problems around the world. And not only that; they all agree on a series of proposals about the creation of new government agencies. This is exactly the agreed scientific position as reported at the time by Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post and so on.
So what prompted the CIA’s interest in climate? The prime reason was the reported loss of a ‘significant part’ of the USSR’s wheat crop during the winter of 1972. Aware of the potentially dire consequences on the ‘politics of food’, the CIA was forced to acknowledge the lack of serious ‘analysis tools’ for climate. Hence, it wanted scientists to respond (unanimously) to policymakers, another feature of climate discussions common to both then and now.
In any case, on the back of the 1974 CIA document, Peterson’s, Connolley’s and Fleck’s reporting of the 1972 Mitchell paper, and the Damon and Kuten 1976 article, it seems clear that there was an agreed view amongst scientists that the world’s climate was cooling.
Why, then, was the CIA report overlooked until now? For one thing, it was classified at the time. Furthermore, Peterson, Connolley and John Fleck, and countless other people with even a passing interest in climate change, might not have obviously looked for it.
However, there are several websites with plenty of evidence pointing in the same direction. We have excerpts from a 1977 book, The Weather Conspiracy – the Coming of the New Ice Age (where the CIA-inspired scientific consensus is mentioned) (10). We can also learn that a 1972 conference of scientific leaders was convened at Brown University to discuss ‘The Present Interglacial: How and when will it End?’ Unless all participants believed a glacial period was in the making, that question would be meaningless. In fact the ‘42 top American and European investigators’ present concluded that ‘a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experience by civilized mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon’ (11).
The consensus was strong enough for Henry Kissinger to address the UN General Assembly on 15 April 1974: ‘The poorest nations… have been threatened by a natural [disaster]: the possibility of climatic changes in the monsoon belt and perhaps throughout the world.’ (12) Finally, indications of a build-up of a seeming scientific consensus on global cooling could be traced back as far as 1961.
Years ago, an Italian scientist humorously suggested the following to all aspiring climatologists:
‘To the question “Is the climate changing?” by all means never, ever, reply: “No, everything’s normal” […] because people would unanimously conclude that you understand nothing about meteorology, and nothing about climate. It would be the end of your career. The only sensible answer is: “Of course it is changing! It’s a well-known fact, scientifically confirmed and one that none could argue against.” You can then launch yourself into forecasting for the next hundred years a climate identical to the current one, amplifying the latest phenomena to extreme consequences.’ (13)
Let’s face it: today’s climate fears are similar to those of 35 years ago – even if the science has changed, and the thermometer readings have changed, and the climate models have changed, and the policies themselves have changed. Wouldn’t it be nice to see us become Climate Adults, leaving the infantile scaremongering behind, once and for all. We might even be able to devise better solutions than things like the hurried-up disaster called ETS (emission trading scheme).
Maurizio Morabito is a banking consultant, journalist and blogger.
Previously on spiked
Christopher C Horner told Rob Lyons that censorship and conformism are preventing proper investigation of climate change hysteria. Stuart Blackman said climate change is not beyond questioning. Christopher Monckton felt that Al Gore was too chicken to debate him. John Gillott asked whether there really was a consensus on global warming. Brendan O’Neill examined global warming’s chilling effect on free speech. Or read more at spiked issues Environment and Free speech.
(1) The great global cooling myth and the politics of science, John Fleck, Skeptical Enquirer, May 2009
(2) The Cooling World, Newsweek, 28 April 1975
(3) Global Cooling, Wikipedia
(4) The Global Cooling Myth, RealClimate.org, January 2005
(5) Global Cooling Again, RealClimate.org, October 2006
(6) Symons Memorial Lecture by BJ Mason, QJRMS, 1976, p473
(7) UNDERSTANDING CLIMATE CHANGE: A program for action, US National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council Report, 1975
(8) Symons Memorial Lecture, by BJ Mason, QJRMS, 1976, p473
(9) A study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems, CIA Report, 1974
(10) Excerpts from The Weather Conspiracy, the Coming of the New Ice Age, Icecap.us
(11) See An Important Letter Sent To The President About The Danger Of Climate Change, Fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com, 21 October 2009
(12) Cited in Our Changing Weather Patterns, Alan Wilkie, 1976, p48
(13) How to Be Right About the Climate: Always!, by Vincenzo Ferrara (trans. Maurizio Morabito), originally in Rivista di Meteorologia Aeronautica, Vol XLII no 1, Jan-Mar 1982
reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7817/
Same fears, different name?Maurizio Morabito uncovers a 1974 CIA report showing that the ‘scientific consensus’ then was that the world was cooling.
Maurizio Morabito
Panic about climate change is not an entirely contemporary phenomenon. In fact, 40 years ago, some scientists were similarly fearful about an impending climate catastrophe. The world would be harmed and life would become harsh, we were told. Policies were drawn up to deal with the coming change, and the scientists crossed their fingers. But there is one vital difference between the panic then and the panic now. It wasn’t global warming that was concerning scientists 40 years ago; it was global cooling.
This revelation comes from a recently unearthed 1974 CIA report. Because of this we now know that a large number of scientists really were convinced that world temperatures were on the way down. The only uncertainty centred around the strength and duration of the upcoming cooling of the planet. Yet this apparent consensus around global cooling, so prevalent during the 1970s, seems to have been erased from history. Why?
The principal reason is that awareness of this contrasting consensus threatens the current climate change edifice. Try to put yourself in the uncomfortable shoes of an advocate of climate change policies, determined to scare the wits out of the majority of voters and world leaders about global warming by presenting it as the consensus view amongst scientists. What would you do with a previous consensus that contradicts the current view? ‘If scientists in the 1970s were predicting an imminent ice age’, summarises John Fleck in the Skeptical Enquirer, ‘how can their forecasts of greenhouse warming today be trusted?’ (1)
It doesn’t take much effort to find ‘the world is cooling!’ articles in the online archives of the New York Times and the Washington Post, or on websites reporting what appeared in a famous Newsweek article from 1975, ‘The Cooling World’ (2). Written by science correspondents, many of them now dead, these pieces show plenty of scientists ready to depict a colder future in doom-laden words. There are even mentions of government agencies getting involved.
All of this seems incompatible with the contemporary view of catastrophic global warming. First of all, the phraseology used then to describe a cooling world of floods and droughts is identical to the phraseology used now to describe a warming world of flood and droughts. Worse, even the mere acknowledgement that climate change alarmism is not new would undermine fears being stoked around impending environmental, social and economic disasters due to unfavourable changes in temperatures.
Take, as an analogous example, the panic around Y2K or the ‘Millennium Bug’. Despite the predictions of a techno-meltdown, a cyber-geddon, computers the world over spectacularly failed to crash on 1 January 2000. With all of that very clear and fresh in most people’s memories, it would be very difficult to spread fears about a ‘Year 2100 Bug’. It’s because of experiences like this that scepticism has kept apace, despite a number of scares and panics in the British and worldwide print media over the past decade. Look at the reaction first to the problem of BSE (or Mad Cows’ Disease), then to SARS and now to swine flu: they tell a story of ever diminishing returns, of a general public becoming more immune to panics.
Likewise, if it becomes widely known that a number of scientists agreed that catastrophic cooling was happening little less than 40 years ago, current fears about climate changes will be seriously undermined. It might then be possible to view climate change as a set of possible scenarios to be investigated instead of panicked over.
That’s what has likely spurred some proponents of climate change to action. Take the Wikipedia entry on global cooling (3), which presents global cooling as ‘conjecture’, a ‘hypothesis’ that ‘never had significant scientific support’. Such a statement is just too easy to falsify (you only have to show it had significant scientific support, once). Tellingly, the Newsweek article (4) is left perfectly unexplained in Wikipedia; and, ironically, most of the global cooling entry appears to be about the surfacing of global warming concerns.
This rewriting of history isn’t confined to Wikipedia. Prominent examples include a couple of entries from January 2005 and October 2006 on the RealClimate blog (5, 6), an article in the Skeptical Enquirer by John Fleck called ‘The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus’ (7), and a piece in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society by Thomas Peterson together with William Connolley and John Fleck in September 2008.
In the Realclimate blog, Connolley points to a 1976 paper by BJ Mason stating that ‘there is no physical basis for predicting either the timing or magnitude of [climate] changes’. Connolley quotes a 1975 US National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council report that states ‘it does not seem possible to predict climate’. He then spends a lot of time talking about the timescale needed for an ice age to materialise, before labelling the Newsweek article ‘regrettable’, a ‘science stor[y] from the mass media’ (8).
Fleck’s Skeptical Enquirer article goes further, asserting that ‘scientists in the 1970s did not predict imminent global cooling or a looming ice age’. That is used as a springboard to explain how at the time ‘scientists began to look at the possible role of increased carbon dioxide emitted when fossil fuels are burned’.
Finally, in the piece from the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the authors declare that ‘There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then’. Time and again, they show evidence of a growing scientific consensus on global warming.
Is that the end of it? Is it really a myth that a large number of scientists believed the world was getting cooler? Not quite. Peterson’s, Connolley’s and Fleck’s first trick is to narrow the ‘myth’ to ‘an imminent ice age’, rather than simply ‘global cooling’. They then argue that for it be even approaching a consensus view amongst scientists, there would have to be ‘both the presence of many articles describing global cooling projections and the absence of articles projecting global warming’. Absence? As in not even one? Is that really possible, even in theory?
Peterson, Connolley and Fleck proceed to conduct a scientific literature survey, but they exclude, for example, geology-related works, which is ironic given that they argue that ‘the myth’s basis lies in a selective misreading of the texts’. They carry on even after admitting ‘most’ of the surveyed articles ‘do not… make clear predictions’. They manage also to find a feeble excuse for the 1975 Newsweek article, enlisting New York Times uber-warmist Andy Revkin to explain that ‘cooling’ could have been a ‘good peg’ for climate stories at the time. They also extend the temporal window of their search so wide (1965-1979, with citations counted up to 1983) that it would have been truly remarkable if a scientific consensus of any sort had been maintained without an IPCC-like body to sustain it, especially in a science as young as climatology.
This certainly doesn’t seem like a healthy way to look at, and understand, history. There simply was no IPCC in the 1970s, and there was still space for a number of new hypotheses. To go out looking for a 2008-style consensus, and perhaps even an IPCC-equivalent body in the 1970s, is to be anti-historical. It is a view analogous to those paintings from the Middle Ages that naively portrayed ancient Romans in contemporary garb.
But that’s not all. Peterson, Connolley and Fleck include this little gem: ‘By the early 1970s, when [Dr Murray] Mitchell updated his work (Mitchell 1972), the notion of a global cooling trend was widely accepted, albeit poorly understood.’ Is that the sound of somebody shooting themselves in the foot? Is it possible that a single paragraph undermines a whole article? After all, it does mention a ‘global cooling trend’, and uses an expression such as ‘widely accepted’ (the consensus that dare not speak its name perhaps). Continue now a few lines down the article and this is what you’ll find: ‘It was not long, however, before scientists teasing apart the details of Mitchell’s trend found that it was not necessarily a global phenomenon.’
A pattern is clearly emerging. We have a ‘widely accepted [by the scientific community]…global cooling trend’, at least judging from Mitchell’s work in 1972; doubts about that growing in the same scientific community from 1975/1976, as per Damon and Kunen’s paper; but not early enough to prevent Newsweek from publishing its 1975 article, one that even mentions a certain Dr Murray Mitchell. That means that pieces of the global cooling puzzle do suggest that cooling was a widely-held view in the 1970s.
Admittedly, such an agreed view did not last the whole decade: rather, it concerned the 1972 to 1975 period. Says who? Says the CIA, in a unique report I was recently able to re-discover in the British Library (9). It seems that even in the era of the internet and Google it is possible to unearth ‘lost files’.
Forgotten for 35 years, the CIA report, A Study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems frequently mentions a scientific acceptance of global cooling. It also reveals how most climate fears have never really left us, regardless of the underlying temperature trend.
Having seen the CIA report mentioned in a 1976 Washington Post piece, but with no copy of it on the internet, I obtained the microfiche document from the British Library. The content of the report’s 36 pages is striking. It may have been written in 1974, but the depictions are uncannily familiar: climate change, it says, will lead to floods and famines, and leaders in climatology are issuing stark warnings about threats to ‘the stability of most states’. The only thing to differentiate it from today’s scaremongering is the fact that the CIA in 1974 was concerned about global cooling, not warming. The report even mentions a ‘consensus’ among scientists.
The document is embarrasing to read. The ‘new climatic era’ is described in 1974 as a harbinger of famine, starvation, refugees, floods, droughts, crop failures, monsoons and the cause of all kinds of meteorological phenomena. As expected, potential benefits are downplayed and potential harms highlighted: the Sahara is expected to expand, and world grain reserves may last less than one month, the report claimed. There is even a cursory list of past civilisations destroyed by climatic episodes: The Indus, the Hittites, the Mycenaean and the Empire of Mali.
According to the CIA, these climate models are being refined (as always) and the energy balance of the atmosphere is perfectly explicable without a single reference to greenhouse gases. Thanks to government intervention (of course), many famous scientists, until then victims of ‘personality clashes’, have managed to establish a ‘scientific consensus’ about ‘global climate change’, including vague threats about a ‘greater variability’ in climate and serious economic problems around the world. And not only that; they all agree on a series of proposals about the creation of new government agencies. This is exactly the agreed scientific position as reported at the time by Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post and so on.
So what prompted the CIA’s interest in climate? The prime reason was the reported loss of a ‘significant part’ of the USSR’s wheat crop during the winter of 1972. Aware of the potentially dire consequences on the ‘politics of food’, the CIA was forced to acknowledge the lack of serious ‘analysis tools’ for climate. Hence, it wanted scientists to respond (unanimously) to policymakers, another feature of climate discussions common to both then and now.
In any case, on the back of the 1974 CIA document, Peterson’s, Connolley’s and Fleck’s reporting of the 1972 Mitchell paper, and the Damon and Kuten 1976 article, it seems clear that there was an agreed view amongst scientists that the world’s climate was cooling.
Why, then, was the CIA report overlooked until now? For one thing, it was classified at the time. Furthermore, Peterson, Connolley and John Fleck, and countless other people with even a passing interest in climate change, might not have obviously looked for it.
However, there are several websites with plenty of evidence pointing in the same direction. We have excerpts from a 1977 book, The Weather Conspiracy – the Coming of the New Ice Age (where the CIA-inspired scientific consensus is mentioned) (10). We can also learn that a 1972 conference of scientific leaders was convened at Brown University to discuss ‘The Present Interglacial: How and when will it End?’ Unless all participants believed a glacial period was in the making, that question would be meaningless. In fact the ‘42 top American and European investigators’ present concluded that ‘a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experience by civilized mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon’ (11).
The consensus was strong enough for Henry Kissinger to address the UN General Assembly on 15 April 1974: ‘The poorest nations… have been threatened by a natural [disaster]: the possibility of climatic changes in the monsoon belt and perhaps throughout the world.’ (12) Finally, indications of a build-up of a seeming scientific consensus on global cooling could be traced back as far as 1961.
Years ago, an Italian scientist humorously suggested the following to all aspiring climatologists:
‘To the question “Is the climate changing?” by all means never, ever, reply: “No, everything’s normal” […] because people would unanimously conclude that you understand nothing about meteorology, and nothing about climate. It would be the end of your career. The only sensible answer is: “Of course it is changing! It’s a well-known fact, scientifically confirmed and one that none could argue against.” You can then launch yourself into forecasting for the next hundred years a climate identical to the current one, amplifying the latest phenomena to extreme consequences.’ (13)
Let’s face it: today’s climate fears are similar to those of 35 years ago – even if the science has changed, and the thermometer readings have changed, and the climate models have changed, and the policies themselves have changed. Wouldn’t it be nice to see us become Climate Adults, leaving the infantile scaremongering behind, once and for all. We might even be able to devise better solutions than things like the hurried-up disaster called ETS (emission trading scheme).
Maurizio Morabito is a banking consultant, journalist and blogger.
Previously on spiked
Christopher C Horner told Rob Lyons that censorship and conformism are preventing proper investigation of climate change hysteria. Stuart Blackman said climate change is not beyond questioning. Christopher Monckton felt that Al Gore was too chicken to debate him. John Gillott asked whether there really was a consensus on global warming. Brendan O’Neill examined global warming’s chilling effect on free speech. Or read more at spiked issues Environment and Free speech.
(1) The great global cooling myth and the politics of science, John Fleck, Skeptical Enquirer, May 2009
(2) The Cooling World, Newsweek, 28 April 1975
(3) Global Cooling, Wikipedia
(4) The Global Cooling Myth, RealClimate.org, January 2005
(5) Global Cooling Again, RealClimate.org, October 2006
(6) Symons Memorial Lecture by BJ Mason, QJRMS, 1976, p473
(7) UNDERSTANDING CLIMATE CHANGE: A program for action, US National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council Report, 1975
(8) Symons Memorial Lecture, by BJ Mason, QJRMS, 1976, p473
(9) A study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems, CIA Report, 1974
(10) Excerpts from The Weather Conspiracy, the Coming of the New Ice Age, Icecap.us
(11) See An Important Letter Sent To The President About The Danger Of Climate Change, Fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com, 21 October 2009
(12) Cited in Our Changing Weather Patterns, Alan Wilkie, 1976, p48
(13) How to Be Right About the Climate: Always!, by Vincenzo Ferrara (trans. Maurizio Morabito), originally in Rivista di Meteorologia Aeronautica, Vol XLII no 1, Jan-Mar 1982
reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7817/
50 reasons Climate Change
Link - http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/12/50-reasons-why-global-warming.html
1) There is "no real scientific proof" that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man's activity.
Technically, proof exists only in mathematics, not in science. Whatever terminology you choose to use, however, there is overwhelming evidence that the current warming is caused by the rise in greenhouse gases due to human activities.
2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 per cent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the Earth during geological history.
Misleading comparison. Since the industrial age began human emissions are far higher than volcanic emissions.
3) Warmer periods of the Earth's history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.
In the past 3 million years changing levels of sunshine triggered and ended the ice ages. Carbon dioxide was a feedback that increased warming, rather than the initial cause. In the more distant past, several warming episodes were directly triggered by CO2.
4) After world war 2, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.
In fact, temperatures fell during the 1940s and then remained roughly level until the late 1970s. The fall was partly due to high levels of pollutants such as sulphur dioxide counteracting the warming effect.
5) Throughout the Earth's history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher - more than 10 times as high.
Which shows that higher CO2 means higher temperatures, taking into account the fact that the sun was cooler in the past. The crucial point is that civilisation is adapted to 20th century temperatures.
6) Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time.
Yes. And sea level has been up to 70 metres higher during warm periods. If that happens again, there'll be no more London or New York.
7) The 0.7 °C increase in the average global temperature over the past hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends.
Wrong. The rapid warming since the late 1970s has occurred even though other factors that can warm the planet, such as the sun's intensity, have remained constant.
8) The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favourable reviewers, not the 4000 usually cited.
Untrue, as even the briefest look at the scientific literature can establish.
9) Leaked e-mails from British climate scientists - in a scandal known as "climategate" - suggest that that has been manipulated to exaggerate global warming
Nothing in the emails undermines any of the key scientific conclusions. Independent groups have come to the same conclusions.
10) A large body of scientific research suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years.
The sun may have contributed to the warming in the first part of the 20th century but it has not caused the rapid warming since the late 1970s.
11) Politicians and activists claim rising sea levels are a direct cause of global warming, but sea levels have been increasing steadily since the last ice age 10,000 years ago.
Wrong. Sea level rose very rapidly as the North American ice sheet melted after the last ice age but levelled off and has been nearly stable for the past 2000 years or so. Now it is starting to rise rapidly again.
12) Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London says climate change is too complicated to be caused by just one factor, whether CO2 or clouds.
He is right. All sorts of factors affect climate, even the lead in petrol. However, the recent warming is mostly due to rising greenhouse gases, and if we pump out more CO2 it will get even hotter.
13) Peter Lilley MP said last month that "fewer people in Britain than in any other country believe in the importance of global warming. That is despite the fact that our government and our political class - predominantly - are more committed to it than their counterparts in any other country in the world".
Irrelevant and incorrect on all counts.
14) In pursuit of the global warming rhetoric, wind farms will do very little to nothing to reduce CO2 emissions.
There are arguments over how much wind power can contribute, but there is no doubt they are already helping reduce emissions in many countries.
15) Professor Plimer, professor of geology and earth sciences at the University of Adelaide, stated that the idea of taking a single trace gas in the atmosphere, accusing it and finding it guilty of total responsibility for climate change, is an "absurdity".
See (1). And note that Plimer is a geologist, not a climatologist.
16) A Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist, Willie Soon, said he is "embarrassed and puzzled" by the shallow science in papers that support the proposition that the Earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming.
Many scientists think Soon should be embarrassed by some of the papers he has published.
17) The science of what determines the Earth's temperature is in fact far from settled or understood.
There are still lots of details to fill in but the big picture is increasingly clear. The uncertainties that do exist swing both ways: there could be more warming than predicted.
18) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, unlike water vapour, which is tied to climate concerns, and which we can't even pretend to control.
Water vapour is a feedback, not a cause of warming. The amount of water in the atmosphere depends on temperature; any excess rains out within days.
19) A petition by scientists trying to tell the world that the political and media portrayal of global warming is false was put forward in the Heidelberg Appeal in 1992. Today, more than 4000 signatories, including 72 Nobel prizewinners, from 106 countries have signed it.
That's not what the Heidelberg Appeal really said, and 1992 was a long time ago.
20) It is claimed the average global temperature increased at a dangerously fast rate in the 20th century but the recent rate of average global temperature rise has been between 1 and 2 °C per century - within natural rates.
Incorrect. Over the past 1000 years temperature has never changed nearly as fast.
21) Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, chairman of the scientific council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, Poland, says the Earth's temperature has more to do with cloud cover and water vapour than CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
See (18). And why believe someone whose work was rejected by the scientific community?
22) There is strong evidence from solar studies which suggests that the Earth's current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades.
The Earth is still warming and even if the sun's intensity does fall, it will not outweigh the effect of rising greenhouse gases.
23) It is a myth that receding glaciers are proof of global warming as glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for many centuries.
Incorrect. The current retreat is unprecendented.
24) It is a falsehood that the Earth's poles are warming because that is natural variation and while the western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer we also see that the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder.
Illogical and incorrect. Warming is warming whatever causes it. And all parts of the Arctic are warmer compared with the average from 1951 to 1980. The extent of the warming is contributing to the rapidly shrinking in the extent of sea ice cover during summer.
25) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims climate-driven "impacts on biodiversity are significant and of key relevance", but those claims are simply not supported by scientific research.
There is already clear evidence that the distributions of many species are changing as the planet warms (PDF). If it gets much warmer, some will have nowhere to go.
26) The IPCC threat of climate change to the world's species does not make sense as wild species are at least 1 million years old, which means they have all been through hundreds of climate cycles.
Many species are less than 1 million years old. In any case, during the past 3 million years, the Earth has got a lot colder than it is now during ice ages but never much hotter.
27) Research goes strongly against claims that CO2-induced global warming would cause catastrophic disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.
Depends on what timescale you are talking about. Scientists differ on how quickly they think the ice sheets will melt, but studies of warm periods leave no doubt that if the temperature gets much higher and stays higher, all the ice sheets will melt completely after several centuries or millennia, causing sea level to rise by 70 metres.
28) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels are our best hope of raising crop yields to feed an ever-growing population.
Higher CO2 levels do boost growth of some plants, but only if there's enough water throughout the growing season and the temperature is appropriate for particular plants. Overall, climate change is expected to reduce yields once the temperature rise exceeds 3 °C.
29) The biggest climate change ever experienced on Earth took place around 700 million years ago.
So what?
30) The slight increase in temperature which has been observed since 1900 is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term natural climate cycles.
Repetitive and incorrect. See (10).
31) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels of some so-called "greenhouse gases" may be contributing to higher oxygen levels and global cooling, not warming.
Burning fossil fuels produces CO2 and consumes oxygen, and thus lowers oxygen levels, though the decrease is too tiny to matter.
32) Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain-top observations made over the past three decades have not shown any significant change in the long-term rate of increase in global temperatures.
The rate of increase is in line with predictions.
33) Today's CO2 concentration of around 385 ppm is very low compared with most of the Earth's history - we actually live in a carbon-deficient atmosphere.
And when CO2 levels were higher there were no ice sheets and sea levels were 70 metres higher. Plus, the sun was cooler in the past.
34) It is a myth that CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas because greenhouse gases form about 3 per cent of the atmosphere by volume, and CO2 constitutes about 0.037 per cent of the atmosphere.
You can only get close to the 3 per cent figure by counting water vapour, which as we have already said is a feedback not a cause.
35) It is a myth that computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming because computer models can be made to "verify" anything.
No, they can't, because climate models are based on the physical laws that apply in the real world. In any case, the crucial evidence that CO2 warms the planet comes from physics and chemistry, not from general climate models.
36) There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes.
Incorrect. For instance, while there is much uncertainty in this area, there is growing evidence that hurricanes will get stronger, though there may not be more of them.
37) One statement deleted from a UN report in 1996 stated that "none of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases".
Meaningless taken out of context, without knowing what studies the statement was referring to.
38) The world "warmed" by 0.07 +/- 0.07 °C from 1999 to 2008, not the 0.20 °C expected by the IPCC.
Actually temperature rose 0.19 ºC, but global warming does not mean natural variation goes away. Periods of cooling are still to be expected.
39) The IPCC says "it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense" but there has been no increase in the intensity or frequency of tropical cyclones globally.
Incorrect. Some studies have found an increase.
40) Rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be shown not only to have a negligible effect on the Earth's many ecosystems, but in some cases to be a positive help to many organisms.
Incorrect and contradictory. Either the effect is negligible or helpful: it can't be both. In fact, rising CO2 will lead to big temperature increases, which will have a dramatic effect on Earth's ecosystems. Some species will benefit as their range expands, others will run out of suitable space. The speed of the change - far faster than natural climate change in the past - will make it very difficult for plants and animals to move fast enough.
41) Researchers who compare and contrast climate-change impact on civilisations found warm periods are beneficial to mankind and cold periods harmful.
Which researchers? Where were their findings published? In any case, over the past two millennia, warm periods have generally involved tiny changes compared with the changes we can expect over the next century.
42) The Met Office asserts we are in the hottest decade since records began but this is precisely what the world should expect if the climate is cyclical.
Er, why?
43) Rising CO2 levels increase plant growth and make plants more resistant to drought and pests.
Yet more repetition. See (28).
44) The historical increase in the air's CO2 content has improved human nutrition by raising crop yields during the past 150 years.
According to who? This statement is impossible to prove or disprove. What we can say is that the bulk of the increase in yields over this time are due to improved plant varieties and techniques, many of which are heavily reliant on the use of fossil fuels. If we don't start planning for the end of cheap oil, food prices could soar.
45) The increase of the air's CO2 content has probably helped lengthen human lifespans since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
How exactly, and according to who?
46) The IPCC alleges that "climate change currently contributes to the global burden of disease and premature deaths", but the evidence shows that higher temperatures and rising CO2 levels has helped global populations.
Incorrect. Excessive heat during summers is already killing more people than are being saved by milder winters.
47) In May of 2004, the Russian Academy of Sciences published a report concluding that the Kyoto protocol has no scientific grounding at all.
See here for the political background. Russia signed up to the Kyoto protocol later that year.
48) The "climategate" scandal pointed to a expensive public campaign of disinformation and the denigration of scientists who opposed the belief that CO2 emissions were causing climate change.
Or it points to a relatively cheap public education campaign and efforts by responsible scientists to ensure political decisions are based on sound science rather than on papers that have been shown to be flawed.
49) The head of Britain's climate change watchdog has predicted households will need to spend up to £15,000 on a full energy efficiency makeover if the government is to meet its ambitious targets for cutting carbon emissions.
Even if he has - no source is given - no one can be forced to spend money they don't have and such spending is an investment that will save householders thousands of pounds in the long term. If energy prices rise sharply as demand for oil and gas exceeds supply, we may all be wishing we had invested more in energy efficiency.
50) Wind power is unlikely to be the answer to our energy needs. The wind power industry argues that there are "no direct subsidies", but it involves a total subsidy of as much as £60 per MWh, which falls directly on electricity consumers. This burden will grow in line with attempts to achieve wind power targets, according to a recent OFGEM report.
1) There is "no real scientific proof" that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man's activity.
Technically, proof exists only in mathematics, not in science. Whatever terminology you choose to use, however, there is overwhelming evidence that the current warming is caused by the rise in greenhouse gases due to human activities.
2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 per cent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the Earth during geological history.
Misleading comparison. Since the industrial age began human emissions are far higher than volcanic emissions.
3) Warmer periods of the Earth's history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.
In the past 3 million years changing levels of sunshine triggered and ended the ice ages. Carbon dioxide was a feedback that increased warming, rather than the initial cause. In the more distant past, several warming episodes were directly triggered by CO2.
4) After world war 2, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.
In fact, temperatures fell during the 1940s and then remained roughly level until the late 1970s. The fall was partly due to high levels of pollutants such as sulphur dioxide counteracting the warming effect.
5) Throughout the Earth's history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher - more than 10 times as high.
Which shows that higher CO2 means higher temperatures, taking into account the fact that the sun was cooler in the past. The crucial point is that civilisation is adapted to 20th century temperatures.
6) Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time.
Yes. And sea level has been up to 70 metres higher during warm periods. If that happens again, there'll be no more London or New York.
7) The 0.7 °C increase in the average global temperature over the past hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends.
Wrong. The rapid warming since the late 1970s has occurred even though other factors that can warm the planet, such as the sun's intensity, have remained constant.
8) The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favourable reviewers, not the 4000 usually cited.
Untrue, as even the briefest look at the scientific literature can establish.
9) Leaked e-mails from British climate scientists - in a scandal known as "climategate" - suggest that that has been manipulated to exaggerate global warming
Nothing in the emails undermines any of the key scientific conclusions. Independent groups have come to the same conclusions.
10) A large body of scientific research suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years.
The sun may have contributed to the warming in the first part of the 20th century but it has not caused the rapid warming since the late 1970s.
11) Politicians and activists claim rising sea levels are a direct cause of global warming, but sea levels have been increasing steadily since the last ice age 10,000 years ago.
Wrong. Sea level rose very rapidly as the North American ice sheet melted after the last ice age but levelled off and has been nearly stable for the past 2000 years or so. Now it is starting to rise rapidly again.
12) Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London says climate change is too complicated to be caused by just one factor, whether CO2 or clouds.
He is right. All sorts of factors affect climate, even the lead in petrol. However, the recent warming is mostly due to rising greenhouse gases, and if we pump out more CO2 it will get even hotter.
13) Peter Lilley MP said last month that "fewer people in Britain than in any other country believe in the importance of global warming. That is despite the fact that our government and our political class - predominantly - are more committed to it than their counterparts in any other country in the world".
Irrelevant and incorrect on all counts.
14) In pursuit of the global warming rhetoric, wind farms will do very little to nothing to reduce CO2 emissions.
There are arguments over how much wind power can contribute, but there is no doubt they are already helping reduce emissions in many countries.
15) Professor Plimer, professor of geology and earth sciences at the University of Adelaide, stated that the idea of taking a single trace gas in the atmosphere, accusing it and finding it guilty of total responsibility for climate change, is an "absurdity".
See (1). And note that Plimer is a geologist, not a climatologist.
16) A Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist, Willie Soon, said he is "embarrassed and puzzled" by the shallow science in papers that support the proposition that the Earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming.
Many scientists think Soon should be embarrassed by some of the papers he has published.
17) The science of what determines the Earth's temperature is in fact far from settled or understood.
There are still lots of details to fill in but the big picture is increasingly clear. The uncertainties that do exist swing both ways: there could be more warming than predicted.
18) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, unlike water vapour, which is tied to climate concerns, and which we can't even pretend to control.
Water vapour is a feedback, not a cause of warming. The amount of water in the atmosphere depends on temperature; any excess rains out within days.
19) A petition by scientists trying to tell the world that the political and media portrayal of global warming is false was put forward in the Heidelberg Appeal in 1992. Today, more than 4000 signatories, including 72 Nobel prizewinners, from 106 countries have signed it.
That's not what the Heidelberg Appeal really said, and 1992 was a long time ago.
20) It is claimed the average global temperature increased at a dangerously fast rate in the 20th century but the recent rate of average global temperature rise has been between 1 and 2 °C per century - within natural rates.
Incorrect. Over the past 1000 years temperature has never changed nearly as fast.
21) Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, chairman of the scientific council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, Poland, says the Earth's temperature has more to do with cloud cover and water vapour than CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
See (18). And why believe someone whose work was rejected by the scientific community?
22) There is strong evidence from solar studies which suggests that the Earth's current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades.
The Earth is still warming and even if the sun's intensity does fall, it will not outweigh the effect of rising greenhouse gases.
23) It is a myth that receding glaciers are proof of global warming as glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for many centuries.
Incorrect. The current retreat is unprecendented.
24) It is a falsehood that the Earth's poles are warming because that is natural variation and while the western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer we also see that the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder.
Illogical and incorrect. Warming is warming whatever causes it. And all parts of the Arctic are warmer compared with the average from 1951 to 1980. The extent of the warming is contributing to the rapidly shrinking in the extent of sea ice cover during summer.
25) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims climate-driven "impacts on biodiversity are significant and of key relevance", but those claims are simply not supported by scientific research.
There is already clear evidence that the distributions of many species are changing as the planet warms (PDF). If it gets much warmer, some will have nowhere to go.
26) The IPCC threat of climate change to the world's species does not make sense as wild species are at least 1 million years old, which means they have all been through hundreds of climate cycles.
Many species are less than 1 million years old. In any case, during the past 3 million years, the Earth has got a lot colder than it is now during ice ages but never much hotter.
27) Research goes strongly against claims that CO2-induced global warming would cause catastrophic disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.
Depends on what timescale you are talking about. Scientists differ on how quickly they think the ice sheets will melt, but studies of warm periods leave no doubt that if the temperature gets much higher and stays higher, all the ice sheets will melt completely after several centuries or millennia, causing sea level to rise by 70 metres.
28) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels are our best hope of raising crop yields to feed an ever-growing population.
Higher CO2 levels do boost growth of some plants, but only if there's enough water throughout the growing season and the temperature is appropriate for particular plants. Overall, climate change is expected to reduce yields once the temperature rise exceeds 3 °C.
29) The biggest climate change ever experienced on Earth took place around 700 million years ago.
So what?
30) The slight increase in temperature which has been observed since 1900 is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term natural climate cycles.
Repetitive and incorrect. See (10).
31) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels of some so-called "greenhouse gases" may be contributing to higher oxygen levels and global cooling, not warming.
Burning fossil fuels produces CO2 and consumes oxygen, and thus lowers oxygen levels, though the decrease is too tiny to matter.
32) Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain-top observations made over the past three decades have not shown any significant change in the long-term rate of increase in global temperatures.
The rate of increase is in line with predictions.
33) Today's CO2 concentration of around 385 ppm is very low compared with most of the Earth's history - we actually live in a carbon-deficient atmosphere.
And when CO2 levels were higher there were no ice sheets and sea levels were 70 metres higher. Plus, the sun was cooler in the past.
34) It is a myth that CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas because greenhouse gases form about 3 per cent of the atmosphere by volume, and CO2 constitutes about 0.037 per cent of the atmosphere.
You can only get close to the 3 per cent figure by counting water vapour, which as we have already said is a feedback not a cause.
35) It is a myth that computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming because computer models can be made to "verify" anything.
No, they can't, because climate models are based on the physical laws that apply in the real world. In any case, the crucial evidence that CO2 warms the planet comes from physics and chemistry, not from general climate models.
36) There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes.
Incorrect. For instance, while there is much uncertainty in this area, there is growing evidence that hurricanes will get stronger, though there may not be more of them.
37) One statement deleted from a UN report in 1996 stated that "none of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases".
Meaningless taken out of context, without knowing what studies the statement was referring to.
38) The world "warmed" by 0.07 +/- 0.07 °C from 1999 to 2008, not the 0.20 °C expected by the IPCC.
Actually temperature rose 0.19 ºC, but global warming does not mean natural variation goes away. Periods of cooling are still to be expected.
39) The IPCC says "it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense" but there has been no increase in the intensity or frequency of tropical cyclones globally.
Incorrect. Some studies have found an increase.
40) Rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be shown not only to have a negligible effect on the Earth's many ecosystems, but in some cases to be a positive help to many organisms.
Incorrect and contradictory. Either the effect is negligible or helpful: it can't be both. In fact, rising CO2 will lead to big temperature increases, which will have a dramatic effect on Earth's ecosystems. Some species will benefit as their range expands, others will run out of suitable space. The speed of the change - far faster than natural climate change in the past - will make it very difficult for plants and animals to move fast enough.
41) Researchers who compare and contrast climate-change impact on civilisations found warm periods are beneficial to mankind and cold periods harmful.
Which researchers? Where were their findings published? In any case, over the past two millennia, warm periods have generally involved tiny changes compared with the changes we can expect over the next century.
42) The Met Office asserts we are in the hottest decade since records began but this is precisely what the world should expect if the climate is cyclical.
Er, why?
43) Rising CO2 levels increase plant growth and make plants more resistant to drought and pests.
Yet more repetition. See (28).
44) The historical increase in the air's CO2 content has improved human nutrition by raising crop yields during the past 150 years.
According to who? This statement is impossible to prove or disprove. What we can say is that the bulk of the increase in yields over this time are due to improved plant varieties and techniques, many of which are heavily reliant on the use of fossil fuels. If we don't start planning for the end of cheap oil, food prices could soar.
45) The increase of the air's CO2 content has probably helped lengthen human lifespans since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
How exactly, and according to who?
46) The IPCC alleges that "climate change currently contributes to the global burden of disease and premature deaths", but the evidence shows that higher temperatures and rising CO2 levels has helped global populations.
Incorrect. Excessive heat during summers is already killing more people than are being saved by milder winters.
47) In May of 2004, the Russian Academy of Sciences published a report concluding that the Kyoto protocol has no scientific grounding at all.
See here for the political background. Russia signed up to the Kyoto protocol later that year.
48) The "climategate" scandal pointed to a expensive public campaign of disinformation and the denigration of scientists who opposed the belief that CO2 emissions were causing climate change.
Or it points to a relatively cheap public education campaign and efforts by responsible scientists to ensure political decisions are based on sound science rather than on papers that have been shown to be flawed.
49) The head of Britain's climate change watchdog has predicted households will need to spend up to £15,000 on a full energy efficiency makeover if the government is to meet its ambitious targets for cutting carbon emissions.
Even if he has - no source is given - no one can be forced to spend money they don't have and such spending is an investment that will save householders thousands of pounds in the long term. If energy prices rise sharply as demand for oil and gas exceeds supply, we may all be wishing we had invested more in energy efficiency.
50) Wind power is unlikely to be the answer to our energy needs. The wind power industry argues that there are "no direct subsidies", but it involves a total subsidy of as much as £60 per MWh, which falls directly on electricity consumers. This burden will grow in line with attempts to achieve wind power targets, according to a recent OFGEM report.
100 reasons Climate Change is natural
HERE are the 100 reasons, released in a dossier issued by the European Foundation, why climate change is natural and not man-made:
1) There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.
** EXPRESS NEWS: 100 REASONS WHY GLOBAL WARMING IS NATURAL**
2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.
3) Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.
4) After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.
5) Throughout the Earth’s history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher – more than ten times as high.
6) Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time.
7) The 0.7C increase in the average global temperature over the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends.
SEARCH UK NEWS for:
8) The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favourable reviewers not the 4,000 usually cited.
9) Leaked e-mails from British climate scientists – in a scandal known as “Climate-gate” - suggest that that has been manipulated to exaggerate global warming
10) A large body of scientific research suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years.
11) Politicians and activiists claim rising sea levels are a direct cause of global warming but sea levels rates have been increasing steadily since the last ice age 10,000 ago
12) Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London says climate change is too complicated to be caused by just one factor, whether CO2 or clouds
13) Peter Lilley MP said last month that “fewer people in Britain than in any other country believe in the importance of global warming. That is despite the fact that our Government and our political class—predominantly—are more committed to it than their counterparts in any other country in the world”.
14) In pursuit of the global warming rhetoric, wind farms will do very little to nothing to reduce CO2 emissions
15) Professor Plimer, Professor of Geology and Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide, stated that the idea of taking a single trace gas in the atmosphere, accusing it and finding it guilty of total responsibility for climate change, is an “absurdity”
16) A Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist, Willie Soon, said he is “embarrassed and puzzled” by the shallow science in papers that support the proposition that the earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming.
17) The science of what determines the earth’s temperature is in fact far from settled or understood.
18) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, unlike water vapour which is tied to climate concerns, and which we can’t even pretend to control
19) A petition by scientists trying to tell the world that the political and media portrayal of global warming is false was put forward in the Heidelberg Appeal in 1992. Today, more than 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, from 106 countries have signed it.
20) It is claimed the average global temperature increased at a dangerously fast rate in the 20th century but the recent rate of average global temperature rise has been between 1 and 2 degrees C per century - within natural rates
21) Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, Poland says the earth’s temperature has more to do with cloud cover and water vapor than CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
22) There is strong evidence from solar studies which suggests that the Earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades
23) It is myth that receding glaciers are proof of global warming as glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for many centuries
24) It is a falsehood that the earth’s poles are warming because that is natural variation and while the western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer we also see that the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder
25) The IPCC claims climate driven “impacts on biodiversity are significant and of key relevance” but those claims are simply not supported by scientific research
26) The IPCC threat of climate change to the world’s species does not make sense as wild species are at least one million years old, which means they have all been through hundreds of climate cycles
27) Research goes strongly against claims that CO2-induced global warming would cause catastrophic disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets.
28) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels are our best hope of raising crop yields to feed an ever-growing population
29) The biggest climate change ever experienced on earth took place around 700 million years ago
30) The slight increase in temperature which has been observed since 1900 is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term natural climate cycles
31) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels of some so-called “greenhouse gases” may be contributing to higher oxygen levels and global cooling, not warming
32) Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures
33) Today’s CO2 concentration of around 385 ppm is very low compared to most of the earth’s history – we actually live in a carbon-deficient atmosphere
34) It is a myth that CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas because greenhouse gases form about 3% of the atmosphere by volume, and CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere
35) It is a myth that computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming because computer models can be made to “verify” anything
36) There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes
37) One statement deleted from a UN report in 1996 stated that “none of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases”
38) The world “warmed” by 0.07 +/- 0.07 degrees C from 1999 to 2008, not the 0.20 degrees C expected by the IPCC
39) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says “it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense” but there has been no increase in the intensity or frequency of tropical cyclones globally
40) Rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be shown not only to have a negligible effect on the Earth’s many ecosystems, but in some cases to be a positive help to many organisms
41) Researchers who compare and contrast climate change impact on civilizations found warm periods are beneficial to mankind and cold periods harmful
42) The Met Office asserts we are in the hottest decade since records began but this is precisely what the world should expect if the climate is cyclical
43) Rising CO2 levels increase plant growth and make plants more resistant to drought and pests
44) The historical increase in the air’s CO2 content has improved human nutrition by raising crop yields during the past 150 years
45) The increase of the air’s CO2 content has probably helped lengthen human lifespans since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution
46) The IPCC alleges that “climate change currently contributes to the global burden of disease and premature deaths” but the evidence shows that higher temperatures and rising CO2 levels has helped global populations
47) In May of 2004, the Russian Academy of Sciences published a report concluding that the Kyoto Protocol has no scientific grounding at all.
48) The “Climate-gate” scandal pointed to a expensive public campaign of disinformation and the denigration of scientists who opposed the belief that CO2 emissions were causing climate change
49) The head of Britain’s climate change watchdog has predicted households will need to spend up to £15,000 on a full energy efficiency makeover if the Government is to meet its ambitious targets for cutting carbon emissions.
50) Wind power is unlikely to be the answer to our energy needs. The wind power industry argues that there are “no direct subsidies” but it involves a total subsidy of as much as £60 per MWh which falls directly on electricity consumers. This burden will grow in line with attempts to achieve Wind power targets, according to a recent OFGEM report.
51) Wind farms are not an efficient way to produce energy. The British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) accepts a figure of 75 per cent back-up power is required.
52) Global temperatures are below the low end of IPCC predictions not at “at the top end of IPCC estimates”
53) Climate alarmists have raised the concern over acidification of the oceans but Tom Segalstad from Oslo University in Norway , and others, have noted that the composition of ocean water – including CO2, calcium, and water – can act as a buffering agent in the acidification of the oceans.
54) The UN’s IPCC computer models of human-caused global warming predict the emergence of a “hotspot” in the upper troposphere over the tropics. Former researcher in the Australian Department of Climate Change, David Evans, said there is no evidence of such a hotspot
55) The argument that climate change is a of result of global warming caused by human activity is the argument of flat Earthers.
56) The manner in which US President Barack Obama sidestepped Congress to order emission cuts shows how undemocratic and irrational the entire international decision-making process has become with regards to emission-target setting.
57) William Kininmonth, a former head of the National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation, wrote “the likely extent of global temperature rise from a doubling of CO2 is less than 1C. Such warming is well within the envelope of variation experienced during the past 10,000 years and insignificant in the context of glacial cycles during the past million years, when Earth has been predominantly very cold and covered by extensive ice sheets.”
58) Canada has shown the world targets derived from the existing Kyoto commitments were always unrealistic and did not work for the country.
59) In the lead up to the Copenhagen summit, David Davis MP said of previous climate summits, at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and Kyoto in 1997 that many had promised greater cuts, but “neither happened”, but we are continuing along the same lines.
60) The UK ’s environmental policy has a long-term price tag of about £55 billion, before taking into account the impact on its economic growth.
61) The UN’s panel on climate change warned that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035. J. Graham Cogley a professor at Ontario Trent University, claims this inaccurate stating the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.
62) Under existing Kyoto obligations the EU has attempted to claim success, while actually increasing emissions by 13 per cent, according to Lord Lawson. In addition the EU has pursued this scheme by purchasing “offsets” from countries such as China paying them billions of dollars to destroy atmospheric pollutants, such as CFC-23, which were manufactured purely in order to be destroyed.
63) It is claimed that the average global temperature was relatively unchanging in pre-industrial times but sky-rocketed since 1900, and will increase by several degrees more over the next 100 years according to Penn State University researcher Michael Mann. There is no convincing empirical evidence that past climate was unchanging, nor that 20th century changes in average global temperature were unusual or unnatural.
64) Michael Mann of Penn State University has actually shown that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age did in fact exist, which contrasts with his earlier work which produced the “hockey stick graph” which showed a constant temperature over the past thousand years or so followed by a recent dramatic upturn.
65) The globe’s current approach to climate change in which major industrialised countries agree to nonsensical targets for their CO2 emissions by a given date, as it has been under the Kyoto system, is very expensive.
66) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures when looking at the history of the Earth’s temperature.
67) Global temperatures have not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years and have actually been falling for nine years. The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed a scientific team had expressed dismay at the fact global warming was contrary to their predictions and admitted their inability to explain it was “a travesty”.
68) The IPCC predicts that a warmer planet will lead to more extreme weather, including drought, flooding, storms, snow, and wildfires. But over the last century, during which the IPCC claims the world experienced more rapid warming than any time in the past two millennia, the world did not experience significantly greater trends in any of these extreme weather events.
69) In explaining the average temperature standstill we are currently experiencing, the Met Office Hadley Centre ran a series of computer climate predictions and found in many of the computer runs there were decade-long standstills but none for 15 years – so it expects global warming to resume swiftly.
70) Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote: “The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the Earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. Such hysteria (over global warming) simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth.”
71) Despite the 1997 Kyoto Protocol’s status as the flagship of the fight against climate change it has been a failure.
72) The first phase of the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which ran from 2005 to 2007 was a failure. Huge over-allocation of permits to pollute led to a collapse in the price of carbon from €33 to just €0.20 per tonne meaning the system did not reduce emissions at all.
73) The EU trading scheme, to manage carbon emissions has completely failed and actually allows European businesses to duck out of making their emissions reductions at home by offsetting, which means paying for cuts to be made overseas instead.
74) To date “cap and trade” carbon markets have done almost nothing to reduce emissions.
75) In the United States , the cap-and-trade is an approach designed to control carbon emissions and will impose huge costs upon American citizens via a carbon tax on all goods and services produced in the United States. The average family of four can expect to pay an additional $1700, or £1,043, more each year. It is predicted that the United States will lose more than 2 million jobs as the result of cap-and-trade schemes.
76) Dr Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has indicated that out of the 21 climate models tracked by the IPCC the differences in warming exhibited by those models is mostly the result of different strengths of positive cloud feedback – and that increasing CO2 is insufficient to explain global-average warming in the last 50 to 100 years.
77) Why should politicians devote our scarce resources in a globally competitive world to a false and ill-defined problem, while ignoring the real problems the entire planet faces, such as: poverty, hunger, disease or terrorism.
78) A proper analysis of ice core records from the past 650,000 years demonstrates that temperature increases have come before, and not resulted from, increases in CO2 by hundreds of years.
79) Since the cause of global warming is mostly natural, then there is in actual fact very little we can do about it. (We are still not able to control the sun).
80) A substantial number of the panel of 2,500 climate scientists on the United Nation’s International Panel on Climate Change, which created a statement on scientific unanimity on climate change and man-made global warming, were found to have serious concerns.
81) The UK’s Met Office has been forced this year to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by revelations about the data.
82) Politicians and activists push for renewable energy sources such as wind turbines under the rhetoric of climate change, but it is essentially about money – under the system of Renewable Obligations. Much of the money is paid for by consumers in electricity bills. It amounts to £1 billion a year.
83) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.
84) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal’s editor, solely because he did not share their willingness to debase science for political purposes.
85) Ice-core data clearly show that temperatures change centuries before concentrations of atmospheric CO2 change. Thus, there appears to be little evidence for insisting that changes in concentrations of CO2 are the cause of past temperature and climate change.
86) There are no experimentally verified processes explaining how CO2 concentrations can fall in a few centuries without falling temperatures – in fact it is changing temperatures which cause changes in CO2 concentrations, which is consistent with experiments that show CO2 is the atmospheric gas most readily absorbed by water.
87) The Government’s Renewable Energy Strategy contains a massive increase in electricity generation by wind power costing around £4 billion a year over the next twenty years. The benefits will be only £4 to £5 billion overall (not per annum). So costs will outnumber benefits by a range of between eleven and seventeen times.
88) Whilst CO2 levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout history, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and the growth rate has now been constant for the past 25 years.
89) It is a myth that CO2 is a pollutant, because nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere and human beings could not live in 100% nitrogen either: CO2 is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is and CO2 is essential to life.
90) Politicians and climate activists make claims to rising sea levels but certain members in the IPCC chose an area to measure in Hong Kong that is subsiding. They used the record reading of 2.3 mm per year rise of sea level.
91) The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998.
92) If one factors in non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements show little, if any, global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).
93) US President Barack Obama pledged to cut emissions by 2050 to equal those of 1910 when there were 92 million Americans. In 2050, there will be 420 million Americans, so Obama’s promise means that emissions per head will be approximately what they were in 1875. It simply will not happen.
94) The European Union has already agreed to cut emissions by 20 percent to 2020, compared with 1990 levels, and is willing to increase the target to 30 percent. However, these are unachievable and the EU has already massively failed with its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), as EU emissions actually rose by 0.8 percent from 2005 to 2006 and are known to be well above the Kyoto goal.
95) Australia has stated it wants to slash greenhouse emissions by up to 25 percent below 2000 levels by 2020, but the pledges were so unpopular that the country’s Senate has voted against the carbon trading Bill, and the Opposition’s Party leader has now been ousted by a climate change sceptic.
96) Canada plans to reduce emissions by 20 percent compared with 2006 levels by 2020, representing approximately a 3 percent cut from 1990 levels but it simultaneously defends its Alberta tar sands emissions and its record as one of the world’s highest per-capita emissions setters.
97) India plans to reduce the ratio of emissions to production by 20-25 percent compared with 2005 levels by 2020, but all Government officials insist that since India has to grow for its development and poverty alleviation, it has to emit, because the economy is driven by carbon.
98) The Leipzig Declaration in 1996, was signed by 110 scientists who said: “We – along with many of our fellow citizens – are apprehensive about the climate treaty conference scheduled for Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997” and “based on all the evidence available to us, we cannot subscribe to the politically inspired world view that envisages climate catastrophes and calls for hasty actions.”
99) A US Oregon Petition Project stated “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 scientific evidence that human release of CO2, 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.”
100) A report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change concluded “We find no support for the IPCC’s claim that climate observations during the twentieth century are either unprecedented or provide evidence of an anthropogenic effect on climate.”
1) There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.
** EXPRESS NEWS: 100 REASONS WHY GLOBAL WARMING IS NATURAL**
2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.
3) Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.
4) After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.
5) Throughout the Earth’s history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher – more than ten times as high.
6) Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time.
7) The 0.7C increase in the average global temperature over the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends.
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8) The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favourable reviewers not the 4,000 usually cited.
9) Leaked e-mails from British climate scientists – in a scandal known as “Climate-gate” - suggest that that has been manipulated to exaggerate global warming
10) A large body of scientific research suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years.
11) Politicians and activiists claim rising sea levels are a direct cause of global warming but sea levels rates have been increasing steadily since the last ice age 10,000 ago
12) Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London says climate change is too complicated to be caused by just one factor, whether CO2 or clouds
13) Peter Lilley MP said last month that “fewer people in Britain than in any other country believe in the importance of global warming. That is despite the fact that our Government and our political class—predominantly—are more committed to it than their counterparts in any other country in the world”.
14) In pursuit of the global warming rhetoric, wind farms will do very little to nothing to reduce CO2 emissions
15) Professor Plimer, Professor of Geology and Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide, stated that the idea of taking a single trace gas in the atmosphere, accusing it and finding it guilty of total responsibility for climate change, is an “absurdity”
16) A Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist, Willie Soon, said he is “embarrassed and puzzled” by the shallow science in papers that support the proposition that the earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming.
17) The science of what determines the earth’s temperature is in fact far from settled or understood.
18) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, unlike water vapour which is tied to climate concerns, and which we can’t even pretend to control
19) A petition by scientists trying to tell the world that the political and media portrayal of global warming is false was put forward in the Heidelberg Appeal in 1992. Today, more than 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, from 106 countries have signed it.
20) It is claimed the average global temperature increased at a dangerously fast rate in the 20th century but the recent rate of average global temperature rise has been between 1 and 2 degrees C per century - within natural rates
21) Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, Poland says the earth’s temperature has more to do with cloud cover and water vapor than CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
22) There is strong evidence from solar studies which suggests that the Earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades
23) It is myth that receding glaciers are proof of global warming as glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for many centuries
24) It is a falsehood that the earth’s poles are warming because that is natural variation and while the western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer we also see that the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder
25) The IPCC claims climate driven “impacts on biodiversity are significant and of key relevance” but those claims are simply not supported by scientific research
26) The IPCC threat of climate change to the world’s species does not make sense as wild species are at least one million years old, which means they have all been through hundreds of climate cycles
27) Research goes strongly against claims that CO2-induced global warming would cause catastrophic disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets.
28) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels are our best hope of raising crop yields to feed an ever-growing population
29) The biggest climate change ever experienced on earth took place around 700 million years ago
30) The slight increase in temperature which has been observed since 1900 is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term natural climate cycles
31) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels of some so-called “greenhouse gases” may be contributing to higher oxygen levels and global cooling, not warming
32) Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures
33) Today’s CO2 concentration of around 385 ppm is very low compared to most of the earth’s history – we actually live in a carbon-deficient atmosphere
34) It is a myth that CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas because greenhouse gases form about 3% of the atmosphere by volume, and CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere
35) It is a myth that computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming because computer models can be made to “verify” anything
36) There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes
37) One statement deleted from a UN report in 1996 stated that “none of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases”
38) The world “warmed” by 0.07 +/- 0.07 degrees C from 1999 to 2008, not the 0.20 degrees C expected by the IPCC
39) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says “it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense” but there has been no increase in the intensity or frequency of tropical cyclones globally
40) Rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be shown not only to have a negligible effect on the Earth’s many ecosystems, but in some cases to be a positive help to many organisms
41) Researchers who compare and contrast climate change impact on civilizations found warm periods are beneficial to mankind and cold periods harmful
42) The Met Office asserts we are in the hottest decade since records began but this is precisely what the world should expect if the climate is cyclical
43) Rising CO2 levels increase plant growth and make plants more resistant to drought and pests
44) The historical increase in the air’s CO2 content has improved human nutrition by raising crop yields during the past 150 years
45) The increase of the air’s CO2 content has probably helped lengthen human lifespans since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution
46) The IPCC alleges that “climate change currently contributes to the global burden of disease and premature deaths” but the evidence shows that higher temperatures and rising CO2 levels has helped global populations
47) In May of 2004, the Russian Academy of Sciences published a report concluding that the Kyoto Protocol has no scientific grounding at all.
48) The “Climate-gate” scandal pointed to a expensive public campaign of disinformation and the denigration of scientists who opposed the belief that CO2 emissions were causing climate change
49) The head of Britain’s climate change watchdog has predicted households will need to spend up to £15,000 on a full energy efficiency makeover if the Government is to meet its ambitious targets for cutting carbon emissions.
50) Wind power is unlikely to be the answer to our energy needs. The wind power industry argues that there are “no direct subsidies” but it involves a total subsidy of as much as £60 per MWh which falls directly on electricity consumers. This burden will grow in line with attempts to achieve Wind power targets, according to a recent OFGEM report.
51) Wind farms are not an efficient way to produce energy. The British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) accepts a figure of 75 per cent back-up power is required.
52) Global temperatures are below the low end of IPCC predictions not at “at the top end of IPCC estimates”
53) Climate alarmists have raised the concern over acidification of the oceans but Tom Segalstad from Oslo University in Norway , and others, have noted that the composition of ocean water – including CO2, calcium, and water – can act as a buffering agent in the acidification of the oceans.
54) The UN’s IPCC computer models of human-caused global warming predict the emergence of a “hotspot” in the upper troposphere over the tropics. Former researcher in the Australian Department of Climate Change, David Evans, said there is no evidence of such a hotspot
55) The argument that climate change is a of result of global warming caused by human activity is the argument of flat Earthers.
56) The manner in which US President Barack Obama sidestepped Congress to order emission cuts shows how undemocratic and irrational the entire international decision-making process has become with regards to emission-target setting.
57) William Kininmonth, a former head of the National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation, wrote “the likely extent of global temperature rise from a doubling of CO2 is less than 1C. Such warming is well within the envelope of variation experienced during the past 10,000 years and insignificant in the context of glacial cycles during the past million years, when Earth has been predominantly very cold and covered by extensive ice sheets.”
58) Canada has shown the world targets derived from the existing Kyoto commitments were always unrealistic and did not work for the country.
59) In the lead up to the Copenhagen summit, David Davis MP said of previous climate summits, at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and Kyoto in 1997 that many had promised greater cuts, but “neither happened”, but we are continuing along the same lines.
60) The UK ’s environmental policy has a long-term price tag of about £55 billion, before taking into account the impact on its economic growth.
61) The UN’s panel on climate change warned that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035. J. Graham Cogley a professor at Ontario Trent University, claims this inaccurate stating the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.
62) Under existing Kyoto obligations the EU has attempted to claim success, while actually increasing emissions by 13 per cent, according to Lord Lawson. In addition the EU has pursued this scheme by purchasing “offsets” from countries such as China paying them billions of dollars to destroy atmospheric pollutants, such as CFC-23, which were manufactured purely in order to be destroyed.
63) It is claimed that the average global temperature was relatively unchanging in pre-industrial times but sky-rocketed since 1900, and will increase by several degrees more over the next 100 years according to Penn State University researcher Michael Mann. There is no convincing empirical evidence that past climate was unchanging, nor that 20th century changes in average global temperature were unusual or unnatural.
64) Michael Mann of Penn State University has actually shown that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age did in fact exist, which contrasts with his earlier work which produced the “hockey stick graph” which showed a constant temperature over the past thousand years or so followed by a recent dramatic upturn.
65) The globe’s current approach to climate change in which major industrialised countries agree to nonsensical targets for their CO2 emissions by a given date, as it has been under the Kyoto system, is very expensive.
66) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures when looking at the history of the Earth’s temperature.
67) Global temperatures have not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years and have actually been falling for nine years. The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed a scientific team had expressed dismay at the fact global warming was contrary to their predictions and admitted their inability to explain it was “a travesty”.
68) The IPCC predicts that a warmer planet will lead to more extreme weather, including drought, flooding, storms, snow, and wildfires. But over the last century, during which the IPCC claims the world experienced more rapid warming than any time in the past two millennia, the world did not experience significantly greater trends in any of these extreme weather events.
69) In explaining the average temperature standstill we are currently experiencing, the Met Office Hadley Centre ran a series of computer climate predictions and found in many of the computer runs there were decade-long standstills but none for 15 years – so it expects global warming to resume swiftly.
70) Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote: “The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the Earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. Such hysteria (over global warming) simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth.”
71) Despite the 1997 Kyoto Protocol’s status as the flagship of the fight against climate change it has been a failure.
72) The first phase of the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which ran from 2005 to 2007 was a failure. Huge over-allocation of permits to pollute led to a collapse in the price of carbon from €33 to just €0.20 per tonne meaning the system did not reduce emissions at all.
73) The EU trading scheme, to manage carbon emissions has completely failed and actually allows European businesses to duck out of making their emissions reductions at home by offsetting, which means paying for cuts to be made overseas instead.
74) To date “cap and trade” carbon markets have done almost nothing to reduce emissions.
75) In the United States , the cap-and-trade is an approach designed to control carbon emissions and will impose huge costs upon American citizens via a carbon tax on all goods and services produced in the United States. The average family of four can expect to pay an additional $1700, or £1,043, more each year. It is predicted that the United States will lose more than 2 million jobs as the result of cap-and-trade schemes.
76) Dr Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has indicated that out of the 21 climate models tracked by the IPCC the differences in warming exhibited by those models is mostly the result of different strengths of positive cloud feedback – and that increasing CO2 is insufficient to explain global-average warming in the last 50 to 100 years.
77) Why should politicians devote our scarce resources in a globally competitive world to a false and ill-defined problem, while ignoring the real problems the entire planet faces, such as: poverty, hunger, disease or terrorism.
78) A proper analysis of ice core records from the past 650,000 years demonstrates that temperature increases have come before, and not resulted from, increases in CO2 by hundreds of years.
79) Since the cause of global warming is mostly natural, then there is in actual fact very little we can do about it. (We are still not able to control the sun).
80) A substantial number of the panel of 2,500 climate scientists on the United Nation’s International Panel on Climate Change, which created a statement on scientific unanimity on climate change and man-made global warming, were found to have serious concerns.
81) The UK’s Met Office has been forced this year to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by revelations about the data.
82) Politicians and activists push for renewable energy sources such as wind turbines under the rhetoric of climate change, but it is essentially about money – under the system of Renewable Obligations. Much of the money is paid for by consumers in electricity bills. It amounts to £1 billion a year.
83) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.
84) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal’s editor, solely because he did not share their willingness to debase science for political purposes.
85) Ice-core data clearly show that temperatures change centuries before concentrations of atmospheric CO2 change. Thus, there appears to be little evidence for insisting that changes in concentrations of CO2 are the cause of past temperature and climate change.
86) There are no experimentally verified processes explaining how CO2 concentrations can fall in a few centuries without falling temperatures – in fact it is changing temperatures which cause changes in CO2 concentrations, which is consistent with experiments that show CO2 is the atmospheric gas most readily absorbed by water.
87) The Government’s Renewable Energy Strategy contains a massive increase in electricity generation by wind power costing around £4 billion a year over the next twenty years. The benefits will be only £4 to £5 billion overall (not per annum). So costs will outnumber benefits by a range of between eleven and seventeen times.
88) Whilst CO2 levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout history, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and the growth rate has now been constant for the past 25 years.
89) It is a myth that CO2 is a pollutant, because nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere and human beings could not live in 100% nitrogen either: CO2 is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is and CO2 is essential to life.
90) Politicians and climate activists make claims to rising sea levels but certain members in the IPCC chose an area to measure in Hong Kong that is subsiding. They used the record reading of 2.3 mm per year rise of sea level.
91) The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998.
92) If one factors in non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements show little, if any, global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).
93) US President Barack Obama pledged to cut emissions by 2050 to equal those of 1910 when there were 92 million Americans. In 2050, there will be 420 million Americans, so Obama’s promise means that emissions per head will be approximately what they were in 1875. It simply will not happen.
94) The European Union has already agreed to cut emissions by 20 percent to 2020, compared with 1990 levels, and is willing to increase the target to 30 percent. However, these are unachievable and the EU has already massively failed with its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), as EU emissions actually rose by 0.8 percent from 2005 to 2006 and are known to be well above the Kyoto goal.
95) Australia has stated it wants to slash greenhouse emissions by up to 25 percent below 2000 levels by 2020, but the pledges were so unpopular that the country’s Senate has voted against the carbon trading Bill, and the Opposition’s Party leader has now been ousted by a climate change sceptic.
96) Canada plans to reduce emissions by 20 percent compared with 2006 levels by 2020, representing approximately a 3 percent cut from 1990 levels but it simultaneously defends its Alberta tar sands emissions and its record as one of the world’s highest per-capita emissions setters.
97) India plans to reduce the ratio of emissions to production by 20-25 percent compared with 2005 levels by 2020, but all Government officials insist that since India has to grow for its development and poverty alleviation, it has to emit, because the economy is driven by carbon.
98) The Leipzig Declaration in 1996, was signed by 110 scientists who said: “We – along with many of our fellow citizens – are apprehensive about the climate treaty conference scheduled for Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997” and “based on all the evidence available to us, we cannot subscribe to the politically inspired world view that envisages climate catastrophes and calls for hasty actions.”
99) A US Oregon Petition Project stated “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 scientific evidence that human release of CO2, 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.”
100) A report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change concluded “We find no support for the IPCC’s claim that climate observations during the twentieth century are either unprecedented or provide evidence of an anthropogenic effect on climate.”
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