Climate Change

ᔥ Brisbane Times

The Climate Change’Global Warming proponents have at various times claimed all sorts of calamities are going to befall us unless we spend massive amounts trying to mitigate natural earth cycles. Slowly, one by one their claims are being proven to have been alarmist at best and fraud at worst:

Rising ocean temperatures caused by climate change are unlikely to mean the end of the coral on the Great Barrier Reef, according to a new scientific study.

The Cell Press journal Current Biology this morning published what it says is the first large-scale investigation of climate effects on corals and found while some corals were dying, others were flourishing and adapting to the change in water temperatures.

For the study researchers identified and measured more than 35,000 coral colonies on 33 reefs across the length of the Great Barrier Reef to see how they were responding to warming ocean waters.

In results they have described as ‘‘surprising’’ the study found while one species declined in abundance, other species could rise in number.

One of the researchers, Professor Terry Hughes from James Cook University, said while critical issues remained he now believed rising temperatures were unlikely to mean the end of the coral reef.

‘‘The good news is that, rather than experiencing wholesale destruction, many coral reefs will survive climate change by changing the mix of coral species as the ocean warms and becomes more acidic,’’ he said.

‘‘That’s important for people who rely on the rich and beautiful coral reefs of today for food, tourism, and other livelihoods.’’

He said earlier studies of climate change and corals had been done on a much smaller geographical scale, with a primary focus on total coral cover or counts of species as rather crude indicators of reef health.

ᔥ The Globe and Mail

Climate Change propagandists like to tell us that all sorts of creatures are doomed as a result of “climate change”. Using their argument it was probablt climate change that saw off teh dinosaurs.

Anyway it seems that once again the apologists were wrong…this time about Polar Bears. A real apology for all their chicken little behaviour would be nice:

The debate about climate change and its impact on polar bears has intensified with the release of a survey that shows the bear population in a key part of northern Canada is far larger than many scientists thought, and might be growing.

The number of bears along the western shore of Hudson Bay, believed to be among the most threatened bear subpopulations, stands at 1,013 and could be even higher, according to the results of an aerial survey released Wednesday by the Government of Nunavut. That’s 66 per cent higher than estimates by other researchers who forecasted the numbers would fall to as low as 610 because of warming temperatures that melt ice faster and ruin bears’ ability to hunt. The Hudson Bay region, which straddles Nunavut and Manitoba, is critical because it’s considered a bellwether for how polar bears are doing elsewhere in the Arctic.

The study shows that “the bear population is not in crisis as people believed,” said Drikus Gissing, Nunavut’s director of wildlife management. “There is no doom and gloom.”

ᔥ Stuff.co.nz

No matter what the issue, media always manages to find someone who is “outraged”. Todays outraged people are climate change fanciers who are “outraged” that some scientists think that changing the planet’s biosphere is silly, when it is easier to bioengineer human to cope with warming.

The ensuing shit fight amongst scientists is hilarious:

If it is so hard to change the climate to suit humans, why not alter humans to suit the changing climate, philosophers from Oxford and New York universities are asking.

They suggest humans could be modified to be smaller, dislike eating meat, have fewer children and be more willing to co-operate with social goals.

Behavioural changes might not be enough to prevent climate change even if they were widely adopted, and international agreements for measures such as emissions trading are proving elusive, say Matthew Liao of New York University and Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache of Oxford University.

So human engineering deserves serious consideration in the debate about how to solve climate change, they write in a coming paper for the academic journal Ethics, Policy & Environment.

A person’s ecological footprint is directly correlated to size, because larger people eat more than lighter people, their cars need more fuel to carry them and they wear out shoes, carpets and furniture sooner than lighter people, the authors write. They suggest hormone treatments could be used to suppress child growth, or embryos could be selected for smaller size.

Reducing consumption of red meat could have significant environmental benefits, the paper says, citing estimates that as much as 51 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock farming. They say people who lack the motivation or willpower to give up eating meat could be helped by ”meat patches” on their skin to deliver hormones to stimulate their immune system against common bovine proteins.

”Eating ‘eco-unfriendly’ food would induce unpleasant experiences,” the authors say.

Better educated women have fewer children, so human engineering to improve cognition could reduce fertility as ”a positive side effect from the point of view of tackling climate change”, the paper argues.

Pharmacological treatments such as the ”love drug” oxytocin could encourage people to act as a group and boost their appreciation of other life forms and nature, the authors say.

The paper has sparked a storm in the blogosphere. The environmentalist Bill McKibben tweeted that the authors had proposed ”the worst climate-change solutions of all time”. They have also been denounced as Nazis and ecofascists.

The authors are bemused but unrepentant. If people were willing to consider ”really dangerous” geoengineering solutions such as using space mirrors to alter the Earth’s solar reflectivity, human engineering should also be on the table, Dr Liao said.

3News

Earth Hour was a big fat fail this year. Perhaps people are waking up to the big fat con that is climate change:

A lot of Kiwis forgot to switch off their lights for this year’s Earth Hour, but organisers of the event are unconcerned.

Figures from national grid operator Transpower show that across most of New Zealand, power usage during Saturday’s Earth Hour was higher than that for the same period last week.

…

But the New Zealand organisers of Earth Hour say the event is not about power savings on the night.

Perhaps Kiwis don’t need to commiserate with North Koreans who have their very own Earth Hour every single night.

If it isn’t about power savings then what exactly is it about? The organisers say the environment…but they all promote the lighting of paraffin candles…it is a crock and Kiwis know it.

ᔥ The Australian

A warmist lobby group has issued instructions to its adherents that the IPCC can be ignored and they they should continue to scaremonger away:

A GLOBAL lobby group has distributed a “spin sheet” encouraging its 300 member organisations to emphasise the link between climate change and extreme weather events, despite uncertainties acknowledged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

An “action pack” distributed by Global Campaign for Climate Action said members “shouldn’t be afraid to make the connection”, despite the sometimes low level of confidence in the official documents of the IPCC. The action pack, which was produced to coincide with the release of the latest full IPCC report into the link between climate change and extreme weather events, rekindled claims that overstating the case damaged the credibility of the science.

“What this leaked document shows is again we have groups out there promoting more extreme situations than the report actually warrants because the latest report shows there are degrees of uncertainty,” said Institute of Public Affairs climate spokesman Tim Wilson.

“When the claims don’t correlate it undermines the confidence that people can actually have in climate science.”

ᔥ Fox News

While all the weirdo’s are sitting in the dark at 8:30 pm tonight, I will be celebrating Human Achievement Hour by turning every light on, watching a DVD, playing music, simultaneously using my iPhone, iPad and Laptop and streaming video amongst other things:

As millions of people sit in the dark during Earth Hour to call for action against climate change this weekend, a libertarian think tank wants you to fight the power by keeping the lights on.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute plans to commemorate Earth Hour 2012 with its “Human Achievement Hour,” 60 minutes to gather with friends in a heated home, watch television and surf the Internet instead of dimming or shutting off the lights altogether to draw attention to climate change.

“HAH is an annual event meant to recognize and celebrate the fact that this is the greatest time to be alive, and that the reason we have come is that people have been free to use their minds and the resources in their environment to experiment, create, and innovate,” reads a CEI website on the event scheduled to coincide with Earth Hour 2012 from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. local time Saturday.

Participants in the event understand the “necessity to protect the individual persons from government coercion,” according to the Washington-based think tank.

“Observers of Earth Hour want world leaders to ‘do something’ about pollution and energy use,” the website continues. “What this means is that they want politicians to use legal mandates and punitive taxes to prevent individuals from freely using resources, hindering our ability to create the solutions and technologies of the future.”

Myron Ebell, CEI’s director of energy and global warming policy, said the event is about saluting the people who “keep the lights on and produce the energy” that makes human achievement possible.

ᔥ The Australian

Climate Change is claiming the first seaside house…not through increased tides, rather from weirdo councils and their regulations devaluing houses and forcing sales because of their belief in a myth:

LIKE many working couples, Anne and Russell Secombe decided to find a place by the sea where they would eventually retire to live out the rest of their lives pursuing simple pleasures.

In the 1970s, the couple, now in their 80s, found it, a modest single-level brick house at 23 Illaroo Rd, Lake Cathie, a town on the NSW mid-north coast.

It’s simple bliss: Anne, a retired clerk, spends time keeping up her neat garden; Russell, a retired mechanic, angles on the beach for blackfish, flathead and bream. But yesterday the Secombes’ sense of hard-earned stability collapsed when they discovered they could be among the first victims in Australia to be dispossessed of their home. Not because of any existing environmental threat, but because the local council believes climate change could pose one by the end of the century.

In a move that struck incredulity, alarm and fear among locals, Port Macquarie Hastings Council put a study on the council website recommending that council enforce a “planned retreat” for the owners of the 17 houses on Illaroo Road. The area is one of 15 “hot spots” identified by the NSW government as being vulnerable to the effects of sea level rises due to climate change, as outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

For Illaroo Road residents Kylie Outtrim, a nurse, and Stephen Hunt, a financial planner, yesterday marked “D Day” for making a property already devalued by council actions now unsellable. Illaroo Road is about 7m above mean sea level, so there’s no danger of flooding.

But the council’s concern is that if IPCC projections of climate change and sea level rises come true, increased erosion will progressively undermine the road and then the houses.

The council’s plan would mean the Secombes and their neighbours would, over an unspecified period of time, be expected or required to sell their house to the council and move out.

“We don’t want to shift, no way,” Mr Secombe told The Weekend Australian yesterday.

Ms Outtrim tells of their frustration at not being able to renovate the 1970s, two-storey brick house they bought five years ago because of the council’s stance.

After the couple bought the house with a plan to renovate it and retire in it, the council imposed a ban on Illaroo Road owners doing any redevelopments on their properties.

Council’s action has reduced property values on Illaroo Road by between a third and a half, according to local observers.

The report commissioned by the council and prepared by the Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation says the “planned retreat” option would be the best of four to deal with a threat of erosion projected to emerge for a forecast rise of 0.4 of a metre by 2050 and a rise of 0.9 of a metre in sea level by the turn of the century”.

The report estimates the cost of acquiring the 17 houses at $10.5 million but says it would be preferable to building a protective wall called a revetment, at a cost of $3m which they define as a “technically feasible option” that would “provide certifiable protection from erosion risks”.

SMEC also found the other two options – “beach renourishment” involving bringing in sand to replenish that lost by erosion, and building groynes (long breakwaters built into the sea) – would not be feasible. But getting rid of the houses would work because, SMEC reasons, if they are not there any more, they can’t be threatened with climate change.

ᔥ Wall Street Journal

People are starting to very slowly wake up to the fact that the calamity predicted hasn’t happened.

What is happening to global temperatures in reality? The answer is: almost nothing for more than 10 years. Monthly values of the global temperature anomaly of the lower atmosphere, complied at the University of Alabama from NASA satellite data, can be found at the website http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/. The latest (February 2012) monthly global temperature anomaly for the lower atmosphere was minus 0.12 degrees Celsius, slightly less than the average since the satellite record of temperatures began in 1979.

The lack of any statistically significant warming for over a decade has made it more difficult for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its supporters to demonize the atmospheric gas CO2 which is released when fossil fuels are burned. The burning of fossil fuels has been one reason for an increase of CO2 levels in the atmosphere to around 395 ppm (or parts per million), up from preindustrial levels of about 280 ppm.

Pretty soon there is going to be some very angry people searching for the perpetrators of the fraud.

ᔥ The Telegraph

Climate Change is such a crock:

Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat Energy Secretary, said he would not scrap or water down the Climate Change Act, after a year-long review into reducing bureaucracy surrounding environmental laws.

The Act underpins all of the Government’s policies on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, from support for wind farms to higher road taxes for more polluting cars.
It costs up to £18 billion per year, the equivalent of £650 for every household, according to a government analysis.

The “believer” world erupted last week with “gotcha” columns and blogs when private board papers from a US conservative think-tank,Heartland,  were stolen and publicised. The useful idiots here in New Zealand also jumped in on the act.

Unfortunately for them all their claims were, yesterday, turned topsy-turvy when a leading climate scientist (chair of the IGU Integrity Committee) confessed that he had fraudulently obtained the documents by a form of identity theft. Worse, the main document is a forgery.

Peter H. Gleick, a water and climate analyst who has been studying aspects of global warming for more than two decades, in recent years became an aggressive critic of organizations and individuals casting doubt on the seriousness of greenhouse-driven climate change. He used blogs,congressional testimony, group letters and other means to make his case.

Now, Gleick has admitted to an act that leaves his reputation in ruins and threatens to undercut the cause he spent so much time pursuing. His summary, just published on his blog at Huffington Post, speaks for itself. …

…

The Heartland Institute had already signaled that it plans to seek charges and civil action against the person who extracted its documents under a false identity. Foreshadowing today’s events, on Friday, Ross Kaminsky, a senior fellow and former board member at Heartland, posted a piece on the American Spectator site naming Gleick as an “obvious suspect.” Now they have their man.

I won’t speculate on how the legal aspects of this story might play out.

Another question, of course, is who wrote the climate strategy document that Gleick now says was mailed to him. His admitted acts of deception in acquiring the cache of authentic Heartland documents surely will sustain suspicion that he created the summary, which Heartland’s leadership insists is fake.

One way or the other, Gleick’s use of deception in pursuit of his cause after years of calling out climate deception has destroyed his credibility and harmed others. (Some of the released documents contain information about Heartland employees that has no bearing on the climate fight.) That is his personal tragedy and shame (and I’m sure devastating for his colleagues, friends and family).