We should give up futile attempts to combat climate change

A group of over 100 scientists has written an open letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations stating the UN climate conference is taking the World in entirely the wrong direction.

Snowjob

A new video from the Heartland.org disputes the common misconceptions about anthropogenic global warming using clips from An Inconvenient Truth and the Great Global Warming Swindle.



The video concludes with this statement:

Learning the facts is the best way to understand that global warming is occurring but is not a crisis. It is better to trust scientists than politicians. Don't let fear ruin your day. Learn the facts.

How inconvenient for the Goracle.

More here.

January 2008 Environment & Climate News

Three respected scientists, Arthur B. Robinson, Noah E. Robinson, and Willie Soon, have written a review article on climate change that is generating considerable “buzz” in the scientific community. The essay, published originally in the peer-reviewed Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, could fundamentally change the world-wide debate on global warming and appears in full in this special edition of ECN. We are thankful to the authors and Dr. Jane Orient, president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, for permission to reprint it.

via Heartland.org

Download the full review article in the January 2008 issue of Environment & Climate News

UN censors dissenting scientists

From Heartland.org:

Lone voice of dissent censored by United Nations
Written By: Tom Swiss
Published In: News Releases
Publication Date: December 13, 2007
Publisher: The Heartland Institute


(CHICAGO, Illinois - December 13, 2007) -- For the second time this week, the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) was kicked off the press schedule for the United Nations' climate conference in Bali, Indonesia.

The ICSC is a group of scientists from Africa, Australia, Europe, India, New Zealand, and the U.S. who contend sound science does not support the outrageous claims and draconian regulations proposed in Bali.

The ICSC team leader, Bryan Leyland, an expert in carbon and energy trading, reported, "This morning I confirmed we had the main conference hall for 9:00 AM tomorrow. At 4:30 PM today, I found that Barbara Black bumped us off the schedule and closed further bookings. I'm fuming."

Black is NGO liaison officer for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bali.

Earlier in the week, UN officials in Bali closed down the ICSC's first press conference there. Black interrupted the press conference and demanded the scientists immediately cease. She threatened to have the police physically remove them from the premises.

Black's efforts are part of the United Nations' ongoing censorship of dissenting voices at Bali. ICSC scientists have been prevented from participating in panel discussions, side events, and exhibits.

For further information:

Bryan Leyland
+64 21 978 996
bryanleyland@mac.com
Christopher Monckton
+44 7980 634784
monckton@mail.com

Study: Part of Global-Warming Model May Be Wrong

via Fox News:

Part of the scientific consensus on global warming may be flawed, a new study asserts.

The researchers compared predictions of 22 widely used climate "models" — elaborate schematics that try to forecast how the global weather system will behave — with actual readings gathered by surface stations, weather balloons and orbiting satellites over the past three decades.

The study, published online this week in the International Journal of Climatology, found that while most of the models predicted that the middle and upper parts of the troposphere —1 to 6 miles above the Earth's surface — would have warmed drastically over the past 30 years, actual observations showed only a little warming, especially over tropical regions.

"Can the models accurately explain the climate from the recent past? It seems that the answer is no," said lead study author David H. Douglass, a physicist specializing in climate at the University of Rochester.

Douglass and his co-authors S. Fred Singer, a physicist at the University of Virginia, and John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, are noted global-warming skeptics.

Kyoto Double talk

via today's National Post:

Is it just our imagination, or is there something about global warming that makes Liberals especially unbearable?

(...)

First, there is Stephane Dion, who served as environment minister from 2004 to 2006. He is in Bali this week, spreading the same climate change gospel he refused to implement when he was actually in a position to do so. He calls Mr. Harper's approach "a recipe for failure." Perhaps. But we would prefer Mr. Harper's "recipe" to the equally failed approach Mr. Dion's Liberals advocated while in power -- which consisted in large part of shipping off hundreds of millions of dollars to Vladimir Putin's Russia to purchase carbon credits. Under both the Liberals and the Conservatives, Canada has badly missed its Kyoto targets. At least under Mr. Harper, we don't have to prop up Russia's quasi-dictatorship for the privilege.

Full article.

While Greenies Gab, Science Strides Forward

Marc Sheppard asks, How Green Was My Bali? and explains that the scientific evidence continues to contradict the carbon-minded global warming alarmists gathered at the latest UN climate fest. From today's American Thinker:

Without exception, everything discussed at UNFCC, indeed the very temporary greening of Bali itself, is predicated on the specious argument that GHG, and no other forces, might be driving global temperatures.

But the science on which the U.N's hysteria-engendered flock base their planet-saving plans is settled only in their minds and the reams of hyped reports from the IPCC, which they foolishly expect to dictate global climate policies.

Readers are all too aware of the endless tricks, deceptions, outright lies, and more tricks used to divert attention from any driver not Carbon (and, therefore, not industry) related. Those same readers are well aware that this author believes the factor most irresponsibly ignored by alarmists to be Solar, as I have opined many times, including here , here, and here.

As it happens, last week also saw astronomer and Sun expert Dr David Whitehouse further the case for Solar forcing's majority influence. Whitehouse reported that it's been months since any sunspots have been observed:

"After a period of exceptionally high activity in the 20th century, our Sun has suddenly gone exceptionally quiet."

The significance of which might become quite evident quite quickly. You see, whenever presented with the obvious (and logical) correlations between solar activity and Terran climate in the past, Solar Deniers claimed that continued elevations in global temperatures after 1998 somehow disproved any direct connection. While insignificant in long-term analysis, Whitehouse nonetheless attributed this to the rapid increase between 1978 and 1998, after which average temps have held their high, but steady, level:

"Almost everyone agrees that throughout most of the last century the solar influence was significant. Studies show that by the end of the 20th century the Sun's activity may have been at its highest for more than 8,000 years."

He suggests we're actually in a period of solar activity low enough to not only counteract any GHG increases, but, as proposed by Russian Academy of Sciences members, actually cause temperatures to drop 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2020. Whitehouse dubs this new Solar season, which may even usher in another Little Ice Age, the Modern Solar Minimum. The good doctor also lists it with previously correlative periods the greenies completely ignore.

Solar Deniers? I like that term.

The greening of Al Gore

The Goracle has received a bit of criticism in the press prior to receiving his Nobel Prize.
From the Times Online:

WHO would have thought that saving the planet could be such a lucrative business? Al Gore, the former US vice-president turned environmental campaigner, has made more than £50m in just seven years from his books, speeches and shrewd investments in technology and green ventures.

and from the Daily Mail:

Al Gore is criticised for lining his own pockets after £3,300-per-minute green speech

But at least he's saving the world from CO2 right?
Well, not exactly: Gore Takes Train From Oslo Airport, Luggage Takes Mercedes

Update: scientists in Australia are investigating eco-friendly flatulence.

Lord Monckton: Dishonest political tampering with the science on global warming

Christopher (Lord) Monckton takes a blast at the hypocrisy now playing out at the UN's climate change conference in Bali.

As a contributor to the IPCC's 2007 report, I share the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. Yet I and many of my peers in the British House of Lords - through our hereditary element the most independent-minded of lawmakers - profoundly disagree on fundamental scientific grounds with both the IPCC and my co-laureate's alarmist movie An Inconvenient Truth, which won this year's Oscar for Best Sci-Fi Comedy Horror.

Two detailed investigations by Committees of the House confirm that the IPCC has deliberately, persistently and prodigiously exaggerated not only the effect of greenhouse gases on temperature but also the environmental consequences of warmer weather.

He doesn't mince his words, does he? He goes on to explain the devastating effects of following the folly of the IPCC and the global warming alarmists:

If we take the heroically stupid decisions now on the table at Bali, it will once again be the world's poorest people who will die unheeded in their tens of millions, this time for lack of the heat and light and power and medical attention which we in the West have long been fortunate enough to take for granted.

If we deny them the fossil-fuelled growth we have enjoyed, they will remain poor and, paradoxically, their populations will continue to increase, making the world's carbon footprint very much larger in the long run.

As they die, and as global temperature continues to fail to rise in accordance with the IPCC's laughably-exaggerated predictions, the self-congratulatory rhetoric that is the hallmark of the now-useless, costly, corrupt UN will again be near-unanimously parroted by lazy, unthinking politicians and journalists who ought to have done their duty by the poor but are now - for the third time in three decades - failing to speak up for those who are about to die.

My fellow-participants, there is no climate crisis. The correct policy response to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. Take courage! Do nothing, and save the world's poor from yet another careless, UN-driven slaughter.

Full article via the Jakarta Post

h/t: Bourque

CO2 cannot be blamed for Global warming

"The notion that carbon emissions cause global warming is not scientifically defensible on today's evidence." "It's not science, it's politics"

via Bushvision:

David Evans worked for the Aust[tralian] Greenhouse office as a modeller and established the worlds best method of carbon accounting. He also started to realise CO2 is not the cause of dangerous global warming. Here he explains why.

Save the World: Dump Kyoto

Is implementing the Kyoto Protocol the best way to "save the world" from global warming? If you believe so, then you better read this article by Jonathan Kay, writing in Tuesday's National Post:

You rarely see anyone actually crunch the numbers and prove Kyoto's worth on a cost-benefit basis.

That's because, as world-renowned Danish thinker Bjorn Lomborg demonstrates in a new book, you can't.

Lomborg's book -- excerpted in a three-part series that appeared on these pages a month ago -- is built around the (surprisingly) rich body of peer-reviewed studies that measure the aggregate social cost of climate change on human societies -- including its impacts on agriculture, fisheries, fresh water supplies, hurricanes and land loss... For every dollar we spend on Kyoto, we get back 34¢.

And even this analysis is optimistic -- because it assumes the most efficient carbon-abatement policies available. In practice, many nations have opted instead for inefficient, but optically attractive, solutions such as windmills.

Schemes that are even more ambitious than Kyoto result in even greater economic inefficiencies.

That's because of the law of diminishing marginal returns. Our first carbon cuts are always going to be the easy ones -- dropping the house thermostat when we go away for the weekend, screwing in a few CFL light bulbs, buying a slightly smaller SUV, etc. But the deeper you cut carbon emissions, the more painful and difficult the cuts become.

But here's where Lomborg's analysis is especially trenchant. While his methods are ruthlessly utilitarian, he shares the same humanitarian goals ostensibly championed by climate change activists. Indeed, there's nothing he'd like more for the $180-billion a year demanded by Kyoto to be shovelled into other programs that address human misery more directly. If we did so, he shows, we'd save millions more lives.

h/t: Global Warming Hyperbole

Dion's smear campaign

Check this video by Richard Madan of CityNews on the Mulroney-Schreiber inquisition, where right at the end Madan reports:

"But Liberals are going to keep this pressure up - if not to smear the government, but to smear the Conservative brand."

Stephane Dion, the current leader of the Liberal Party has apparently concluded that a good old fashioned smear campaign will accomplish for him what his lack of leadership on real issues will not.