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Monday, August 18, 2008

Monckton vs. Littlemore Debate audio

The much anticipated radio debate between Christopher Walter(the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley), a global warming skeptic and Richard Littlemore, a global warming alarmist took place just a while ago on the Roy Green show on the Corus Network.
The audio is at Liberty News Central.

Arctic ice refuses to melt as ordered

Steven Goddard writes in the Register:

Just a few weeks ago, predictions of Arctic ice collapse were buzzing all over the internet. Some scientists were predicting that the "North Pole may be ice-free for first time this summer". Others predicted that the entire "polar ice cap would disappear this summer".

The Arctic melt season is nearly done for this year. The sun is now very low above the horizon and will set for the winter at the North Pole in five weeks. And none of these dire predictions have come to pass. Yet there is, however, something odd going on with the ice data.

(...)

The Arctic did not experience the meltdowns forecast by NSIDC and the Norwegian Polar Year Secretariat. It didn't even come close. Additionally, some current graphs and press releases from NSIDC seem less than conservative. There appears to be a consistent pattern of overstatement related to Arctic ice loss.

We know that Arctic summer ice extent is largely determined by variable oceanic and atmospheric currents such as the Arctic Oscillation. NASA claimed last summer that "not all the large changes seen in Arctic climate in recent years are a result of long-term trends associated with global warming". The media tendency to knee-jerkingly blame everything on "global warming" makes for an easy story - but it is not based on solid science. ®

Friday, August 15, 2008

Stop the Carbon Tax



via www.stopthecarbontax.ca

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Decade has had fewest 90-degree days since 1930

More evidence of global cooling via the Chicago Tribune:

August is the wettest and often the muggiest month of the year. Yet, summer heat continues in short supply, continuing a trend that has dominated much of the 21st Century's opening decade. There have been only 162 days 90 degrees or warmer at Midway Airport over the period from 2000 to 2008. That's by far the fewest 90-degree temperatures in the opening nine years of any decade on record here since 1930.

This summer's highest reading to date has been just 91 degrees. That's unusual. Since 1928, only one year—2000—has failed to record a higher warm-season temperature by Aug. 13.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

the world's most expensive man

JR has the details over at Just Right.

Seniors speak out on shifty green carbon taxes

Al Hollingsworth posted 3 interesting letters yesterday at HalifaxLive from Canadian seniors who are frustrated with the newest form of taxation: the carbon tax.

The carbon tax lie

As the baby boomers retire, seniors in this country are about to hold the balance of power, a scary thought if you are a Liberal. This week an item popped into my email box with a message to “Pass this on to everyone in Canada.” A near impossible task but, with an Internet platform I can post it for all to see.

The document is comprised of three letters, written by Canadians in various parts of this vast land. It is fair to say that the opinion reflects the mood of most seniors I know. Only those with blind loyalty to a party, including those who inherited their political stripes through genetics, might differ.
Bravo to Hollingsworth for reprinting these 3 letters from Canadian seniors. I like the straight no nonsense language in their letters reproduced below.

Letter 1
Subject: The Carbon Tax

The rumble is now moving across the country and will gain force.

Please don’t let this happen any further in Canada. Canada emits only 2% of the world’s supply of greenhouse gasses and 52% of that comes from the Oil Sands Plants.

Automotive emissions are less than 20% of the 48% balance of Canada’s 2% of the world outcome. Do the math, it’s such an insignificant amount it’s a joke.

Our fuel prices are now $6.75 per gallon, equivalent to $6.00 per gallon U.S.. When Canadians realize what a jackpot the politicians can get us into by supporting a carbon tax, they will be out to get any politician that supports this cause. Dion, Campbell etc. will regret the day they devised this scheme. Americans are screaming at $4.00 a gallon. Our provincial and federal governments are ripping us off with high taxes on fuel now. This is such a cash cow they don’t want to stop. Stop excessive taxation and giving our money away abroad. We need more support and tax relief for our seniors and baby boomers now retiring and trying to find a fixed income level they can exist upon after working all their lives and paying heavily into the system.

And I am not a Liberal or NDP supporter. I am a senior and a middle-of-the-road conservative and we will be in the majority in Canada for the next 20 years, so politicians get smart and support us.

Do some hard thinking about the future and protect our seniors and all the population from the excessive costs we are facing now and in the future with more taxes. Technology will fix the oil sands problem as they are working on a fix now to reduce that source in the future. Why us with these programs at this time?

Brian Morris
A concerned senior and loyal Canadian
Kelowna, BC

Letter 2
Consider this from one person who has bothered to do the home work.

When a politician’s lips move, I know he’s probably lying. Mr. Dion says his carbon tax will be revenue neutral. So, I went online and found a carbon calculator and keyed in the annual energy consumption for our household and learned we produce 17 toms of greenhouse gas. Fully 60% of this usage is for electricity which we use to heat our home.

I have already improved insulation in my walls and replaced my windows and doors; use the new “twirley” lights and ensured that my appliances are all Energy Star products. In the past 20 years, these measures reduced my electricity usage from 24,000 KW hours per year to 16,000 KW hours per year last year. What is my reward for this improved efficiency? My power bill is unchanged from what it was 20 years ago. But, my power bill would attract a carbon tax of $104 in year one of Mr. Dion’s plan and $416 in year four. My power bill would rise from $166 per month to $210 per month in year four.

Since I live on a fixed income consisting of CCP and Old Age Security, my income tax bill runs at less than $200 per year. So, for my household, Mr. Dion’s revenue neutral carbon tax will cost me $416 per year, less income tax reductions of about $10 per year.

Revenue neutral? In a pig’s eye! This is a tax on seniors living on fixed incomes. Well, Mr. Dion, you haven’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of ever getting my vote. I hope everyone else takes five minutes to run the same calculations I did and vote to send this joker to the political bone yard.

Jon C. Coates
Halifax NS

Letter 3
Remember when they brought in the National Income Tax? They promised that it would remain in effect only until all of Canada’s World War 1 debt was repaid. Fooled us good! Debt was repaid, but the tax never came off and will be with us for eternity.

How about this lie. Trudeau imposed a 5% tax on every liter of gas in order to establish a National Oil Company called Petro Canada. He swore that this tax would come off as soon as Petro Canada was up and running. And so it came to pass Petro Canada was established. It was sold to private hands, the enormous cash windfall was frittered away AND HIS 5% (plus, plus) still adorns our pumps to this very day.

Now how is this for a con job? Take our BC premier (Gordon) Campbell, PULEEZE. He truly believes that most British Columbians are brain dead. You will keep paying a yearly escalating carbon tax at the pump and you receive a reduction in your provincial income tax. The new political buzz word is “revenue neutral.” Should this not be called what it truly is; “RECYCLING YOUR MONEY.” Just think folks, another bureaucracy eating up our hard earned cash to administer loser dreams.

And remember, once a government gets addicted to a tax grab, and you let them get away with it, you have handed them a Carte Blanche ticket to impose new taxes, to keep raising others and use it to buy your votes to boot.

If we condone all this, then Premier Campbell is right in assuming that we are all brain dead in British Columbia.

Walt Grochmal
Vernon, BC
h/t: Newsbeat1

Friday, August 8, 2008

Dion's shifty green carbon tax claims first victims

And appropriately they're Liberals. Robert Morrissey has withdrawn his name as the Liberal's star candidate in the riding of Egmont in Prince Edward Island.

Robert Morrissey is clearly feeling the heat on the carbon tax and doesn’t want to campaign on raising the price of gas, home-heating fuel and groceries, says the federal Conservative Party’s director of communications.

Ryan Sparrow was reacting Wednesday to the surprise announcement by the star Liberal candidate that he was withdrawing his name as the nominated candidate in Egmont.

Morrissey won that nomination in front of a crowd of more than 1,300 last November in Woodstock. He defeated former P.E.I. premier Keith Milligan and Angie Cormier, a Cap-Egmont businesswoman, to win the nod.

“The Liberals can deliver their talking points all they want but everyone knows the deal. You don’t win a hotly contested nomination meeting for a long-held Liberal riding and then just quit,’’ Sparrow said from Ottawa.

“Morrissey is clearly feeling the heat on the carbon tax and doesn’t want to campaign on raising the price of gas, home heating fuel and groceries.’’
And now there's late breaking news that another Liberal candidate is stepping down, this time in Saskatchewan.
If there's to be a federal election this fall, the Liberals will need to get a candidate in Palliser.

Long-time nominated candidate Gary Oledzki is stepping down for personal and professional reasons.

The party is now on the search for a replacement.
All this comes as Dion claims he's ready to take on Stephen Harper's Conservatives in an election. Right. And Dion's shifty green carbon tax is all about the environment and not higher taxes and redistribution of wealth.
Liberals are being left in the dust by Conservatives when it comes to raising cash. They're in the same ballpark as third-place New Democrats.
It appears that the wheels are falling off Stephane Dion's election bus - even before an election has been called.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Gunter: Environmentalism is causing global warming

Lorne Gunter in today's National Post, All the news that's fit to scare

And what of the study, released in July by Switzerland's Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, that shows European temperatures, at least, have risen in large part because of efforts over the past 30 years to clean the continent's skies?

Christian Ruckstuhl and 12 coauthors found that of the 1C rise in temperature in Europe over the last three decades, "at least half of the warming" is attributable to a reduction of aerosols, such as sulphur dioxide and black soot particles. As Europeans have cleaned up their smokestacks and tailpipes, and as dirty old Soviet-era East European plants have been modernized to Western standards, more sunlight has penetrated the continent's atmosphere and warmed things up a bit.

In other words, environmentalism is causing global warming. As ecoadvocates have won tighter clean-air regulations, their efforts have been rewarded with brighter days (a good thing), but also warmer temperatures.
Gunter also comments on the recent news stories about warming in the Canadian Arctic:
Fear that melt water from the park's glaciers might lead to flash flooding and landslides has been reported by everyone from AFP to the BBC as proof of the adverse side-effects of man-made climate change.

Meanwhile, it is barely reported outside Alaska that America's northernmost state is having a record cool summer.

If it reaches 19C in Anchorage today, it will be just the eighth time that's happened this summer. Indeed, this could be the first summer ever that Anchorage never hits 24C.

Auyuittuq is at 66 degrees north; Anchorage is at 61.

The Baffin story may be more significant than the Alaska one. But why are we hearing all about one and nothing about the other? You can bet that if Anchorage were suffering a record hot summer, it would be all over the news and presented--as the Baffin temperatures are -- as yet further proof of the dangerous impacts of global warming in the north.
Once more, the mainstream media ignores news stories that do not fit with its bias towards global warming alarmism.

Friday, August 1, 2008

Arctic ice greater than normal

Next time a global warming alarmist tries to tell you that arctic ice is at record lows, you can correct their misinformation by referring them to this article by Piers Akerman in the Daily Telegraph.

It seems that in fact there is "more ice than normal in the Arctic waters north of the Svalbard archipelago" these days.

Ed: the above link and quote corrected.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Jennifer Marohasy has posted a link to this pdf copy of Ian Wilson's excellent presentation with an alternate explanation for climate change.

Great Jupiter! I think he might be onto something here!

h/t: the Daily Bayonet.

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Dion mocked by his own staffers over the Green Shaft

Stephane Dion, the current leader of the Liberal Party of Canada has been mocked by his own staffers! Stephen Taylor provides this little tidbit which he received from a source at the Liberal Research Bureau.

Read this document on Scribd: greenshaft

When your own paid staffers are producing stuff like this, you know you must be in trouble. Big trouble.

Related:
Prime Minister Stephen Harper says his minority government will be holding confidence votes in the Commons this autumn, setting up another stare-down with the Opposition Liberals.
If Dion is afraid of forcing an election by bringing votes of confidence, then PM Harper seems ready to take the initiative.

Hey, somebody's got to do the job of the Official Opposition.

We have water

NASA Spacecraft Confirms Martian Water, Mission Extended

TUCSON, Ariz. -- Laboratory tests aboard NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander's robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples.

"We have water," said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. "We've seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted."
more here.

The so-called "smart" car

Wasn't it really just a matter of time until the performance guys set their sights on the stupid Smart Car:

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Feulner: Kyoto's pointless promises

An excerpt for Ed Feulner's opinion piece Kyoto's pointless promises from the IndyStar:

China's CO2 emissions rose 8 percent last year, after jumping more than 11 percent in each of the two previous years. According to a Dutch study, China alone accounted for two-thirds of the growth in global greenhouse-gas emissions in 2007, and its current lead over the United States in such emissions is only expected to grow.

Contrast that with our environmental record.

The U.S. government estimates that energy-related carbon dioxide emissions increased by just 1.6 percent in 2007, after dropping 1.5 percent the year before. The growth in our emissions is less than the growth of our gross domestic product, meaning we've improved the economy while reducing the growth in our emissions.

And we're doing that without being part of the Kyoto treaty.
Indeed, few people would know this fact because the US is generally portrayed by the main stream media as the guilty culprit when it comes to emissions of so-called "greenhouse gases". More on the Kyoto Accord:
That 1997 agreement requires the 37 countries that signed it to slash emissions by a combined 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. But the treaty is a pipe dream. Instead of falling, the United Nations reported that such emissions are nearing "an all-time high." Greenhouse gas emissions from the Kyoto signers increased 2.6 percent between 2000 and 2005.
Yet we have seen no increase in world temperatures in the past ten years and scientists are now forcasting a period of global cooling lasting maybe one or two decades.
Signing Kyoto may allow a country to claim it's a good "global citizen," but many of those citizens aren't keeping their promises. The U.N. reports Kyoto signers Austria, New Zealand and Canada have all increased their emissions over 1990 levels -- by 14, 23 and 54 percent, respectively.

In fact, the U.N. admits that the only reason the world might meet Kyoto's goal (a 5 percent reduction from 1990 emissions levels by 2012) is because the economies of so many Eastern European economies collapsed when the Iron Curtain fell. In other words, only a domestic recession will allow the planet to hit Kyoto's target.
Feulner goes on to discuss the economics of Kyoto and the failure of the US congress to pass the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill because "it would slash our national GDP by at least $1.7 trillion by the year 2030".

Yet despite the failure of the majority of Kyoto's signatories to meet their emissions reductions targets, and despite the minimal effect on world temperatures that fully implemented Kyoto CO2 reductions would bring (0.07 degrees Celsius reduction in global temperatures by 2050), the world marches on toward Kyotocide with the UN leading the charge for a new "son of Kyoto" treaty which would reduce CO2 emissions even further.

I'll close with Feulner's final comment:
The world doesn't need a new Kyoto -- the treaty that accomplished nothing but takes the gold medal for uselessness and hypocrisy.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Better, cheaper LED's

Too bad Dalton. The days of the mercury-laden compact flourescent light (CFL) may be numbered...

The incandescent lightbulb that wastes 90% of the electricity as heat is dying, we all know that. But a new breakthrough in solid state lighting might also kill compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) faster than some expected. Scientists at Purdue University have figured out how to manufacture LED solid-state lights on regular metal-coated silicon wafers (more details below). What this means is: much lower costs.
More here.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Seven graphs

Andrew Bolt provides seven graphs that should make you ask: What? Has global warming now stopped?


Click image for the full story or download the graphs in PDF.

Evans: No smoking gun for CO2

Dr David Evans built models for the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 thru 2005. He writes in the Australian that scientists have been unable to find the "signature" of an increased greenhouse effect caused by CO2, that there is no smoking hot spot:

The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming. So we know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming. If we had found the greenhouse signature then I would be an alarmist again.

When the signature was found to be missing in 2007 (after the latest IPCC report), alarmists objected that maybe the readings of the radiosonde thermometers might not be accurate and maybe the hot spot was there but had gone undetected. Yet hundreds of radiosondes have given the same answer, so statistically it is not possible that they missed the hot spot.
Dr. Evans is a convert, a skeptic. He quotes Lord Keynes who asked, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

Be sure to read the whole thing.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Proved: There is no climate crisis

A major new paper shows CO2’s effect on temperature was overstated 500-2000% by the IPCC.

WASHINGTON (7-15-08) - Mathematical proof that there is no “climate crisis” appears today in a major, peer-reviewed paper in Physics and Society, a learned journal of the 10,000-strong American Physical Society, SPPI reports.

Christopher Monckton, who once advised Margaret Thatcher, demonstrates via 30 equations that computer models used by the UN’s climate panel (IPCC) were pre-programmed with overstated values for the three variables whose product is “climate sensitivity” (temperature increase in response to greenhouse-gas increase), resulting in a 500-2000% overstatement of CO2’s effect on temperature in the IPCC’s latest climate assessment report, published in 2007.

Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered demonstrates that later this century a doubling of the concentration of CO2 compared with pre-industrial levels will increase global mean surface temperature not by the 6 °F predicted by the IPCC but, harmlessly, by little more than 1 °F. Lord Monckton concludes –

“… Perhaps real-world climate sensitivity is very much below the IPCC’s estimates. Perhaps, therefore, there is no ‘climate crisis’ at all. … The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.”
The full report, Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered is available at the American Physical Society (APS) website newsletter Physics & Society: July 2008.
Lord Monckton’s paper reveals that –
  • The IPCC’s 2007 climate summary overstated CO2’s impact on temperature by 500-2000%;
  • CO2 enrichment will add little more than 1 °F (0.6 °C) to global mean surface temperature by 2100;
  • Not one of the three key variables whose product is climate sensitivity can be measured directly;
  • The IPCC’s values for these key variables are taken from only four published papers, not 2,500;
  • The IPCC’s values for each of the three variables, and hence for climate sensitivity, are overstated;
  • “Global warming” halted ten years ago, and surface temperature has been falling for seven years;
  • Not one of the computer models relied upon by the IPCC predicted so long and rapid a cooling;
  • The IPCC inserted a table into the scientists’ draft, overstating the effect of ice-melt by 1000%;
  • It was proved 50 years ago that predicting climate more than two weeks ahead is impossible;
  • Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth warmed;
  • In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years.

Update: from the APS Physics and Society website:
There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.
Also this report from DailyTech:
The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming "incontrovertible."

(...)

After publication of this story, the APS responded with a statement that its Physics and Society Forum is merely one unit within the APS, and its views do not reflect those of the Society at large.
At least the Physics and Society people at APS are encouraging debate on the science. That's long overdue.

Monday, July 14, 2008

The green shaft

PM Stephen Harper comments on Stephane Dion's shifty green carbon tax proposal:

"Dion's carbon tax is not an environment policy. It is just a wealth redistribution program disguised as an environment policy," Harper told the crowd. "The Green Shift is a green shaft and we must never let it happen to our country."
Exactly.

Update: Lorne Gunter.
By aiming his taxes at producers, rather than consumers, Mr. Dion clearly means to extract more of his new revenues from some provinces than others -- not coincidentally the provinces that seldom elect Liberal MPs.

The share of the green taxes he wishes to impose on Alberta and Saskatchewan would work out to nearly $1,500 per capita, or $6,000 per family. In the rest of the country, the load would be just $325 per person or $1,300 a family.
Is that the sound of separatism I hear coming from the west?

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Dion's shifty green carbon tax

is looking more and more like it's just another Liberal tax. From the Edmonton Journal: Carbon tax would tap Alberta resources to fund Liberal social programs

CALGARY - An Ontario Liberal MP said Friday his party's Green Shift carbon-tax proposal will raid Alberta's energy riches and transfer wealth "from rich to poor, from the oilpatch to the rest of the country."

Ken Boshcoff, MP for Thunder Bay-Rainy River, rekindled memories of the controversial national energy program when he stated on a blog post that the Grits' Green Shift program will inflict financial pain on Alberta and its oil and gas industry.

The carbon-tax proposal -- which is being sold to Canadians as an environmental initiative, first and foremost -- would slap a levy on greenhouse gas emissions in Canada and return the roughly $15 billion in annual revenues through a series of cuts to income and corporate tax.

Failing to say much about any environmental benefits of the plan, Boshcoff proudly proclaimed on a political news blog that the Green Shift is the "most aggressive anti-poverty program in 40 years," which will target wealthy provinces -- particularly Alberta.

"The shift will transfer wealth from rich to poor, from the oilpatch to the rest of the country, and from the coffers of big business to the pockets of low-income Canadians," he said in a post on NetNewsledger.com.

The MP explains in his post that the $15 billion in revenues will be used to pay for Liberal party social policies, including $9 billion in tax cuts for low-income earners and $2.9 billion for a universal child tax benefit.
Just where are the environmental benefits that are supposed to come from Dion's shifty green carbon tax? No mention of them. None. Conservative MP Jason Kenney adds:
"It reveals the real plan here, which is a massive new tax in order to finance increased social spending," Kenney said. "When you scratch below the surface, what you see here is a discredited, old, beggar-thy-neighbour, class-warfare politics."
What all of this talk by Dion & company about "green" taxes really boils down to is the introduction of massive new taxes and increased social spending with no environmental impact whatsoever.

Same old Liberal tax and spend. Same old Liberal plans for the redistribution of wealth from the "have" provinces (are there any left besides Alberta?) to the "have-not" provinces. This has a smell about it that's reminiscent of P.E. Trudeau and Marc LaLonde and the NEP.

Can the Liberals possibly come up with anything more divisive for this country?

Related: Company seeks $8.5 million from Liberals for use of Green Shift name.