Global Warming

ᔥ The Local

Great stuff in Sweden, now if we can get Steven Joyce and John Key to see the light:

Six of ten local politicians in Sweden doubt whether human activity is to blame for global warming, a new study has found.

In addition, one out of ten municipal politicians and local government managers totally deny that the phenomenon of global warming even exists, according to a survey carried out by the Swedish Defence Research Agency (Försvarets forskningsinstitutet – FOI).

ᔥ Stuff.co.nz

It looks like Global Warming has come a gutser. Looks like we better crank up the carbon emissions to stave off the freeze. On the plus side, it will be better weather for duck shooting

The world could be heading for a new ‘solar minimum’ period, possibly plummeting the planet into an Ice Age, scientists say.

Researchers say the present increase in sun activity with solar flares and storms could be followed by this minimum period.

The period would see a cooling of the planet, refuting predictions of further global-warming.

The research for this comes from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences.

Its scientists analysed sediment in Lake Meerfelder Maar and found direct evidence of a ‘solar minimum’ causing a sudden cooling in Europe 2800 years ago.

Dr Achim Brauer of the GFZ said the research shows there was an increase in humidity and windiness at the same time as the sustained reduction in solar activity.

He said the measurements of lake sediment allow precise dating of short-term climate changes.

ᔥ Stuff.co.nz

More alarmist clap trap from NIWA worried about half metre rises in sea levels. Basically they are scaring people about the sea level rising up to your knees?

Extreme floods which usually only occur once a century could eventually happen every year as sea levels rise, National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA) says.

New Zealand needs to start preparing for that possibility now – before it’s too late, NIWA’s principal scientist Rob Bell said.

Once sea levels have risen by half a metre, once in 100-year flooding events could occur annually, Bell said.

Higher storm surges could damage beaches, seawalls, buildings and roads and may affect drinking water, Bell said.

When the half a metre rise will occur is uncertain, but Bell said a one metre rise by 2100 could not be ruled out.

It was crucial that councils started thinking about the risks as sixty-five per cent of Kiwis lived within five kilometres of the sea, Bell said.

ᔥ The Telegraph

Oh dear…it looks like the poster child for climate change advocates and warmists actually cause active climate change themselves.

Wind farms can cause climate change, according to new research, that shows for the first time the new technology is already pushing up temperatures.

Usually at night the air closer to the ground becomes colder when the sun goes down and the earth cools.

But on huge wind farms the motion of the turbines mixes the air higher in the atmosphere that is warmer, pushing up the overall temperature.

Satellite data over a large area in Texas, that is now covered by four of the world’s largest wind farms, found that over a decade the local temperature went up by almost 1C as more turbines are built.

This could have long term effects on wildlife living in the immediate areas of larger wind farms.

It could also affect regional weather patterns as warmer areas affect the formation of cloud and even wind speeds.

ᔥ Andrew Sullivan

Apparently if the 40% of US workers who could, worked from home just two days a week, we could help save the environment by reducing yearly carbon emissions by 53 million metric tons. But there is a catch:

[O]ne spam message produces the equivalent of 0.3 grams of CO2 … And what about the 62 trillion emails sent each year? Those emails produce as much CO2 as 1.6 million cars driving around the earth.

Now if only the Greens would help by stopping their own spamming or work towards a global ban on spam…they want to ban everything else after all.

MSNBC.com

The great global arming swindle is coming to an end, and the cracks are beginning to appear in the edifice. When former alarmists are starting to apologise and of their own volition then I believe we have progress:

James Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his “Gaia” theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being “alarmist” about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too.

Lovelock, 92, is writing a new book in which he will say climate change is still happening, but not as quickly as he once feared.

He previously painted some of the direst visions of the effects of climate change. In 2006, in an article in the U.K.’s Independent newspaper, he wrote that “before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”

It was this sort of alarmism that made reasonable arguments for mitigation get swamped int he race for the worst possible headlines.

“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said.

“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said.

“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added.

He pointed to Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and Tim Flannery’s “The Weather Makers” as other examples of “alarmist” forecasts of the future.

Finally someone from the alarmist team has called bullshit on Al Gore. I await his apology.

Asked if he was now a climate skeptic, Lovelock told msnbc.com: “It depends what you mean by a skeptic. I’m not a denier.”

He said human-caused carbon dioxide emissions were driving an increase in the global temperature, but added that the effect of the oceans was not well enough understood and could have a key role.

“It (the sea) could make all the difference between a hot age and an ice age,” he said.

He said he still thought that climate change was happening, but that its effects would be felt farther in the future than he previously thought.

“We will have global warming, but it’s been deferred a bit,” Lovelock said.

As “an independent and a loner,” he said he did not mind saying “All right, I made a mistake.” He claimed a university or government scientist might fear an admission of a mistake would lead to the loss of funding.

And there is James Lovelock’s apology. Now let’s hear some more.

ᔥ BBC

Climate Change enthusiasts and warmists like to say that Climate CHange is killing all sorts of things, like seals, polar bears, penguins…even glaciers…but then facts smack them in the face:

Some glaciers on Asia’s Karakoram mountains are defying the global trend and getting thicker, say researchers.

A French team used satellite data to show that glaciers in part of the Karakoram range, to the west of the Himalayan region, are putting on mass.

The reason is unclear, as glaciers in other parts of the Himalayas are losing mass – which also is the global trend.

The region’s glaciers are poorly studied, yet provide a vital water source for more than a billion people.

The response of Himalayan glaciers to global warming has been a hot topic ever since the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which contained the erroneous claim that ice from most of the region could disappear by 2035.

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.