Man-made global warming debate heats up

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, and proof that data relating to man-made global warming and climate change is skewed or just plain inaccurate, some scientists and many environmentalists still support its existence. While that may seem ridiculous on its face, supporters are unflagging in their push to protect the planet at all costs. When will the general public realize the anti-energy argument no longer holds water?

By: Tom Harris

“We are very energized and enthusiastic about millions of people coming together and making this the biggest day of climate action ever,” said a young German activist wearing a “350.org” t-shirt at Berlin’s 10/10/10 demonstrations on Sunday. Campaigners around her, and indeed “people at 7,347 events in 188 countries”, according to organizers, danced, sang, planted trees, and picked up garbage as part of the massive worldwide 10/10/10 “Global Work Party”.

What’s that all about? And, what is so special about 350?

350.0rg founder Bill McKibben explained, “It’s the boundary condition for a habitable planet. We’re already past it. We’re at 390 parts per million [of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere]. That’s why the arctic is melting. That’s why Australia is burning up… … if we put very much more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll pass the kind of tipping points … that mean we’ll never be able to get back there even if we stopped driving every car and powering every factory. … We’re fighting to keep real collapse at bay ....”

McKibben asserts that only misguided “climate change deniers” disagree with the urgent need to reduce humanity’s CO2 emissions to avoid climate catastrophe.

But he is completely wrong.

First, no rational scientist denies that climate changes. As Professor Tim Patterson of the Department of Earth Sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada testified before the House of Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development in 2005, “Based on the paleoclimatic data I and others have collected, it's obvious that climate is, and always has been, variable. In fact, the only constant about climate is change; it changes continually.”

Scientists such as Patterson would obviously deny that they deny climate change – they are denial deniers.

If anyone could rationally be labeled climate change deniers, it is those who hold the absurd view that our climate was tranquil until we started to emit significant amounts of CO2.

The ‘denier’ label is simply an attempt to equate those of us who question political correctness on climate change to Holocaust deniers. It is trying to discredit a message by discrediting the messenger, a logical fallacy referred to as ad hominem – “against the man”. It’s also irrational to put the questioning of forecasts of future events on a par with denying what has already happened.

Climate activists claim that there is a consensus among experts that humanity’s CO2 emissions are causing a climate crisis. In reality, there has never been a reputable worldwide poll of the thousands of experts who study the causes of climate change. Assertions that the multitude of scientists who worked on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports agree that our CO2 emissions are taking us to a planetary crisis are completely unfounded. Climate data analyst John McLean of Melbourne, Australia has repeatedly demonstrated that only a few dozen scientist participants in the IPCC process even commented on the issue.

Most climate statements by national science academies are quite meaningless, as well. They are simply proclamations from academy executives or select panels, not their scientist members, since no national science body that has spoken in support of schemes to “stop climate change” have demonstrated that a majority of their members agree with the academy statements.

We cannot forecast climate decades from now any better than we can predict the weather two weeks ahead. The system is simply too complex and our understanding of the science too primitive. Dr. Chris Essex, Professor of Applied Mathematics at The University of Western Ontario explains, “Climate is one of the most challenging open problems in modern science. Some knowledgeable scientists believe that the climate problem can never be solved.” Not only are today’s computerized climate models (the primary basis of the alarm) not known to properly represent the climate system, they cannot be programmed to do so since we do not know the underlying science well enough to know what to program the computers to compute.

Many scientists who work with the IPCC know this. They even stated in their Third Assessment Report (Section 14.2.2.2, page 774): "In climate research and modelling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible."

International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) Chief Science Advisor Dr. Bob Carter of James Cook University in Australia writes in his new book Climate: The Counter Consensus, “science provides no unambiguous evidence that dangerous global warming or even measurable human-caused global warming is occurring … despite the expenditure since 1990 of many tens of billions of dollars searching for it.”

It is no secret that many experts in the field agree with Essex, Carter and Patterson. ICSC’s recently launched Climate Scientists’ Register has already attracted the endorsement of 139 leading climate experts from 21 countries. The Register states, “We, the undersigned, having assessed the relevant scientific evidence, do not find convincing support for the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide are causing, or will in the foreseeable future cause, dangerous global warming."

Sadly for the environmental movement, which has committed vast resources to this activism, 10/10/10, 350.org and similar campaigns are dangerously off track. When the public finally come to realize how they have been so seriously misled on what has become a central theme of modern environmentalism, efforts to address real environment problems may very well be set back decades.

In the meantime, billions of dollars are wasted and thousands of jobs threatened, all for an unproven hypothesis that never made any sense in the first place.

Tom Harris is Executive Director of the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC - http://www.climatescienceinternational.org/). He teaches a second year climate course in the Department of Earth Sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

Don't Say You Haven't Been Warned...

With more and more evidence surfacing on almost a daily basis as more and more scientists weigh in, many are recognizing the fallacy of global warming. The data prove it over and over again. While many scientists believe that global warming may exist, it’s a cyclical change in climate and not man-made. And, true that some may believe it’s getting marginally warmer, others believe we’re on the brink of

another ice age.

BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The ten coldest winter-spring temperatures out of the last 500 in Stockholm, Sweden, were almost all during the Little Ice Age. No surprise there. The coldest was 1569, followed by 1573.

The warmest years: 1863, 1990, 1743, 1525, 1989, 1605, 1822, 1790, 1762, and 2008, in that order. The years since 1976, supposedly with “unprecedented warming,” claim only three slots among the top ten. Apparently, the Modern Warming isn’t all that hot. Nor do we have any temperature readings from the earlier Medieval and Roman Warmings, which the ice cores and seabed sediments tell us were even warmer than today.

In science, observations must be taken much more seriously than theories or computer models. The Swedish data came primarily from long-term records on sea ice conditions in the Stockholm harbor inlet—such as the dates when the ice broke up each year. The data correlation is good when the harbor records overlap with instrumental data.

Apparently, the Swedish ice record must also be taken more seriously than today’s “official” temperature records. The “consensus,” of course, is that the planet has warmed about 0.7 degree C since 1850 and will undergo drastic greenhouse warming in the century ahead. However, we know that the worlds best-ever temperature data come from the satellite readings since 1978. They give whole-earth coverage, including the oceans. Nor do they suffer from the Urban Heat Island effect, which has increasingly polluted recent land-based thermometers.

The satellites say the earth’s temperatures since 1978 have risen at a miniscule rate of 0.005 C per decade. If that satellite trend continues, we can expect the planet to warm another 0.05 C by 2100. That compares well with my forecast that the world will warm only about another half-degree C during the next several centuries—because Nature’s every-1500-year warming cycles have been “front-loaded.” They’ve gotten about half of their total temperature change in the first decades after the shift, with the other half spread out erratically over hundreds of years.

Senior U.S. meteorologist Joe D’Aleo says our recent thermometer records have been manipulated. He says the shut-down of rural thermometers and the “adjustment factors” applied by Goddard Space Institute and the National Climate Data Center have systematically suppressed temperatures from the years before WWII. This has made the temperature increases in recent years look larger.

Eugenia Kalnay at the University of Maryland found that adjusting the satellite and high-altitude balloon records for “no cities and no land use changes” over the past 50 years wiped out 40 percent of U.S. warming.

The New Zealand Science and Education Trust has filed a High Court suit against the country’s “official” temperature record. The country’s Seven Station temperature set “officially” shows warming at the rate of 0.91 C per 100 years since 1909. But New Zealand’s raw temperature data—posted on line—shows only 6 percent of that warming, a statistically insignificant trend of 0.06 C per century since 1850.

The country’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research just announced it has “no responsibility” for the “official record” it has been publishing.

The raw thermometer data says New Zealand was actually warmer in during the period from 1863–1919 than it is now! The apparent 20th century warming was dependent on the use of “adjustments taken by NIWA from a 1981 student thesis by former NIWA employee James Salinger.” Salinger had gotten his training in climatology from the University of East Anglia, where leaked e-mails have revealed a broad effort by “climate experts” to make the Modern Warming look scarier than it has actually been.

Those Swedish harbor records are looking better and better.

Resources:

Leijonhufvud et al., “Five centuries of Stockholm winter-spring temperatures reconstructed from documentary evidence and instrumental observations.” Climatic Change 101, 109-141.

Latest Global Average Tropospheric Temperatures, drroyspencer.com

Kalnay and Cai, 2008, “Estimated Impact of Urbanization and Land Use on U.S. Surface Temperature Trends: Preliminary Report,” Nature 423, pp.528–531.

Anthony Watts, “New Zealand’s NIWA Temperature Train Wreck,” wattsupwiththat.com, Oct. 9, 2010.

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, is an environmental economist. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Just one more tax...

Whether or not Congress approves the extension of the Bush tax cuts across the board, this is yet another hidden tax that will rear its ugly head on your electric bill. The pressure to produce enough wind and solar energy is not realistic for many reasons. Just think of areas in the Midwest and eastern part of the United States where the sun may not appear for days at a time. Or there isn’t enough wind at a high enough speed to produce any kind of energy. Renewables are nice to think about, but will hardly replace the need for fossil fuels in our lifetime. In the article below, the RES is proof of that.

By S. Fred Singer

The US Senate’s proposed Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) would force electric utilities to generate a large and increasing percentage of their power from wind and solar – rising to 15% by 2021. These goals resemble those of the Waxman-Markey bill that barely passed the House in June 2009. It’s disturbing that some Republicans on the House Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted for ACELA (American Clean Energy Leadership Act). If the Senate were to take up an energy bill, it is likely that Sen. Brownback (R-KS) will introduce an amendment for RES.

Now, it is quite clear that wind and solar are not economic -- and probably never will be competitive, even when fuel prices rise significantly. So the RES mandate would mean that all of us taxpayers would support even more the RE rent-seekers and lobbyists, who are already milking the government for subsidies and tax-breaks for the construction of wind farms and solar energy projects.

In addition, electricity users (rate payers) would pay more for electric power to cover the higher cost. The so-called “feed in tariff” would force utilities to buy expensive wind and solar electricity and average the cost into the rest of the power produced. The consumer, meaning all of us, would pay for this extravaganza. It’s just a huge transfer of money, yet another regressive tax on consumers, with the electric utilities forced to become tax collectors.

The hoax part of the RES is that “clean electricity” is being advertised as a way to save the earth from the ‘dreadful fate’ of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). To accept this outlandish proposition, one would have to believe that the carbon dioxide generated in the burning of fossil fuels has a noticeable influence on climate. The data argue against it. The constantly advertised “scientific consensus” is phony; it does not exist. The evidence that the UN climate panel, the IPCC, puts forward in support of AGW is pitifully inadequate—and wrong. It is easy to show that no credible evidence exists; just look at the summary of the NIPCC report “Nature, not human activity, rules the climate;” it is available for free on the Internet.

The fraud relates to the idea that energy produced without CO2 emission is “clean.” This word ‘clean’ is being misused, and that’s a huge part of the problem. Of course, removing the genuine pollutants like sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides and mercury from smokestacks is a real clean up. It is already mandated by the Clean Air Act and being pursued adequately. But CO2 is not a pollutant – in spite of the claims of the EPA in its ‘Endangerment Finding – which has yet to be tested in court. CO2 is neither toxic nor irritating nor visible—nor a climate forcer of any significance, so the idea that we have to stop emitting CO2, or capture and sequester it, is a pure fraud.

And finally, the whole scheme is a financial rip-off. We all know that wind and solar energy are intermittent. If their use should rise beyond the present few percent, we would require either on-site storage of electricity or we would have to have standby capacity, probably fueled by expensive natural gas, to kick in when the wind kicks out. Either scheme would impose huge additional costs.

The biggest part of the swindle is that the RES is being sold on the basis of creating “green jobs.” But since when does wasting money create productive jobs? Why not leave it with consumers who can save and invest it to create real jobs. A study conducted in Spain, which has gone overboard on renewable energy, shows that each so-called green job displaces between two and three real jobs. In any case, the manufacture of wind turbines and photovoltaic cells is now in the hands of lower-cost Chinese industry. So the green jobs would consist of sweeping the mirrors clean from dust and dirt and fixing the blades and gearboxes of the turbines when they fail.

In all of this, the proposed legislation ignores nuclear power, which is not only “clean” in the sense of not emitting carbon dioxide, but is also competitive in price with most fossil fuels. Nuclear is most likely to become the major source of electric power once low-cost fossil fuels are depleted. Yet ACELA explicitly says that new nuclear power, updates to existing nuclear facilities and generation from municipal solid waste incineration are not included in the base quantity

The hypocrisy of the RES advocates is appalling. It’s OK for the taxpayer to subsidize low-carbon energy that doesn’t work (wind, solar) but not low-carbon energy that does work (nuclear).

S. Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, is the founder of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) www.NIPCCreport.org

The Big Green Lie

Thousands of scientists have now gone on record calling man-made global warming a joke that not based on accurate science. It's already been proven that the data that backed up Al Gore's biggest hoax was tweaked to suit environmentalists. In this scientific article, we learn more about how serious this "joke" really is and what it will mean to all of us...

By Louis Prudhomme, President, Essential Sciences & Engineering, Inc.

Today’s “green” efforts can be likened to Hans Christian Anderson’s classic children’s tale The Emperor’s New Clothes.

You may recall how the mischievous tailors played on the vanity of the Emperor and his court to create a hoax for profit. Sound familiar? Like the Emperor’s advisers, the politicos pretend to “see” what they are told is real, while the people aren’t buying it.

The players today may be a little different, but the story is essentially the same. In the classic, the weakness is the Emperor’s vanity. In the modern version, global warming creates a sense of guilt over potential harm to nature—“weavers” fabricate the idea that we must choose between energy and the planet. This time, more than the Emperor’s vanity is at stake and the plot revolves around green energy—with wind and solar as the key to a utopian future. The Great Green Lie is that we need to end our dependence on traditional fuels.

Leaving fiction behind, the truth is that throughout the Earth’s 4+ billion years, the climate has been both warmer and cooler; the percentage of carbon dioxide and water in the atmosphere has varied considerably. But, like the classic tale, many pretend to see the “truth” the “weavers” put forward, lest they be thought stupid or unfit for their posts.

In the 70’s, clean air and water laws were implemented based on local smog and pollution. Today, US companies are examples of ingenuity in their management of emissions. More energy efficient methods of using resources such as coal, oil, gas, and uranium have been developed. The exhaust or releases are often cleaner than the intake, and certainly cleaner than those in other large industrial countries such as China and India.

The objective of the 70’s legislation was the control of real poisonous releases such as carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, lead, etc. Now, the great villains are naturally occurring carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapor (H2O)--known as greenhouse gases (GHG). If all Mankind disappeared tomorrow, GHG would remain virtually the same. While solar and geologic phenomena are a greater influence on GHG than the human use of hydrocarbon fuels, the storyline is now about managing individual and national behavior through taxation and rationing. The proponents of such policy have created an artificial crisis based more on guilt than on proven science.

Today, bureaucrats, like the emperor’s advisers, defer to these supposed intellectuals to impose higher taxes and more stringent regulations on energy producers while government subsidies pour into building underdeveloped dependent technologies—electric cars, solar and “wind farms.” (Note these all depend on petroleum or utility-scale electricity to make them possible.)

To know whether or not we are being duped, like the child in the classic tale—“he hasn't got anything on,” we must make honest observations.

• The “renewable” technologies depend on energy and raw materials that must be extracted from the earth.
• It can cost more to produce and operate a Solar Cell or a Wind Turbine Generator than the energy they produce.
• Raising the price of primary energy sources will then raise the cost of the solar and wind technologies.
• Cap and trade doesn’t really help anyone, it just moves the problem and raises costs.
• The Chicago Climate Exchange is like ENRON, only the artificial trade commodity is carbon dioxide, a compound necessary to the earth’s survival.
• The United States is on track to emulate Spain’s failed “Green Economy.”

When we stop pretending that see the “lie,” we discover that the American public has been swindled. Solar and wind technologies are far from being able to carry the energy load for large industrial countries. Unfortunately, the “storyline” prevents us from seeing true solutions.

Our energy needs continue to grow and only nuclear power—successfully operated by the US Navy without incident for nearly 60 years—has the ability to truly power the US, yet it is shunned here while adopted in France, Germany and Japan. We must start now as it will be decades before we can create the infrastructure to replace coal power plants with nuclear.

Cost-effective, available energy, coupled with ingenuity and industry, has been the power that has made America great.
Now, Americans are expected to produce and use energy using the same material that the weavers used to dress the Emperor—stuffing their pockets while producing nothing. If the current legislative trend continues, the rest of the world will be laughing as America will have no clothes.

Louis Prudhomme is the President of Essential Sciences & Engineering, Inc. (www.nmese.com ), a New Mexico corporation and holds a Master of Science in Engineering Acoustics. A retired US Navy officer, he is currently engaged as an international consultant to industry for system reliability, process improvement and energy management.