Bush calls for greenhouse gas targets by 2008

Apparently there a no politicians remaining who are able to withstand the political pressure of the climate change alarmists.

Via the Financial Times: Bush in U-turn on global warming

George W. Bush on Thursday unveiled a striking about-face on global warming, calling on the world’s leading economies to join the US in agreeing a global target to reduce carbon dioxide emissions before the end of his term in office.

The US president was speaking just ahead of a G8 summit at which climate change was expected to be high on the agenda of European governments. He explained that his apparent conversion – which follows almost seven years of having rejected precisely the road he outlined – was prompted by new scientific findings.

But Mr Bush made no pledge on the size of emissions cuts that the US would be prepared to sign up to and gave no indication of a timeframe. The White House also ruled out carbon trading as the way to cutting emissions.

Too bad for Al Gore. Looks like he won't be making $billions selling carbon indulgences under the Bush administration.

Environmental campaigners accused the president of cynically seeking to circumvent the Kyoto process, which the United Nations is seeking to renew at talks in December. Others accused him of a ploy to derail tougher European proposals.

Mr Bush said: “Science has deepened our understanding of climate change and opened new possibilities for confronting it.

“By the end of next year, America and other nations will set a long-term global goal for reducing greenhouse gases.”

The US favours reliance on technology and the removal of trade barriers to spread that technology as opposed to the European approach of cap and trade and an unworkable 2 Degree C temperature cap.

Reuters video.

Update: more from Global Warming Hysteria:

There are growing signs that it is not the United States that is isolated on international climate politics, but the Europeans. Apparently, neither the Americans, nor China, nor India, and possibly not even Russia, are swinging in behind Europe's position.

The Ontario-California "deal"

There's lots of criticism of the deal Ontario Premier Daltom McGuinty announced yesterday with the Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger. From the Globe & Mail:

The oil industry warned yesterday that consumers will pay more at the pump and that Ontario could become more dependent on foreign oil under a new "low carbon" fuel standard being adopted by the provincial government. (...)

In an agreement signed yesterday with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mr. McGuinty committed the province to adopt the fuel standard, which would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from the province's transportation fuel by 10 per cent by 2020.

Oil industry officials said the fuel standard would encourage the province's refiners to substitute imported, light crudes for the heavier grades from Western Canada that have more carbon and require more energy to refine into gasoline. The lighter grades are considerably more expensive than the heavier grades.

"The Ontario policy eventually will result probably in more reliance on foreign oil," said Alain Perez, president of the Canadian Petroleum Products Institute, which represents the refining end of the business. And that's a problem "given the political volatility of the places the oil has to come from," he said.

Alan Lloyd, a former head of the California Environmental Protection Agency, said the low carbon fuel standard is a clear threat to producers of heavy oil and the oil sands, especially if more states and provinces adopt it. "Part of the rationale here was to try to discourage the use of some of the heaviest oil, which is loaded with carbon," he said.

Anyone who would sign a deal making us more reliant on more expensive foreign oil when we have abundant supplies right here in Canada has no business sitting the Premier's office in Toronto. Hey Dalton, I bet they love you out in Alberta California.

Chicken Little lays an egg

via the Peterborough Examiner:

Editorial - Wednesday, May 30, 2007 @ 00:00

Re "Myth makers exposed" (Column, May 25) -

I am one of those "talk radio" hosts that David Suzuki refers to in his rant that you chose to print last Friday. The pompous arrogance of the man is incredible!

He states that, "Talking to these people is hard because they come armed with obscure-sounding references about things like the 'medieval warm period,' 'solar flares' and 'hockey-stick' graphs. They seem so sure of themselves that the media still routinely feature these so-called global warming skeptics in opinion articles, television interviews and especially on talk radio."

"Talking to these people is hard"??!!!

What he doesn't say is that he routinely avoids honest debate on the science of global warming. Until I see him accept the challenge to openly debate the science with people he calls "so-called global warming skeptics," (people like Dr. Tim Patterson, professor of Paleo-climatology, Carleton University; Dr. Fred Michel, director of Carleton University's Institute of Environmental Science; and Tom Harris, executive director of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, all who have been on my show), I will continue to describe Dr. Suzuki as a phony and a chicken! A Little Chicken! A Little Chicken who tells people the sky is falling and then runs away when asked to debate his outrageous claims with learned scientists who know the science he pretends to be an expert on, better than he does!!

JOHN COUNSELL

"Late Night Counsell"

Don't hold your breath waiting for Suzuki to partake in an honest and open debate.

NASA administrator says global warming ain't no stinking problem.

Here comes the rain, kids. NASA administrator says global warming ain't no stinking problem via Prometheus:

NPR just sent out a press release previewing a Steve Inskeep interview airing on tomorrow's Morning Edition with NASA Administration Michael Griffin. The title of the press release? How about

NASA ADMINISTRATOR MICHAEL GRIFFIN NOT SURE THAT GLOBAL WARMING IS A PROBLEM

Ok. The rest of the press release goes on to say [my bolds]

May 30, 2007; Washington, DC – NASA Administrator Michael Griffin tells NPR News that while he has no doubt “a trend of global warming exists, I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with.” In an interview with Steve Inskeep airing tomorrow on NPR News’ Morning Edition, Administrator Griffin says “I guess I would ask which human beings - where and when - are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.”

there's more...

Kyoto's Dog blog

The Conservatives launched an new website today to criticize the current leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and his inaction in support of Senate Reform. The new site is called NotaLeader.ca.

As part of the new website the Tories have created a blog - supposedly written by Citizen Dion's dog "Kyoto".

Recognizing a good play on words when they see one, they've named it Kyoto's Dog Blog. Now that's a neat name for a blog!

Update: the new website was accompanied by the release of new radio and TV ads. Video clip 1 Video clip 2 Video Clip 3

Economy up 3.3%, CO2 emissions down 1.3%

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions dropped slightly last year even as the economy grew, according to an initial estimate released yesterday by the Energy Information Administration. [blog]

(...)

In 2006 the U.S. economy grew 3.3 percent, a fact President Bush touted yesterday as he hailed the government's "flash estimate" that the country's carbon dioxide emissions dropped by 78 million metric tons last year.

Source.

Also: Recreation Industry’s Gravest Threats Come from Global Warming “Solutions,” Senate Hearing Reveals

Apollo 15 data and Earth's energy budget

Shaopeng Huang, geophysicist with the University or Michigan is calling for an international effort to develop and deploy monitoring stations on the moon for the study of terrestrial climate change.

Science Daily — Poets may see "a face of plaintive sweetness" or "a cheek like beryl stone" when they look at the moon, but Shaopeng Huang sees something else altogether: the ideal location for a network of observatories dedicated to studying climate change on Earth.

Using data from an Apollo 15 experiment whose original intent was thwarted by unanticipated lunar surface conditions, the University of Michigan geophysicist recently showed that surface temperatures on the near side of the moon accurately record important information about Earth's climate system.

Based on his analysis, recently published online in Advances in Space Research, Huang is calling for an international effort to develop and deploy monitoring stations on the moon for the study of terrestrial climate change.

Global climate change is driven by an imbalance between incoming energy from the sun and outgoing energy from Earth. Without understanding the climate system's inputs and outputs---its so-called energy budget---it is impossible to tease out the relative contributions of natural and human-induced influences and to predict future climate, Huang said.

But detecting changes in the energy budget is difficult with existing ground-based and space-borne technologies, he noted. Fortunately, instruments left behind by the Apollo 15 astronauts---all U-M alumni, incidentally---inadvertently provided just the necessary measurements.

(...)

On the near side of the airless moon, where Apollo 15 landed, surface temperature is controlled by solar radiation during daytime and energy radiated from Earth at night. Huang showed that due to an amplifying effect, even weak radiation from Earth produces measurable temperature changes in the regolith. Further, his revisit of the data revealed distinctly different characteristics in daytime and nighttime lunar surface temperature variations.

This allowed him to uncover a lunar night-time warming trend from mid-1972 to late 1975, which was consistent with a global dimming of Earth that occurred over the same period and was due to a general decrease of sunlight over land surfaces. (Widespread ground-based radiation records from that period show that solar radiation reaching Earth's surface during that period decreased significantly, for reasons that are not completely understood.)

Huang's study demonstrated that signals from the energy budget of Earth's climate system are detectable on the moon and can be useful in monitoring and predicting climate change.

For that and other reasons, the moon is the perfect place for a system of observatories, Huang said. "As the sole natural satellite of Earth, the moon is an enduring platform without complications from atmosphere, hydrosphere or biosphere, and could provide records of Earth's radiation budget that would complement ground-based and man-made satellite records."

full article

h/t

Some inconvenient science

for the climate change alarmists - via Peter C. Glover at Global Warming Hysteria:

"Science does not support claims of drastic increases in global temperatures over the 21st century, nor does it support claims of human influence on weather events and other secondary effects of climate change."

Conclusion from: 'Climate Science: Climate Change and its Impacts' a report by National Center for Policy Studies, USA. For the full report go here. For an insightful WSJ op-ed article about the report go here.

Interview with Dr. William Gray

At Headline Earth Katie Fehlinger interviews meteorologist, hurricane expert and global warming skeptic Dr. William Gray.

Weather Forecast | Weather Maps | Weather Radar

Hot Air Study Melts Global Warming Theory

Steven Milloy via Fox News

Global warming alarmists may want to expedite their efforts to hamstring the global economy with greenhouse gas regulation. A new study touted as showing that we’re not sufficiently panicky about manmade carbon dioxide emissions actually supports the exact opposite conclusion.

“Warnings about global warming may not be dire enough, according to a climate study that describes a runaway-train acceleration of industrial carbon dioxide emissions,” USA Today shrieked this week.

The study authors reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the rate of manmade carbon dioxide emissions was three times greater during 2000 to 2004 than during the 1990s.

Since increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels allegedly are causing global warming, the new study must mean that global temperatures are soaring even faster now than they did during the 1990s, right?

Wrong, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Climatic Data Center.

By overlaying the atmospheric carbon dioxide trend onto graphs of near-surface temperatures, surface temperatures and ocean temperatures, it is readily apparent that ever-changing global temperatures aren’t keeping pace with ever-increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

more...

Climate Momentum Shifting?

Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming - Now Skeptics
Growing Number of Scientists Convert to Skeptics After Reviewing New Research

From a May 15 post on Sen. James Inhofe's website at US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works:

Following the U.S. Senate's vote today on a global warming measure (see today's AP article: Senate Defeats Climate Change Measure,) it is an opportune time to examine the recent and quite remarkable momentum shift taking place in climate science. Many former believers in catastrophic man-made global warming have recently reversed themselves and are now climate skeptics. The names included below are just a sampling of the prominent scientists who have spoken out recently to oppose former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, and the media driven “consensus” on man-made global warming.

the List.

[Another] State climatologist not jumping on global warming bandwagon

Another state climatologist has spoken out about the lack of consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), this time at Mississippi State University. From the Commercial Dispatch Online:

Many people who saw “An Inconvenient Truth,” a global warming documentary featuring Al Gore, immediately became very concerned about global climate change and impending weather disasters.

Don't count state climatologist Dr. Charles Wax of Mississippi State University as one of them.

“First off, there isn't a consensus among scientists,” Wax told the Columbus Rotary Club Tuesday. “Don't let anybody tell you there is.”

Wax spent much of his presentation telling the audience how the global climate is cyclical. It's always gone through periods of warming and cooling. As for cries of impending doom, Wax says there's tons of data on both sides - and man's ever-changing weather monitoring capability further clouds the picture.

“I wouldn't want to be called a skeptic,” Wax said. “I have been called non-reputable (by people who believe differently).”

The climate is changing, Wax admits - but it's always changing and always has.

“I don't know if it's going to rain Thursday or not. Certainly I don't know what the temperature is going to be in 2050,” he said.

Wax said political and policy confusion have fueled the debate over global warming, and changes in the way weather is tracked have added to the confusion.

“In 1957, all the thermometers (the government uses to track temperatures) were moved from fields onto airports,” Wax said. “It went from the Weather Bureau, which supported agriculture, to the Department of Commerce. Cities are hotter. (If you look at the numbers) you'll see a major climate change in 1957 alone.”

Wax showed Rotarians graphs of climate trends over 11,000 years, pointing out the cycles global temperatures have gone through. He said the rise of civilization coincided with a warming period.

“There was a little ice age from 1400 to 1800,” Wax said. “We're warming back up, but it's not nearly as warm as it was 2,000 or 7,000 years ago.”

One can only wonder if Dr. Wax will face similar experience as these two other state climatolgists.

Update: Associate State Climatologist Fired for Exposing Warming Myths

University of Washington climate scientist Mark Albright was dismissed on March 12 from his position as associate state climatologist, just weeks after exposing false claims of shrinking glaciers in the Cascade Mountains.

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels (D) had asserted in a February 7 Seattle Times editorial, "the average snow pack in the Cascades has declined 50 percent since 1950 and will be cut in half again in 30 years if we don't start addressing the problems of climate change now."

Albright knew from his research that the Cascade Mountains snow pack had not declined anywhere near what Nickels asserted, and that the snow pack has actually been growing in recent years.

h/t.

Little Ice Age

The Big Chill, part 1.

From YouTube with this comment:

A documentary depicting some of the science and conditions the world experienced both during the "Medieval Warm Period" and the "Little Ice Age", two events in world history that the IPCC, Al Gore, David Suzuki and others say, didn't happen. These two events kill the "Hockey Stick" graph, as they do not appear in Al Gore's "A Convenient Lie" or in IPCC reports, but are very real as you will see.

You will find parts 2 thru 11 here.

Killjoy-in-chief at the global warming love-fest

Robert E. Murray:

"Some elitists in our country can't, or won't, tell fact from fiction, can't understand what a draconian climate change program will do [to] the dreams of millions of working Americans and those on fixed incomes," says the chairman and CEO of Murray Energy, one of the largest private coal concerns in the country.

"The science of global warming is speculative. But there's nothing speculative about the damage a C02 capture program will do to this country. I know the names of many of the thousands of people--American workers, their families--whose lives will be destroyed by what has become a deceitful and hysterical campaign, perpetrated by fear-mongers in our society and by corporate executives intent on their own profits or competitive advantage. I can't stand by and watch."

Full article from Opinion Journal.

What will the weather be like two weeks from now?

At Climate Science a post by Roger Pielke Sr., WG1 IPCC Chapter 1 - More Scientifically Erroneous Statements has this to say about the IPCC:

Their claim that

Projecting changes in climate due to changes in greenhouse gases 50 years from now is a very different and much more easily solved problem than forecasting weather patterns just weeks from now.

is such an absurd, scientifically unsupported claim, that the media and any scientists who swallow this conclusion are either blind to the scientific understanding of the climate system, or have other motives to promote the IPCC viewpoint. The absurdity of the IPCC claim should be obvious to anyone with common sense.

Emphasis added.

The above quote indicates that the writers of the IPCC report are rather concerned about those skeptics who question why we should believe their predictions of CO2 driven climate change in the coming century, when everyone knows the unreliability of short to medium term weather forecasts. They were concerned enough to address the issue in their report.

So, just what will the weather be like two weeks from now? Has modern science really improved notably on the predictions of weather found here?

More importantly, why should we believe the climate predictions of the IPCC?

TIPS

By these calculations, the world's most abundant fossil fuel could supply clean, green electricity at the world's most economical prices.

Links: Paper (pdf) by Alex G. Fassbender, P.E. Thermoenergy.

h/t: SDA

Only 15% say global warming is caused by humans

Looks like Suzuki and Gore have a lot more work to do. Only 15% of respondents to this poll at CTV Calgary think that human activity is solely responsible for global warming.

Update: 62% of respondents to this Angus Reid poll want reduced taxes rather than reduced global warming.

You are entering the Twilight Zone

NASA Discovers 'Twilight Zone' of New Air Particles

An extensive and previously unknown "twilight zone" of particles in the atmosphere could complicate scientists' efforts to determine how much the Earth's climate will warm in the future, a new study finds.

"The effects of this zone are not included in most computer models that estimate the impact of aerosols on climate," said lead author Ilan Koren of the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel. "This could be one of the reasons why current measurements of this effect don't match our model estimates."

Oops.

Al Gore Protested by ‘Environmental Militants’ in Argentina, Media Mum

From Newsbusters.org by Noel Sheppard (emphasis added):

When President Bush receives protests as he travels abroad, it’s front-page headline news. Yet, when former Vice President Al Gore is so protested, the media couldn’t care less.

Although the Associated Press did report Gore’s visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to speak at a biofuels conference Friday, virtually no American media outlet picked up the story:

As Gore spoke, outside the hotel demonstrators on bicycles and wearing surgical masks chanted slogans against multinational agribusinesses, saying the biofuel boom will cause deforestation and turn arable land into deserts.

Sadly, there wasn't a lot of details in this piece about the actual protests. Thankfully, I received the following La Nacion article by e-mail yesterday with a translation that offered a lot more insights into the matter:

(DyN) – Environmental militants, from the left and from the Quebracho group protested this afternoon in the neighborhood of Hotel Alvear, where the former US vice president Al Gore is the stellar guest at the 1st American Biofuels Congress.

The demonstration against Al Gore’s presence was in the corner of Ave. Callao and Callao, where the police had installed barricades preventing the access to the hotel, one block away.

The protest started with a group of environmentalists, some of them disguised as victims of pollution, remembering that during Bill Clinton’s administration –from whom Al Gore was his vice president- the USA refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, proposed by the UN for reducing carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming.

They also took a big sign reading: “Stop spraying”, referring to spraying flights against coca leaves crops in Colombia.

After the advance of the environmentalists that praised Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez because they consider that corn and soybean are needed for food and not fuel for the big countries, Quebracho arrived with huge flags and banners.

It is indeed a highly-kept secret that as corn prices have skyrocketed across the globe due to the use of ethanol, the world’s poor are being negatively impacted. As reported in paragraphs ten and eleven of the aforementioned AP article:

But a quarter of Argentina's 38 million people remain in poverty five years after an economic crisis, and the middle classes are also squeezed by two years of double-digit inflation. Harvesting the forests and switching ranchland from beef to soybeans for biodiesel will drive up consumer prices even more, they fear.

"Biofuels will bring big business here that will make the rich richer and only bring more hunger and misery to the poor," said Ramon Garcia, a farmer at the protests. "They want to buy up Argentine farmland to damage it and produce biofuels that they'll take back to the United States."

Unfortunately, a Google News search identified that so far, only Forbes.com has published this AP article. This despite the AP making its first edition of the piece available at 3:29 PM EST Friday.

Furthermore, from what I can tell by also doing a LexisNexis search, no other American media outlet has covered this matter.

Yet, foreign press representatives aren't so shy. As reported Friday by Ireland On-line (emphasis added):

Argentina’s government is hopping on the biofuels bandwagon by offering tax incentives for new initiatives and saying five % of the nation’s fuel supply must be biodiesel- or ethanol-based in three years.

But many Argentines are worried that diverting farmland for biofuels – made from corn, sugarcane, palm oil and other agricultural products – will drive up food prices even higher.

Sadly, this is a negative ancillary impact of the new rush to biofuels folks like soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore and his sycophants in the media not only ignore, but want to hide from the American people as they advance their manmade global warming alarmism.

Maybe this is why the Buenos Aires protests will largely be ignored by America’s press.

Myth: Corn Ethanol is great

ABC's John Stossel, author of Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity exposes the truth about ethanol.

Disciples of doom

That's how Tom Langdon describes folks like Kooky Suzuki and the Goracle in this article from the Hamilton Spectator.

Enough already! I've had it up to here with the likes of Al Gore and David Suzuki telling us the world is going to end next week.

Sorry, but I find it hard to believe diatribes delivered by people that have no expertise in a field of study as complex as this one.

If you think I'm off base, look up Suzuki's degrees and you will find he has degrees in biology and zoology and at one time was respected by his peers for his knowledge in those fields.

However, he does not have a degree in climatology.

Perhaps that's why he refuses to publicly debate a real climatologist and prefers to just present a one-sided view through speeches to the converted and through interviews with the media who hang on his every word as if he were the Almighty Himself

A surprisingly rational viewpoint from the usually left-leaning Hamilton, Ontario daily. Read it all.

Mr. Green

h/t: SDA

Watson: mankind like a virus

Here's a preview of what our world will be like if the extreme environmentalists are ever in charge...Eco-Extremist Wants World Population to Drop below 1 Billion

Apparently, saving the whales is more important than saving 5.5 billion people. Paul Watson, founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and famous for militant intervention to stop whalers, now warns mankind is “acting like a virus” and is harming Mother Earth.

“No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas.” New York, London, Paris, Moscow are all too big. Then again, so are Moose Jaw, Timbuktu and even Annapolis, Md.

· “We need vast areas of the planet where humans do not live at all and where other species are free to evolve without human interference.”

· “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.”

· “Sea transportation should be by sail. The big clippers were the finest ships ever built and sufficient to our needs. Air transportation should be by solar powered blimps when air transportation is necessary.”

· At least Watson was generous and said people could still talk with one another across great distances. “Communication systems can link the communities,” he proclaimed from on high.

Not to be outdone, a British group says children are bad for the planet:

HAVING large families should be frowned upon as an environmental misdemeanour in the same way as frequent long-haul flights, driving a big car and failing to reuse plastic bags, says a report to be published today by a green think tank.

John Guillebaud, co-chairman of OPT and emeritus professor of family planning at University College London, said: "The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights.

What will these whackos want to regulate next?

Reid Bryson challenging the conventional wisdom

Via Drudge:

Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the history of American education. Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology—now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences—in the 1970s he became the first director of what’s now the UW’s Gaylord Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies. He’s a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor—created, the U.N. says, to recognize “outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment.” He has authored five books and more than 230 other publications and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world.

Long ago in the Army Air Corps, Bryson and a colleague prepared the aviation weather forecast that predicted discovery of the jet stream by a group of B-29s flying to and from Tokyo. Their warning to expect westerly winds at 168 knots earned Bryson and his friend a chewing out from a general—and the general’s apology the next day when he learned they were right. Bryson flew into a couple of typhoons in 1944, three years before the Weather Service officially did such things, and he prepared the forecast for the homeward flight of the Enola Gay. Back in Wisconsin, he built a program at the UW that’s trained some of the nation’s leading climatologists.

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

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

In the 1960s, Bryson’s idea was widely considered a radical proposition. But nowadays things have turned almost in the opposite direction: Hardly a day passes without some authority figure claiming that whatever the climate happens to be doing, human activity must be part of the explanation. And once again, Bryson is challenging the conventional wisdom.

Glenn Beck video

This is a partial video (about 6 and a half minutes) of Glenn Beck's recent special Exposed: Climate of Fear. This comes from YouTube via Media Matters, an organization which is critical of anthropogenic global warming deniers and has criticized Beck's special, but they do show it intact.

Update: per simon in the comments, here's the full video.

Four Basic IPCC Lies

A big hat tip to JR at Just Right for his post about the latest article from Lawrence Solomon in his series, The Deniers.

Lawrence Solomon’s column "The Deniers: Part XXI" in yesterday’s National Post focuses on Polish scientist Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, whose research proved a key IPCC assumption false.

"The IPCC relies on ice-core data -- on air that has been trapped for hundreds or thousands of years deep below the surface," Dr. Jaworowski explains.

"These ice cores are a foundation of the global warming hypothesis, but the foundation is groundless -- the IPCC has based its global-warming hypothesis on arbitrary assumptions and these assumptions, it is now clear, are false."

While Dr. Jaworowski’s work is extremely important, the results aren’t that surprising. What is more surprising, shocking really, is that there was an organized effort to suppress his research on the grounds that it is "immoral" to do research that might contradict a preferred hypothesis:

....in 1994 Dr. Jaworowski, together with a team from the Norwegian Institute for Energy Technics, proposed a research project on the reliability of trace-gas determinations in the polar ice. The prospective sponsors of the research refused to fund it, claiming the research would be "immoral" if it served to undermine the foundations of climate research.

Several years earlier, in a peer-reviewed article ...Dr. Jaworowski criticized the methods by which CO2 levels were ascertained from ice cores, and cast doubt on the global-warming hypothesis. The institute's director, while agreeing to publish his article, also warned Dr. Jaworowski that "this is not the way one gets research projects." Once published, the institute came under fire .... Although none of the critics faulted Dr. Jaworowski's science, the institute nevertheless fired him to maintain its access to funding.

Which all leads nicely into this which I've been planning to post for the past few days. I believe that peer-reviewed article mentioned by JR was: CO2: The Greatest Scientific Scandal of Our Time, Zbigniew Jaworowski, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc. in which he explains the political nature of the IPCC:

On Feb. 2, 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) again uttered its mantra of catastrophe about man-made global warming. After weeks of noisy propaganda, a 21-page “Summary for Policymakers” of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, 2007, was presented in grandiose style in Paris to a crowd of politicians and media, accompanied by a blackout of the Eiffel Tower to show that electric energy is bad. The event induced a tsunami of hysteria that ran around the world. This was probably the main aim of this clearly political paper, prepared by governmental and United Nations bureaucrats, and published more than three months before the IPCC’s 1,600-page scientific report, which is to be released in May. In the words of the IPCC, this delay is needed for adjustment of the main text, so that “Changes . . . [could be] made to ensure consistency with the ‘Summary for Policymakers.’ ” Not a single word in these 1,600 pages is to be in conflict with what politicians said beforehand in the summary!

The IPCC's full Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) - the one containing the science, has now been released but you would never know it because it got next to no attention from the media.

Jaworowski explains what he calls the Four Basic IPCC Lies:

The four basic statements in the “Summary for Policymakers” are:

1. Carbon dioxide, the most important anthropogenic emissions increased markedly as a result of human activities, and its atmospheric concentration of 379 ppmv (parts by volume) in 2005 by far exceeded the natural range of 180 to 300 ppmv over the last 650,000 years.

2. Since 1750, human activities warmed the climate.

3. The warmth of the last half-century is unusual, is the highest in at least the past 1,300 years, and is “very likely” caused by increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations;

4. Predictions are made that anthropogenic warming will continue for centuries, and between 2090 and 2099 the global average surface temperature will increase 1.1°C to 6.4°C. Various scare stories of global catastrophes are prophesied to occur if man-made emissions are not curbed by drastic political decisions. The obvious beneficial effects of warming for man and all the biosphere are downplayed.

Except for CO2, all these points are garlanded with qualifications such as “likely,” “very likely,” “extremely likely,” “with very high confidence,” and “unequivocal.”

In fact, to the contrary, all these points are incorrect.

You will have to read the 16 page report, which can be downloaded here in PDF format to see the explanations.

But there's more: the IPCC chose to ignore more than 90,000 direct CO2 measurements because the data from them not fit their preclusion that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are causing global warming:

We thus find ourselves in the situation that the entire theory of man-made global warming—with its repercussions in science, and its important consequences for politics and the global economy—is based on ice core studies that provided a false picture of the atmospheric CO2 levels. Meanwhile, more than 90,000 direct measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere, carried out in America, Asia, and Europe between 1812 and 1961, with excellent chemical methods (accuracy better than 3%), were arbitrarily rejected. These measurements had been published in 175 technical papers. For the past three decades, these well-known direct CO2 measurements, recently compiled and analyzed by Ernst-Georg Beck (Beck 2006a, Beck 2006b, Beck 2007), were completely ignored by climatologists—and not because they were wrong. Indeed, these measurements were made by several Nobel Prize winners, using the techniques that are standard textbook procedures in chemistry, biochemistry, botany, hygiene, medicine, nutrition, and ecology. The only reason for rejection was that these measurements did not fit the hypothesis of anthropogenic climatic warming. I regard this as perhaps the greatest scientific scandal of our time.

Jaworowski previously gave a statement to the the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in which he concluded:

The basis of most of the IPCC conclusions on anthropogenic causes and on projections of climatic change is the assumption of low level of CO2 in the pre-industrial atmosphere. This assumption, based on glaciological studies, is false. Therefore IPCC projections should not be used for national and global economic planning. The climatically inefficient and economically disastrous Kyoto Protocol, based on IPCC projections, was correctly defined by President George W. Bush as “fatally flawed”. This criticism was recently followed by the President of Russia Vladimir V. Putin. I hope that their rational views might save the world from enormous damage that could be induced by implementing recommendations based on distorted science.

Macleans: Al Gore's tenuous grasp on the 'truth'

Just inside the front cover, on page 4 of the May 14, 2007 issue of Maclean's magazine appears this photo of the Goracle with an interesting caption:

GORE BLASTED the Tories' green plan, but it includes almost every remedy that he calls for

The editorial that follows is called "Al Gore's tenuous grasp on the 'truth'" (sorry, it doesn't appear to be available on-line yet, but the print version of the magazine is available now and I've copied it here):

Of all the memorable scenes in Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth, it's hard to forget his forecast on rising oceans.

The collapse of the Greenland ice sheet at the hands of global warming will increase worldwide sea levels by nearly seven metres, Gore states. He sketches out the impact this will have: India and Bangladesh will be inundated. Forty million people will be displaced around Shanghai. Florida will all but disappear. Most cruel of all, however, is the effect on New York City. His graphics then show a blue tide of water slowly swallowing up city streets. "This is what would happen to Manhattan. They [scientists] can measure this precisely." In a whisper he adds: "The area where the World Trade Center Memorial is to be located would be underwater." It is perhaps the most powerful moment in the movie. Yet, like the bulk of Gore's message, it is also heavily exaggerated and of questionable practical value.

Those scientists in which Gore puts so much faith do discuss the possibility of a failure of Greenland's ice. In fact, the February 2007 report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change mentions the possibility of a seven-metre rise in the oceans. But that report also says global warming would have to continue "for millennia" for this to occur. Gore's Manhattan/Atlantis scenario is thus a potential risk sometime after 4007. It's not exactly a clear and present danger.

We bring this up not because global warming or environmentalism are things to be
ignored—they are important issues to be sure—but to point out Gore's frequent distance from the useful truth. His comment last week in Toronto that the Conservative government's environmental plan is a "complete and total fraud... designed to mislead the Canadian people" is as exaggerated and misplaced as his movie scaremongering. It is never a fraud to be honest. However painful it may be for single-minded idealists like Gore to admit, it is an absolute impossibility for Canada to meet its 2012 Kyoto targets without triggering economic collapse.

The plan released by Environment Minister John Baird last month includes almost all the remedies Gore himself calls for. Ottawa has already introduced tax breaks for public transit. Now we have rebates for fuel-efficient cars with new standards on the way. There will be carbon sequestering, a new technology fund and a ban on incandescent bulbs. Baird's plan is also notable for its focus on reducing air pollution, which arguably has a bigger negative impact on Canadians today than global warming ever will. Taken as a whole, the plan represents an effective compromise between economic sanity and environmental necessity.

Gore's fascinating reinvention of himself from earnest but boring politician to environmental crusader is a notable achievement. If he has made himself rich in the process, we applaud that as well. But during this transformation, Gore appears to have forgotten the art of realistic policy-making, and he has ceased to tell his audience the whole truth. M

Kudos to Macleans for making this honest and unbiased assessment of the Goracle and the deceptions that he promotes in the name of environmentalism.

There's lots more on environmentalism in this issue of Macleans, including a 5 page "Green Report" by Luiza CH. Savage and Nicholas Kohler, titled "Welcome to Planet Al" about the recent travels of the "larger-than-life-jet-setting-celebrity-magnet-environmental-rock-star" through Canada.

A lot more polar bears

More evidence that the polar bear population is not endangered by global warming.



In fact it is thriving.

Toronto - Polar bears are the poster animals of global warming. The image of a polar bear floating on an ice floe is one of the most dramatic visual statements in the fight against rising temperatures in the Arctic.

But global warming is not killing the polar bears of Canada's eastern Arctic, according to one ongoing study. Scheduled for release next year, it says the number of polar bears in the Davis Strait area of Canada's eastern Arctic – one of 19 polar bear populations worldwide – has grown to 2,100, up from 850 in the mid-1980s.

"There aren't just a few more bears. There are a ... lot more bears," biologist Mitchell Taylor told the Nunatsiaq News of Iqaluit in the Arctic territory of Nunavut. Earlier, in a long telephone conversation, Dr. Taylor explained his conviction that threats to polar bears from global warming are exaggerated and that their numbers are increasing. He has studied the animals for the Nunavut government for two decades.

Update: But then, you'll never convince this Australian reporter who emitted tonnes of carbon (I'm sure she purchased offsets) to jet to the Canadian arctic, only to be attacked by a one of those cuddly polar bears. To her, the bear attacked because of the effects of global warming, and had nothing to do with the fact that the bear is carnivorous predator.

Suzuki: I'm over by 'hundreds of tonnes'

This "profile" of David Suzuki appeared in today's Vancouver Sun (the writer is obviously so smitten by the great environmentalist that he completely forgot to make use of a grammar or spell-checker - I've copied his words below verbatim).

Buried amongst all the gushing praise, you will see this startling admission:

Our planet canabsorb each person creating one tonne of carbon emissions from fossilfuels a year, he figures. The average Canadian now accounts for morethan 20 tonnes. Yet hes far, far beyond even that excess. Each roundtrip between Toronto and London, he estimates, creates about one tonneof greenhouse gases per passenger. So, Suzuki guesses, hes over hislimit by hundreds of tonnes.

Yes, hes being buying carbon offsets, he says. But hes now decidedthats no longer enough: Starting out his eighth decade, hes decidedhe needs to be more in sync with the planets ability to absorb all hisgreenhouse gases, so this frequent flyers long-haul flights must bedrastically cut.

If he's over his limit by "hundreds of tonnes", then his carbon footprint is about 20 to 30 times that of the average Canadian. How Al Gorish of him!

So this epiphany means that Suzuki is promising no more annual vacations to Australia, and that he will be clustering future speaking engagements in geographic areas to cut back on emissions or speaking by video conference.

Big deal. Even with these reductions, Kooky Suzuki's carbon footprint will still dwarf that of the average Canadian, who he says is 20 times higher than ideal. The hypocrisy is astounding.

Beck's Climate of Fear

Glenn Becks global warming documentary last night on CNN was well done. Admittedly one-sided, Beck's report covered a lot of information that you quite simply won't hear from the main stream media - and gave a voice to a number of global warming skeptics.

Here's a report via Newsbusters.org

If you missed it last night, Glenn Beck’s skeptical program about anthropogenic global warming, “Climate of Fear,” aired on CNN Headline News.

In it, Beck skewered many of the misnomers advanced by global warming alarmists, especially soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore (full transcript available here).

Video (3:05): Real (2.28 MB) or Windows (1.90 MB), plus MP3 (2.83 MB).

The video clips above are of just the first few minutes of the show. If anyone knows where the full video is, please post a link in the comments.

Cool the Kyoto hot air

This editorial today was a bit surprising:

It's time to cool the rhetoric on global warming. While there's room for debate on climate change, demonizing people who hold a different view won't do the planet any good.

Canadians need to strike the best balance between economic growth and driving down greenhouse gas emissions. Not to try to outdo each other in name-calling.

Why did I find this editorial to be so surprising? After all, this type of sentiment has appeared in the press before. No, it wasn't what was being said, it was where it was being said.

When a paper like the Red Star argues for more debate on climate change, it gives hope that all the fear-mongering from the likes of Suzuki, the Goracle and Dion and all the hype and hysteria promoted by the media hasn't had the desired effect.

Bring on the debate.

Horner interview Part 2

Katie Fehlinger at Headline Earth concludes her interview with Chris Horner.

Weather Forecast | Weather Maps | Weather Radar

Part 1 is here.

Glenn Beck: Climate of Fear

Who's responsible for global warming and what can be done to fix it? Why would someone be harassed just for raising questions? Glenn Beck takes on the media hype surrounding the global warming debate and asks whether some proposed solutions would do more harm than good.

Don't miss "Exposed: A Climate of Fear," a one-hour Glenn Beck special report, Wednesday at 7 and 9 p.m. ET on CNN Headline News.

Spread the word - Download the brochure (pdf) from www.glennbeck.com

Here's a teaser: yesterday Glenn Beck spoke with Martin Durkin, director of the Great Global Warming Swindle.

Rex Murphy

from the CBC's The National of April 27th: