| Home | Carbon Dioxide | Nitrous Oxide & Methane | Energy matters | Testimonies | Comment |
|
General comments "There is a problem in science publications, and especially in climate change. It only takes a single overly optimistic
analysis of a data set to appear in print to be taken up in a subsequent paper and portrayed as being scientifically more solid than it really is.
Then of course in a subsequent paper it becomes an undisputed fact. Finally it becomes institutionalized and appears in a pamphlet or on a
minister’s or science advisor’s powerpoint presentation." - David Whitehouse, GWPF.
The following statement by Dr. Richard Lindzen, one of the world’s most respected climatologists and a Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Professor of Atmospheric Science should be read by all alarmists, especially David Cameron, the Millibands and Barrack O'Barmy. “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed
world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain
computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.” The journalist H.L. Mencken had it right, “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false
front for the urge to rule.” The writer Donna Leon said - “Always be afraid of people in possession of what they believe is
the truth. They’ll do anything to see that the facts are changed and whipped into shape to agree with it.” |
|
Get a copy of Christopher Bookers report The BBC and Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal here. Feb 24, 2012 (Dr. David M.W. Evans consulted full time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part time 2008 to 2010, modeling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. Evans is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees including a PhD from Stanford University in electrical engineering. The area of human endeavour with the most experience and sophistication in dealing with feedbacks and analyzing complex systems is electrical engineering, and the most crucial and disputed aspects of understanding the climate system are the feedbacks. The evidence supporting the idea that CO2 emissions were the main cause of global warming reversed itself from 1998 to 2006, causing Evans to move from being a warmist to a sceptic) We check the main predictions of the climate models against the best and latest data. Fortunately the climate models got all their major predictions wrong. Why? Every serious sceptical scientist has been consistently saying essentially the same thing for over 20 years, yet most people have never heard the message. Here it is, put simply enough for any lay reader willing to pay attention. What the Government Climate Scientists Say:-
The climate models :- If the CO2 level doubles (as it is on course to do by about 2070 to 2100), the climate models estimate the temperature increase due to that extra CO2 will be about 1.1C x 3 = 3.3C.[1] The direct effect of CO2 is well-established physics, based on laboratory results, and known for over a century.[2] Feedbacks are due to the ways the Earth reacts to the direct warming effect of the CO2. The threefold amplification by feedbacks is based on the assumption, or guess, made around 1980, that more warming due to CO2 will cause more evaporation from the oceans and that this extra water vapour will in turn lead to even more heat trapping because water vapour is the main greenhouse gas. And extra heat will cause even more evaporation, and so on. This amplification is built into all the climate models.[3] The amount of amplification is estimated by assuming that nearly all the industrial-age warming is due to our CO2. The government climate scientists and the media often tell us about the direct effect of the CO2, but rarely admit that two-thirds of their projected temperature increases are due to amplification by feedbacks. What the Sceptics Say:-
Figure 2 - The sceptic’s view:- If the CO2 level doubles, sceptics estimates that the temperature increase due to that extra CO2 will be about 1.1C x 0.5 ≈ 0.6C.[4] The serious sceptical scientists have always agreed with the government climate scientists about the direct effect of CO2. The argument is entirely about the feedbacks. The feedbacks dampen or reduce the direct effect of the extra CO2, cutting it roughly in half.[5] The main feedbacks involve evaporation, water vapor, and clouds. In particular, water vapor condenses into clouds, so extra water vapor due to the direct warming effect of extra CO2 will cause extra clouds, which reflect sunlight back out to space and cool the earth, thereby reducing the overall warming. There are literally thousands of feedbacks, each of which either reinforces or opposes the direct-warming effect of the extra CO2. Almost every long-lived system is governed by net feedback that dampens its response to a perturbation. If a system instead reacts to a perturbation by amplifying it, the system is likely to reach a tipping point and become unstable (like the electronic squeal that erupts when a microphone gets too close to its speakers). The earth’s climate is long-lived and stable - it has never gone into runaway greenhouse, unlike Venus - which strongly suggests that the feedbacks dampen temperature perturbations such as that from extra CO2. What the Data Says:- The climate models have been essentially the same for 30 years now, maintaining roughly the same sensitivity to extra CO2 even while they got more detailed with more computer power. Air Temperatures :-
Figure 3. Hansen’s predictions to the US Congress in 1988,[6] compared to the subsequent temperatures as measured by NASA satellites.[7] Hansen’s climate model clearly exaggerated future temperature rises. In particular, his climate model predicted that if human CO2 emissions were cut back drastically starting in 1988, such that by year 2000 the CO2 level was not rising at all, we would get his scenario C. But in reality the temperature did not even rise this much, even though our CO2 emissions strongly increased which suggests that the climate models greatly overestimate the effect of CO2 emissions. A more considered prediction by the climate models was made in 1990 in the IPCC’s First Assessment Report:[8] Figure 4 Predictions of the IPCC’s First Assessment Report in 1990, compared to the subsequent temperatures as measured by NASA satellites. It’s 20 years now, and the average rate of increase in reality is below the lowest trend in the range predicted by the IPCC. Ocean Temperatures :- The oceans hold the vast bulk of the heat in the climate system. We’ve only been measuring ocean temperature properly since mid-2003, when the Argo system became operational.[9][10] In Argo, a buoy duck dives down to a depth of 2,000 meters, measures temperatures as it very slowly ascends, then radios the results back to headquarters via satellite. Over 3,000 Argo buoys constantly patrol all the oceans of the world.
Figure 5. Climate model predictions of ocean temperature,[11] versus the measurements by Argo.[12] The unit of the vertical axis is 10^22 Joules (about 0.01C). The ocean temperature has been basically flat since we started measuring it properly, and not warming as quickly as the climate models predict. Atmospheric Hotspot The climate models predict a particular pattern of atmospheric warming during periods of global warming; the most prominent change they predict is a warming in the tropics about 10 km up, the “hotspot.” The hotspot is the sign of the amplification in their theory (see figure 1). The theory says the hotspot is caused by extra evaporation, and by extra water vapor pushing the warmer, wetter lower troposphere up into volume previously occupied by cool dry air. The presence of a hotspot would indicate amplification is occurring, and vice versa. We have been measuring atmospheric temperatures with weather balloons since the 1960s. Millions of weather balloons have built up a good picture of atmospheric temperatures over the last few decades, including the warming period from the late 1970s to the late ‘90s. This important and pivotal data was not released publicly by the climate establishment until 2006, and then in an obscure place.[13] Here it is:
Figure 6. On the left is the data collected by millions of weather balloons.[14] On the right is what the climate models say was happening.[15] The theory (as per the climate models) is incompatible with the observations. In both diagrams the horizontal axis shows latitude, and the right vertical axis shows height in kilometers. In reality there was no hotspot, not even a small one. So in reality there is no amplification - the amplification shown in figure 1 does not exist.[16] Outgoing Radiation :- ERBE shows the observed data. All the rest are climate model predictions.
The climate models predict that when the surface of the earth warms, less heat is radiated from the earth into space (on a weekly or monthly time scale). This is because, according to the theory, the warmer surface causes more evaporation and thus there is more heat-trapping water vapor. This is the heat-trapping mechanism that is responsible for the assumed amplification in figure 1. Satellites have been measuring the radiation emitted from the earth for the last two decades. A major study has linked the changes in temperature on the earth’s surface with the changes in the outgoing radiation. Here are the results: Outgoing radiation from earth (vertical axis) against sea-surface temperature (horizontal), as measured by the ERBE satellites (upper-left graph) and as “predicted” by 11 climate models (the other graphs).[17] Notice that the slopes of the graphs for the climate models are opposite to the slope of the graph for the observed data. This shows that in reality the earth gives off more heat when its surface is warmer. This is the opposite of what the climate models predict. This shows that the climate models trap heat too aggressively, and that their assumed amplification shown in figure 1 does not exist. Conclusions All the data here is impeccably sourced - satellites, Argo, and weather balloons.[18] The air and ocean temperature data shows that the climate models overestimate temperature rises. The climate establishment suggest that cooling due to undetected aerosols might be responsible for the failure of the models to date, but this excuse is wearing thin - it continues not to warm as much as they said it would, or in the way they said it would. On the other hand, the rise in air temperature has been greater than the sceptics say could be due to CO2. The sceptic’s excuse is that the rise is mainly due to other forces - and they point out that the world has been in a fairly steady warming trend of 0.5C per century since 1680 (with alternating ~30 year periods of warming and mild cooling) where as the vast bulk of all human CO2 emissions have been after 1945. We’ve checked all the main predictions of the climate models against the best data: The climate models get them all wrong. The missing hotspot and outgoing radiation data both, independently, prove that the amplification in the climate models is not present. Without the amplification, the climate model temperature predictions would be cut by at least two-thirds, which would explain why they overestimated the recent air and ocean temperature increases. Therefore, • The climate models are fundamentally flawed. Their assumed threefold amplification by feedbacks does not in fact exist.
Some Political Points The data presented here is impeccably sourced, very relevant, publicly available, and from our best instruments. Yet it never appears in the mainstream media. Have you ever seen anything like any of the figures here in the mainstream media? That alone tells you that the “debate” is about politics and power, and not about science or truth. This is an unusual political issue, because there is a right and a wrong answer, and everyone will know which it is eventually. People are going ahead and emitting CO2 anyway, so we are doing the experiment: either the world heats up by several degrees by 2050 or so, or it doesn’t. Notice that the sceptics agree with the government climate scientists about the direct effect of CO2; they just disagree about the feedbacks. The climate debate is all about the feedbacks; everything else is merely a sideshow. Yet hardly anyone knows that. The government climate scientists and the mainstream media have framed the debate in terms of the direct effect of CO2 and sideshows such as arctic ice, bad weather, or psychology. They almost never mention the feedbacks. Why is that? Who has the power to make that happen? Notes [1] More generally, if the CO2 level is x (in parts per million) then the climate models estimate the temperature increase due to the extra CO2 over the preindustrial level of 280 ppm as 4.33 ln(x / 280). For example, this model attributes a temperature rise of 4.33 ln(392/280) = 1.46°C to the increase from preindustrial to the current CO2 level of 392 ppm. [2] The direct effect of CO2 is the same for each doubling of the CO2 level (that is, logarithmic). Calculations of the increased surface temperature due to of a doubling of the CO2 level vary from 1.0°C to 1.2°C. In this document we use the midpoint value 1.1°C; which value you use does not affect the arguments made here. [3] The IPCC, in their last Assessment Report in 2007, project a temperature increase for a doubling of CO2 (called the climate sensitivity) in the range 2.0°C to 4.5°C. The central point of their model estimates is 3.3°C, which is 3.0 times the direct CO2 effect of 1.1°C, so we simply say their amplification is threefold. To be more precise, each climate model has a slightly different effective amplification, but they are generally around 3.0. [4] More generally, if the CO2 level is x (in parts per million) then skeptics estimate the temperature increase due to the extra CO2 over the preindustrial level of 280 ppm as 0.72 ln(x / 280). For example, skeptics attribute a temperature rise of 0.72 ln(392/280) = 0.24°C to the increase from preindustrial to the current CO2 level of 392 ppm. [5] The effect of feedbacks is hard to pin down with empirical evidence because there are more forces affecting the temperature than just changes in CO2 level, but seems to be multiplication by something between 0.25 and 0.9. We have used 0.5 here for simplicity. [6] Hansen's predictions were made in Hansen et al, Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 93, no. D8 (August 20, 1988), fig. 3a, p. 9,347: pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1988/1988_Hansen_etal.pdf . In the graph here, Hansen's three scenarios are graphed to start from the same point in mid-1987 — we are only interested in changes (anomalies). [7] The earth's temperature shown here is as measured by the NASA satellites that have been measuring the earth's temperature since 1979, managed at the University of Alabama, Hunstville (UAH). Satellites measure the temperature 24/7 over broad swathes of land and ocean, across the whole world except the poles. While satellites had some initial calibration problems, those have long since been fully fixed to everyone's satisfaction. Satellites are mankind's most reliable, extensive, and unbiased method for measuring the earth's air temperature temperatures since 1979. This is an impeccable source of data, and you can download the data yourself from vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt (save it as .txt file then open it in Microsoft Excel; the numbers in the "Globe" column are the changes in MSU Global Monthly Mean Lower Troposphere Temperatures in °C). [8] IPCC First Assessment Report, 1990, page xxii (www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_full_report.pdf ) in the Policymakers Summary, figure 8 and surrounding text, for the business-as-usual scenario (which is what in fact occurred, there being no significant controls or decrease in the rate of increase of emissions to date). "Under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A) emissions of greenhouse gases, the average rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century is estimated to be about 0.3°C per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2°C to 0.5°C)." [9] "Argo," MetOffice.uk.gov. [10] Ocean temperature measurements before Argo are nearly worthless. Before Argo, ocean temperature was measured with buckets or with bathythermographs (XBTs) — which are expendable probes lowered into the water, transmitting temperature and pressure data back along a pair of thin wires. Nearly all measurements were from ships along the main commercial shipping lanes, so geographical coverage of the world's oceans was poor — for example the huge southern oceans were not monitored. XBTs do not go as deep as Argo floats, and their data is much less precise and much less accurate (for one thing, they move too quickly through the water to come to thermal equilibrium with the water they are trying to measure). [11] The climate models project ocean heat content increasing at about 0.7 × 10^22 Joules per year. See Hansen et al., 2005: "Earth's Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications," Science, 308, 1431–1435, p. 1432, where the increase in ocean heat content per square meter of surface, in the upper 750m, according to typical models, is 6.0 Watt•year/m2 per year, which converts to 0.7 × 10^22 Joules per year for the entire ocean as explained at here. [12] The ocean heat content down to 700m as measured by Argo is now available; you can download it from here as a CSV file. The numbers are the changes in average heat for the three months, in units of 10^22 Joules, seasonally adjusted. The Argo system started in mid-2003, so we started the data at 2003–6. [13] The weather-balloon data showing the atmospheric warming pattern was finally released in 2006, in the US Climate Change Science Program, 2006, part E of figure 5.7, on page 116. There is no other data for this period, and we cannot collect more data on atmospheric warming during global warming until global warming resumes. This is the only data there is. By the way, isn't this an obscure place to release such important and pivotal data — you don't suppose they are trying to hide something, do you? [14] See previous note. [15] Any climate model, for example, IPCC Assessment Report 4, 2007, ch. 9, p. 675, which is also on the web (figure 9.1, parts c and f). There was little warming 1959–1977, so the commonly available 1959–1999 simulations work as well. [16] So the multiplier in the second box in figures 1 and 2 is at most 1.0. [17] Lindzen and Choi 2009, Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 36. The paper was corrected after some criticism, coming to essentially the same result again in 2011. [18] In particular, we have not quoted results from land thermometers, or from sparse sampling by buckets and XBTs at sea. Land thermometers are notoriously susceptible to localized effects — see Is the Western Climate Establishment Corrupt? by the same author. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
20th Nov 2011 - IPCC scientists test the Exit doors This is another big tipping point on the slide out of the Great Global Scam. IPCC scientists, facing the travesty of predictions-gone-wrong, are trying to salvage some face, and plant some escape-clause seeds for later. But people are not stupid. A conveniently leaked IPCC draft is testing the ground. What excuses can they get away with? Hidden underneath some pat lines about how anthropogenic global warming is “likely” to influence… ah cold days and warm days, is the get-out-of-jail clause that’s really a bombshell :- “Uncertainty in the sign of projected changes in climate extremes over the coming two to three decades is relatively large because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability”. Translated: The natural climate forces are stronger than we thought, and we give up, we can’t say whether it will get warmer or colder in the next twenty years. This multipurpose prediction means that in the future, if it’s colder, they’re right; if it’s warmer, they’re right; and they have it covered for more or less storms, floods, droughts, blizzards and frost too. And then there’s the perpetual-motion aspect of the threat. ‘Greenhouse gases might not be dominant now’ (like they’ve been saying for the last 20 years) ‘but they will be’ they tell us. They will be! Look out! The storms are coming, we’re all doomed. (Well we definitely absolutely might be.) Got that? If the century progresses without restraints on greenhouse gas emissions, their impacts will come to dominate, it forecasts: 1. “It is very likely that the length, frequency and/or intensity of warm spells, including heat waves, will
continue to increase over most land areas… The journalist Bruce Anderson continued with - “When these fanatics are highly intellectual, the danger is compounded. If the facts appear to be against them, intellectuals have the self-confidence to club the errant data into a whimpering silence.” Then look for the segue where the scientists and activist-journalists, quietly shift the goal-posts :- It’s impossible to read the draft without coming away with the impression that with or without anthropogenic climate change, extreme weather impacts are going to be felt more and more, simply because there are more and more people on planet Earth – particularly in the swelling “megacities” of the developing world that overwhelmingly lie on the coast or on big rivers close to the coast. That’s an EXIT clause and it reads like this :- We might have been wrong about CO2 causing the disasters, but disasters are still coming. More people are going to die from climate catastrophes because there are lots more people! See, “we were right all along to be concerned about the climate”. (Just not quite right about the cause). This is a handy excuse. Al Gore tried a segue like this out a couple of years ago — pretending that he was just fine tuning his altruistic saintly concern by saying quietly that CO2 wasn’t as bad as he’d thought but Black Carbon (!) was awful pollution. In other words, he’ll never admit he made a bad call, or has been caught pushing a scam, he’ll just say he was right all along, “carbon is still the issue, it’s just a slightly different form”. These IPCC scientists are using the same technique: Climate Disasters are still the issue — it’s just a slightly different reason. Repeat after me: AGW is still bad, skeptics are still wrong, and look over here at this slightly new twist on the predictions of disaster. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Oct 11, 2011 Maurice Strong, senior advisor to Kofi Annan, U.N. Secretary-General who chaired the gigantic (40,000 participants) “U.N. Conference on Environment and Development” in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, who was responsible for putting together the Kyoto Protocol with thousands of bureaucrats, diplomats, and politicians, stated: “We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse. Isn’t it our job to bring that about?”Timothy Wirth, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Global Issues, seconded Strong’s statement: “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”Richard Benedick, a deputy assistant secretary of state who headed policy divisions of the U.S. State Department, stated: “A global warming treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect.”Peter Menzies in the Calgary Herald, Christine Stewart, former Canadian Environment Minister for the Liberal Party of Canada, said in 1998 that “No matter if the science is all phoney, there are collateral environmental benefits”IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer in November 2010 admitted “one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.” Instead, climate change policy is about how “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth...” Now see what Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, said when he visited Australia in July 2011. In referring to the ideological orientations of those individuals and organisations (as above) who have significant financial and other vested interests in propagating the ‘Doctrine’ of anthropogenic induced climate change, President Klaus said: “They want to change us, to change our behaviour, our way of life, our values and preferences, they want to restrict our freedom because they themselves believe they know what is good for us. They are not interested in climate. They misuse the climate in their goal to restrict our freedom. What is endangered is freedom, the climate is okay." After noting that today’s human-induced climate change alarmists are the ideological descendents of the zero and negative population growth advocates of the 1970s who erroneously forecast that human population pressures would lead to increases in global poverty and growing shortages in resources, President Klaus went on to add: “They hate us, the humans, they consider us selfish and sinful creatures who must be controlled by them. I used to live in a similar world - called communism - and I know that it led to the worst environmental damage the world has ever experienced.”
Aug 29, 2011 This is text of the speech (edited for online publication) delivered by professor Bob Carter at the “Convoy of No Confidence” protest in Canberra, Australia, on August 22, 2011. It’s a bit long but is well worth reading. Professor Bob Carter is an Emeritus Fellow, Institute of Public Affairs (Melbourne), Chief Scientific Advisor, International Climate Science Coalition (Toronto), Advisory Council Member, Global Warming Policy Foundation (London), Science Advisor, Science & Public Policy Institute (Washington). He is also the author of Climate: the Counter Consensus (Stacey International, 2010). (Not a looney 'climate-change-denier' then!) Here is the speech :- My perspective is that of an experienced scientist - one who has spent a professional lifetime studying ancient environmental and climatic change. I therefore have nothing to say, and neither should I have anything to say, about the politics of the carbon dioxide tax. Rather, my role today is to share with you a summary of the science that should be, but actually isn’t, illuminating policy making on climate change. Agreed Facts :- Let us start with the three key facts on which nearly all scientists agree :-
Amongst qualified scientists there are no “climate change deniers”, as the press so likes to badge those who do not agree with the warming hysteria. In reality, the great majority of independent scientists are agnostic rather than sceptical about the hypothesis of human-caused warming. It is the likely magnitude of human-caused warming, not the existence of a warming tendency in the first place, that is under debate. Depending upon the feedbacks that are allowed for (water vapour, clouds etc.), answers to the question “How much warming will occur for a doubling of carbon dioxide?” range from “unmeasurably small” to “6°C of warming”. Factual evidence, including both the known history of climate and recent new papers on atmospheric physics, favours an inconsequential warming of a few tenths of a degree for a doubling of carbon dioxide. It is only the speculative computer models of the UN that project a perhaps more troubling 3°C or more of warming for a doubling. Three other questions of importance that have indeterminate answers :-
Not much “settled science” there, then! The two key policy questions are :-
What is the cost? At the intended rate of $23/tonne of carbon dioxide emitted, >$100 billion of extra costs will be imposed by 2020, and these costs will be passed down to every citizen of Australia at a rate of about $500/person (or $2,000/family of four) per year. What is the benefit? If (and it’s a very big if) implementing the new tax actually does result in a cut of 5% in Australian emissions, which is the government’s target, then the theoretical amount of global warming averted would be much less than one-thousandth of a degree; even cutting Australia’s emissions altogether would avert warming of only 0.02 deg. C (two one-hundredths of a degree). So the question is “How many people here today are prepared to pay extra costs of $500/person/year in return for a notional warming averted of less than one-thousandth of a degree?” I now wish to move on to the issue of public dishonesty. In this regard, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave us the “Carbon pollution reduction scheme”; and the ghost of George Orwell surely stirred. Prime Minister Gillard is now giving us a “Clean Energy” bill; well, last week, this further dishonesty stimulated George Orwell to get out of his grave and to walk the 368 km from Albury to Canberra (8 days), to appear in resurrected form at last Tuesday’s rally in the guise of truck driver Mr Troy ("Grover") Logan. Regarding the dishonest communication that compelled Mr Logan to action, we must surely all agree that the language of the government spinmeisters lately has been compelling:
Why this utterly dishonest language and marketing? Why propagandize what is essentially a scientific issue? Why expensive, tax-payer-funded advertising instead of honest communication? The answer, of course, is that the result of the cost/benefit analysis we have just undertaken is, literally, ridiculous, for it shows that a carbon dioxide tax will yield no benefits whatsoever. The government’s communication of its global warming policy therefore has to centre on untruth, spin, propaganda and advertising, for there are no real benefits to market. Note too that environmental improvement has nothing to do with the carbon dioxide tax’. except as a cynical marketing hook towards a desired new source of revenue for the federal exchequer. The way forward - Adaptation to all climate change. We have a baby (which represents dangerous climate change); and we have some very dirty bathwater (which is carbon dioxide taxation). It is vital that in throwing out the smelly bath water we do not at the same time discard the baby. Why so? Well, the reason is that as Australians we live on what is probably the world’s most dangerous continent for climate-related hazard. Active volcanoes have we none, and compared to New Zealand and Japan our earthquakes are relatively rare and only of moderate magnitude. But when it comes to droughts, floods, cyclones and bushfires - well, as they say, we punch above our weight there, and Australia’s hazards are truly of world class, even textbook, stature. But do we then follow world-best-practice in the way in which we deal with our dangerous, natural, climate-related hazards? Well I suggest that you ask that question of the relatives of the 173 persons who lost their lives in the 2009 Victoria bushfires; or perhaps ask the thousands of persons living near Cardwell and Innisfail, whose homes or livelihoods were damaged during Cyclones Larry and Yasi; or ask the tens of thousands of Brisbanites whose homes were submerged earlier this year during the February floods. Perhaps ask these persons: “Do you feel you are well protected against Australia’s climate hazards by the government’s plan to tax CO2 emissions?” You and I know full well what their answer will be. A government has a sovereign duty of care to its citizens to protect them against natural hazard. And the reason that recent Australian state and federal governments have done so poorly in this regard recently is because they have taken their eyes off the ball of natural climate-related hazard, in order to chase the passing political meteorite of hysterical alarm about speculative, human-caused global warming. For a fraction of the money already squandered on the Kyoto Protocol, and on ineffectual, doomed-to-failure anti-carbon dioxide measures, Australia could already have - but does not have - a world-leading climate hazard response and adaptation system. The way forward, then, is to fund and manage our relevant research and hazard agencies to better prepare for, and adapt to, all climate-related hazards as and when they occur - and that quite irrespective of the presumed causation of particular events. To date, and despite all the public hysteria, no scientist has been able to isolate and measure the theoretical warming effect of human carbon dioxide emissions on global temperature. Yet the question was a good one to have first asked back in the 1990s, and it remains possible that some time in the future a measurable human-caused climatic trend might emerge. In proper prudent fashion, therefore, a policy of preparation and adaptation to the known range of natural climate hazard is also an effective precautionary policy against any human-caused hazard that might, or might not, emerge in the future. Conclusions So my final conclusions are these. First, we do indeed need to “Axe the Tax”. But, thereafter, we also need to “Adapt to the Fact” that natural climate-related events and trends are particularly hazardous in Australia, and that a better national policy is clearly needed to deal with our climate hazards by using strategies of careful preparation and intelligent adaptation.
The Spectator - 21 May 2011 The government's new emissions target will despoil the countryside, rob the poor - and enrich landowners like me. By Matt Ridley. 'Greener food and greener fuel' is the promise of Ensus, a firm that opened Europe's largest (£250 million) bio-ethanol plant at Wilton on Tees-side last year, and has now shut it down for lack of profitable customers. This is actually the second shut-down at the plant - which takes subsidies and turns them into motor fuel - the first being a three-week refit to try to stop the stench bothering the neighbours. Welcome to the neo-medieval world of Britain's energy policy. It is a world in which Highland glens are buzzing with bulldozers damming streams for miniature hydro plants, in which the Dogger Bank is to be dotted with windmills at Brobdingnagian expense, in which Heathrow is to burn wood trucked in from Surrey, and Yorkshire wheat is being turned into motor fuel. We are going back to using the landscape to generate our energy. Bad news for the landscape. The industrial revolution, when Britain turned to coal for its energy, not only catapulted us into prosperity (because coal proved cheaper and more reliable than wood, wind, water and horse as a means of turning machines), but saved our landscape too. Forests grew back and rivers returned to their natural beds when their energy was no longer needed. Land that had once grown hay for millions of horses could grow food for human beings instead - or become parks and gardens. Whether we like it or not, we are now reversing this policy, only with six times the population and a hundred times the energy needs. The government's craven decision this week to placate the green pressure groups by agreeing a unilateral and tough new carbon rationing target of 50 per cent for 2027 - they wanted to water it down, but were frightened of being taken to judicial review by Greenpeace - condemns Britain to ruining yet more of its landscape. Remember that it takes a wind farm the size of Greater London to generate as much electricity as a single coal-fired power station - on a windy day (on other days we will have to do without). Or the felling of a forest twice the size of Cumbria every year. Yet this ruthless violation of the landscape is not even the most medieval aspect of the government's energy policy. Its financing would embarrass even the Sheriff of Nottingham. Every renewable project, from offshore wind farms to rooftop solar panels to bio-ethanol plants, is paid for by a stealth poll tax levied from everybody's electricity bills called the renewable obligation (RO). The RO already adds an astonishing £1.1 billion a year to the electricity bills of Britons; by 2020 it could be £8 billion, or 30 per cent extra. Unlike the poll tax, which was merely not progressive, this tax is highly regressive. It robs the poor - including those too poor to pay income tax - and hands much of the money to the landed rich in three different ways: higher wheat and wood prices; rents for wind farms; and the iniquitous 'feed-in tariff, by which the person who produces electricity by 'renewable' means is paid three times the market rate. As a landowner myself I refuse to join the feeding frenzy of the last two, but I cannot avoid the first. Lord Turnbull, the former Cabinet secretary, put it this way in a report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation this week: 'It is astonishing that the Liberals who attach such importance to fairness turn a blind eye to this transfer from poor to rich, running to billions a year. If you live in a council tower block in Lambeth you don't have much opportunity to get your nose into this trough.' Driving up the price of electricity this way destroys jobs. One Spanish study suggests 2.2 jobs lost for each one created by green energy schemes, another Scottish one finds 3.7. If you don't believe the numbers, ask a local widget-maker if the size of his electricity bill affects his ability to take people on or lay them off. So let's recap. The current energy policy is taking your money off you through your utility bills, handing that money to a rich landowner - like me - to buy first-growth claret with, putting up the price of your food and your (chipboard) furniture, threatening your job and spoiling your view. It had better be worth it. The sole intended benefit you will get from all this pain is lower carbon emissions. Not a guarantee of a cooler climate, because Britain is such a trivial part of the world economy, and carbon dioxide's effect on climate is one of several factors. But at least it will give William Hague a warm glow of satisfaction in showing the Chinese what he calls 'the UK's international moral leadership on the issue'. But notice I used the word 'intended'. Does any of this actually lower carbon emissions? With the single exception of hydro, not one of the renewables has managed to save an ounce of carbon. Wind is so unreliable that coal-fired stations have to be kept spinning in the background (powering them up and down wastes even more energy and carbon). Wheat for ethanol is grown using tractors running on almost the same amount of diesel - and is anyway full of carbon itself (infra-red rays do not distinguish between carbon atoms from plants that grew yesterday and from plants that grew 300 million years ago). Solar will always be a statistical asterisk in cloudy Britain. As for wood, consider the effect of a simple rule passed by the London borough of Merton in 2003 and slavishly emulated by planners all over the country. The Merton rule requires all developers who build a building of more than 1,000 square metres to generate 10 per cent of energy 'renewably' on site. The effect has been to make it worth my while to thin my woods in Northumberland for the first time in decades. How so? Faced with the need to find an energy source sufficiently dense to fit on site, developers have turned en masse to wood (or biomass as they prefer to call it). This has led to convoys of diesel lorries chugging through the streets of London to deliver wood to buildings - how very 13th-century! Delivering, drying and burning this wood produces far more carbon dioxide than delivering gas would. And lo, by bidding up the price of wood, the effect has been to cause landowners to harvest their timber younger than before, which increases carbon emissions. Thus enriched by having lost less money in managing woods, people like me take a holiday - on a jet. So as policy own goals go the Merton rule is a quintuple whammy. According to one estimate, Britain is producing about six million extra tons of carbon dioxide each year as a result of redirecting its wood supply from current use by the wood-panel and other related industries into energy supply. The neo-medieval policy of picking winners - or rather losers - creates a salivating lobby for subsidies (even the RSPB takes money from wind farms to shut it up about their eagle killing). But it is saddling ordinary Britons with uncompetitive energy prices, lost jobs, rising fuel poverty, spoiled landscapes - and higher carbon emissions too. Time for a peasants' revolt. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 17th May 2011. The inconvenient truth is that they're wrong. New Coalition targets for tackling climate change promise only a succession of own goals, says Andrew Turnbull. Today, Coalition ministers are expected to confirm the Government's ambitious framework for addressing climate change when they announce new targets for achieving their goals. Under the Climate Change Act 2008, there is a legal duty to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in 2050 by 80% from the 1990 base. In addition, a Committee on Climate Change has been established to set out five-yearly targets on the way to 2050 and to comment on progress. Furthermore, a wide range of measures has been introduced, at EU and national levels – the latest is the proposal for a floor price for carbon. All this is based on a clear view of the science that is consistent with advice from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It has identified man-made emissions of CO2 as the principal driver of the rise in temperature over the past century (about 0.7°C). In one scenario, where we carry on as usual, the central projection for the rise is 1-1.5°C by mid-century and 3°C by end-century. However, if temperature rises more than 2°C, serious impacts such as rising sea levels, drought, storms and damage to food supply will occur. The 80% figure, therefore, is set at the level considered necessary to prevent this threshold being crossed. On the face of it, this seems like a cohesive package: policy is aligned with scientific advice. But the Really Inconvenient Truth (not the one in Al Gore's film) is that this whole edifice is flawed and built on shaky foundations. First, the science is nowhere near as conclusive as it is presented. Though there is no disagreement that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, there is no consensus on the relationship between CO2 and temperature. Many scientists also challenge the dominant role assigned to man-made CO2, arguing that other variables such as the sun, cosmic rays, oceans and clouds have been underplayed. Given this, it is unwise of the Government to have placed such heavy bets on just one interpretation of the evidence. Critics also point out that the correlation between the increase in CO2 and temperature is far from straightforward. CO2 concentrations have risen steadily since about 1940, but the rise in temperature started much earlier and has cycled around a gently rising trend. For example, after a rapid rise in temperature between 1970 and the late 1990s, there has been no increase in the past decade. Second, there have been failings in the governance of science. Senior figures in our scientific establishment, rather than promoting challenge, have sought to close the debate down and tell us the science is settled. The gap between the IPCC's huge responsibilities to advise on one of the biggest issues of the day, and its competence to do so, is now so vast that it should be scrapped and replaced. Third, the framework provided by the Climate Change Act takes no account of what other nations are doing. For a country like the UK, which produces only 2-3 per cent of global man-made emissions, this makes no sense. If we push too hard on decarbonisation, we will suffer double jeopardy: our energy-using industries will migrate and we may still need to invest heavily in adapting our infrastructure. Fourth, the way in which the policy responses are being prioritised makes no sense. In a logical world, one would start with those technologies that are most effective in terms of cost per ton of CO2 abated. But the EU renewables policy denies this logic. One set of technologies – in particular, wind – is guaranteed a market share and an indexed price regardless of how competitive it really is. Taking account of wind's intermittency, its cost per kilowatt hour (kWh) exceeds that of other low carbon sources. Wind capacity should not be confused with output. Fifth, current policies are hugely unfair. Those with large properties or landholdings on which to install solar panels or wind turbines can earn 30p-40p per kWh, which is retailed at around 11p. The loss is paid for by a levy on all households and businesses. If you live in a tower block in Lambeth, you don't have much opportunity to share in this. Finally, policies are failing to adapt to change, notably the impact of shale gas, which can make a huge contribution to carbon reduction with little extra cost. We need an approach to the science that welcomes challenge from diverse points of view rather than seeking to suppress them, and which recognises the uncertainties that remain in distinguishing the relative contributions of man and nature. From our politicians, officials and parliamentarians we require more rationality and curiosity and an end to alarmist propaganda. They should pay more attention to the national interest and less to cutting a dash as global evangelists. In responding to the advice from the Committee on Climate Change on the next set of targets, the Government has an opportunity for a rethink. Instead, it seems likely that the requirements of keeping the Coalition together will take precedence. Lord Turnbull was Permanent Secretary of the Department of the Environment 1994-98 and of HM Treasury 1998-2002; and Cabinet Secretary 2002-2005. He is a trustee of The Global Warming Policy Foundation and a fuller version of this article is on its website, www.thegwpf.org ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
A good comment from the Telegraph website that says it all! The 'establishment's' continued willingness to accept climate change as proven fact in the face of inconclusive evidence is incomprehensible and will cost us dear. There is a simple logic to this debate which is conveniently ignored - this is the real Inconvenient Truth. To prove that climate change is real, the following must be demonstrated: If all this can be shown conclusively - or at least beyond reasonable doubt - we then need further to be convinced that this matter
is urgent and requires immediate, drastic and costly action. For this the following must be shown: It is also essential to demonstrate: We need the impartial logic of science not the continuing outpourings of ill-informed opinion. The government should take heed before embarking on costly and likely ineffective programmes of remediation. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ October 29, 2010 - The “One Page” Guide to Climate and Energy Issues. Presented at “National Issues Forum” in the county office building auditorium, Charlottesville, Virginia on October 29, 2010 by Charles Battig, M.S.,M.D. These issues are more than about traditional science; they combine political/sociological belief systems, dogma, and one-sided government funding; proper caring for the environment does not equate with radical environmentalism/climatism. Club of Rome 1991: “in searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming...would fit the bill… the real enemy then is humanity itself.” The one-world-government, U.N. agenda has employed manmade global warming scares as its political tool for wealth redistribution. Scientists have biases/agendas: climatologist Stephen Schneider: “we have to offer scary scenarios...decide the right balance between being effective and being honest.” The 2009 “Climategate” scandal exposed the scientific misconduct of those involved as they sought academic notoriety, governmental grant funding, while they promoted fears of manmade climate change to build support for imposed political solutions of wealth redistribution via control of energy and its cost. Since the “little ice age” (A.D. 1300-1800) ended, global temperatures have risen about 1.5 F; the exact amount and causes are in doubt because of numerous reinterpretations of the raw temperature data; the major increases are in cities (urban heat islands); satellite temperature data covers only the last 30 years; surface stations cover only 30% of the earth’s surface...modest global warming is beneficial to society and nature; cold is the historical killer, not warmth. The warmest recent year is 1934; the Medieval Warm Period (A.D. 900-1300) was warmer than now; carbon dioxide levels were much lower then...the more recent temperature record shows an average 30 year cycle of cooling and warming. Since 1998 the earth has been in a cooling trend, even as carbon dioxide levels continue to rise. There is no valid “carbon dioxide up/temperature up” proven correlation. Climate models and computers cannot predict the future climate; no one knows all the variables and their interactions; evidence of global warming does not prove it is manmade; any human component is buried in the massive effects of nature. Carbon dioxide is absolutely essential to your life; it is not a biological pollutant; it is necessary for plant life, which produces oxygen and food for us carbon-based humans. Atmospheric carbon dioxide increases have fed the re-growth of the Amazon and eastern U.S. forests. Water vapour is the number one greenhouse gas. In 2007, a British court ruled that 9 out of the 12 catastrophic climate events in Mr. Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” were unfounded; the film was judged “political propaganda”, and had to be so announced, if shown in public schools. (See also Testimonies - 35 Inconvenient Truths). Petroleum oil, natural gas, and coal are the original “bio-fuels” and are plentiful (see also Energy Matters - Our long-term energy future); the only shortage is the one imposed on their use by the government. Present governmental policies aimed at restricting domestic energy production send “green jobs” overseas; we are forced to import more foreign oil rather than develop our own plentiful resources with American labour. The U.S. gets most of its petroleum oil from Canada and Mexico. China is drilling for oil off the U.S. coast in areas prohibited to U.S. companies. The eastern U.S. is the new “Saudi Arabia of natural gas.” Corn ethanol gasoline is more polluting and less efficient than basic gasoline; it carries a 45 cent tax cost and a 54 cent import duty on Brazilian sugar cane ethanol...a boon to Iowa mega-farm interests at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. Wind turbine and solar energy are not “free energy”...they require huge land areas, destroy large areas of native habitat, and consume disproportionate amounts of concrete and building resources for the amount of energy produced; they require the construction of additional conventional power plants to produce electricity when the wind stops or the sun sets...they survive only because of massive governmental subsidies and costly, imposed-mandates for their use ,solar and wind receive about 20x the subsidies for nuclear, for the same energy produced. Wind turbine power farms are more polluting than conventional gas power plants. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
September 6th 2010
But what difference would it make if he did resign? None whatsoever! Whoever the UN put in his place would be just another true believer.
This is because the charter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is:-
"... to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic
information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options
for adaptation and mitigation. IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy." [my emphasis] In the words of John McLean:- "If it were proven that there is no human influence or that the human influence was negligible
then the justification for the IPCC's existence would disappear, its unique position of influence would disappear and, we can surmise,
substantial funding for climate research that somehow supported the notion of a human influence would likewise disappear.
The continued existence of the organization is therefore dependent on its own reports." So, unless the IPCC is disbanded, you can be sure of only one thing - that things will remain the same.
You will continue to be taken for fools and tax cash cows. Even if they could be persuaded to do the decent thing the IPCC has gone too far
down the alarmist route and contaminated science too much to even think of backtracking now. The the only question that should be considered -
'Are human induced carbon emissions causing climate change?' continues to get pushed aside. Is it us? Yes or No.
Unfortunately, as shown above, the IPCC starts from a Yes answer without explaining the basis of their stance. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
June 2010
In his new book Whole Earth Discipline, Stewart Brand - ecology guru and icon of the counter culture -
says there is no longer room for ideology in green thinking and that only science and engineering can save us from
climate-change catastrophe. In the face of climate change everyone is an environmentalist. We can no longer afford an ideology - the ridiculous
spectacle of Conservatives not believing in climate change because Al Gore does. Climate change is not a partisan issue,
it's a clear and present danger. Look at Darfur, paralysed by drought and war - a slow-motion Haiti. As a futurist I think in scenarios and some scenarios are extremely bleak, but we cant let despair lead to paralysis.
We need to be engineers for the next 100 years, and we need to stop burning cheap coal. If we don't stop burning it then
we're dead. James Hansen (NASA climatologist) proposes a carbon tax, phasing out of coal-fired plants, urgent R&D on
nuclear energy, and international co-operation. In a letter to President Obama, Hansen says: 'One of the greatest dangers
the world faces is the possibility that a vocal minority of anti-nuclear activists could prevent phase-out of coal emissions' Energy efficiency, crucial as it is, can't replace all the coal-fired power plants that need to be shut down and it
can't generate power for the growing economies of China, India, Africa and Latin America. To my mind the Green path forwards begins with environmentalists realising that nuclear power will grow no matter what
we do. China has 11 working reactors, five under construction, 30 planned and 86 proposed. Five out of six people live
in the developing world -about 5.7 billion in 2010. One way or another they (the world's poor) will get grid electricity.
Where that electricity comes from will determine what happens with the climate. Right now 40% of the world's electricity comes from coal, 20% from gas, 16% from nuclear, 16% from hydro, 6% from oil,
2% from renewables. To generate a gigawatt of electricity needs 58 square miles of solar panels, 298 square miles of
wind farm, 965 square miles of corn for biofuel, or one nuclear power station - about a third of a square mile.
(TT note. This is incorrect because one standard UK power station has a
generating capacity of 2 gigawatts. Therefore the square-mileage for solar
panels, wind farms and biofuel should be doubled to account for one nuclear station) I've learned to disbelieve much of what I've been told by my fellow environmentalists and now I think of the four Absolute Evils of nuclear power (safety, cost, waste storage and proliferation) the way an engineer does, as design problems. We need to build, as Amory Lovens, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute says, 'so that major failures - by accident or malice - become impossible by design rather than inevitable by design. Nukes are green, new nukes even more so. The new, fourth generation of nuclear is fantastic and getting better. Small mobile nuclear plants - the Russians are building 35-megawatt reactors that float on barges - will provide power where it's needed. In Japan, Toshiba has invented a 10-to-50- 'nuclear battery' that the company calls 'super-safe, small and simple'. A lab in California is building small, sealed, transportable and autonomous reactors that can be planted in the ground; no fuel goes in, no waste comes out. I discuss the challenges of safety, waste and proliferation in detail in Whole Earth Discipline. As for cost, the problem is not that nuclear is expensive but that coal is cheap. Whole Earth Catalogue (Brands classic DIY ecology manual) was a libertarian bible that said 'don't ask what your country can do for you, do it yourself - but only governments cooperating can make coal expensive. It's a sign of how desperate things have become that we need government, it's all hands on deck. Last year 443 nuclear plants kept three gigatons of coal-fired carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Tripling the worlds nuclear capacity to 700 gigawatts per year over 50 years would reduce carbon emissions by one gigaton a year. We need more power. As I said, energy efficiency is not enough, and you can't tell poor people in the developing world that they can't have electricity. I hope in five years' time science will have moved on, and that we won't be having this conversation but for now, what's the choice? As Bill McKibben (long-time Green activist) says: 'nuclear power is a potential threat, coal-fired is guaranteed destruction'. Stewart Brand was in Bristol for the Festival of Ideas. For this year's programme visit www.ideasfestival.co.uk ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
May 2010 As a taster, and to demonstrate the non-accusatory mien of their views, I repeat below the concluding remarks of their 'Scepticism' page:- Whatever the category of scepticism people find themselves in there are widespread attributions of fraud, conspiracy and selectivity of data and such claims are to be resisted. Many scientists and groups of scientists in several disciplines are doing painstaking work and reporting their results in peer-reviewed journals. Individual papers may very well come to incorrect or speculative conclusions, but these are usually sorted out within a relatively short time. It is part of the scientific process to speculate and put forward possible explanations for new results and some of these are almost bound to be in error. Most valid scepticism is directed at those papers which are concerned with climate modeling and, in particular, those that portray the future. The IPCC reports do make reference to all the work published in the time after the previous one and do attempt to summarize the various findings. In this there is evidence of some bias towards basing all future changes in climate on the greenhouse effect to the exclusion of natural forcings. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
February 2010
Politicians and scientists should not try to stifle open debate on climate Change.
What about all this post ClimateGate controversy over climate change. We should
simply ask these 4 questions: Even if the climate scientists can tell us what is happening, and why they think it is happening, they cannot tell us what governments should be doing about it. So what should governments be doing? Four things: ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Don’t confuse environmentalism with science. Truth is not determined by majority vote. Any talk of a “consensus” in science is best not taken as the final word. As Somerset Maugham once put it, “If 40 million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie.” Climatology is a science, not to be confused with environmentalism. The heart of environmentalism is not to be found in the natural sciences. It is ideology and nothing more. That is why it ends in “-ism.” Environmentalism is itself not a monolith, but its dominant strand is distinctly statist in character. As such, its main nemesis is the science of economics, not climatology or any of the other natural sciences. A sound understanding of economics is all that is needed to discredit the emerging interventionist social agenda of the environmental movement. The methods that they recommend cannot deliver the results that they promise. It is common to hear accusations of “junk science” hurled against environmentalists, particularly those touting the dangers of climate change. These accusations might be well taken and, if so, would be sufficient to derail the CO2 “Cap and Trade” juggernaut. But the real objective of the environmental movement appears to be in the social realm. That means the control of people, with environmental controls serving merely as the instrument. We have had considerable domestic and international experience with governments that micromanage the lives of their residents. The more governments interfere in our lives, the more things go wrong. The people are poorer, less healthy and less able to adapt to the vagaries of nature and of other men. If ever a science were settled, this would be it. It should be obvious that each individual’s actions affect the rest of us to some greater or lesser extent. The same is true with respect to the environment around us. Complex interactions present us with great regularities, as well as many unexpected events. It has always been so; and we can expect it to remain so. The environmental activists that met recntly in Copenhagen need to mature a bit and come to understand that we have less to fear from CO2 than from bad ideas. Instead of sucking the oxygen out of the debate, they should admit that they know far less than their claims would suggest. They need to learn humility, an essential ingredient in anyone who would speak of science. We need not con ourselves that we know enough to predict the Earth’s temperature 100, or even 20 years from now. Even less certain should we be that we have the power to control it.
What we can control is our readiness to face whatever comes. But to follow the advice of the Copenhagen activists, or those who voted for Climate Change bills, is the path of fools. It is the path of weakness and dissipation. We know better, and we have done better. It is free societies that have done the best in meeting economic and environmental challenges. It is free societies that have led the way in developing new energy sources and making them incrementally more efficient. If we, as consumers, really feel that burning coal for energy is too dirty, we don’t even need to put a tax on it. All we need to do is stop wasting money on subsidies to low-yield, low-reliability sources, such as wind and solar and remove the irrational and crushing regulatory burdens from more promising energy sources, such as nuclear. We don’t need to subsidize any energy source. The technology has already advanced sufficiently that private competition to serve customers would result in a systematic replacement of old energy sources by cheaper and cleaner sources. If governments would stick to their job of protecting us from aggression, rather than blocking us from progress, we would now be wealthier, healthier, safer and cleaner. 'Whenever science inclines towards dogma and fanaticism, it is almost always trying to conceal doubt and great uncertainty' Carl Yung. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ December 2009 - Climategate. So the 'experts', Phil Jones, Keith Briffa et al, at University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit have been outed at last.
No longer can they pretend that they are proper scientists with only the truth in mind.
They are, as anyone with any common sense has known all along, charlatans! But let us not dwell too much on the dishonesty of the alarmist brigade relating to climate change. It really doesn't matter a lot. Anyone with more than 2 brain cells know that climate changes, it always has and it always will. The scope or intensity of that change will not be altered by the misinformation put out by CRU or Hadley Centre, or for that matter, by Al Gore, James Hansen, Rajendra Pachauri or Michael (forged Hockey Stick graph) Mann or IPCC or any of their other government-funded 'let's terrify the people so that we can stop them using carbon fuels and help the politicians extract more taxes' cronies. The only thing that needs to be sorted is what causes climate change. Is it natural, i.e. the sun? or is it carbon emissions?
Now, I am no scientist, but my schoolboy science tells me that it is not carbon emissions. There is just too little of it in the atmosphere to make a difference and to claim that the gas forms a blanket that stops heat escaping from the atmosphere seems to fall foul of the laws of thermodynamics. In any case human contribution to the total CO2 is insignificant at <4%. Watch that marvellous video by Elisa Pardo (there is a link on the Carbon Dioxide page) if you disagree with that. But if I can see the lie about CO2 then surely there must be thousands of 'scientists' out there who can also see it. Indeed, a friend of mine, who is a retired professor of Earth Science, states quite categorically that 'CO2 is not a global warming gas' but when asked why he doesn't shout this from the rooftops he is uncharacteristically silent. It is this silence that really concerns me. Does the science fraternity think that it will all go away in time? That nothing bad will come of it? That it's only a few rotten apples spoiling for a fight or something? Well, if they think that, they are wrong. There is a lot of anger here in the real world. Contrary to what the alarmists like to tell us, the general public do not buy into the anthropogenic global warming rhetoric. This current scientific fraud is the moment when every member of the science community should come out and state their true views (and Peter B, if you are reading this, this includes your son-in-law Dr. Peter L). The question is simple - Are human induced carbon emissions causing climate change?. There must be a full, public debate. Let us have front page reports in all the newspapers. Insist that the BBC reports the debate fairly, though I know that there is little hope of that happening. No fudges. No half truths. The answer to the question is either Yes or No. If their answer is Yes then show us the science to back it up. And, yes, the public are intelligent enough to understand it. If the answer is No there is no need to do anything other than to repeal all those nonsense 'green' laws and repay the falsely obtained tax money to the poor overtaxed public. The innocent has no need to prove his innocence. We Deniers are not making accusations. It is up to the accusers, the alarmists, to prove their case. If the scam is not put to rest then the whole of science will be tainted when the truth finally comes out. And come out it will! Where once scientists held a treasured spot in the publics heart because they were believed to be the custodians of the truth this will no longer be the case. Scientists of whatever hue will become pariahs and they will be afraid to state their profession in public for fear of reprisals from a public who have been taxed and lied to for purely political ends. Scientists everywhere will be looked upon as public funds scrounging frauds who don't really care about the truth and that will be very hard to eradicate. Be warned. The public demand the truth! |
| Home | Carbon Dioxide | Nitrous Oxide & Methane | Energy matters | Testimonies | Comment |
