Environmental Issue

The argument is essentially over…the BBC caved, many other media outlets are facing reality, even the railroad engineer at the IPCC has given up.

Global Warming hasn’t happened for 17-18 years. Even the warming that did occur was negligible.

Now one of the last bastions of warmist propaganda outfits, the NY times has finally thrown in the towel. But they can’t quite get there to admitting it has stopped, referring instead to a “slowdown”.

As unlikely as this may sound, we have lucked out in recent years when it comes to global warming.

The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace.

The slowdown is a bit of a mystery to climate scientists. True, the basic theory that predicts a warming of the planet in response to human emissions does not suggest that warming should be smooth and continuous. To the contrary, in a climate system still dominated by natural variability, there is every reason to think the warming will proceed in fits and starts.

But given how much is riding on the scientific forecast, the practitioners of climate science would like to understand exactly what is going on. They admit that they do not, even though some potential mechanisms of the slowdown have been suggested. The situation highlights important gaps in our knowledge of the climate system, some of which cannot be closed until we get better measurements from high in space and from deep in the ocean.  Read more »

There is a great deal of press regarding the DCD milk scandal…but who is to blame?

Of course it is easy to blame the useless repeaters intent on massive headlines…which of course I did. But the real root of the issue lies with smelly hippies and the green taliban.

They have been intent on demanding our farmers be clean and green…look at this list of Labour and Green luminaries that implored the use of this ‘technology’

The Labour Party:

“We have been gratified by the support we have received for Eco-n from the Government with the very positive visit by the Minister of Agriculture, Hon. Jim Anderton.

Mr Anderton’s visit was followed by a visit from Associate Minister of Agriculture, Damien O’Connor.”

Ravensdown Annual Report 2006

and;  Read more »

129 scientists have signed an open letter to Ban Ki-Moon about his comments regarding climate change:

On November 9 this year you told the General Assembly: “Extreme weather due to climate change is the new normal … Our challenge remains, clear and urgent: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to strengthen adaptation to … even larger climate shocks … and to reach a legally binding climate agreement by 2015 … This should be one of the main lessons of Hurricane Sandy.”

On November 13 you said at Yale: “The science is clear; we should waste no more time on that debate.”

The following day, in Al Gore’s “Dirty Weather” Webcast, you spoke of “more severe storms, harsher droughts, greater floods”, concluding: “Two weeks ago, Hurricane Sandy struck the eastern seaboard of the United States. A nation saw the reality of climate change. The recovery will cost tens of billions of dollars. The cost of inaction will be even higher. We must reduce our dependence on carbon emissions.”

We the undersigned, qualified in climate-related matters, wish to state that current scientific knowledge does not substantiate your assertions.

The U.K. Met Office recently released data showing that there has been no statistically significant global warming for almost 16 years. During this period, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations rose by nearly 9% to now constitute 0.039% of the atmosphere. Global warming that has not occurred cannot have caused the extreme weather of the past few years. Whether, when and how atmospheric warming will resume is unknown. The science is unclear. Some scientists point out that near-term natural cooling, linked to variations in solar output, is also a distinct possibility.

The “even larger climate shocks” you have mentioned would be worse if the world cooled than if it warmed. Climate changes naturally all the time, sometimes dramatically. The hypothesis that our emissions of CO₂ have caused, or will cause, dangerous warming is not supported by the evidence.

The incidence and severity of extreme weather has not increased. There is little evidence that dangerous weather-related events will occur more often in the future. The U.N.’s own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says in its Special Report on Extreme Weather (2012) that there is “an absence of an attributable climate change signal” in trends in extreme weather losses to date. The funds currently dedicated to trying to stop extreme weather should therefore be diverted to strengthening our infrastructure so as to be able to withstand these inevitable, natural events, and to helping communities rebuild after natural catastrophes such as tropical storm Sandy.

There is no sound reason for the costly, restrictive public policy decisions proposed at the U.N. climate conference in Qatar. Rigorous analysis of unbiased observational data does not support the projections of future global warming predicted by computer models now proven to exaggerate warming and its effects.

Continue reading…

Let’s accept, for argument’s sake, that you give a rat’s arse about too much carbon, and lay awake nights imagining the future when your children are armpit deep in tepid water, fending off the floating corpses of dead polar bears.

Right, now you are Green.   But you did everything to stop this didn’t you?    Solar power, wind power, ethanol, carbon trading.

But wait.

The outcome of every one of these Green and bureaucratic interventions has been near enough the complete opposite of what you intended.

Solar power is a bankrupt industry rorted by Chinese dumping subsidies and a blot on every landscape where it has been introduced.

Windpower?   Its most enthusiastic proponents are now the cunning mates of top Tories in the UK, where the extended families of the Conservative PM and his deputy are making fortunes from subsidies, while the only winners from windfarms are the landholding Lords who rent out the family estates for rows of bird-shredders.

Ethanol?  BIG agriculture has taken that over (it’s BIG and you hate that).   The result, further devastation of the rainforests and a worldwide increase in food prices that is starving the poor.

Carbon Trading?  Scammed by governments and smart traders, collapsing under the weight of its own absurdity.   Even in NZ, the ETS means $330 million in corporate welfare for BIG agriculture.

Every move a total failure, the only beneficiaries the very institutions and classes you despise.

Hey Greenie…you know what is working?    The Free Market, that’s what.   It is working for you.

Weather conditions around the world this summer have provided ample fodder for the global warming debate. Droughts and heat waves are a harbinger of our future, carbon cuts are needed now more than ever, and yet meaningful policies have not been enacted.

But, beyond this well-trodden battlefield, something amazing has happened: Carbon-dioxide emissions in the United States have dropped to their lowest level in 20 years. Estimating on the basis of data from the US Energy Information Agency from the first five months of 2012, this year’s expected CO2 emissions have declined by more than 800 million tons, or 14 percent from their peak in 2007.

The cause is an unprecedented switch to natural gas, which emits 45 percent less carbon per energy unit. The U.S. used to generate about half its electricity from coal, and roughly 20 percent from gas. Over the past five years, those numbers have changed, first slowly and now dramatically: In April of this year, coal’s share in power generation plummeted to just 32 percent, on par with gas.

America’s rapid switch to natural gas is the result of three decades of technological innovation, particularly the development of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which has opened up large new resources of previously inaccessible shale gas. Despite some legitimate concerns about safety, it is hard to overstate the overwhelming benefits.

For starters, fracking has caused gas prices to drop dramatically. Adjusted for inflation, natural gas has not been this cheap for the past 35 years, with the price this year three to five times lower than it was in the mid-2000s. And, while a flagging economy may explain a small portion of the drop in U.S. carbon emissions, the EIA emphasizes that the major explanation is natural gas.

The reduction is even more impressive when one considers that 57 million additional energy consumers were added to the U.S. population over the past two decades. Indeed, U.S. carbon emissions have dropped about 20 percent per capita, and are now at their lowest level since Dwight D. Eisenhower left the White House in 1961.

ᔥ Daily Mail

Pretty much anything the Greens tout costs you money…big money. Take wind farms, they are becoming a millstone around Britain’s neck:

Britain’s ‘obsession’ with wind farms will push up family electricity bills by more than £300 a year, a report claimed today.

The Government’s green energy plans for the next eight years are a £124billion ‘blunder’ that will hit every UK household, a senior British economist has also said.

In a stark warning Professor Gordon Hughes, who has produced a study on how wind energy will hit energy costs, said that British consumers simply cannot afford to subsidise wind power.

Prof Hughes is one of the UK’s leading energy economists and works at the prestigious University of Edinburgh. He was also a senior adviser on energy and environmental policy at the World Bank.

By 2020 average electricity bills will be around 58 per cent higher – a £320 increase – just because of the flood of wind turbines planned for Britains’s coastlines, fields and seas, he said.

Completing the gloomy picture, Professor Hughes believes for all the huge investment in wind farms Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions may not even fall.

ᔥ  Watts Up With That

Global Warming alarmists will try to claim anything that “proves” their delusions. Like street lights melting because of high temperatures caused, of course, by global warming:

Followed up by an alarmist tweeting the same to a US Senator:

This is the photo they were tweeting:

But there are more than a few problems with their hypothesis. Stillwater Oklahoma isn’t nearly as hot as Phoenix, Arizona where the highest temperature recorded is 50°C…which although hot isn’t nearly hot enough to melt High density polyethelene (HDPE) from which the Street Light Globes are made. The melting point of those is 130°C.

Perhaps if the alarmists had checked the news then they would have found out that the street lights melted, not because of global warming, but because of warming of a different nature:

But according to KFOR-TV in Oklahoma City, the street lamps melted because of a dumpster fire in the area the night before. KFOR first posted the streetlamp photo on its Facebook page.

ᔥ The Telegraph

We have been lied to…now it is official. James Delingpole explains how we have been systematically lied to by agencies.

Have a look at this chart. It tells you pretty much all you need to know about the much-anticipated scoop by Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That?

What it means, in a nutshell, is that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – the US government body in charge of America’s temperature record, has systematically exaggerated the extent of late 20th century global warming. In fact, it has doubled it.

Is this a case of deliberate fraud by Warmist scientists hell bent on keeping their funding gravy train rolling? Well, after what we saw in Climategate anything is possible. (I mean it’s not like NOAA is run by hard-left eco activists, is it?) But I think more likely it is a case of confirmation bias. The Warmists who comprise the climate scientist establishment spend so much time communicating with other warmists and so little time paying attention to the views of dissenting scientists such as Henrik Svensmark – or Fred Singer or Richard Lindzen or indeed Anthony Watts – that it simply hasn’t occurred to them that their temperature records need adjusting downwards not upwards.

What Watts has conclusively demonstrated is that most of the weather stations in the US are so poorly sited that their temperature data is unreliable. Around 90 per cent have had their temperature readings skewed by the Urban Heat Island effect. While he has suspected this for some time what he has been unable to do until his latest, landmark paper (co-authored with Evan Jones of New York, Stephen McIntyre of Toronto, Canada, and Dr. John R. Christy from the Department of Atmospheric Science, University of Alabama, Huntsville) is to put precise figures on the degree of distortion involved.

For the full story go to Watts Up With That NOW!

ᔥ Quadrant

Phillipa Martyr has been following the money trail with climate change…it is interesting how much you can get if you mention those two little words. I’ll just bet this is happening here almost exactly the same:

OK, so we know that climate change will sink the Maldives, poison the wells, produce a zombie apocalypse, and quite possibly speed up the neutrino activity of the earth’s core (or was that solar flares? can’t remember).

But did you also know that it will impact upon our sheds, our ability to reason, our food supply, our newspapers, our Trekkies, and – most surprisingly of all – former Australian Attorney-General H V Evatt?

I was recently working my way through the Australian Research Council’s list of successful Discovery grants for 2011, which are commencing this year and most of which will run for the next three years. Along the way, I was tickled to see just how far-reaching the impact of climate change will be in Australia.

In case you hadn’t realised the seriousness of the problem, I thought I’d share these budding projects with you. Names of grantees and institutions have been omitted to protect the innocent, but I have included the FOR, or Field of Research as coded by the ARC, and the total grant monies. Enjoy.

Physiology: “Abrupt environmental changes can put natural populations at risk of extinction. The project will show to what extent individuals can compensate for temperature changes and thereby render populations resilient to climate change. This research will make theoretical advances and improve the power to predict impacts of future climate change.” ($370,000)

Civil Engineering: “This project will develop innovative light gauge steel roofing systems with considerably increased wind resistance and reliable design rules for cold-formed steel codes worldwide. It will contribute to the Australian government’s goal of increasing building resilience against future extreme and more frequent wind events caused by climate change.” ($320,000)

Public Health and Health Sciences: “This study will investigate the effects of extreme heat, increasing temperatures and consequences of climate change, on the population health of rural communities in South Australia. Findings will inform adaptation strategies to prevent an increase in heat-associated and climate change-associated morbidity and mortality in rural areas.” ($122,000 – 2 years)

Political Science: “Commonsense says that claims about how social and political life ought to be arranged must not make infeasible demands. This project will investigate this piece of commonsense and explore its implications for a number of pressing issues, such as climate change, multiculturalism, political participation, inequality, historical justice, and the rules of war.” ($408,587)

Sociology: “We know very little about the ways food security is governed in Australia. This study – the first social-science based study of food security in the nation – will allow us to understand how a multiplicity of agencies come together to ensure the delivery of food, especially at a time of climate change impacts.” ($100,000 – 2 years)

Psychology: “Climate change represents a moral challenge to humanity, and one that elicits high levels of emotion. This project examines how emotions and morality influence how people send and receive messages about climate change, and does so with an eye to developing concrete and do-able strategies for positive change.” ($197,302)

Journalism and Professional Writing: “This project will examine the use of news management or ‘spin’ by Australian governments. Is it a legitimate tool of government in the face of a hyper-adversarial news media or a technique which undermines democracy? It will examine ‘spin’ in connection with policies on climate change, economic policy, indigenous policy and asylum seekers policy.” ($95,000)

Literary Studies: “The project will devise and develop a new ‘cultural materialist’ paradigm for science fiction studies and apply it to a case study of science fictional representations of catastrophe, especially nuclear war, plague and extreme climate change.” ($239,000)

Historical Studies: “This project will produce a comprehensive new biography of H.V. Evatt, High Court judge, minister in the 1940s, President of the United Nations General Assembly and leader of the Australian Labor Party opposition during the 1950s. Evatt’s life resonates with modern challenges both of liberty in a time of terror, and of internationalism in a time of global warming.” ($185,000)

ᔥ Herald on Sunday

Rodney Hide says the ETS is a scam, he’s right of course.:

Former Prime Minister Helen Clark declares me a denier, actor Lucy Lawless says I’m whacko and political columnist Chris Trotter wants to charge me with treason.

Phew. All because I say out loud what most Kiwis think: New Zealand’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is a scam and a waste. The ETS taxes our elderly trying to heat their homes and then uses the revenue to subsidise multi-national Japanese companies. These companies bought forests in New Zealand. Their trees are now subsidised because they suck up CO2.

And the reason for the money-go-round? To cool the planet. Even ETS architects say it won’t make a difference. So it’s a scam. And a waste.

It is a scam. Just like all the other eco-scams perpetrated on us:

The science is settled. Yada yada. Some extraordinary number of scientists have reached consensus. Blah, blah.

It all moves me not a jot. Science is not religion. It’s not politics. Science is never settled and truth isn’t decided by voting.

Besides, I’ve already survived innumerable environmental scares. We didn’t run out of oil as was scientifically predicted when I was at school.

Nor did we suffer the catastrophic ecological collapse that was the consensus. The ozone hole has gone the way of the Y2K bug. The population bomb never went off. We haven’t run out of food. And acid rain never killed the forests.

Back in the 1970s the earth was cooling. The frightener then was the impending ice age. I kid you not. It was front cover of Time magazine. The Earth then warmed. The frightener flipped to global warming. Then the Earth cooled. The scaremongers learned the lesson. They hedge their bets now, declaring the scare “climate change”. These flip-flops all happened in my lifetime. It’s hard to take the scares seriously.

Some of us don’t take them seriously other than to counter them because some, politicians included do take them seriously unfortunately. All scams have an element of fraud to them and the fraud is in the computer models:

 [Y]es, the Earth is warmer now than it was 100 years ago. The science shows that doubling CO2 in the atmosphere would increase the Earth’s temperature by a little over one degree.

It’s warmer now than it was but the present temperature is nothing out of the ordinary. It’s been warmer. And the present rate of temperature change is, again, nothing alarming. The Earth has seen it all before.

It’s all about what happens next. That’s where the leap occurs from science to computer models. The predicted rise in CO2 on its own doesn’t produce a rise in temperature that is at all worrying. Its effect must be multiplied within the models.

The chief greenhouse gas is not CO2, but water vapour. The models are programmed so increasing CO2 warms the earth, producing more water vapour which, in turn, warms the earth even more. It’s that multiplying effect through increased water vapour that causes the “climate change” scare, not the CO2 increase on its own.

The multiplication through water vapour is found only in the models. It’s not seen in nature. That’s despite spending billions of dollars looking. Indeed, it’s quite possible that water vapour has the opposite effect and dampens CO2′s warming effect.

It’s only the computer models that produce the scary future. And that’s precisely the result they programmed to produce. The models aren’t science and the science shows there’s nothing to be alarmed about. The scare is not from the real world. It’s a computer program, programmed to scare.

And a final word about crazy, silly Lucy Lawless:

I’m happy for Eco-Warrior Lucy Lawless to ditch her purple Mercedes, downsize her LA house, and swap electricity for solar panels to heat her swimming pool. Good for her. I am sure the planet heaved a sigh of relief.

But please, Lucy, lay off encouraging the Government to take ever more punishing action that makes it harder for the rest of us to heat our homes, get to work, and have work to go to.

We want to look after our kids too. For ordinary people it’s a job and a warm home that’s at stake. Not a downsized LA pad and switching the pool to solar.

Swotting up on Helen Kelly I was surprised to discover the following:

Helen Kelly has been President of the CTU since 2007. She is the CTU’s chief spokesperson on a wide range of issues including economic development, employment law, climate change, social partnership and ACC.

What on earth are unions doing having a climate change policy?

Surely the role of unions is to operate as a protection racket for workers, not to waste members dues on dumb stuff like climate change.

Someone needs to ask Helen Kelly why the CTU is wasting union members dues on something that is clearly not relevant to industrial relations.

Or does climate change mean plenty more overseas junkets at members expense to discuss how unions can save the world from climate change?