By Arpita Mukherjee, Merinews
THE WINTER this year was unusually long and harsh. What possibly could explain the occurrence of unusual cold wave conditions this year throughout the globe when environmentalists voicing their concerns about the human-led global warming had predicted that the rise in carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere would result in shorter winters with no significant dip in the mercury? Was this winter an exception to the rule or is it simply following a trend? After all, studies conducted by a small group of ‘sceptic’ scientists reveal that global warming has been waning since 2001. Latest studies supported by satellite data cast doubt on the climate fears propounded by environmentalists supported by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Satellite measurements available since 1979 show no warming in the southern hemisphere and the trend in the northern hemisphere appears to have waned since 2001. In August 2007, the UK Met Office acknowledged that obvious global warming had stopped. Paleo-climate scientist Bob Carter testifying before the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has noted that the accepted global average temperature statistics used by IPCC show no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. According to UN scientist Madhav L. Khandekar, a retired Environment Canada scientist and an expert IPCC reviewer in 2007, the recent worldwide analysis of ocean surface temperatures shows that sea surface temperatures over world oceans are slowly declining since mid-1998.
The mainstream media seems to be purposely ignoring the bulk of the findings by renowned researchers throughout the globe that the current global warming fear attributed solely to carbon dioxide rise is utterly unfounded. Why is the IPCC, which has been blamed for relying on climate models based on wrong assumptions, continuing with its false prophecy? Read more here.
By Dan Gainor, Boone Picken’s Free Market Fellow, Business and Media Institute
To hear the mainstream media tell it, we have a Titanic problem with global warming. Not large, but Titanic in that they believe “unsinkable” mankind is facing a looming cataclysm. How do they know? Because some scientists tell them that’s the way it is. But when other scientists tell them that might not be the case, they only half listen and soon forget. Such is the fate of the unprecedented 2008 International Conference on Climate Change put on by the Heartland Institute. That event drew 500 scientists, economists and public policy experts to New York to discuss the flaws in the Al Gorean “consensus” on global warming.
It should have been big news, but the media never gave it a fair chance. Reporters mischaracterized the three-day event as “quirky” or a “roast” of Al Gore and called attendees “flat Earthers,” as if we would sail right off the edge of the world. The event had such promise. Along with about 100 scientists from around the globe, actual members of the mainstream media attended representing The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and major networks like ABC and CNN. But no stories. That was typical. None of the broadcast network coverage the week of the event even acknowledged the conference existed.
Print coverage was nearly as bad. While some discussed the conference intelligently - like Investor’s Business Daily or columnist John Tierney from the Times - others used it as one more chance to sink opposition to the hype surrounding manmade global warming. Those stories, and hundreds more like them, helped prove one of the very points the conference intended to make - that the mainstream media have given up the role of observer and become advocates for one side in the climate debate.
Dan Gainor is The Boone Pickens Fellow and vice president of the Media Research Center’s Business & Media Institute. He can be seen Thursday afternoon each week on Fox Business Network.
EPW Minority Blog
Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbara Boxer conceded today that the Lieberman-Warner global warming cap-and-trade bill would be pulled if “weakening amendments” are added during the scheduled June 2008 floor debate. Boxer’s pledge today appeared to signal the 2008 exit strategy for pulling the Lieberman-Warner bill (America’s Climate Security Act - S2191.) Greenwire reporter Darren Samuelsohn described Boxer as “pledging to punt the issue into 2009 if any amendments get added that weaken the legislation.” “Boxer made combating global warming her top priority after she became chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee” reported an October 19, 2007 article in the Sacramento Bee. Political reality now appears to be denying Boxer the achievement of her “top priority” during the current Congress.
During today’s press conference, Boxer pledged to use the failed bill as a political tool during this election year. “We will hold those who weakened it accountable in November,” Boxer said at a press conference with the heads of 15 environmental groups today. “We will pull the bill and bring back the legislation after we have a new Congress and a new President,” Boxer added, sounding a political warning to opponents of the bill. During the question and answer, Boxer said she would play “hardball” with Senators who vote against the bill.
Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW), commented on Boxer’s warning to her fellow lawmakers. “This should send a chilling message to any Senator who wishes to make any changes to the bill to lessen the economic impact on their constituents,” Inhofe said. “It’s clear from Chairman Boxer’s comments today that she does not anticipate being able to move this bill this year,” Inhofe said. “As Chairman Boxer is aware, several amendments designed to protect the economy and to deploy low emission energy sources like nuclear are likely to pass during a floor debate. Even ardent supporters of cap-and-trade in the business community, notably Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, believe this bill is the wrong approach for America. It’s inconceivable to me that supporters of this bill would try to force upon Americans more burdensome regulations while China remains exempt,” Inhofe added. [Note: Opponents of the bill include Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, prominent businessmen, and Senators normally open to cap-and-trade legislation). Read more here.
Update: The United States “would lose between 1.2 and 1.8 million jobs in 2020 and between 3 and 4 million jobs in 2030,” according to a new study conducted by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). Job losses would result because of “lower industrial output due to higher energy prices, the high cost of complying with required emissions cuts, and greater competition from overseas manufacturers with lower energy costs.” See more here.
By John Tierney, New York Times
All right, let’s talk about the money. After I asked readers to focus on the substance of the skeptics’ arguments at this week’s conference on global warming, readers insisted that I should have focused on the financing of the sponsor, the Heartland Institute. Others objected to my (and my colleague Andy Revkin) even writing about a conferenced sponsored by this group. I’m used to this sort of criticism, but I still find it baffling. Do the critics really think there’s more money and glory to be won by doubting global warming than by going along with the majority?
I ask this question not because I doubt the integrity or competence of the researchers and environmental groups who are getting billions of dollars from government agencies, corporations, foundations and private donors concerned about climate change. Yet even before the program was announced for this week’s conference, even as Heartland was (without success) inviting Mr. Gore and scientists on his side to come debate, the event was dismissed as impossibly tainted by money. At RealClimate , the blog that touts its devotion to sober scientific analysis, the Heartland Institute was written off as “a front group for the fossil fuel industry,” the same theme that was picked up by some commenters on this blog. Here’s a response from Joseph Bast, Heartland’s president: “Donations from energy companies have never amounted to more than 5 percent of our budget in any year, and there is no corporate sponsor underwriting any of this conference. These criticisms are just a standard left-wing smear.”
If readers insist on debating the pecuniary motives of scientists and their patrons, I’d be curious to see figures comparing how much money corporations, foundations and government agencies today give to global-warming skeptics versus how much they give to the other side. Again, I’m not suggesting that the researchers taking this money are corrupt, or that scientists will suppress the truth if it turns out the current prevailing view of climate change is wrong. If contradictions emerge, scientists will debate and revise their theories eventually. But it will take longer to figure out what’s happening if dissent is stifled and skeptics are demonized. The skeptics in the minority start off with a disadvantage in getting their message heard simply because of the media’s bias for bad news and horror stories. When there’s a well-financed majority dominating the public debate, I find it odd to hear complaints that anyone else should receive money or attention. Read more of this right on point analysis here.
By Ariana Eunjung Cha, in the Washington Post Foreign Service
The first time Li Gengxuan saw the dump trucks from the nearby factory pull into his village, he couldn’t believe what happened. Stopping between the cornfields and the primary school playground, the workers dumped buckets of bubbling white liquid onto the ground. Then they turned around and drove right back through the gates of their compound without a word. This ritual has been going on almost every day for nine months, Li and other villagers said.
In China, a country buckling with the breakneck pace of its industrial growth, such stories of environmental pollution are not uncommon. But the Luoyang Zhonggui High-Technology Co., here in the central plains of Henan Province near the Yellow River, stands out for one reason: It’s a green energy company, producing polysilicon destined for solar energy panels sold around the world. But the byproduct of polysilicon production—silicon tetrachloride—is a highly toxic substance that poses environmental hazards. “The land where you dump or bury it will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in the place. . . . It is like dynamite—it is poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it,” said Ren Bingyan, a professor at the School of Material Sciences at Hebei Industrial University.
The situation in Li’s village points to the environmental trade-offs the world is making as it races to head off a dwindling supply of fossil fuels. Forests are being cleared to grow biofuels like palm oil, but scientists argue that the disappearance of such huge swaths of forests is contributing to climate change. Hydropower dams are being constructed to replace coal-fired power plants, but they are submerging whole ecosystems under water.
By Ted Buss, Times Record
The latest impact piece you’ll never read or view in the suffocating liberal media is the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change that just concluded in New York City. On Feb. 12 noted doomsayer Jim Martin, executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, told the Denver Post, “You could have a convention of all scientists who dispute climate change in a relatively small phone booth.” Jim’s prediction was about as close as the coming ice age his cronies forecasted in the 1970s. More than 200 climate and environmental scientists from Australia, Canada, England, Poland, France, Hungary, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden and the United States attended the three-day conference in New York. They were joined by environmental authorities from Harvard, The Institute Pasteur in Paris, Johns Hopkins, the Universities of Virginia, Alabama, Arizona State and many other fine universities. “The alarmists in the global warming debate have had their say over and over again in every newspaper in the country every day,” said conference host Joseph Bast of the Heartland Institute. “They’ve been seen in countless news reports and documentary films. They have totally dominated the media’s coverage of this issue. They have swayed the view of many people, and many of them have gotten very rich in the process.” Bast pointed out many scientists appeared, despite the potential loss of research grants, tenure, and the ability to get published in the future. Many even dared to speak out vehemently against what they consider “the mass delusion of our time.” “We are not in this for money,” he continued. “The scientists with us today have been published thousands of times in the world’s leading scientific journals. They deserve to be heard.”
Nobel Prize, Emmy and Academy Awards winner Al Gore was asked to participate, and he declined. Likely he was jetting off somewhere to tell followers they need to be riding bikes to work. Incidentally, isn’t it interesting that a group of Norwegian socialists select the Peace Prize winner each year, and past nominees included Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini? “The claim that global warming is a ‘crisis’ is itself a theory,” said Bast. “It can be falsified by scientific fact just as the claim that there is a ‘consensus’ that global warming is man-made has been disproved by the fact that this conference is being held.” Is global warming a crisis, as we’ve been told so often by media, politicians and environmental activists? Or is it moderate, mostly natural and unstoppable, as we are told by distinguished scientists who are not looking to make billions peddling carbon offsets? Doesn’t it seem logical that both sides have a right to be heard? Read more here.
By Noel Sheppard, Newsbusters
One of the biggest concerns of media analysts and press watchers is the brainwashing effect bad reporting has on the public. No finer example of this propagandist power exists than with the liberal bogeyman known as global warming, for the constant climate alarmism being spewed 24 yours a day, seven days a week has tremendously and demonstrably impacted the views of the citizenry. Of course, that’s the goal.
Consider the following e-mail message I received this morning from someone that appears to work for the government of Ontario, Canada: What are you, retarded? Global warming = MORE snowfall. Not less.
Meaning snowfall records will be broken. What set this man off to send such an e-mail message to a perfect stranger? This article from last Thursday addressing the record snowfall around the country.
Photo courtesy of Ric Werme, Penacook, NH
Sadly, what this angry reader clearly missed was that the piece was a response to all those hysterical press proclamations last year that global warming would significantly reduce snowfall around the world resulting in huge financial losses to ski resorts and winter vacation homeowners.
Alas, poor reading comprehension on the part of the citizenry—even those in neighboring countries—might be our least concern in this situation. What should scare us all much more is the idea that the propaganda attack regarding this issue is so effective that folks will blame every weather-related event—even record snowfall!—on global warming. The fear-mongering is working, ladies and gentlemen. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Read more here.
By Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post
When Christopher Monckton, who served as a special adviser to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, ponders the current political push to curb greenhouse gases linked to climate change, he thinks of King Canute. According to Monckton, Canute—the Viking who ruled England along with much of Scandinavia nearly a thousand years ago—took his courtiers to the ocean’s edge one day, set down his throne and ordered the tide not to come in. The tide, of course, came in, and the king got his feet wet. The lesson? The king taught his advisers “humility,” Monckton said, by showing them that even he, a king, could not control nature. In the same way, he argued, modern-day politicians should not fool themselves into thinking that humanity is having a big impact on climate.
Monckton, along with other high-profile global warming skeptics such as University of Virginia professor emeritus S. Fred Singer and Virginia state climatologist Patrick J. Michaels, are gathered in New York this week for a conference aimed at challenging the idea that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank funded by energy and health-care corporations as well as conservative foundations and individuals, the 2 1/2 -day session poses a stark contrast to the near-unanimous chorus of concern expressed by top U.S. politicians and most of the scientific mainstream.
Several climate scientists and environmental advocates poked fun at the meeting. Frank O’Donnell, who heads the watchdog group Clean Air Watch, said the conference “looks like the climate equivalent of Custer’s last stand. They seem to have tried to find every last skeptic on Earth and put them in one hotel off Broadway.” Read more here
Icecap Note: the ad hominem attacks by the environmental groups and alarmist professors like Michael Oppenheimer (formerly with the Environmental Defense Fund) in this story about this gathering were predictable as they have the most to lose from their hoax being exposed. You will never see them argue the science because the science is not on their side. I can say with certainty that this group is just the tip of the iceberg of what I believe is really a silent majority of scientists in this and allied fields, and teachers and politicians who don’t buy into the alarmist hype but who can’t speak out because their jobs will be threatened. I get hundreds of emails from these people expressing great frustration and thanking ICECAP and for other internet sites you see often referenced and linked to here for providing a beacon to the truth on this issue. We will not be right on every point and in fact not everyone at the conference, which by the way included numerous IPCC reviewers, agrees on every point. That is what standard practice should be in science. Now it is polluted by greed and power. The grant toting alarmists and environmental groups raking in billions of dollars have hijacked the science. Let us hope if the natural cyclical cooling that we believe is more likely than a resumption of warming takes place in the next few decades, that these people are held accountable for their action and the harm they might do to the economy and the good and hard working people of this nation and the world.