By Alan Caruba, Warning Signs
[Warning! This is satire. If there is any resemblance to reality in the text below, it is purely intentional.]
Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and winner of a Hollywood Oscar for his documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth”, was at it again, giving another of those “The End is Near” speeches in which he advises the rest of us to stop driving, get rid of our air conditioners, and do everything else to avoid global warming. He says we only have ten years in which to do this. After that, says Al Gore, there will be so much carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere we will all be fried like ants on the sidewalk. Considering that there’s only 0.038% of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere, listening to his idiotic bloviating can and has impaired the mental health of countless people.
His latest Gore-a-tion is that we need to stop using fossil fuels to generate electricity because, as he put it in his usual understated way, “The future of human civilization is at stake.” Briefly, it’s worth noting that coal accounts for just over 50% of all the electricity we use, nuclear for another 20%, natural gas for just under 20%, and the rest from minor sources like hydroelectric. Solar and wind power, combined, accounts for less than 4% because it remains a really stupid way to generate electricity. Instead of banning everything Al Gore and his Little Green Friends want eliminated from modern life, why can’t we just get Al Gore banned?
Frankly, I think a case can be made that Al Gore represents a compelling reason to set aside the First Amendment guarantees of free speech and free press. (But only for him!) Single-handedly, Al Gore has frightened more pre-school and school-age children in the history of the nation. I maintain that it would be a public service to put Al Gore under house arrest where he could continue to burn through more energy than twenty average homes in Nashville, Tennessee. This single act would render the entire world a Gore-Free Zone where polar bears would not be exploited for being cute to everyone except seals and some citizens of Alaska for whom the word “cute” does not come instantly to mind when one of them is in the backyard.
A Gore-Free Zone would be one in which the rest of us could devote more time to figuring out what to do as the Earth enters its second decade of atmospheric cooling and, unless the Sun warms up soon, slides into the next Ice Age. Read more here.
By Andrew Bolt, Australian Herald Sun
These are the seven graphs that should make the Rudd Government feel sick. These are the seven graphs that should make you ask: What? Has global warming now stopped? Look for yourself. They show that the world hasn’t warmed for a decade, and has even cooled for several years. See for yourself:
Click here to view the graphs in detail.
Sea ice now isn’t melting, but spreading. The seas have not just stopped rising, but started to fall. Nor is the weather getting wilder. Cyclones, as well as tornadoes and hurricanes, aren’t increasing and the rain in Australia hasn’t stopped falling. What’s more, the slight warming we saw over the century until 1998 still makes the world no hotter today than it was 1000 years ago. In fact, it’s even a bit cooler. So, dude, where’s my global warming? These graphs should in fact be good news for the Government and all the other warming preachers who warned we were doomed by our gases, which were heating the world to hell.
Now Prime Minister Kevin Rudd can at last stop sweating about the warming terrors he told us were coming - the horrific droughts, the dengue fever, the malaria, the devastation to our land and economy. And he can announce that, hey, emergency over for now. His emissions trading scheme will go into deep freeze while he checks this good news. As for his promise this week to make your power bills go up $200 a year to stop global warming? His promise to make even food more expensive? To put gassy companies out of business, and their workers out of a job? Cancel all that. As you were, soldier. Good news has come from the front. But now you can see why these graphs terrify Rudd, who has never admitted to a single fact they contain. Read more here.
By Al Sonja L. Schmidt
Global Warming Hype Turns to Terror in Young Children! In her new book, Deb & Seby’s Real Deal on Global Warming, veteran comedy writer Al Sonja L. Schmidt uses her wit to ease the growing fears of children who are concerned over the earth’s future destruction and offers an alternate view on climate change than what they may have heard in the media or learned at school.
“Images of the earth drowning and beloved animals becoming extinct are plaguing children of all ages, striking fear that we are doomed!” says Schmidt. This dilemma, dubbed “eco-phobia,” is a result of the scare tactics that have successfully worked on younger audiences. Children are also worried that they are not doing enough to help the environment. With the remnants of Earth Day lingering, environmentally-friendly activities have moved from planting flowers and cleaning up parks to political rallies and protests that only further a sense of doom to impressionable youth. “Let’s restore a sense of earth to Earth Day. Rather than using fear to provoke a reaction, why not offer positive encouragement to ease the concern children have for our planet?” asks Schmidt.
In the book, animated characters Deb & Seby explore the issues, answering questions like:
• Who’s Telling Us this Scary Stuff and Why?
• If Industry is So Bad, Why does the Rest of the World Want It?
• Why Global Warming Seems So Real
• Are People Really the Biggest Greenhouse Gas Polluters?
• If there’s Another Side, Why Haven’t We Heard It?
• What makes it “The Most Serious Issue of our Time”?
Deb & Seby’s Real Deal on Global Warming presents the views of many respected scientists, researchers and professors from around the world who oppose the global warming predictions that have taken the world by storm. It exposes why we can all “chill-lax” about global warming, man’s real input into this “problem,” wacky so-called solutions to global warming and other eco-predictions that turned out to be wrong.
“Is the global warming movement about caring for the Earth or about politics, a feel-good philosophy and control over our lifestyles?” asks Schmidt. “The ‘real deal’ is there’s no scientific consensus to prove that adults, much less children, have anything to worry about.”
Al Sonja L. Schmidt is a comedic writer who has brought her talent to award-winning children’s programming, including That’s So Raven, The Famous Jett Jackson and Cory in the House, as well as primetime comedy series In Living Color and NBC’s Hidden Hills.
By Monique Newton, Anchorage Daily News
People are exchanging their flip-flops and shorts for close-toed shoes and fleece more than usual this summer. The cool, gloomy weather is almost as hot a topic in town as steep gas prices.
Sam Albanese, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in Anchorage said “Normally, Anchorage has 14 or 15 days in the summer that reach the 70-degree mark, Albanese said. This year, there have been two. And the city didn’t see 70 at all until July 2. That threshold typically comes in early to mid-June, according to weather records. So far this month, the daily high temperature has fallen below the average high for the date more than half the time. In fact, the temperature has missed the mark every day for the past week. And in June, temperatures fell below the average high on 24 of 30 days.”
Plants are blooming later and slower because of the low temperatures, said Barbara Miller, senior horticulturist at the Alaska Botanical Garden. “Some of the later-blooming plants are probably going to have problems,” she said. “They’re going to run out of summer and their buds will probably be frozen.” It’s not been good for some tropical annuals, like impatiens, that depend on warmer weather. “They’re just in the ground, sitting there, not growing,” Miller said. Pat Mulligan, president of the Alaska Pioneer Fruit Growers, said the low temperatures are making it harder to grow produce. “If people in the (fruit growers) club are growing apples that are pushing the envelope to ripen before frost, now the growing season is shorter,” he said. “You’re talking substantial loss of growing time.”
Judging by the pattern of June weather over nearly two decades, this should’ve been a warm summer, meteorologist David Vonderheide said. “Every four to five years we would get a cool June, and then bang—something has happened to interrupt this little cycle,” Vonderheide said. He thinks the strong forces of La Nina are the culprit. La Nina, a phenomenon that causes ocean temperatures to dip below average, kicked in this year and resulted in a drop in land temperatures, Albanese said. Another cause could be Pacific decadal oscillation, a cyclical period of lower ocean temperatures that comes every 20 to 25 years. There’s a warm phase and a cold phase of the climate pattern, Vonderheide said. “We were in a warm phase of the Pacific decadal oscillation in the ‘80s and ‘90s,” he said. “(Some forecasters) believe we may have entered into the cold phase.” As in any coastal area, the ocean’s temperature has great influence on the weather in Anchorage, forecasters say. Land both heats and cools more easily than water, so subtle temperature changes in the Pacific Ocean can mean dramatic variations on Alaska land. Read more here.
By the The Heritage Foundation on Right Side News
It’s hard to find a voice outside the Midwest or Archer Daniels Midland buildings that support the use of biofuels and ethanol as a means for filling gas tanks. Environmentalists and especially world hunger groups are adamantly expressing their concern about the unintended consequences of biofuels policy.
Christopher Booker and Richard North have a terrific piece in the Telegraph discussing the unique story of biofuels and how this policy went from pipedream to absolute disaster. It chronicles the history of biofuel policy and how its implementation has led to rising food prices. They note that “According to the World Bank’s top economist, Don Mitchell, biofuels had been responsible for three-quarters of the 140 per cent rise in world food prices between 2002 and 2008.”
Oxfam International says that these policies have pushed 30 million people into poverty. Even the head of Britain’s Renewable Fuels Agency is calling for a change: “So devastating has been this onslaught on biofuels that last Monday, Ed Gallagher, chairman of our new Renewable Fuels Agency, published a report recommending that Britain should drastically review its policy, slowing the introduction of biofuels and concentrating on “second-generation biofuels”, such as crop wastes and wood chips, that do not compete with food production.” It’s time politicians here at home seriously consider changing its biofuel policy and repeal the ethanol mandate along with any tariffs that discourage imports.
Read more here.
Also see this posting on Time Wasting on Nuclear Waste. The Heritage Foundation recently released the chart called, U.S. a Nonstarter in Nuclear Power. The point of the chart was to show those that continue to question the value of nuclear power that other countries are making concrete decisions and moving forward in earnest. The bottom line is that nuclear energy has strong opponents that have made careers out of being anti-nuclear and their propaganda continues to permeate the national debate. So long as this dynamic manifests itself as fence sitting elected officials that will not take the right steps on nuclear energy policy, America’s nuclear renaissance remains in doubt. And it is these reluctant lawmakers that, despite this country’s thirst for new energy, continue to deny U.S. citizens access to nuclear energy and assure that to date, when it comes to building new nuclear plants, the U.S. unfortunately, is a nonstarter.
Curtis Krueger, St. Petersburg Times
In Al Gore’s Nobel-winning movie An Inconvenient Truth, hurricanes became symbols of the danger of global warming. The reality is more complicated. Scientists are locked in debate about whether global warming is spiking the intensity of hurricanes. Even those who agree that humans are causing global warming disagree about whether it is making hurricanes worse.
Leading experts are changing their findings. Climatologists desperate for clues are boring holes along Florida’s coastline, trying to discern from grains of sand how many tropical storms pounded our shores in past centuries. Amid the whirlwind of debate, most scientists agree on the most urgent hurricane threat. And it’s not global warming. Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor of atmospheric science, was named by Time magazine in 2006 as one of “100 people who shape our world.” The reason? Just before Hurricane Katrina smashed into New Orleans in 2005, he published a scientific paper in the journal Nature saying the power of hurricanes had nearly doubled in recent decades.
To test the theory, Emanuel and other scientists recently loaded tons of data into computer models, hoping to learn how bad it could get if global warming keeps pushing up sea temperatures. The results were surprising: Hurricanes didn’t increase dramatically in the projections, even after decades of simulated global warming. Emanuel was not disappointed that the research seemed to undercut his old results. “One gets used to being mistaken, and we follow the evidence and sometimes the evidence is contradictory and then we have to sort it out.” He’s uncertain whether the recent results are correct or the outcome of faulty models. “There is a real conundrum here.” Read more here.
By Jim Peden, the Middlebury Community Network
As a dissenting physicist, I simply can no longer buy the notion that CO2 produces any significant warming of the atmosphere at any rate. I’ve studied the atomic absorption physics to death, from John Nicol’s extensive development to the much longer winded dissertation by Gerlich & Tscheuschner and everything in between, it simply doesn’t add up. Even if every single IR photon absorbed by a CO2 molecule were magically transformed into purely thermal translational modes , the pitifully small quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere doesn’t add up to much additional heat. And if the aforementioned magical 100% transformation from radiation into “heat” were true, then all arguments concerning re-emission ( source of all the wonderful “greenhouse effect” cartoons with their arrows flying in all directions ) are out the window.
More and more, I am becoming convinced that atmospheric heating is primarily by thermal conduction from the surface, whose temperature is determined primarily by solar absorption. I get a lot of email from laymen seeking simple answers. My simple reply goes like this:
1. The sun heats the earth.
2. The earth heats the atmosphere
3. After the sun sets, the atmosphere cools back down
With a parting comment: “If we were to have 96 continuous hours without sunlight, temperatures would likely be below freezing over all the world’s land masses. The warmest place you could find would be to take a swim in the nearest ocean. There is no physical process in the atmosphere which “traps” heat. The so-called “greenhouse effect “ is a myth.
See Jim’s editorial on the Global warming Hoax here.
James A. Peden, Editor of the Middlebury Community Network, spent some of his earlier years as an Atmospheric Physicist at the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh and Extranuclear Laboratories in Blawnox, Pennsylvania, studying ion-molecule reactions in the upper atmosphere. As a student, he was elected to both the National Physics Honor Society and the National Mathematics Honor Fraternity, and was President of the Student Section of the American Institute of Physics. He was a founding member of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, and a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Paul MacRae
After more than year’s intensive research for a book on the bizarre distortions that make up the global warming issue, I now wonder how anyone in the “consensus” climate scientist community sleeps at night. And yet, individually, I’m certain that 99 per cent of them are highly principled human beings. If more climate scientists spoke out about what they really believe, here’s what I think the silent minority (majority?) might say:Hello. I am a “consensus” climate scientist, and I must confess that I and many of my fellow climate scientists haven’t been entirely honest with the public over the last 20 years or so on the issue of global warming, what causes it, and what damage it is likely to cause. Therefore, I have decided to come clean and tell the public honestly what “consensus” climate science is really all about.
First, many of us are genuinely afraid that human beings are the main cause of the planetary warming of the past century and that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could be a serious problem, maybe even catastrophic. That’s why we’ve felt it necessary to lie to you. We’re afraid you won’t take the threat seriously if we tell you the truth - that there may not be a threat because we have absolutely no scientific evidence to back up our beliefs. None. I know we’ve told you that the science is “settled” and “certain” and that anyone who dares question it is either senile or crazy or in the pay of the oil companies. But it’s not true. There is only circumstantial evidence that human activities are the main cause of warming, and there’s no scientific evidence at all that warming will be disastrous. There is just speculation.
For one thing, the carbon cycle is just one of dozens, maybe hundreds of factors affecting the planet’s climate. It isn’t the “principal” driver of climate. And that means humans can’t be the “principal” driver of climate, either, as Al Gore charges, since our contribution to the carbon cycle is only 5 per cent a year; nature supplies 95 per cent.
Most of my colleagues know this, but because of our fears of what could happen, we’ve tried to keep the public in the dark about our doubts. We’ve done this by claiming there is, in Al Gore’s words, a “100 per cent” consensus among climate scientists that the issue of the cause of global warming is settled, that it’s caused by humans, and that it’s going to be a catastrophe. And anyone who says otherwise is a heretic. The ‘100 per cent consensus’ is a myth. Well, I’m exposing another lie: there is no “consensus.” There are thousands of scientists who don’t believe in the human-caused, catastrophic global warming theory. However, many are afraid to speak out because they will lose research grants -the U.S. alone spends an estimated $4 billion a year on climate research - and possibly have their careers ruined by their “consensus” colleagues. My “consensus” colleagues accuse global warming skeptics of being in the pay of the oil companies. If so, they’re either highly principled or really dumb: the oil companies don’t pay nearly as well for skeptical research as governments do for research confirming global warming. Even if it’s not warming.
Because, finally, that’s the most blatant fib of all: that the planet is currently warming. It hasn’t warmed since either 1998 or 2001, depending on how you do your calculations. Yet, so far, the “consensus” climate community has not come out and officially told the public that the planet isn’t warming. If asked, they just say it’s an interlude, a plateau, only an “apparent” warming, and that warming will resume again soon. Even though ten years of no warming is more than an interlude, and not just “apparent,” they’d prefer the public not know that. If carbon dioxide is increasing but the planet isn’t warming, even if only for 10 years, then clearly carbon dioxide isn’t driving the climate.
Unfortunately, I’m only a “fictional” climate scientist. Until a few more “real” climate scientists break the “consensus” to come out with the truth, the public will continue to believe that they, not nature, are to blame for warming, that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” when, in fact, it’s essential for life, and that the solution is taxing themselves into poverty - all based on a consensus climate science whose “consensus” and “science” are, alas, as “fictional” as I am. Read more here.