Free Republic

[snip] ....What's going on? "The desire to disbelieve deepens as the scale of the threat grows," concludes economist-ethicist Clive Hamilton. He and others who track what they call "denialism" find that its nature is changing in America, last redoubt of climate naysayers. It has taken on a more partisan, ideological tone. Polls find a widening Republican-Democrat gap on climate. Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry even accuses climate scientists of lying for money. Global warming looms as a debatable question in yet another U.S. election campaign. From his big-windowed office overlooking the wooded campus of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades,...

Sitting in on a March 1 Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) press conference regarding global warming and heavy snowfalls, I couldn’t help feeling like the chairman of the Senate committee questioning mafia capo Frank Pentangeli in Godfather II. The chairman, listening incredulously as Pentangeli contradicts a sworn written statement he had earlier given to the committee, waves the written statement in the air and protests, “We have a sworn affidavit — we have it — your sworn affidavit…. Do you deny that confession, and do you realize what will happen as a result of your denial?” The UN Intergovernmental Panel...

The New York Times is self-destructing on Global Warming. Once again, Climate Change alarmists blame winter weather on Global Warming. What is interesting in this New York Times op-ed is that the author (Judah Cohen) knocks the underpinning of climate change alarmism right out from under the whole movement: "As global temperatures have warmed and as Arctic sea ice has melted over the past two and a half decades, more moisture has become available to fall as snow over the continents. So the snow cover across Siberia in the fall has steadily increased.   The sun's energy reflects off...

There is a proposal for the United Nations to accept “ecocide” as a fifth “crime against peace”, which could be tried at the International Criminal Court, is the brainchild of British Planetary Rights Lawyer Polly Higgins. You can watch her video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZiN6DWMsP4. You know that anyone who happens to call themselves a ‘Planetary Rights Lawyer’ is already a sausage short of a hotdog. But Polly’s Law won’t stop at mere ecocide. Oh, no, no. Supporters of a new ecocide law also believe it could be used to prosecute “climate deniers” who distort science and facts to discourage voters and...

States' Rights: A revolt against economic hardship imposed by unelected bureaucrats based on junk science is brewing. This Tea Party movement wants the faulty finding on carbon dioxide to be reviewed and dumped. They say you shouldn't mess with Texas, and on Tuesday the state filed suit to overturn the "endangerment" finding by the Environmental Protection Agency that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant that must be regulated. CO2, the basis for all plant and therefore all animal life, was targeted early by environmental activists as the root cause of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming (AGW). But the Earth has cooled...

It has been tough to keep up with all the bad news for global warming alarmists. We're on the edge of our chair, waiting for the next shoe to drop. This has been an Imelda Marcos kind of season for shoe-dropping about global warming.At your next dinner party, here are some of the latest talking points to bring up when someone reminds you that Al Gore and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won Nobel prizes for their work on global warming.ClimateGate – This scandal began the latest round of revelations when thousands of leaked documents from Britain's East...

Cap-And-Trade: The Grand Canyon State avoids a big economic hole by suspending its participation in a multistate initiative to fight climate change. As climate fraud is exposed, economic reality sets in. Will California follow? Not since King Canute have government officials engaged in an exercise as futile as in 2007, when seven U.S. states and four Canadian provinces got together to form something called the Western Regional Climate Action Initiative to reduce regional greenhouse gas emissions starting in 2012. Leading the charge for the pact was California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who insisted, "We cannot wait for the United States government...

Climate alarmists conjured a world where nothing was certain but death, taxes and catastrophic global warming. They used this presumed scientific certainty as a bludgeon against the skeptics they deemed "deniers" -- a word meant to have the noxious whiff of Holocaust denial. All in the cause of hustling the world into a grand carbon-rationing scheme. Any questions about the evidence for the cataclysmic projections, any concerns about the costs and benefits were trumped by that fearsome scientific "consensus," which had "settled" the important questions. A funny thing happened to this "consensus" on the way to its inevitable triumph, though:...

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who flies around on private planes so as to tell larger numbers of people how they must live their lives in order to save the planet, wrote a column last year on the lack of winter weather in Washington, D.C. "In Virginia, the weather also has changed dramatically. Recently arrived residents in the northern suburbs, accustomed to today's anemic winters, might find it astonishing to learn that there were once ski runs on Ballantrae Hill in McLean, with a rope tow and local ski club. Snow is so scarce today that most Virginia children probably...

The film Not Evil Just Wrong is far too politically incorrect to be feted in Hollywood or the politicos. This is the last movie they want anybody seeing. ... Mr. McAleer and his wife Ann McElhinney — who also made Mine Your Own Business, a documentary that fingered anti-development radicals and “the dark side of environmentalism” — have inevitably not attracted the kind of attention lavished on The Age of Stupid, which features a lone archivist looking back from a devastated world in the year 2055 and wondering how we could have allowed it all to go so terribly, terribly...

How many times have you been told that the debate on the science of climate change is “over”? Probably almost as many times as Al Gore has traveled in private jets and limousines to urge audiences to repent of their fuelish ways. Although tirelessly intoned by politicians, major media, advocacy groups, academics, and even some Kyoto critics, the “debate is over” mantra is just plain false. The core issues of climate-change attribution, climate sensitivity, and even anthropogenic detection remain very much in play.DetectionThe world has warmed overall during the past 130 years, as evidenced by melting glaciers, longer growing seasons, and both proxy and instrumental data. However, the main era of “anthropogenic” global...

More than 70 of the world’s elite scientists specializing in climate issues will confront the subject of global warming at the second annual International Conference on Climate Change in New York City March 8-10, 2009.They will be joined by economists, legal experts, and other climate specialists calling attention to new research that contradicts claims that Earth’s moderate warming during the 20th Century primarily was man-made and has reached crisis proportions.The conference expects to draw 1,000 attendees including private-sector business people, state and federal legislators and officials, policy analysts, media, and students.Headliners among the 70-plus presenters will be: William Gray,...

In the previous parts to this investigation we've looked at the arguments put forward by both the Alarmists and the Realists. The reason why there's more emphasis on the position of the Alarmists is that the onus is on them to prove their theory. So far they've produced no sound evidence for that nor have they answered their critics.In spite of the failed theory of the 70s when many eminent scientists were predicting that the long-term outlook for the earth's climate was for it to get colder, the pro-case scientists and others cannot come up with any plausible data...

So far we've briefly had a look at the core arguments put forward by the Alarmists - whose who support the theory of man-made global warming - and the Realists - those who, at the moment, don't. However in Australia much of the support for the Alarmists' point of view is based on distorted information, untruths and naked lies.Australia at the mercy of Mother NatureOf all the countries in the western world, Australia is the one that suffers most from the vagaries of the weather. Somewhere, at some time, part of the country is experiencing drought. Never, though, is...

So far we've briefly had a look at the core arguments put forward by the Alarmists - whose who support the theory of man-made global warming - and the Realists - those who, at the moment , don't. However the amount of support and publicity given to the Alarmists is out of proportion to the number of people who actually support their theory.The media has a lot to answer forReading the public comments section of the major media organizations' web sites, the pro-global warming support is at about 1 in three persons, whilst those who are unconvinced by the...

So far we've briefly had a look at the core arguments put forward by the Alarmists - whose who support the theory of man-made global warming - and the Realists - those who, at the moment , don't. The acts of deception by the Alarmists also requires explanation on their part.It's unanimously agreed by the scientific community that the earth is about 4.5 billion years old and during that time, it's undergone at least 12, and possibly 14 major periods of climate change. In addition to this there has been numerous minor changes to the earth's climate.Past periods of...

So far in part 1 we've briefly had a look at the core arguments put forward by the Alarmists - whose who support the theory of man-made global warming - and the Realists - those who, at the moment , don't.More accurate data needed before trends can be ascertainedWhat the Alarmists need to do is provide more compelling evidence to support their position. All they rely on at the moment is current data and compare it to climatic events since the 1890s when modern recording of temperatures began.The major problems with this constricted approach are twofold:Firstly, the instruments used...

During the past 15 years a major world-wide controversy has arisen concerning the earth's climate: Is it getting warmer? - and if so the cause of this phenomena.Two different aspects of the same controversy, but rolled into one by many people. These people assume that acceptance of the global warming theory means accepting that mans' industrial activities are causing the problem. Such people fail to see that the two issues are separate. Belief in global warming does not mean belief in mans' culpability.The man-made global warming theory polarizes people like no other. Most of the average people who have...

“But we must have power, power to order all things as we will, for that good which only the Wise can see.” The power-corrupted Saruman of Many Colours declaiming in J. R. R. Tolkien’s masterpiece, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954, p. 272) The planet has warmed up since the Little Ice Age and it has warmed up relatively quickly between 1975 and 1998, so much so that we humans are becoming consumed with guilt and anxiety about our place on Earth. Our production of CO2 into the atmosphere is supposed to be the cause. I’ve set out elsewhere the...

Robert D. Brinsmead (A Series of 20 Short Essays) THE ENVIRONMENTAL OPTIMIST - 1 IS THE WORLD RUNNING OUT OF RESOURCES? Here is the fascinating story of two men – one an environmental pessimist, the other an environmental optimist. They went head to head in a very public and sometimes very acrimonious debate in the last quarter of the 20th century. Paul Ehrlich, professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University, was the king of environmental pessimists. He became the darling of the environmental movement. He leapt into prominence with his book, The Population Bomb (1968). It highlighted an impending crisis...

NASA scientist James Hansen, a high-ranking government employee, appeared in a Congressional committee meeting room June 23 to say CEOs of fossil energy companies “should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.” Their crime: Disagreeing with him. No word on the form of energy he used to travel to the inquisition. Hansen further claimed that federal laws to mandate restrictions on U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have been “blocked by special interests, focused on short-term profits.” Um, no. Eleven Congresses -- five Democrat, six Republican -- have declined to limit greenhouse gas emissions since Hansen’s much-celebrated testimony before Colorado...

“Bishop claims environment abusers as bad as sex,” colorfully declared the headline of the Birmingham (England) Post. The May 31 article began: “The Bishop of Stafford has compared people who ignore the effects of climate change to the Austrian child sex monster Josef Fritzl.” In all too common fashion for Global Warming alarmists, the Anglican bishop recently employed a pastoral letter to liken dissenters on Global Warming to Josef Fritzl, who fathered seven children by his daughter, who was locked up in the basement across two decades.

If the ‘progressives’ get their way on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it will be ordinary Americans who suffer, says John Entine Let’s call it the black box syndrome: making revolutionary changes or new products without any real handle on what has actually been created or the potential impact. No-one really knew what the risks were when the wizards of Wall Street launched the inscrutable credit products that led to the current financial bubble that is now imploding, rocking the world economy. Now we have something akin to that bubble building in the environmental arena, in the inflated rhetoric on...

The alignment of the planets, and especially that of Jupiter and Saturn, control the climate on Earth.So explained Rhodes Fairbridge of Columbia University, a giant in science over much of the last century whose accomplishments are perhaps unsurpassed for their breadth, depth, and volume. This one man authored or co-authored 100 scientific books and more than 1,000 scientific papers, he edited the Benchmarks in Geology series (more than 90 volumes in print) and was general editor of the Encyclopaedias of the Earth Sciences. He edited eight major encyclopedias of specialized scientific papers in the atmospheric sciences and astrogeology; geomorphology;...

Thirty days after Steve McIntyre caught NASA cooking climate history again - this time in a feeble attempt to somehow conceal the alarmist-embarrassing  downward trend since 1998 -- Al Gore shamelessly portrayed Saturday's Myanmar cyclone catastrophe as a ‘consequence' of global warming.  A mere 16 days after NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation's cool phase shift would likely bring colder temperatures for as many as the next 20-30 years, Gore told NPR that the "trend toward stronger and more destructive storms appears to be linked to global warming and specifically to the impact of global...

'Big Thaw,' a summertime spectacular in National Geographic magazine, provided awesome scenes of climate-change catastrophes.The glaciers are melting. The ice sheets are melting. They're sliding rapidly out to sea. More rapidly than anyone imagined. Look for the ice sheets to collapse. Look for sea levels to rise. Etc. Etc.National Geographic's breathless account, brilliantly illustrated with the stunning photography for which it is famous, won headlines around the world. It has been dramatized and magnified on nightly newscasts and blogs alike, and has become a staple in the popular imagination.But it won't happen, says Prof. Cliff Ollier of the University...

Vincent Gray has begun a second career as a climate-change activist. His motivation springs from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body that combats global warming by advocating the reduction of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Dr. Gray has worked relentlessly for the IPCC as an expert reviewer since the early 1990s.But Dr. Gray isn't an activist in the cause of enforcing the Kyoto Protocol and realizing the other goals of the worldwide IPCC process. To the contrary, Dr. Gray's mission, in his new role as cofounder of The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, is to...

Antarctica -- a vast territory whose sea-ice growth in winter effectively doubles its size to envelop an area three times that of Canada -- is the world's coldest continent by far, its permanent ice sheet regulating the Antarctic atmosphere. It is also the world's windiest and driest continent by far, and its highest by far, with a mean elevation of 2,300 metres.It is also the world's most remote continent, its least explored and least understood.Not until 1998, with the advent of new technologies and improved scientific understanding, did human knowledge "allow the question of the global relevance of Antarctica...

To save the planet from global warming -- a looming catastrophe many believe we can no longer prevent -- could require that China stop building the equivalent of a new 1000 megawatt coal plant every five days, and India the same equivalent every two weeks. It could also require that the rest of the developing world slows its economic growth, for the good of humanity. And it could require us, in the rich countries, to dramatically curtail our air and auto travel, and other greenhouse gas producing activities, even if it means plunging ourselves into recession if not depression.Or,...

Ideologies: Once in a while the truth accidentally tumbles out on global warming activists' real agenda. That's exactly what happened at the U.N., when Bolivia's leader called for ending capitalism to save the planet. Delivering the keynote address at the United Nations forum on Indigenous People on Monday, Bolivia's President Evo Morales told the adoring crowd that "if we want to save our planet earth, to save life, to save mankind, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system."Morales elaborated on that by calling for an end to "unbridled industrial development, extraction of natural resources, excessive...

The last few years have witnessed an Internet-stock bubble and a real-estate bubble. Could we be approaching the bursting point of the climate-change bubble? The intensity of the current climate crusade, Al Gore’s $300 million ad campaign, and Time’s fifth panicky global-warming cover in three years (“Be Worried, Be Very Worried” read the 2006 cover) are all good contrary indicators suggesting that the hysteria is reaching its terminal stage. Like mortgage-backed securities dealers, the climate campaigners are in a panic because the public isn’t buying what they’re selling. The latest annual Gallup survey on the environment shows that only 37...

Want to talk about really inconvenient truths? Well, despite Nobel Laureate Al Gore's massive campaign to scare the world into thinking the planet is facing imminent doom at the hands of global warming, Americans don't seem to be buying it.In fact, a new Gallup poll released moments ago revealed, "a little more than a third say they worry about [global warming] a great deal, a percentage that is roughly the same as the one Gallup measured 19 years ago."Hehehehehe.Here are the exquisitely delicious details (emphasis added): Despite the enormous attention paid to global warming over the past several years, the...

Stephen Schwartz knows as much about the effects of aerosols on climate change as anyone in the world, and he's worried. He believes climate change is so massive an economic issue that we face costs "in the trillions if not quadrillions of dollars." He thinks a Herculean effort and great sacrifice is required to get the world down to zero net increase in carbon dioxide concentrations, an effort he compares to that which the Allies undertook in their all-out war against Nazi Germany and Japan."Recall World War II, where everyone was making a sacrifice: gas rationing, tire rationing, no...

Iceland is shrouded in a permanent low-pressure system. Far to the south, the Azores are shrouded in permanent highs. Both pressure systems rock, from east to west and with ever-changing intensity, in the process controlling the North Atlantic's westerly winds. When the westerlies are strong, Europe's summers are cool, its winters are mild and rain is frequent. When westerlies are weak, rainfall decreases and temperatures become extreme, leading to summer heat waves and winter deep freezes.These year-to-year variations in the North Atlantic are known as the North Atlantic Oscillation. Though in many ways mysterious, their effects are quite predictable...

He's called the world's most famous hurricane expert, not because he likes to fly into hurricanes to experience them up close -- which he does -- but because of what he's learned from them, up there, buffeted by the fury of nature. William Gray has developed an intuitive sense when it comes to understanding the atmosphere in its infinite complexity. This intuition rooted in experience allowed him to pioneer the science of hurricane forecasting more than two decades ago, and subsequently to practice his craft with an unprecedented precision that he keeps refining year after year. He and his...

Bob Carter, a professor at James Cook University (Queensland) and the University of Adelaide (South Australia), is a paleontologist, a stratigrapher, and a marine geologist.He has been chair of the National Marine Science and Technologies Committee, director of the Australian Office of the Ocean Drilling Program, and chair of the Earth Sciences Discipline Panel of the Australian Research Council.He is Cambridge educated.And he is an outspoken global-warming skeptic.Most global-warming skeptics criticize the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on limited grounds -- they might view the science put forth by the IPCC to be at odds with science...

We are doomed, say climate change scientists associated with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that is organizing most of the climate change research occurring in the world today. Carbon dioxide from man-made sources rises to the atmosphere and then stays there for 50, 100, or even 200 years. This unprecedented buildup of CO2 then traps heat that would otherwise escape our atmosphere, threatening us all."This is nonsense," says Tom V. Segalstad, head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo and formerly an expert reviewer with the same IPCC. He laments...

He's the world's most cited climatologist, according to an analysis in the journal of the British Institute of Geographers. He's also the fifth-most-cited physical geographer in the world, and the 11th most cited among all geographers.He has written some 230 articles and five books, including in such fields as geology, limnology, meteorology and archeology.He has twice seen his papers in Environmental Conservation awarded prizes for being "best paper of the year," and he's a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honour, created to recognize "outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment."He's Dr. Reid Bryson,...

Lawrence Solomon's series becomes a book, providing heft to the claim that climate science is not settledGlobal warming has become a question for citizens, and not only scientists. Citizens must decide how serious the threat is and what to do about it, which cures make sense, and which might be worse than the disease. Alas, the answers to these questions depend on scientific issues of fierce complexity that few laymen are capable of confronting directly. So what are we to do? Al Gore has an answer, and in some ways it is a very sound answer. Mr. Gore says, essentially,...

There’s broad agreement that America should reduce its dependence on imported oil, but far less agreement on why. Are we combating global warming, or are we distancing ourselves from hostile and unstable regimes? The popular reply is that it hardly matters — we need to do both and the goals reinforce each other. But these two national energy goals are not only different but frequently in conflict, and effective policy will not be forged until those conflicts are addressed. Meanwhile, we ’ll continue to see watered down legislative efforts similar to the Energy Act of 2007 and its predecessors. When dependence...

Over the past half-century, we have become used to planetary scares. In the late Sixties, we were told of a population explosion that would lead to global starvation. Then, a little later, we were warned the world was running out of natural resources. By the Seventies, when global temperatures began to dip, many eminent scientists warned us that we faced a new Ice Age. But the latest scare, global warming, has engaged the political and opinion-forming classes to a greater extent than any of these. The readiness to embrace this fashionable belief has led the present Labour Government, enthusiastically supported...

Acne, agricultural land increase, Africa devastated, African aid threatened,  air pressure changes, Alaska reshaped, allergies increase, Alps melting, Amazon a desert, American dream end,  amphibians breeding earlier (or not),  anaphylactic reactions to bee stings,  ancient forests dramatically changed, animals head for the hills, Antarctic grass flourishes, Antarctic ice grows, Antarctic ice shrinks, Antarctic sea life at risk,   anxiety treatment, algal blooms, archaeological sites threatened, Arctic bogs melt, Arctic in bloom, Arctic ice free, Arctic lakes disappear, Arctic tundra to burn, Atlantic less salty, Atlantic more salty,   atmospheric circulation modified, attack of the killer jellyfish, avalanches reduced, avalanches increased, ...

Today, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee will hold a hearing on the implications of climate change for human health. Malaria will top the menu, but so will ignorance and disinformation.The lead witness will be Dr. Jonathan Patz of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has suggested that U.S. energy policy may be "indirectly exporting diseases to other parts of the world." Dr. Patz, the World Health Organization (WHO) and others claim that global warming is now spreading disease and may be the cause of some 160,000 deaths a year.In 2007, for example, WHO pointed to rising temperatures...

Unlike so many of the hapless victims on TVOne's daily Crimewatch (also known as One Network News) I have recently been lucky enough to be in two right places at the right time. In December last year, at the UN conference in Bali, I heard Viscount Monckton present a paper prepared by himself, the Australian Dr David Evans and our own Dr Vincent Gray (who were at Bali, too) that showed while the IPCC models predict that greenhouse gases would produce an extensive "hot spot" in the upper troposphere over the tropics, the satellite measurements show no such hotspots have...

On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, while other Republicans were talking about taxes, the economy or immigration, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was talking about the environment."I will clean up the planet," he told a group of Concord voters. "I will make global warming a priority."A little later, a chunk of snow fell from a nearby rooftop and landed near the senator, who didn't skip a beat: "That's that climate change right there."McCain is betting that his record as the rare Republican addressing global warming will bolster his appeal to Democrats and independents. It's a tricky balance. He...

In the 1970s, leading scientists claimed that the world was threatened by an era of global cooling.Based on what we've learned this decade, says George Kukla, those scientists - and he was among them -- had it right. The world is about to enter another Ice Age.Dr. Kukla, in 1972 a member of the Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences and a pioneer in the field of astronomical forcing, became a central figure in convincing the United States government to take the dangers of climate change seriously. In January of that year, he and another geologist, Robert Matthews of Brown University,...

Michael Griffin aired his doubts about climate-change politics on National Public Radio. Under a barrage of criticism, he recantedThe head of NASA -- the National Aeronautical and Space Association--is "an idiot" and "in denial." He is also "surprisingly naive" and "a fool." With his judgment and competence so lacking, demands abound for his resignation as head of the largest and most accomplished science agency in the world. Those comments and others in the past week have come from scientists shocked to learn that NASA chief Michael Griffin thinks differently than they about global warming. Among the most shocked is one...

"Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled." S o said Al Gore ... in 1992. Amazingly, he made his claims despite much evidence of their falsity. A Gallup poll at the time reported that 53% of scientists actively involved in global climate research did not believe global warming had occurred; 30% weren't sure; and only 17% believed global warming had begun. Even a Greenpeace poll showed 47% of climatologists didn't think a runaway greenhouse effect was imminent; only 36% thought it possible and a mere...

Germany's Hans von Storch, one of the world's leading climate scientists, believes that climate change is for real and that humans are responsible. He also believes that we shouldn't fear climate change, that predictions of doom are "hysterical" when they aren't "completely idiotic and dubious," and that many of the science establishment's pronouncements on climate change are bereft of scientific merit."Theories of global warming have left laboratories far behind. Now, they are the stuff of Hollywood," he wrote in Der Spiegel, in an article that castigated global warming alarmists for debasing scientific inquiry and intimidating those who would challenge...

If you're the type of person who sets aside money today for the university education of your great-great-great grandchildren, even if it means that you may not be able to afford university tuition for your own children, you may think it sensible for society to invest now in major measures to stop global warming.If you're not this type -- and who in his right mind is -- you should forget about Kyoto-like greenhouse-gas reduction targets and the crash programs that would be required to meet them. Doing so would not only be economically prudent, it would be -- by...