“Clearly, the wrong horses have been backed.”

For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).
Yes, you did read that right. And also, yes, this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society’s continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
In response to these facts, a global warming devotee will chuckle and say “how silly to judge climate change over such a short period”. Yet in the next breath, the same person will assure you that the 28-year-long period of warming which occurred between 1970 and 1998 constitutes a dangerous (and man-made) warming. Tosh. Our devotee will also pass by the curious additional facts that a period of similar warming occurred between 1918 and 1940, well prior to the greatest phase of world industrialisation, and that cooling occurred between 1940 and 1965, at precisely the time that human emissions were increasing at their greatest rate.

Climate denier, Prof Bob Carter “is a geologist at James Cook University, Queensland, engaged in paleoclimate research.”

On his presidential campaign trail late in 1999 and in serious need of at least some farm votes, Al Gore boasted to a Midwest audience that it was he who had cast a tie-breaking vote in 1994 against a proposal by New Jersey Democrat Sen. Bill Bradley which would have cut tax incentives for ethanol fuel. “It’s well known that I’ve always supported ethanol. And I have not ducked when votes for … agricultural interests were on the floor.”
[…]
Now, we discover that, thanks to increased ethanol production, something else is turning “Green” — the Gulf of Mexico. A huge 8,543-square-mile dead zone, roughly the size of New Jersey, is growing off the coast of Mississippi and Louisiana. It is the result of a huge algae growth, fueled by nutrients flushed from the farmlands in the Midwest watershed.

“It is clear to me that those who espouse and promote acceptance of the “killer AGW” scenario are highly threatened by serious auditing of the surface record and the network used to obtain it. I have been in both academe and industry, with a career spanning 25 years. I am responsible for world wide efforts with budgets well into the millions. I can well recognize when someone is trying to hide poorly done, low quality science. In this case, I smell blood.“

USHCN Station, Tucson

It gets better! USHCN Wickenberg – “Remember, these are the few select stations being used to determine how much global warming the US is experiencing. “

This discussion (PDF)

“… reviews the analysis and conclusions of Lockwood and Fröhlich and then asks other notable scientists in the field of solar/terrestrial relations to comment on the findings. In doing so, it is found that the conclusions being forwarded by Lockwood and Fröhlich—that the sun has had no impact on the earth’s surface temperature history during the past several decades—is not consistent with the thinking of many other researchers, and instead, indicates more a personal dogma rather than scientific truth.”

Comments by Joseph D’Aleo (first Director of Meteorology and co-founder of the cable TV Weather Channel), Richard C. Willson (Senior Research Scientist, Columbia University’s Center for Climate Systems Research) and Nicola Scafetta, PhD (Dept. of Physics, Free Electron Laser Laboratory, Duke University).
More links here.

Models trump measurements (Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post);

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 the paucity of geologic knowledge among IPCC scientists — a knowledge that is central to understanding climate change, in his view, since geologic processes ultimately determine the level of atmospheric CO2.
“The IPCC needs a lesson in geology to avoid making fundamental mistakes,” he says. “Most leading geologists, throughout the world, know that the IPCC’s view of Earth processes are implausible if not impossible.”
Catastrophic theories of climate change depend on carbon dioxide staying in the atmosphere for long periods of time — otherwise, the CO2 enveloping the globe wouldn’t be dense enough to keep the heat in. Until recently, the world of science was near-unanimous that CO2 couldn’t stay in the atmosphere for more than about five to 10 years because of the oceans’ near-limitless ability to absorb CO2.
“This time period has been established by measurements based on natural carbon-14 and also from readings of carbon-14 from nuclear weapons testing, it has been established by radon-222 measurements, it has been established by measurements of the solubility of atmospheric gases in the oceans, it has been established by comparing the isotope mass balance, it has been established through other mechanisms, too, and over many decades, and by many scientists in many disciplines,” says Prof. Segalstad, whose work has often relied upon such measurements.
Then, with the advent of IPCC-influenced science, the length of time that carbon stays in the atmosphere became controversial. Climate change scientists began creating carbon cycle models to explain what they thought must be an excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. These computer models calculated a long life for carbon dioxide.
Amazingly, the hypothetical results from climate models have trumped the real world measurements of carbon dioxide’s longevity in the atmosphere. Those who claim that CO2 lasts decades or centuries have no such measurements or other physical evidence to support their claims.
Neither can they demonstrate that the various forms of measurement are erroneous.

Continue reading →

Sasktel, call your premier.

The full contract is up at The Smoking Gun.
Via Drudge.
(Perhaps we’re being too hard on the Goracle. You think it’s easy these days to put Chilean sea bass on your childrens’ plates?)

Fort Morgan, Colorado’s USHCN climate station of record.

And a comparison of USHCN stations at Orland and Marysville, California.

Join the project at Surfacestations.org.

Common sense interrupts the climate change debate;

Few people in Africa got to see Al Gore and his troupe of rock-star ecologists strutting their stuff two weekends ago, because most have neither television nor electricity. That’s just as well, because they would have been aghast at Live Earth’s bizarre message.
In Africa, we have much more serious things to worry about than climate change. Indeed, if they achieve their objective the concerts will have done harm to the people of Africa.
[…]
Please, Europe and America, spare us! You can cut your own emissions if you want, but don’t tell us what to do. We really have much more serious and urgent threats to deal with. Unfortunately, our beggarly governments are very susceptible to diktats from on high, especially when they are offered aid (which they use to line the coffers of their bank accounts): don’t encourage them!
Humanity has proven itself hugely adaptable. We survived an Ice Age and a period probably much hotter than today (around 8,000 years ago). The Dutch salvaged land from the sea and built on it. In Saudi Arabia, they drink desalinated sea water. The Tuaregs adapted to the blazing heat of the Sahara and the Eskimos adapted to the freezing cold of the Arctic.

Indeed. It’s an observation that eludes the “1 degree rise in temperature will destroy life on earth as we know it” CBC fruit-fly cult and their megaphones in media.
Just as things look even more grim for the future of that dysfunctional continent, a glimmer of hope appears on an unexpected front;

Rising prices for food have led the United Nations programme fighting famine in Africa and other regions to warn that it can no longer afford to feed the 90m people it has helped for each of the past five years on its budget.
The World Food Programme feeds people in countries including Chad, Uganda and Ethiopia, but reaches a fraction of the 850m people it estimates suffers from hunger. It spent about $600m buying food in 2006. So far, the WFP has not cut its reach because of high commodities prices, but now says it could be forced to do so unless donor countries provide extra funds.
[…]
She said policymakers were becoming more concerned about the impact of biofuel demand on food prices and how the world would continue to feed its expanding population.

If an inflationary food-into-fuel market has the net result of forcing the UN to cut back on its dictatorship funding programs, Africans may finally have a chance to turn their backs on dependency and get legitimate economies off the ground.
Won’t happen though. There are too many hungry bureaucrats at the UN working hard to ensure things stay exactly as they’ve always been.

Can the ice caps melt fast enough save Canada’s sea ports?

Chart Datum varies from country to country, but always follows some low water definition. In Canadian coastal waters, our present target threshold is Lower Low Water Large Tide (LLWLT). LLWLT is the lowest predictable tide *averaged* over an 18.6 year tidal epoch. […]
STATION 00065 – SAINT JOHN
LAST DECADE AVERAGE
4.43
AVERAGE FOR ALL YEARS
4.47
-4CM
[…]
STATION 07735 – Vancouver, BC
LAST DECADE AVERAGE
3.07
AVERAGE FOR ALL YEARS
3.08
-1 CM
[…]
STATION 05010 – Churchill
LAST DECADE AVERAGE
2.57
AVERAGE FOR ALL YEARS
2.58
-1 CM

Apparently not.

Marlo – You are so full of crap. You have been proven wrong. The entire world has proven you wrong. You are the last guy on Earth to get it. Take this warning from me, Marlo. It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar. If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by Corporate America. Go ahead, guy. Take me on. Mike Michael T. Eckhart President American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE)

H/T reader “Ross” who explains;

Marlo Lewis is a lawyer who works at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington. He published a well-reasoned article critiquing a cap-and-trade proposal before Congress, based on recent testimony he gave before a Senate committee.

One clear cut forest at a time;

Guyana’s President Bharrat Jagdeo on Thursday criticized the Kyoto Protocol on climate change for failing to allow countries like his nation with pristine unharvested forests to earn carbon credits.
“The Kyoto Protocol is limited in that sense, and it’s short-sighted in that it encourages bad behaviour basically among countries; if you cut down trees and you plant them back you get money, if you preserve them, you don’t get anything,” Jagdeo told a forum on agro-energy.

But that’s about to change…

He said Guyana has decided to get into the production of bio-fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel.

Goodbye, rain forest – hello, palm oil plantations!
I love it when a plan falls apart.

““There seems to be a discontinuity in the temp curve just before 1980. Is this when the site was moved here, or when the a/c was upgraded?”

An astonishing backdrop containing more than 9 million LEDs has been created for the Genesis “Turn It On Again” world tour.

XL Video UK has supplied 15,089 Barco O-Lite LED panels with 270 control boxes, plus 102 Mitsubishi 16:8 high-resolution LED panels.
The O-lite panels make up a spectacular back wall measuring 13 metre high and 55 metre wide. This is surrounded and topped by 7 lighting towers (“ribs”) reaching heights of up to 28 metres, with the entire structure resembling a giant conch shell. This was designed by Mark Fisher/Stufish.

Related.
h/t

Breitbart.com;

Scientists who probed two kilometers (1.2 miles) through a Greenland glacier to recover the oldest plant DNA on record said Thursday the planet was far warmer hundreds of thousands of years ago than is generally believed.
DNA of trees, plants and insects including butterflies and spiders from beneath the southern Greenland glacier was estimated to date to 450,000 to 900,000 years ago, according to the remnants retrieved from this long-vanished boreal forest.
That contrasts sharply with the prevailing view that a lush forest of this kind could only have existed in Greenland as recently as 2.4 million years ago, according to a summary of the study, which is published Thursday in the journal Science.
The samples suggest the temperature probably reached 10 degrees C (50 degrees Fahrenheit) in the summer and -17 C (1 F) in the winter.
They also indicated that during the last period between ice ages, 116,000-130,000 years ago, when temperatures were on average 5 C (9 F) higher than now, the glaciers on Greenland did not completely melt away.
“These findings allow us to make a more accurate environmental reconstruction of the time period from which these samples were taken,” said Martin Sharp, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta, Canada, and a co-author of the paper.
“What we’ve learned is that this part of the world was significantly warmer than most people thought.”

Science Daily;

Discoveries of a butterfly species’ DNA in the Far East and Western Europe may rewrite the known history of the Pleistocene Ice Age.
Italian researchers Valerio Sbordoni and Paolo Gratton of the Rome Tor Vergata University said traces of the species’ DNA have been found beyond the range once associated with the insect’s history, the Italian news agency ANSA said Wednesday.
The Italian duo, along with Polish Academy of Sciences researcher Maciek Konopinski, used the new data to create an updated map of the world’s greenery during the global ice age more than 10,000 years ago.
“The evidence from the mitochondrial DNA strongly suggests that large patches of the world’s forests survived the impact of the last Ice Age and were alive and well as far back as 150,000 years ago,” Sbordoni told ANSA. “There were definitely oases in which the Parnassius mnemosyne butterfly thrived, especially in the Carpathians and the ancient German region of Pannonia.”

1937 – Canada’s hottest day on record; temperatures reach 45.0C (114F) in Midale and Yellow Grass, both in southern Saskatchewan. *

And still the dust blew.
On June 24 it blew with such fury that it forced the Moose Jaw fair to cancel its horse races and shut down. The force of the storms blowing across southern Saskatchewan was felt as far east as Winnipeg, where once again a dust haze obscured the sun.
Highways became so drifted with dust as to be impassable. South of Moose Jaw the blowing alkali from dried-up Johnstone Lake coated the countryside a dirty white and drove everybody indoors. Sixty miles to the south, near the town of Rockglen, Fife Lake, which had once been thirty-five miles long, dried up completely. Far to the east in the Oxbow area, the Lake of the Rivers went dry and in the process a great mass of prehistoric buffalo bones was uncovered. The farmers of the area lived that year on the returns they got from the fertilizer plants for the carloads of bones them managed to harvest. Near Arcola, the trains were dealyed by the myriads of grasshoppers that lit on the rails and were ground to grease.
The Saskatchewan crop was destroyed by the fourth week of June. Then the heat got worse. At the end of June, 100-degree temperatures were common everywhere and the areas as far north as Prince Albert got a bitter taste of what Regina and Moose Jaw had experienced in 1936. The peak came on July 5 when it touched 110 degrees at Regina, Moose Jaw, and a dozen other southern comminities. For the rest of the summer ninety-degree heat was the rule, for the hot weather extended well into August, and the records established all over on August 23, when it went well over the 100-degree mark again.
There had been hotter Junes than 1937, hotter Julys, and hotter Augusts, but taken together there had never been a longer and hotter summer. – James H. Gray – The Winter Years

What’s a green revolution wiithout a massacre?

Armed groups in Colombia are driving peasants off their land to make way for plantations of palm oil, a biofuel that is being promoted as an environmentally friendly source of energy.
Surging demand for “green” fuel has prompted rightwing paramilitaries to seize swaths of territory, according to activists and farmers. Thousands of families are believed to have fled a campaign of killing and intimidation, swelling Colombia’s population of 3 million displaced people and adding to one of the world’s worst refugee crises after Darfur and Congo.
[…]
“As a consequence of the development of palm by secretive business practices and the use of threats, people have been displaced and [the businesses] have claimed land for themselves,” he said. His claim was backed up by witnesses and groups such as Christian Aid and the National Indigenous Organisation of Colombia.
The revelations tarnish what has been considered an economic and environmental success story. The fruit of the palm oil tree produces a vegetable oil also used in cooking, employs 80,000 people, and is increasingly being turned into biofuel.
“Four years ago Colombia had 172,000 hectares of palm oil,” President Alvaro Uribe told the Guardian. “This year we expect to finish with nearly 400,000.”
“Four years ago Colombia didn’t produce a litre of biofuel. Today, because of our administration, Colombia produces 1.2m litres per day.” Investment in new installations would continue to boost production, he added.
However the lawlessness created by four decades of insurgency in the countryside has enabled rightwing paramilitaries, and also possibly leftwing rebels, to join the boom. Unlike coca, the armed groups’ main income source, palm oil is a legal crop and therefore safe from state-backed eradication efforts.

Before you chime in with kneejerk outrage, think of the big picture, not to mention the opportunities.
Dead Peasant Carbon Credits.
It could work.
(h/t reader Karl.)

Another inconvenient box office ;

Continued weak demand for the singing saviors of climate change
With the worldwide “Live Earth” concert on July 7, Hamburg wants to protect the climate and take its place next to other metropolitan venues such as London, Tokyo and Sydney. But only half of the tickets have been sold. Hamburg tourist officials are giving away the tickets in promotional packages.

Perhaps they can recycle the empty seats as carbon credits. As it stands, the City of Hamburg looks to be on the hook, with the concert unlikely to break even.
(Someone might put them in touch with the Saskatchewan government – world leaders in flogging Al Gore tickets).
More;

Kevin Wall, Al Gore’s new-found partner producer of Live Earth previously founded Network Live to make money, not save the poor. It did neither.
It failed as a business and as an effort to fight poverty. Next he saw Al Gore’s film and, lo and behold, Control Room was born. It’s partners? MSN, DirectTV, Qualcom, etc…. It don’t mean a thing, if it don’t bring the green – and I don’t mean as regards the environment. Same opportunist, different snake oil. zzzzzzzzzzz

The concerts are in trouble in Turkey and South Africa as well.

The Johannesburg leg of the Live Earth concerts has shifted venues due to lack of ticket sales at original venue.
The show will now take place at the 18,000 capacity Coca Cola Dome in the city as opposed to the original venue in Maropeng.
[…]
The Istanbul leg of the event was cancelled last week, due to lack of sponsorship interest.

And a big shout out to Saskatchewan premier Lorne Calvert for prompting SaskTel’s first-ever contribution to a US presidential campaign;

Al Gore visit postponed. Former US vice president Al Gore will not be able to make it to Taiwan this September to address the issue of global warming, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tien Chiu-chin said yesterday. Tien, who invited Gore to visit Taiwan to promote awareness on global warming, told reporters yesterday that she received an e-mail from the Harry Walker Agency, which has the exclusive right to arrange Gore’s speeches, saying that Gore had canceled all his scheduled events in the next six months. The visit to Taiwan had been postponed to next year, she added. Tien said the reason for the cancelation was that Gore was considering a presidential bid.

By the way – since the blow by from the Goracle, it still hasn’t warmed up around here properly.

Michael Crighton, September 15, 2003;

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.