Al Gore: architect of fear

An excellent article by Marc Sheppard: Al Gore's Real Assault on Reason:

In the opening chapter of The Assault on Reason, its seldom reasonable author accuses the Bush administration of exploiting people’s fears “to short-circuit debate and drive the public agenda without regard to the evidence, the facts, or the public interest."

[...]

What’s most confounding about these stinging allegations is that they were penned by the very same man whose Oscar awarded fear-exploitation-film proclaimed – in a gross distortion of prevailing evidence and facts -- that: “Humanity is sitting on a time bomb."

Al Gore has made the exploition of people's fears into an art form. Hypocrisy is no stranger to the former VP. He is himself one of the great architects of anxiety and fear:

As fear of impending doom plays such a crucial role in hysteria-building, it’s no wonder that AGW has been blamed for everything from lighthearted Costa Rican Frog Die-Offs, Australian cockroach migration, Swedish beetle-infestation, Great Britain’s puffin decline, a rise in hay fever and even staff shortages at Bulgarian brothels to deadly serious outbreaks of Malaria, Dengue Fever, West Nile Virus and Cholera, the killer Indian Ocean tsunami, and even last week’s Lake Tahoe wildfires.

In fact, when U.N Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon wrote a WaPo piece this month actually blaming the genocide in Darfur on AGW, his was, not all that surprisingly, not the first. In fact, back in April, Stephan Faris had suggested in an Atlantic Monthly article that:

“The violence in Darfur is usually attributed to ethnic hatred. But global warming may be primarily to blame.”

A good read.

Gore should call for an end to distortion of science

From Alarmist global warming claims melt under scientific scrutiny in the Chicago Sun-Times

In his new book, The Assault on Reason, Al Gore pleads,

"We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public's ability to discern the truth."

Gore repeatedly asks that science and reason displace cynical political posturing as the central focus of public discourse.

If Gore really means what he writes, he has an opportunity to make a difference by leading by example on the issue of global warming.

A cooperative and productive discussion of global warming must be open and honest regarding the science. Global warming threats ought to be studied and mitigated, and they should not be deliberately exaggerated as a means of building support for a desired political position.

Many of the assertions Gore makes in his movie, ''An Inconvenient Truth,'' have been refuted by science, both before and after he made them. Gore can show sincerity in his plea for scientific honesty by publicly acknowledging where science has rebutted his claims.

The author, James M. Taylor calls on Al Gore to lead by example in his call for an end to the distortion of science and goes on to list a number of distortions that Gore could easily correct - if he means what he says.

Turkey leg carved

Too bad.

The Istanbul, Turkey leg of Al Gore's upcoming Live Earth global spectacular has been canceled. Local media suggests the July 07 concert failed to attract sponsorship or promised financial support from the Turkish government.

Or maybe there just wasn't any taste for it in Turkey.

Tickets had yet to go on sale, although major Turkish stars including Mor Ve Otesi, Sebnem Ferah and Hayko Cepkin had agreed to perform. Officials will instead erect giant screens so locals can gather to watch the global warming awareness gigs.

The 24-hour Live Earth concert series will begin in Sydney, Australia and continue across the world with events in Japan, China, South Africa, Germany, London and Brazil, before concluding in New York.

The Police, Kanye West, Faith Hill, Bon Jovi and the Red Hot Chili Peppers are to perform on the steps of Washington D.C.'s Capitol Building on July 7.

Damn, now I'm going to have to burn all my Faith Hill albums.

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On second thought... maybe not.

Trenberth: CGMs cannot predict climate

Some startling comments about the computer models that are "predicting" all the doom and gloom about man-made global warming. Startling considering the source. Via Professor Bob Carter at news.com.au:

KEVIN Trenberth is head of the large US National Centre for Atmospheric Research and one of the advisory high priests of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

A New Zealander by birth, Trenberth has had a distinguished career as a climate scientist with interests in the use of computer General Circulation Models (GCMs), the basis for most of the public alarm about dangerous global warming.

When such a person gives an opinion about the scientific value of GCMs as predictive tools, it is obviously wise to pay attention.

In a remarkable contribution to Nature magazine's Climate Feedback blog, Trenberth concedes GCMs cannot predict future climate and claims the IPCC is not in the business of climate prediction.

Here's the full text of what Trenberth had to say [with emphasis added]:

I have often seen references to predictions of future climate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), presumably through the IPCC assessments (the various chapters in the recently completedWorking Group I Fourth Assessment report ican be accessed through this listing). In fact, since the last report it is also often stated that the science is settled or done and now is the time for action.

In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers “what if” projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios. There are a number of assumptions that go into these emissions scenarios. They are intended to cover a range of possible self consistent “story lines” that then provide decision makers with information about which paths might be more desirable. But they do not consider many things like the recovery of the ozone layer, for instance, or observed trends in forcing agents. There is no estimate, even probabilistically, as to the likelihood of any emissions scenario and no best guess.

Even if there were, the projections are based on model results that provide differences of the future climate relative to that today. None of the models used by IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate. In particular, the state of the oceans, sea ice, and soil moisture has no relationship to the observed state at any recent time in any of the IPCC models. There is neither an El Niño sequence nor any Pacific Decadal Oscillation that replicates the recent past; yet these are critical modes of variability that affect Pacific rim countries and beyond. The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, that may depend on the thermohaline circulation and thus ocean currents in the Atlantic, is not set up to match today’s state, but it is a critical component of the Atlantic hurricanes and it undoubtedly affects forecasts for the next decade from Brazil to Europe. Moreover, the starting climate state in several of the models may depart significantly from the real climate owing to model errors. I postulate that regional climate change is impossible to deal with properly unless the models are initialized.

The current projection method works to the extent it does because it utilizes differences from one time to another and the main model bias and systematic errors are thereby subtracted out. This assumes linearity. It works for global forced variations, but it can not work for many aspects of climate, especially those related to the water cycle. For instance, if the current state is one of drought then it is unlikely to get drier, but unrealistic model states and model biases can easily violate such constraints and project drier conditions. Of course one can initialize a climate model, but a biased model will immediately drift back to the model climate and the predicted trends will then be wrong. Therefore the problem of overcoming this shortcoming, and facing up to initializing climate models means not only obtaining sufficient reliable observations of all aspects of the climate system, but also overcoming model biases. So this is a major challenge.

The IPCC report makes it clear that there is a substantial future commitment to further climate change even if we could stabilize atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. And the commitment is even greater given that the best we can realistically hope for in the near term is to perhaps stabilize emissions, which means increases in concentrations of long-lived greenhouse gases indefinitely into the future. Thus future climate change is guaranteed.

So if the science is settled, then what are we planning for and adapting to? A consensus has emerged that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” to quote the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Working Group I Summary for Policy Makers (pdf) and the science is convincing that humans are the cause. Hence mitigation of the problem: stopping or slowing greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere is essential. The science is clear in this respect.

However, the science is not done because we do not have reliable or regional predictions of climate. But we need them. Indeed it is an imperative! So the science is just beginning. Beginning, that is, to face up to the challenge of building a climate information system that tracks the current climate and the agents of change, that initializes models and makes predictions, and that provides useful climate information on many time scales regionally and tailored to many sectoral needs.

We will adapt to climate change. The question is whether it will be planned or not? How disruptive and how much loss of life will there be because we did not adequately plan for the climate changes that are already occurring?

Kevin Trenberth
Climate Analysis Section, NCAR

As Prof. Carter says, it would be wise to pay attention to what this man says and:

Trenberth's statements are a direct admission of the validity of similar criticisms that have been made of GCMs and the IPCC by climate rationalists for many years.

[...]

These various criticisms of climate modelling can be summed up in the following statement – there is no predictive value in the current generation of computer GCMs and therefore the alarmist IPCC statements about human-caused global warming are unjustified.

h/t: moonbattery

Ban Ki-moon: Climate Change Behind Darfur Killing

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon wants you to feel very, very guilty about global warming. via Brietbart [emphasis added]:

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that the slaughter in Darfur was triggered by global climate change and that more such conflicts may be on the horizon, in an article published Saturday.

"The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change," Ban said in a Washington Post opinion column.

UN statistics showed that rainfall declined some 40 percent over the past two decades, he said, as a rise in Indian Ocean temperatures disrupted monsoons.

"This suggests that the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming," the South Korean diplomat wrote.

"It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought," Ban said in the Washington daily.

When Darfur's land was rich, he said, black farmers welcomed Arab herders and shared their water, he said.

With the drought, however, farmers fenced in their land to prevent overgrazing.

"For the first time in memory, there was no longer enough food and water for all. Fighting broke out," he said.

A hat tip goes to my favourite radio talk show host, who had this comment:

Just when you thought it couldn't get stranger, just when you thought -- it actually gets stranger after this story. But when you thought it couldn't get stranger, we can all breathe a huge sigh of relief. Well, because for a while there, you know, I thought it was barbaric Islamofascists killing off the blacks and Christians in a religious-based genocidal frenzy.

Bonus: listen to Al Gore sing Ball of Fire.

Cross posted at Mitchieville

Bryson: Don't make me throw up

via the Madison, Wisconsin Capital Times:

Reid Bryson, known as the father of scientific climatology, considers global warming a bunch of hooey.

The UW-Madison professor emeritus, who stands against the scientific consensus on this issue, is referred to as a global warming skeptic. But he is not skeptical that global warming exists, he is just doubtful that humans are the cause of it.

There is no question the earth has been warming. It is coming out of the "Little Ice Age," he said in an interview this week.

"However, there is no credible evidence that it is due to mankind and carbon dioxide. We've been coming out of a Little Ice Age for 300 years. We have not been making very much carbon dioxide for 300 years. It's been warming up for a long time," Bryson said.

[...]

Just because almost all of the scientific community believes in man-made global warming proves absolutely nothing, Bryson said. "Consensus doesn't prove anything, in science or anywhere else, except in democracy, maybe."

Bryson, 87, was the founding chairman of the department of meteorology at UW-Madison and of the Institute for Environmental Studies, now known as the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. He retired in 1985, but has gone into the office almost every day since. He does it without pay.

[...]

So, if global warming isn't such a burning issue, why are thousands of scientists so concerned about it?

"Why are so many thousands not concerned about it?" Bryson shot back.

"There is a lot of money to be made in this," he added. "If you want to be an eminent scientist you have to have a lot of grad students and a lot of grants. You can't get grants unless you say, 'Oh global warming, yes, yes, carbon dioxide.'"

Speaking out against global warming is like being a heretic, Bryson noted.

[...]

"There is very little truth to what is being said and an awful lot of religion. It's almost a religion. Where you have to believe in anthropogenic (or man-made) global warming or else you are nuts."

While Bryson doesn't think that global warming is man-made, he said there is some evidence of an effect from mankind, but not an effect of carbon dioxide.

For example, in Wisconsin in the last 100 years the biggest heating has been around Madison, Milwaukee and in the Southeast, where the cities are. There was a slight change in the Green Bay area, he said. The rest of the state shows no warming at all.

"The growth of cities makes it hotter, but that was true back in the 1930s, too," Bryson said. "Big cities were hotter than the surrounding countryside because you concentrate the traffic and you concentrate the home heating. And you modify the surface, you pave a lot of it."

Bryson didn't see Al Gore's movie about global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth."

"Don't make me throw up," he said. "It is not science. It is not true."

Carter: High price for load of hot air

Bob Carter says politicians are being deceived and poses some questions for global warming alarmists and NASA chief Michael Griffin at news.com.au:

Griffin seems to be referring to human-caused global warming, but irrespective of that his opinion is unsupported by the evidence.

The salient facts are these. First, the accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2.

Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).

Third, there are strong indications from solar studies that Earth's current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades.

Propaganda

As they promote thier dogma, environmental alarmists are always quick to dismiss and demonize those who disagree with their position as "deniers" or discredit them for being in the pocket of "big oil". It reminds one of totalitarian censorship and propaganda. At the Reference Frame, Luboš Motl investigates the similarities in Green and Communist propaganda: a comparison.

Those readers who haven't lived in a totalitarian system may have problems to understand why the rest of us finds the structure of the environmentalist propaganda almost identical to the structure of the communist propaganda. To fix this problem, let me translate the official response to Charter 77, the pro-freedom statement penned by Václav Havel. You can compare it e.g. with DeSmogBlog's new defamatory pages against 61 of the "climate change deniers".

[...]

Let me now try to identify some basic common features of the propagandistic algorithms of both ideologies; it won't be too hard:

• They try to convey the message that the opposition doesn't exist
• If the opposition exists, it is composed of unsuccessful or dead bodies who have been defeated decades ago
• The members of the opposition are being controlled by others, usually by demonized sources of power, with hints of corruption
• Opposition gets badges that are meant to be derogatory - capitalist, Zionist, deniers, renegades, contrarians, reactionary, burgeoisie, oil-funded etc.
• Opposition is presented as being against all the people - and all the people should agree and do agree with that; statements that everyone agrees and everyone keeps on supporting the official position are repeated all the time
• The opposition members are criticized for their very existence and for the tiniest deviations from the official ideology, to assure everyone else that one simply can't join them if he wants to survive
• Opposition is claimed to misinterpret words and facts even though it is pretty obvious that it is the official party who is doing that
• The opposing individuals are deconstructed one by one by carefully crafted ad hominem attacks
• The propaganda openly states that a debate or a dialogue itself is unacceptable and no details of the opponents' opinions are ever analyzed
• Whenever it's possible, the opponents must be fired or otherwise harassed

Sound familiar?

Europeans not on track to meet Kyoto

The European Union (EU) is not on track to meet it's greenhouse gas emissions targets under Kyoto, according to an environmental group:

EU emissions slightly decreased in 2005 relative to the previous year, by 0.7 percent - the first decrease since 2001. But in 2005, the combined EU-15 emissions were still only 1.5 percent below 1990 levels, meaning that the EU-15 is not on course to meet its international Kyoto Protocol obligations to cut greenhouse gas pollution by 8 percent by 2012. Spain, Luxembourg, Austria, Portugal, Italy and Ireland are still furthest from their Kyoto emissions targets.

Sonja Meister, Climate Campaigner at Friends of the Europe said: "The new data clearly shows that the EU is still way off course to meet its Kyoto target. The slight drop in emissions in 2005 is a decrease over only one year and is by no means a trend yet. European governments have to seriously increase their efforts to combat climate change, with drastic measures now to set the EU's emissions on a downward path into the long term."

The slight reduction in emissions in 2005 was mainly due to large emissions reductions from Germany, Finland and the Netherlands, which masked increases in many other countries, like Spain and Lithuania. The reduction in Germany and Finland results partly from a shift from coal to cleaner energy sources in the production of public electricity. But at the same time, Friends of the Earth Europe highlights that the decrease in household emissions in Germany and also the Netherlands could be a result of warmer weather conditions, especially since these countries experienced particularly warm winters in 2005.

Emphasis added.

Interesting statement above, "the decrease in emissions... could be a result of warmer weather". So warmer weather accounts for the lowers ghg emissions from energy used for heating. Hmmm.

Interview: Patrick Michaels

Katie Fehlinger at Headline Earth interviews Dr. Patrick Michaels, Sr. Fellow for Environmental Studies at the CATO Institute on global warming, economic development and how to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It's about a minute into the video after the headlines.

Weather Forecast | Weather Maps | Weather Radar

Michaels: "Propserous societies are clean societies. They invest in efficient things".

When your past statements come back to haunt you

YouTube Video of Al Gore from 1992 commenting on President George Herbert Walker Bush.

...did his judgment of foreign policy come into play when he was told that this nation with a record of terrorism, continuing... was making a sustained, concerted effort to acquire weapons of mass destruction - nuclear, chemical and biological?

Wow. Al must really regret having invented the internet...

The T3 tax

Canadian economist, Dr. Ross McKitrick proposes a carbon tax based on and tied to actual measured levels of anthropogenic global warming. To the climate alarmists, this is called putting you money where your mouth is.

From today's Financial Post: [emphasis added]

The approach is based on two points of expert consensus. First, most economists who have written on carbon-dioxide emissions have concluded that an emissions tax is preferable to a cap-and-trade system. The reason is that, while emission-abatement costs vary a lot, based on the target, the social damages from a tonne of carbon-dioxide emissions are roughly constant. The first ton of carbon dioxide imposes the same social cost as the last ton.

In this case, it is better for policy-makers to guess the right price for emissions rather than the right cap. Most studies that have looked at that the global cost per tonne of carbon dioxide have found it is likely to be rather low, less than US$10 per tonne. We don't know what the right emissions cap is, but, if we put a low charge on each unit of emissions, the market will find the (roughly) correct emissions cap.

Second, climate models predict that, if greenhouse gases are driving climate change, there will be a unique fingerprint in the form of a strong warming trend in the tropical troposphere, the region of the atmosphere up to 15 kilometres in altitude, over the tropics, from 20? North to 20? South. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that this will be an early and strong signal of anthropogenic warming. Climate changes due to solar variability or other natural factors will not yield this pattern: only sustained greenhouse warming will do it.

Temperatures in the tropical troposphere are measured every day using weather satellites. The data are analyzed by several teams, including one at the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH) and one at Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) in California. According to the UAH team, the mean tropical tropospheric temperature anomaly (its departure from the 1979-98 average) over the past three years is 0.18C. The corresponding RSS estimate is 0.29C.

Now put those two ideas together. Suppose each country implements something called the T3 tax, whose U.S. dollar rate is set equal to 20 times the three-year moving average of the RSS and UAH estimates of the mean tropical tropospheric temperature anomaly, assessed per tonne of carbon dioxide, updated annually. Based on current data, the tax would be US$4.70 per ton, which is about the median mainstream carbon-dioxide-damage estimate from a major survey published in 2005 by economist Richard Tol. The tax would be implemented on all domestic carbon-dioxide emissions, all the revenues would be recycled into domestic income tax cuts to maintain fiscal neutrality, and there would be no cap on total emissions.

This tax rate is low, and would yield very little emissions abatement. Global-warming skeptics and opponents of greenhouse-abatement policy will like that. But would global-warming activists? They should -- because according to them, the tax will climb rapidly in the years ahead.

The IPCC predicts a warming rate in the tropical troposphere of about double that at the surface, implying about 0.2C to 1.2C per decade in the tropical troposphere under greenhouse-forcing scenarios. That implies the tax will climb by $4 to $24 per tonne per decade, a much more aggressive schedule of emission fee increases than most current proposals. At the upper end of warming forecasts, the tax could reach $200 per tonne of CO2 by 2100, forcing major carbon-emission reductions and a global shift to non-carbon energy sources.

Global-warming activists would like this. But so would skeptics, because they believe the models are exaggerating the warming forecasts. After all, the averaged UAH/ RSS tropical troposphere series went up only about 0.08C over the past decade, and has been going down since 2002. Some solar scientists even expect pronounced cooling to begin in a decade. If they are right, the T3 tax will fall below zero within two decades, turning into a subsidy for carbon emissions.

More at Newsbusters.

It sounds logical enough. A carbon emissions tax offset by income tax cuts. If anthropogenic global warming continues to increase, the carbon tax will increase accordingly. If, as many suspect, man-made global warming is greatly exaggerated and temperatures do not rise as predicted, the tax will remain low or even disappear if temperatures cool.

Let's see if this proposal has any legs.