Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun
Art Raiche, former Chief Research Scientist of the CSIRO, says the organisation’s fear-mongering over climate change can’t be trusted: “Sadly, over the last decade, CSIRO has transformed itself from a once-respected research institute into a highly centralised, government enterprise (oxymoron?), replete with intersecting layers of expensive management, focused on continual reorganisation. Scientific independence has been lost.
For this reason CSIRO no longer attracts top young scientists except as an employer of last resort. It employs a much higher percentage of second and third rate people than was the case two decades ago. In short, much of CSIRO can now be regarded as a sheltered workshop. As an example, consider the Garnaut Report, possibly the longest economic suicide note in Australia’s history. It is based on the dire predictions of CSIRO’s modelling programs.
Consider the assessment from Prof Freeman Dyson of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, one of the world’s most eminent physicists on these general circulation models upon which CSIRO’s predictions are based:
“The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.”
In fact, more than 30,000 scientists also have a jaundiced view of these climate modelling programs and have petitioned the US government against actions to mitigate CO2 emissions? But CSIRO ignores these reservations and continues its role in hopes that they prove that organisation’s relevance by scaring the populace. See full letter here.
Art Raiche worked for CSIRO for 35 years, the last 15 of which he held the rank of Chief Research Scientist.
By Glenn Garvin, Miami Herald
I’ve seen lots of things on Penn & Teller’s Bull----!, television’s only investigative-journalism program run by comic magicians: Hidden-camera pranks where yuppie fools blather on about designer water that actually came from a garden hose. New Age health nuts allowing mollusks to crawl around on their faces to soak up the health benefits of slug slime. Naked people floating around in a zero-gravity chamber for a show on NASA. I don’t actually know what that one was supposed to prove, but Penn & Teller share my first rule of journalism, that naked is always good.
But one thing I haven’t seen is grim; the show is just too much fun for that. So when Thursday’s episode on environmentalism opened with a morose-looking Penn Jillette waving a magazine as he recited one ecotastrophe after another—drought in Africa, flooding in Pakistan and Japan, snowless winters in New England and Northern Europe—I snapped to attention. ‘’It says right here in Time magazine—the weather’s gone nuts and we humans are to blame!’’ Teller wailed. ``We have bleeped up the environment and now we’re going to pay for it!’’
Yeah, that global warming is pretty bad. You know, Al Gore says—oops, never mind. Turns out Penn’s not reading from the infamous Time cover story of 2006 on global warming, the one headlined BE WORRIED. BE VERY WORRIED. No, this Time is from 1974, and the headline is, ANOTHER ICE AGE? And all those violent paroxysms of nature are the pernicious work of global cooling. Yes, back in the days of disco, the news media echoed with predictions of the world’s imminent demise from ice rather than fire. Newsweek warned that temperatures had already dropped ‘’a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.’’ By 1985, Life declared, ``air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching the earth by one half.’’
A MAJOR COOLING WIDELY ACCEPTED TO BE INEVITABLE, agreed The New York Times, adding in an editorial: ‘’Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.’’ To be fair, this was nothing new at The Times. It had been predicting the world was on the verge of turning into a Popsicle since at least 1895—GEOLOGISTS THINK THE WORLD MAY BE FROZEN UP AGAIN, a headline said back then. Perhaps the editors figured that if they printed the story often enough, they were bound to get it right, if only because of the law of averages.
I sometimes find myself longing for the good old days of the Ice Age scare, because at least back then, dissent was possible. When Newsweek in 1975 proposed fighting off those inexorable glaciers by ‘’melting the arctic cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers,’’ it had the grace to concede that some scientists worried just a teensy bit that these solutions “might create problems far greater than they resolve.”
These days, deviating from the orthodoxy on global warming—not just questioning whether it exists, but how much of it is due to human activity, or if the results might be a little less ruinous than the Climate Cassandras predict—is almost enough to get you thrown in jail. And I mean that literally. James Hansen, the former Gore science advisor who’s been one of the foremost doomsayers on global warming, recently said that oil company executives who argue against him “should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.” Read much more here.
Wall Street Journal
Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and other liberal leaders on Capitol Hill are gripped by cold-sweat terror. If they permit a vote on offshore drilling, they know they will lose when Blue Dogs and oil-patch Democrats defect to the GOP position of increasing domestic energy production. So the last failsafe is to shut down Congress.
Majority Leader Reid has decided that deliberation is too taxing for “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” This week he cut off serious energy amendments to his antispeculation bill. Then Senate Appropriations baron Robert Byrd abruptly canceled a bill markup planned for today where Republicans intended to press the issue. Mr. Byrd’s counterpart in the House, David Obey, is enforcing a similar lockdown. Speaker Pelosi says she won’t allow even a debate before Congress’s August recess begins in eight days.
She and Mr. Reid are cornered by substance. The upward pressure on oil prices is caused by rising world-wide consumption and limited growth in supplies. Yet at least 65% of America’s undiscovered, recoverable oil, and 40% of its natural gas, is hostage to the Congressional drilling moratorium.
The Democratic leadership is trying to smother any awareness of their responsibility for high prices. They are also trying to quash a revolt among Democrats who realize that the country is still dependent on fossil fuels, no matter how loudly quasimystical environmentalists like Al Gore claim otherwise.
Release from Free Enterprise Action Fund
The Free Enterprise Action Fund (Ticker: FEAOX) submitted the following letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requesting the SEC to warn publicly-owned companies against making false and misleading statements concerning global warming. Excerpts: We are writing on behalf of the Free Enterprise Action Fund ("FEAOX"), a publicly-traded mutual fund, to petition the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC" or “Commission") to issue interpretive guidance pursuant to the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 ("the Act") that would warn registrants against making potentially false and misleading statements pertaining to global warming and other environmental issues.
We believe the Commission should take action immediately to protect investors. Below are but a few examples of the sort of potentially false and misleading statements being made by registrants. The problematic nature of these statements is discussed in Section II.
Exelon Corp. issued a media release and placed full-page advertisements in major newspapers on July 15, 2008 stating, “The science is overwhelming—climate change is happening now and human activity is the primary cause.”
Lehman Brothers issued a report on climate change featuring the so-called “hockey stick” graph to support the notion that humans are causing global warming.
The General Electric Company issued a “Call for Action” to “slow, stop and even reverse the damage of greenhouse gasses.”
Toyota Motor Corp. states in a report, “When we drive a vehicle, it consumes fossil fuels and emits CO2, a major contributor to climate change.”
Goldman Sachs states in a 2007 report, “By now, the dynamics of global warming are widely known, and we find no reason to dispute the scientific assumptions.”
Caterpillar said in a public statement that, “We must take action now [to reduce carbon dioxide emissions] or risk serious harm to our planet.”
All these statements are potentially false and/or misleading as recent events show. A number of recent developments have tended to expose the above-mentioned registrant statements (and probably many others) as false and/or misleading. Based on the foregoing, we request that the Commission immediately inform and remind registrants that: False and/or misleading statements on material matters may violate the anti-fraud provision of the federal securities laws, Statements by registrants on global warming and other environmental issues could be considered material. There is considerable ongoing debate about the science of global warming and its impacts and; Statements to the effect that “the science is conclusive,” “the debate is over,” and that “human activities are definitely causing harmful global warming” should be avoided. See full letter here.
By Melanie Phillips, Spectator
The ever wise (and droll) Philip Stott says it all here about the eye-opening media spinning of the Ofcom ruling on the Channel Four documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle. As Philip notes, the only thing that matters is that Ofcom ruled the programme did ‘not materially mislead viewers so as to cause harm or offence’ in claiming that man-made global warming -was the biggest scam of modern times. And haven’t the truth-deniers gone just nuts over this, complaining that the programme got off on a ‘technicality’ - some technicality! inflating the relatively minor issues on which Ofcom did find against it out of all proportion (given the huge number of heavy-weight complaints it received which it rejected), and claiming that Ofcom’s criteria were inadequate (not a complaint one would have heard from them had the ruling gone the other way). Desperate stuff from desperate people - because the game is up for them, and they know it. The fabled ‘scientific consensus’ (not) is melting faster than Arctic ice.
There is now overwhelming evidence that the claim of man-made global warming is indeed a swindle - not least the fact that, despite the continuing rise in carbon dioxide, the climate has not warmed for the past ten years and indeed has even cooled for the past five. This is an inconvenient truth which was never forseen by those latter-day seers, the computer modellers who gave us Kyoto on the basis that they could predict the climate’s future; and it also suggests that even if the world’s ice is melting year by year at an unprecedented and otherwise inexplicable rate (in itself untrue) a warming climate demonstrably cannot be the cause.
Numerous reputations - of those indeed who still cling to that infamous ‘consensus’ - are now set to go down the pan. No wonder the stakes were so high for them over the Channel Four programme. But it’s all too late. The carbon cat is out of the bag. The economy of the developed world has been distorted with food prices going through the roof, while good people have been vilified, their professional reputations trashed and their careers jeopardised—all in the cause of a quasi-religious inquisition which it becomes ever clearer has as much basis in actual science as the drowning of witches in the Middle Ages. These people should never be trusted on anything ever again. We must not let them get away with it. Read more here. See also in this Steve McIntyre post, how somehow the IPCC supporters took the ruling as a vindication.
By Jim Peden on Jennifer Marohasy’s The Politics and Environment Blog
Someone please help me out here. Everyone is yelling about fixing the “climate crisis”, but I still can’t find it - the crisis, that is.
There appears to be no significant change in either the frequency or intensity of hurricanes and in fact the last two seasons have been pretty quiet. Katrina hit land as a pretty standard CAT 3 and hurricane intensity isn’t measured by the measure of property damage at any rate. Global “temperatures” appear to be dropping ( if that term has any meaning at any rate ) and the solar scientists are complaining about a quiet sun which is starting to show many of the same characteristics as the Maunder Minimum, which led to the “little ice age”. Well, that’s a crisis, I suppose, but not the same color as the present one. Sea levels continue to rise a minuscule amount each year as they have since the last ice age when sea level was perhaps 400 feet lower than it is today. I just can’t see New York under water anytime in the 21st century at the present observed rates which don’t seem to be changing. Even the oceans seems to be cooling a bit based on data from the new diving buoy system, but perhaps NOAA is cooking the data and we can’t trust them any more than we can trust NASA anymore.
The Antarctic Ice Pack continues to grow and is now larger than ever in the 30+ years we’ve been able to take highly accurate radar altimeter measurements. The Arctic Ice continues to expand and shrink annually as it seems inclined to do, and we note some pretty good sized volcanoes have recently been discovered on the Arctic Ocean floor which might be helping the shrinking part a bit. Polar bear populations are at near record levels and seem healthy, and even I have seen them playing around on floating ice chunks in the Arctic summer. They are a terrestrial animal, after all, as anyone can see who visits the Churchill area in the summer and takes a polar bear cruise on one of their giant bear-proof buses.
Droughts and floods seem to be more strongly correlated with changes in ENSO and his friends than with a one degree temperature rise over the span of a hundred years, but maybe I’m missing something. When I wrote the WE Campaign suggesting they take a closer look at things before falling off the turnip truck, I immediately started receiving email bulletins from them referring to me as a “fellow campaigner”, so I guess I now know how they grew to be a “million strong”.
So, while hordes of folks continually call for Weapons of Mass Taxation to be hauled out to fight the “climate crisis”, I still can’t seem to find the crisis anywhere and note that the likely beneficiaries of carbon taxes and such will be the folks tolling the alarm. As I said at the beginning: I’m having trouble locating the crisis, so I’m hoping some of the many experts here on this forum can give me a little guidance. See more and comments here.
Jennifer notes “this comment posted by Jim Peden in this thread at popular blog realclimate.org was disallowed. I tend to think it is the alarmist scientists that are really in denial?”
By Phil Brennan, Newsmax
In his “Meet the Press” appearance Sunday, former Vice President Al Gore’s controversial views on the issue of global warming not only went mostly unchallenged by host Tom Brokaw, but were accepted as established scientific facts. In introducing Gore, Brokaw opened his remarks by describing Gore as a “Nobel laureate, Oscar winner, and crusader for conservation of energy and attacking the climate change that we’re all experiencing in this country.”
Brokaw continued by saying: “I think that probably our audience understands that there is a growing consensus that climate change is real. But the debate is how real is it, what are the effects of it going to be, and how serious will it affect us?”
Brokaw ignored the recent disclosure that 31,072 Americans with university degrees in science, including 9,021 Ph.Ds, have signed a petition that flatly denies Gore’s claims that human-caused global warming is a settled scientific fact, giving the lie to the claim of an alleged scientific consensus on global warming. The petition, organized by Dr. Arthur Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, stated: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will in the foreseeable future cause catastrophic heating of the earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the earth.”
In responding to Brokaw, however, Gore said: “We are being told by scientists around the world, particularly the international group that is charged with studying this and reporting to world leaders that we may have less than 10 years in order to make dramatic changes lest we lose the chance to avoid catastrophic results from the climate crisis. We’re building up CO2 so rapidly that we’re seeing the consequences scientists have long predicted.”
And last Thursday Gore warned: “The leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis.” He failed to recall that as long ago as 1989 a U.N. group of “leading experts” warned of the same dire perils from global warming in 10 years if action to stop it was not taken. According to July 5, 1989, article in the Miami Herald, the then-director of the New York office of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), Noel Brown, warned of a “10-year window of opportunity to solve” global warming. According to the article, “A senior U.N. Environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees’ threatening political chaos.”
Gore did not explain that such predictions are based solely on computer models based on guesswork, which have frequently been proven unreliable, most recently in failing to predict the current global cooling. Neither Brokaw or Gore mentioned the fact that the planet stopped warming a decade ago and has now entered a cooling period scientists say could last for up to 30 years. Read more here.
By Noel Sheppard, Newsbusters
Last Saturday, one of the nation’s leading climate alarmists—a government employee with a history of attacking people that don’t agree with his views on anthropogenic global warming—wrote rather disparagingly about a somewhat satirical NewsBusters piece.
Despite claiming he typically doesn’t comment on things “written about climate change in the more excitable parts of [sic] web,” NASA’s Gavin Schmidt took time out of his busy Saturday schedule to respond to something he described as “probably the most boneheaded article that I have seen in ages.”
Was this an effort by one of the founding members of RealClimate - the world’s leading website specializing in climate change hysteria - to correct errors he felt existed in my article? Or, was this a predictable attack on a popular conservative blog that not only regularly exposes the one-sided nature of media reports about global warming, but also frequently brings attention to studies that go counter to RealClimate’s, and maybe more importantly, Schmidt’s views?
It seems obvious from their behavior, and from this piece by Schmidt, that one way alarmists create the appearance of a consensus is by attacking anyone that doesn’t agree with them. Maybe it’s because some of these folks demolished Schmidt and two of his fellow alarmists in a March 2007 debate in New York City. Representing the realists at that event was Richard Lindzen, who Schmidt attacked the very next month. In fact, attacking the opposition seems to be a prerequisite at RealClimate as Roger Pielke, Jr., wrote on January 14, 2005: “The site’s focus has been exclusively on attacking those who invoke science as the basis for their opposition to action on climate change, folks such as George Will, Senator James Inhofe, Michael Crichton, McIntyre and McKitrick, Fox News, and Myron Ebell. Whether intended or not, the site has clearly aligned itself squarely with one political position on climate change.” I guess this puts me in good company. Yet, potentially more disturbing is the power RealClimate has within the mainstream media, as well as who appears to be funding and/or supporting this website. See who is paying the bills at Real Climate in this detailed rebuttal piece here. See if you don’t agree with me that Gavin has lost the debate yet again.