Showing posts with label Climate Change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Climate Change. Show all posts

10.26.2021

Is There Really a Climate Emergency?

Posted by Jim Peet at 10/26/2021 03:01:00 PM 0 comments

Labels:

3.04.2019

Disabusing the 97% claim




Fact Checking The Claim Of 97% Consensus On Anthropogenic Climate Change

Excerpt:

The 97% figure has been disputed and vigorously defended, with emotional arguments and counterarguments published in a number of papers. Although the degree of consensus is only one of several arguments for anthropogenic climate change – the statements of professional societies and evidence presented in reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are others – there is data to suggest that support is lower. In this post, I attempt to determine whether the 97% consensus is fact or fiction.

The 97% number was popularized by two articles, the first by Naomi Oreskes, now Professor of Science History and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, and the second by a group of authors led by John Cook, the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at The University of Queensland. Both papers were based on analyses of earlier publications. Other analyses and surveys arrive at different, often lower, numbers depending in part on how support for the concept was defined and on the population surveyed.

This public discussion was started by Oreskes’ brief 2004 article, which included an analysis of 928 papers containing the keywords “global climate change.” The article says “none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position” of anthropogenic global warming. Although this article makes no claim to a specific number, it is routinely described as indicating 100% agreement and used as support for the 97% figure.

In a 2007 book chapter, Oreskes infers that the lack of expressed dissent “demonstrates that any remaining professional dissent is now exceedingly minor.” The chapter revealed that there were about 235 papers in the 2004 article, or 25%, that endorsed the position. An additional 50% were interpreted to have implicitly endorsed, primarily on the basis that they discussed evaluation of impacts. Authors addressing impacts might believe that the Earth is warming without believing it is anthropogenic. In the article, Oreskes said some authors she counted "might believe that current climate change is natural." It is impossible to tell from this analysis how many actually believed it. On that basis, I find that this study does not support the 97% number.

The most influential and most debated article was the 2013 paper by Cook, et al., which popularized the 97% figure. The authors used methodology similar to Oreskes but based their analysis on abstracts rather than full content. I do not intend to reopen the debate over this paper. Instead, let’s consider it along with some of the numerous other surveys available.

Reviews of published surveys were published in 2016 by Cook and his collaborators and by Richard S. J. Tol, Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex. The 2016 Cook paper, which reviews 14 published analyses and includes among its authors Oreskes and several authors of the papers shown in the chart below, concludes that the scientific consensus “is robust, with a range of 90%–100% depending on the exact question, timing and sampling methodology.” The chart shows the post-2000 opinions summarized in Table 1 of the paper. Dates given are those of the survey, not the publication date. I’ve added a 2016 survey of meteorologists from George Mason University and omitted the Oreskes article.

... Despite the difficulty in defining a precise number and the opinion that the exact number is not important, 97% continues to be widely publicized and defended. One might ask why 97% is important. Perhaps it’s because 97% has marketing value. It sounds precise and says that only 3% disagree. By implication, that small number who disagree must be out of the mainstream: cranks, chronic naysayers, or shills of the fossil fuel industry. They are frequently described as a “tiny minority.” It’s not as easy to discount dissenters if the number is 10 or 15 percent.

Comment: It's repeated so much ...

From 1989:








Posted by Jim Peet at 3/04/2019 05:28:00 PM 1 comments

Labels: , , , , ,

6.24.2018

Two different takes on James Hansen



NYTimes: A Prophet of Doom Was Right About the Climate

Excerpt:

With the perspective of three decades, it is fair to ask: How right was his forecast?

The question defies a simple answer. In 1988, Dr. Hansen had to offer a prognostication not just about how the Earth would respond to greenhouse gases, but also about how much of those gases humans would choose to inject into the air.

He did what any cautious forecaster would do: He offered low, medium and high scenarios. The warming over the past 30 years has indeed fallen well within his upper and lower bounds.

One of Dr. Hansen’s scenarios, Scenario B, has turned out to be a reasonably close match for fossil-fuel emissions as they actually occurred. Yet we now know Scenario B predicted too much global warming, by something like 30 percent.

Two reasons for that stand out. One is that Dr. Hansen had assumed a continued increase in certain refrigerant gases that warm the climate. Those gases were ultimately brought under control by a global treaty, the Montreal Protocol — proof that scientific warnings, if taken seriously, can be acted upon at a worldwide scale. 

The bigger problem was that the computers he was using in the 1980s could not operate fast enough to give a realistic picture of the upper atmosphere; as a result, his model was most likely overestimating the Earth’s sensitivity to emissions. In the years since, computer modeling of the climate, though hardly perfect, has improved.

So while his temperature forecast was not flawless, in a larger sense, Dr. Hansen’s 1988 warning has turned out to be entirely on target. As emissions have soared, the planet has warmed relentlessly, just as he said it would; 1988 is not even in the top 20 warmest years now. Every year of this century has been hotter.

The ocean is rising, as Dr. Hansen predicted, and the pace seems to be accelerating. The great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are dumping ever-rising volumes of water into the sea. Coastal flooding is increasing rapidly in the United States. The Arctic Ocean ice cap has shrunk drastically.
WSJ: Thirty Years On, How Well Do Global Warming Predictions Stand Up? James Hansen issued dire warnings in the summer of 1988. Today earth is only modestly warmer.

Excerpt:

Mr. Hansen’s testimony described three possible scenarios for the future of carbon dioxide emissions. He called Scenario A “business as usual,” as it maintained the accelerating emissions growth typical of the 1970s and ’80s. This scenario predicted the earth would warm 1 degree Celsius by 2018. Scenario B set emissions lower, rising at the same rate today as in 1988. Mr. Hansen called this outcome the “most plausible,” and predicted it would lead to about 0.7 degree of warming by this year. He added a final projection, Scenario C, which he deemed highly unlikely: constant emissions beginning in 2000. In that forecast, temperatures would rise a few tenths of a degree before flatlining after 2000.

Thirty years of data have been collected since Mr. Hansen outlined his scenarios—enough to determine which was closest to reality. And the winner is Scenario C. Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000, discounting the larger-than-usual El Niรฑo of 2015-16. Assessed by Mr. Hansen’s model, surface temperatures are behaving as if we had capped 18 years ago the carbon-dioxide emissions responsible for the enhanced greenhouse effect. But we didn’t. And it isn’t just Mr. Hansen who got it wrong. Models devised by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have, on average, predicted about twice as much warming as has been observed since global satellite temperature monitoring began 40 years ago. 

What about Mr. Hansen’s other claims? Outside the warming models, his only explicit claim in the testimony was that the late ’80s and ’90s would see “greater than average warming in the southeast U.S. and the Midwest.” No such spike has been measured in these regions.

As observed temperatures diverged over the years from his predictions, Mr. Hansen doubled down. In a 2007 case on auto emissions, he stated in his deposition that most of Greenland’s ice would soon melt, raising sea levels 23 feet over the course of 100 years. Subsequent research published in Nature magazine on the history of Greenland’s ice cap demonstrated this to be impossible. Much of Greenland’s surface melts every summer, meaning rapid melting might reasonably be expected to occur in a dramatically warming world. But not in the one we live in. The Nature study found only modest ice loss after 6,000 years of much warmer temperatures than human activity could ever sustain.

Several more of Mr. Hansen’s predictions can now be judged by history. Have hurricanes gotten stronger, as Mr. Hansen predicted in a 2016 study? No. Satellite data from 1970 onward shows no evidence of this in relation to global surface temperature. Have storms caused increasing amounts of damage in the U.S.? Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show no such increase in damage, measured as a percentage of gross domestic product. How about stronger tornadoes? The opposite may be true, as NOAA data offers some evidence of a decline. The list of what didn’t happen is long and tedious.
Comment: Why reading the NYTimes is worth the price ... just for the comedy value alone! Text of his testimony


Added: Another view

Posted by Jim Peet at 6/24/2018 08:33:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: , ,

4.01.2018

The Star Tribune's "Climate Change" Mania







Climate change in Minnesota creates septic tank headaches



Excerpt:

Frozen septic systems are emerging as an unexpected consequence of climate change in Minnesota — one that is bedeviling homeowners across the state and could soon cost taxpayers more for the repair and maintenance of fragile rural roads. The cause is a dramatic long-term decline in insulating snow early in November and December. Combined with still-freezing conditions, that drives the frost line deep underground — well below septic pipes and drain fields. As a result, thousands of the half-million Minnesotans whose homes, cabins or businesses rely on underground septic tanks are facing a costly solution: pump their tanks more often and use their showers, washing machines, dishwashers and toilets less. And this year isn’t the worst in a recent history of freeze-ups, septic haulers say. The problem grows especially acute in March and April because Minnesota imposes local road weight restrictions for heavy trucks like the massive septic “honey wagons.” That can leave homeowners stranded as they watch their septic tanks fill up with nowhere for the liquid to go. Except back in the house.
High water opens sinkholes, shifts foundations in south Minneapolis



Excerpt:

Jerry Mullin, who presented Wednesday night on behalf of the Lake Hiawatha area, said the problems there are similar to those around Nokomis. He cited sinkholes, settling houses and streets that stay flooded for days. “The common thread is that we have serious groundwater high-water table issues in this part of the watershed,” he said. “And it’s not well understood as to why these problems have arisen in the last five years.” In a letter to the DNR, Rep. Jean Wagenius, DFL-Minneapolis, said heavy rains will become more common due to climate change. She also highlighted a number of infrastructure changes affecting the water flow. “I’ve represented this area for a long time,” Wagenius said. “People are telling me this has never happened before. And I’ve never heard of it before, either. So I trust what I’m hearing.”
Duluth's hidden creeks, under buildings and roads, increasing cause for worry



Excerpt:

Greys Creek is one of 44 named streams trickling and sometimes gushing their way down Duluth’s steep hill toward the great lake. Early developers who valued land in the heart of the city simply built tunnels over parts of the streams, covering them up so they could erect buildings over them. “It was all about usable space and property a long time ago,” explained Todd Carlson, program coordinator in the city’s engineering department. But age and greater water flow caused by climate change and development up the hill have increasingly turned the tunnels into a maintenance worry for city utilities staff. If the wrong section fails during a storm, it can back up streams and cause flooding or undermine roads and create sinkholes. It’s a prominent issue during spring snow melt and heavy summer rains.
Comments: Image top is the cover of Steve Goreham's The Mad Mad Mad World of Climatism. The Star Tribune takes every opportunity to blame Climate Change! As Captain Renault famously stated Round up the usual suspects.

Posted by Jim Peet at 4/01/2018 10:15:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: , ,

7.09.2017

The so-called "link" between Climate Change and Terrorism

Posted by Jim Peet at 7/09/2017 08:48:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: , ,

6.01.2017

Elites and Climate Change - when One Plane just won't do!






Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton to attend service for Betty Ford

Hillary Clinton - Huma Abedin email exhange

Excerpt:

Huma: Looks like plane won’t be an issue. We got message that family is very inclusive and if you wanted to speak at the service, they would welcome it. Also, looks like michelle obama also going.

Hillary: I’d be honored to speak. Is it ok that we and Mrs. O take two separate planes?

Huma: I think its ok. But let me see what kind of plane she’s taking.

Hillary: I would rather have our own of course.

Comment: They haven't fully bought in on the carbon footprint thing! Top image source

See also: Why the Paris climate accord is meaningless


Posted by Jim Peet at 6/01/2017 03:14:00 PM 1 comments

Labels: ,

5.07.2017

Clear Thinking in the Climate Change Debate

(click above to enlarge)


Dividing the issues on Climate Change

Excerpt:

There are a lot of important strategies for working through [Climate Change] arguments, such as defining terms, following the rules of logic, sniffing out unstated assumptions and presuppositions, etc. But determining the actual claims—which often involves dividing the issue—can be a neglected step.


Comment: I'm not ready to concede the 1st point. For a chart on climate change "consensus" see.


Meanwhile ...




Posted by Jim Peet at 5/07/2017 05:06:00 PM 0 comments

Labels:

12.27.2016

The Church Of Climate Scientology



The Church Of Climate Scientology: How Climate Science Became A Religion

Excerpt:

Here are three ways the Climate Scientologists abuse science.
  1. They use manipulative language.  If you are ever asked the incoherent question “Do you deny climate change?” you have found yourself a Climate Scientologist. No one denies “climate change.” “Climate change” is a constant. The “climate,” which is an averaging of weather over long timespan, is an inherently changing phenomenon. There’s no “climate non-change.” Don’t tell me “Oh, we all know what we mean by climate change”--because I don’t, and neither do you. “Climate change” is a manipulative, rubber term used to mean anything from “the climate changes” (which everyone agrees with) to “we impact the climate at least a tiny amount” (which everyone agrees with) to “we impact the climate for the better” (yes, that’s possible) to “we are making the climate much more dangerous” (which much fewer people agree with) to “we are making the climate much more dangerous and the only response is to stop using fossil fuels but also incoherently oppose nuclear power and hydroelectric power while advocating the worst-performing energy technologies, solar and wind.” Climate Scientologists are usually advocates of the last, bizarre position. Since they can’t argue for that view honestly and directly, they dishonestly name their view “climate change.”
  2. They won’t admit when their theory fails. Modern climate science is dominated by the hypothesis that CO2 is the major driver of climate—so much so that increasing it from .03% to .04% of the atmosphere has brought us to the verge of catastrophe. One simple question to ask about this hypothesis, which has been around for many decades, is: “Does it agree with experiment?” Since the theory uses computer models to make apocalyptic predictions about the future, one straightforward question to ask is: can the climate prediction models actually predict climate? The answer is no. As my colleague at Center for Industrial Progress, physicist and mathematical modeler Eric Dennis, writes in a forthcoming essay on climate modeling: the biggest phenomenon in climate modeling over the last 15 years is the spectacular failure of the models to predict what happened over this period: flat global temperatures, no significant warming trend. This was the one test the climate modelers were forced to stick their necks out for, and they have failed it.
  3. They intimidate, rather than explain.  Two weeks ago I participated on an energy panel with a prominent critic of fossil fuels. Anticipating that he would raise the climate issue, I devoted much of my 5-minute opening to trying to explain the big-picture evidence about fossil fuels and climate. Here was his response, in full. He flashed a Power Point slide with an ominous-looking picture of a desert with the text “6 Degrees Celsius” (implying it would get that much hotter) and said “We’re in trouble. The smartest people on the planet have told us that, and we’re listening to them.” I asked him to explain to me and to the audience how the “smartest people in the world” had proven this so we could understand it for ourselves. His response? He told the audience that since these (unspecified) people are smarter than I am, they should listen to him instead of me. In freshman logic, we are taught that this is the fallacy of “appeal to authority.” The true scientist has no need for appeal to authority—he uses his expertise to give clear explanations for anyone seeking them. For example, if you ask a good physicist about quantum mechanics, he will give you an overview of the evidence, such as the famous double-slit experiment that classical mechanics couldn’t explain. But too often, if you ask a question about climate science, a Climate Scientologist will try to intimidate you to take his beliefs on faith.

Comment: Read the entire article at Forbes (above link)

More from the Wall Street Journal: Climateers Can’t Handle the Truth
Donald Trump, our new president-elect, has been tagged for indiscriminately referring to climate change as a hoax. Here’s what he actually said at a campaign rally in South Carolina one year ago about climate advocacy: “It’s a money-making industry, OK? It’s a hoax, a lot of it.”

This statement, with its clearly framed qualifications, is true and accurate in every detail. It’s a statement of basic truth that can be embraced, and increasingly should be, by exactly those people most concerned about man-made climate change.

Yet it won’t be, for reasons demonstrated by the New York Times’ adoption of the term climate denialist, whose deliberately non-discriminating function we now take care to state precisely: It enables a kind of journalism that is unable—incapacitates itself—to stumble on truths that would be inconvenient to climate religion.

Posted by Jim Peet at 12/27/2016 03:49:00 PM 3 comments

Labels:

11.05.2016

From "Ice Age" to "Nice Age"

Comment: Not so sure about the 21,000 years but the point is well made!
The Okotoks
Pretty hard to grow crops on fields of ice and snow. Small temp drop would end agriculture in Canada.

Comment: Source

Posted by Jim Peet at 11/05/2016 05:07:00 PM 0 comments

Labels: , , ,

1.12.2015

Of course the climate is changing



Climate change's instructive past
Excerpt:



In "The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century," William Rosen explains how Europe's "most widespread and destructive famine" was the result of "an almost incomprehensibly complicated mixture of climate, commerce, and conflict, four centuries in gestation." Early in that century, 10 percent of the population from the Atlantic to the Urals died, partly because of the effect of climate change on "the incredible amalgam of molecules that comprises a few inches of soil that produces the world's food." In the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), from the end of the ninth century to the beginning of the 14th, the Northern Hemisphere was warmer than at any time in the past 8,000 years — for reasons concerning which there is no consensus. Warming increased the amount of arable land — there were vineyards in northern England — leading, Rosen says, to Europe's "first sustained population increase since the fall of the Roman Empire." The need for land on which to grow cereals drove deforestation. The MWP population explosion gave rise to towns, textile manufacturing and new wealthy classes. Then, near the end of the MWP, came the severe winters of 1309-1312, when polar bears could walk from Greenland to Iceland on pack ice. In 1315 there was rain for perhaps 155 consecutive days, washing away topsoil. Upwards of half the arable land in much of Europe was gone; cannibalism arrived as parents ate children. Corpses hanging from gallows were devoured. Human behavior did not cause this climate change. Instead, climate warming caused behavioral change (10 million mouths to feed became 30 million). Then climate cooling caused social changes (rebelliousness and bellicosity) that amplified the consequences of climate, a pattern repeated four centuries later.
Comment: At one time the ice was a mile thick at Chicago

Posted by Jim Peet at 1/12/2015 03:07:00 PM 0 comments

Labels:

2.21.2010

"people wonder where to begin cutting government"

Climate science tantrums

Excerpts:

Last week, Todd Stern, America's special envoy for climate change — yes, there is one; and people wonder where to begin cutting government — warned that those interested in "undermining action on climate change" will seize on "whatever tidbit they can find." Tidbits like specious science, and the absence of warming?

It is tempting to say, only half in jest, that Stern's portfolio violates the First Amendment, which forbids government from undertaking the establishment of religion. A religion is what the faith in catastrophic man-made global warming has become. It is now a tissue of assertions impervious to evidence, assertions that everything, including a historic blizzard, supposedly confirms and nothing, not even the absence of warming, can falsify.




Comment: Wiki Medieval Warm Period

Posted by Jim Peet at 2/21/2010 12:27:00 PM 0 comments

Labels: ,

12.08.2009

George Will: "planet Earth's last chance, until the next one"

George Will: The climate-change travesty

Excerpt:

Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate-change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83 percent below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million Americans in 2050, so Obama's promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen.

...

Copenhagen is the culmination of the post-Kyoto maneuvering by people determined to fix the world's climate by breaking the world's — especially America's — population to the saddle of ever-more-minute supervision by governments. But Copenhagen also is prologue for the 2010 climate change summit in Mexico City, which will be planet Earth's last chance, until the next one.


Comment: Gotto love this (below)

Copenhagen climate conference opens to dire warnings

Excerpts:

Opening ceremonies began with a short film featuring children of the future facing an apocalypse of tempests and desert landscapes if world leaders failed to act today.

"There will be hundreds of millions of refugees," Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN's panel of climate scientists, said in the film.

"Please help save the world," said a little girl, plaintively.

Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen told opening ceremonies that the world is looking to the conference to safeguard humanity.

Posted by Jim Peet at 12/08/2009 11:14:00 AM 1 comments

Labels: ,

1975: The coming ice age!

The Fiction Of Climate Science

Excerpts:

Many of you are too young to remember, but in 1975 our government pushed "the coming ice age."

Random House dutifully printed "THE WEATHER CONSPIRACY … coming of the New Ice Age." This may be the only book ever written by 18 authors. All 18 lived just a short sled ride from Washington, D.C. Newsweek fell in line and did a cover issue warning us of global cooling on April 28, 1975. And The New York Times, Aug. 14, 1976, reported "many signs that Earth may be headed for another ice age."

...

In 1974, the National Science Board announced: "During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade. Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end…leading into the next ice age."

...

In 2002 I stood in a room of the Smithsonian. One entire wall charted the cooling of our globe over the last 60 million years. This was no straight line. The curve had two steep dips followed by leveling. There were no significant warming periods. Smithsonian scientists inscribed it across some 20 feet of plaster, with timelines. Last year, I went back. That fresco is painted over.

Tree rings show a mini ice age in Europe about the time Stradivarius crafted his violins. Chilled Alpine Spruce gave him tighter wood so the instruments sang with a new purity. But England had to give up the wines that the Romans cultivated while our globe cooled, switching from grapes to colder weather grains and learning to take comfort with beer, whisky and ales.

Yet many centuries earlier, during a global warming, Greenland was green. And so it stayed and was settled by Vikings for generations until global cooling came along. Leif Ericsson even made it to Newfoundland. His shallow draft boats, perfect for sailing and rowing up rivers to conquer villages, wouldn't have stood a chance against a baby iceberg.

Those sustained temperature swings, all before the evil economic benefits of oil consumption, suggest there are factors at work besides humans.

Today, as I peck out these words, the weather channel is broadcasting views of a freakish and early snow falling on Dallas. The Iowa state extension service reports that the record corn crop expected this year will have unusually large kernels, thanks to "relatively cool August and September temperatures." And on Jan. 16, 2007, NPR went politically incorrect, briefly, by reporting that "An unusually harsh winter frost, the worst in 20 years, killed much of the California citrus, avocados and flower crops."

To be fair, those reports are short-term swings. But the longer term changes are no more compelling, unless you include the ice ages, and then, perhaps, the panic attempts of the 1970s were right. Is it possible that if we put more CO2 in the air, we'd forestall the next ice age?


Comment: From the Puritan Board

from the Cap and Trade lecture/debate at Texas Tech University last night.

  • If you pretend that the state of Texas is the whole atmosphere.
  • Then the greenhouse gases portion of that would barely cover Lubbock County.
  • The MAN MADE portion of greenhouse gases would be the size of the Texas Tech campus.

And by the way in this cap and trade plan,
the term "greenhouse gases" INCLUDES all water vapor.

Posted by Jim Peet at 12/08/2009 11:06:00 AM 0 comments

Labels:

10.20.2009

007 and climate change

Carbon Is Forever

Comment: FUNNY!

Excerpt:

"Global warming, James. You know, rising sea levels, the whole catastrophe. That's what I needed your help with. I need to know how many feet the Thames has to rise for London to be flooded. I have to give my boss an analysis of the long-term risk that climate change poses for every city. It's a bit of a hassle. I thought you might be able to tell me off the top of your head. That's why . . ."

"Pull the other one."

"I'm serious. CIA Director Leon Panetta launched a Center on Climate Change and National Security last month. You may have seen the news reports. Director Panetta announced, 'Decision makers need information and analysis on the effects climate change can have on security.' That's my new assignment."

"Climate change? You mean there's something going on with all that unseasonable snowfall? Is some megalomaniac controlling the weather? I've heard that one can cause global cooling by shooting missiles to disperse particulates into the stratosphere. Who could be so fiendishly diabolical—is it Hugo Drax we're after? Maybe it's the work of Dr. No."

"I wish," said Leiter. "Nothing quite that sexy. Just gathering data . . ."

"I get it," Bond said with a sly smile. "You've discovered that the U.N. climatologists are out to destroy the economies of the West, something even the Reds couldn't pull off. Your job is to subvert them. Brilliant."

"No, no. We're not allowed to question the science, James. There's no room for skepticism in intelligence."

"I'm all in favor of science," Bond said. He signaled the waiter for another medium dry Martini, shaken. "You can't very well give Fidel a poisoned scuba get-up if you don't know how to make a properly powdered preparation of Madura foot fungus to dust the inside of a wetsuit with. But climate change? Wouldn't you be better off putting that manpower into more immediate threats—say, Iranian nukes?"

"It's interesting you should bring that up," said Leiter, brightening. "If Iran goes nuclear it might cut its carbon footprint, which would really be great. That's why we're recommending to the president . . ."

"You're barmy." Bond slapped a few bills on the table and stood to go. "Call me when you've got some real work to do."

"James, you have to understand," Leiter said, chasing after him. "It's not really the CIA anymore, it's the CYA. At least no one gets prosecuted for doing his job at the Center on Climate Change and National Security."


The CIA is now the CYA

Posted by Jim Peet at 10/20/2009 02:23:00 PM 0 comments

Labels: , , ,

8.12.2009

"Climate change is very real .... I feel it when I'm flying"

Sen. Debbie Stabenow, Energy Leader

Excerpt:

... in an interview with the Detroit News Monday, Senator Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.) - recently appointed to the Senate Energy Committee - made clear that fighting the climate crisis is her top priority.

"Climate change is very real," she confessed as she embraced cap and trade's massive tax increase on Michigan industry - at the same time claiming, against all the evidence, that it would not lead to an increase in manufacturing costs or energy prices. "Global warming creates volatility. I feel it when I'm flying. The storms are more volatile. We are paying the price in more hurricanes and tornadoes."

And there are sea monsters in Lake Michigan. I can feel them when I'm boating.


UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

Excerpt:

Climate change, as all previous speakers have already stated, is the fundamental threat to humankind.

It exacerbates all of the problems we face: poverty, disease, hunger and insecurity. It impedes progress toward the Millennium Development Goals. It deepens the food and energy crises.

That is the harsh reality.

But there is an upside: if we combat climate change with a sustainable, low-emissions approach, just like we see around us in Songdo, we can change the way countries develop.

We can foster a green economy and green growth.

We can fight hunger and poverty while protecting the environment.

The downside is equally dramatic.

If we fail to act, climate change will intensify droughts, floods and other natural disasters.

Water shortages will affect hundreds of millions of people. Malnutrition will engulf large parts of the developing world. Tensions will worsen. Social unrest – even violence – could follow.

The damage to national economies will be enormous. The human suffering will be incalculable.

We have the power to change course. But we must do it now.

As we move toward Copenhagen in December, we must “Seal a Deal” on climate change that secures our common future. I'm glad that the Chairman of the forum and many other speakers have used my campaign slogan “Seal the Deal” in Copenhagen. I won't charge them loyalty. Please use this “Seal the Deal” as widely as possible, as much as you can. We must seal the deal in Copenhagen for the future of humanity.

We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet.



Comment: More "save the planet" globalization-speak

Posted by Jim Peet at 8/12/2009 05:52:00 PM 1 comments

Labels: ,

6.26.2009

Climate Change: The collapse of the "consensus""

WSJ: The Climate Change Climate Change

Excerpt:

Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers." The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country's new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.


Comment: As the world focuses on the death of Michael Jackson (I'm not sure why this is such important news!), Congress is ready to jam through a giant tax grab!

Posted by Jim Peet at 6/26/2009 09:57:00 AM 0 comments

Labels:

2.18.2009

Will's Laws (on doomsaying)

Comment: George Will (always readable) on "eco-pessimism", "calamitous food shortages", "experts", "global warming", "global cooling", and other things that go bump in the night.

George Will: Dark Green Doomsayers

Excerpts:



  1. "Law of Doomsaying": Predict catastrophe no sooner than five years hence but no later than 10 years away, soon enough to terrify but distant enough that people will forget if you are wrong
  2. Montaigne's axiom: "Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know."
  3. Because of today's economy, another law — call it the Law of Clarifying Calamities — is being (redundantly) confirmed. On graphs tracking public opinion, two lines are moving in tandem and inversely: The sharply rising line charts public concern about the economy, the plunging line follows concern about the environment. A recent Pew Research Center poll asked which of 20 issues should be the government's top priorities. Climate change ranked 20th.
  4. Real calamities take our minds off hypothetical ones



Posted by Jim Peet at 2/18/2009 12:19:00 PM 0 comments

Labels: ,

11.10.2008

Al Gore: hyperbole alert!

The Climate for Change

Excerpts:

THE inspiring and transformative choice by the American people to elect Barack Obama as our 44th president lays the foundation for another fateful choice that he — and we — must make this January to begin an emergency rescue of human civilization from the imminent and rapidly growing threat posed by the climate crisis.

The electrifying redemption of America’s revolutionary declaration that all human beings are born equal sets the stage for the renewal of United States leadership in a world that desperately needs to protect its primary endowment: the integrity and livability of the planet.

The world authority on the climate crisis, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, after 20 years of detailed study and four unanimous reports, now says that the evidence is “unequivocal.” To those who are still tempted to dismiss the increasingly urgent alarms from scientists around the world, ignore the melting of the north polar ice cap and all of the other apocalyptic warnings from the planet itself, and who roll their eyes at the very mention of this existential threat to the future of the human species, please wake up. Our children and grandchildren need you to hear and recognize the truth of our situation, before it is too late.

...

Here’s what we can do — now: we can make an immediate and large strategic investment to put people to work replacing 19th-century energy technologies that depend on dangerous and expensive carbon-based fuels with 21st-century technologies that use fuel that is free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth.


Comment: hyperboles in red! Read the entire article for more!

Posted by Jim Peet at 11/10/2008 10:42:00 AM 8 comments

Labels: , ,

4.28.2008

"emissions levels last witnessed when the cotton gin was in daily use"

The Real Cost of Tackling Climate Change

Excerpt:

We all ought to reflect on what an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050 really means. When we do, it becomes clear that the president's target has one overwhelming virtue: Assuming emissions curbs are even necessary, his goal is at least realistic.

The same cannot be said for the carbon emissions targets espoused by the three presidential candidates and environmentalists. Indeed, these targets would send us back to emissions levels last witnessed when the cotton gin was in daily use.

Begin with the current inventory of carbon dioxide emissions – CO2 being the principal greenhouse gas generated almost entirely by energy use. According to the Department of Energy's most recent data on greenhouse gas emissions, in 2006 the U.S. emitted 5.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, or just under 20 tons per capita. An 80% reduction in these emissions from 1990 levels means that the U.S. cannot emit more than about one billion metric tons of CO2 in 2050.

Were man-made carbon dioxide emissions in this country ever that low? The answer is probably yes – from historical energy data it is possible to estimate that the U.S. last emitted one billion metric tons around 1910. But in 1910, the U.S. had 92 million people, and per capita income, in current dollars, was about $6,000.

By the year 2050, the Census Bureau projects that our population will be around 420 million. This means per capita emissions will have to fall to about 2.5 tons in order to meet the goal of 80% reduction.

It is likely that U.S. per capita emissions were never that low – even back in colonial days when the only fuel we burned was wood. The only nations in the world today that emit at this low level are all poor developing nations, such as Belize, Mauritius, Jordan, Haiti and Somalia.

Comment: Those impossible climate goals.

Posted by Jim Peet at 4/28/2008 10:08:00 PM 0 comments

Labels:

1.24.2008

"Father Al, I have polluted!"

Bono confesses sins to 'father' Al Gore

Excerpt:

Having climate campaigner Al Gore round to your house is to open yourself to a self-flagellating guilt trip, Irish rock star Bono confessed Thursday.
Sharing a stage with the former US vice president at the annual gathering of world movers and shakers in the Swiss ski resort of Davos, the U2 frontman joked that their friendship was a source of pressure on the domestic front.

"He's been round my house and it's like... here's the recycler Al, you know... I've got a posh car, but it runs on ethanol Al," Bono said.

Acknowledging that a career in rock music was not always conducive to a green lifestyle, Bono compared a conversation with Gore to an act of religious contrition.

"It's like being with an Irish priest. You start to confess your sins," he said. "Father Al, I am not just a noise polluter, I am a noise-polluting, diesel-soaking, gulfstream-flying rock star.

"I'm going to kick the habit. I'm trying father Al, but oil has been very good for me -- those convoys of articulated lorries, petrochemical products, hair gel."


Comment: At least Bono understands that Al is the High Priest of the Global Warming religion!

Posted by Jim Peet at 1/24/2008 05:02:00 PM 0 comments

Labels: , , ,

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)