The Sound Of Settled Science

New research

…concludes that the Earth’s climate is only about one-third as sensitive to carbon dioxide as the IPCC assumes. […]
According to Schwartz’s results, which are based on the empirical relationship between trends in surface temperature and ocean heat content, doubling the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere would result in a 1.1oC increase in average temperature (0.1–2.1oC, two standard deviation uncertainty range). Schwartz’s result is 63% lower than the IPCC’s estimate of 3oC for a doubling of CO2 (2.0–4.5oC, 2SD range).

Right now we’re about 41% above the estimated pre-industrial CO2 level of 270 ppm. At the current rate of increase of about 0.55% per year, CO2 will double around 2070. Based on Schwartz’s results, we should expect about a 0.6oC additional increase in temperature between now and 2070 due to this additional CO2. That doesn’t seem particularly alarming.
[…]
Stephen Schwartz is a pretty mainstream climate scientist. Yet along with dozens of other studies in the scientific literature, his new study belies Al Gore’s claim that there is no legitimate scholarly alternative to climate catastrophism.
Indeed, if Schwartz’s results are correct, that alone would be enough to overturn in one fell swoop the IPCC’s scientific “consensus”, the environmentalists’ climate hysteria, and the political pretext for the energy-restriction policies that have become so popular with the world’s environmental regulators, elected officials, and corporations. The question is, will anyone in the mainstream media notice?

More.
Stephen E Schwartz is in the pay of the well known oil giant, Brookhaven National Lab – Atmospheric Science Division.
Click here for the math geek pron. (pdf)

How Deep, Señor Chavez?

February 17, 2007;

“One hopes the bulldozer manufacturers aren’t foolish enough to pull out. The Venezuela mass grave industry is poised for explosive growth.”

[x] hyper-inflation
[x] price controls
[x] currency revaluation
[x] food shortages
[x] nationalize banks
[x] nationalize industry
[x] land seizures and “redistribution”
[x] silencing opposition media…

[x] President for life.
Any questions?
Previous.

Y2Kyoto: Shares Decline On The Hot Air Exchange

Europe’s Dirty Secret (PDF);

The EU emissions trading scheme (ETS), the region’s main policy tool to
combat climate change, is not working and should be reconsidered due to its high operating costs and poor results of curbing greenhouse gas emissions, a UK-based think tank said on Thursday.
“The EU ETS is costing a lot, but it isn’t working,” Hugo Robinson, an analyst with Open Europe, said in a statement released together with a new study, Europe’s Dirty Secret: Why the EU Emissions Trading Scheme isn’t working.
Open Europe, an independent think tank set up by UK business leaders, reckons the 27-member bloc needs to embrace radical reforms based on economic liberalization, with greater transparency and more accountability.
The cap-and-trade market for carbon dioxide emissions was launched in 2005, covering about 12,000 installations from emissions-intensive industries, such as energy, steel and glass.
The market’s first trading period, from 2005 through 2007, has seen the benchmark carbon contract for delivery in December 2007 drop below €0.10 – due to too many emissions permits handed out to installations participating in the scheme.
EU officials have insisted the first trading period has been a test phase, while the EU commission has tightened its allowance policy for the 2008-2012 second trading period. Officials are currently reviewing how to improve the market going forward.
“Everybody knows that phase one was a learning period with teething problems,” a spokeswoman at the EU commission told Point Carbon. “We have full confidence in the second phase and we are preparing the review of the system (for the third phase) to iron out existing problems,” she said, adding that the Open Europe report appeared to be “politically motivated.”
Still, Open Europe sees new problems ahead, while some problems have not been resolved.
“New problems are emerging in the second phase. Member states have opted to buy in vast numbers of what are essentially carbon offsets from developing countries, rather than make real reductions in emissions. But the offsets are often not reducing emissions, or are even subsidising polluters,” he said.
“This approach does nothing for our energy security and it doesn’t appear to be doing much good for the environment. It has also become clear that some member states are clearly using the complexity of the system to provide covert industrial subsidies to polluting industries,” Robinson said.

Telegraph

[A] ground-breaking study has now called into question the effectiveness of using trees to “offset” emissions, suggesting that their ability to “lock-up” carbon dioxide has been greatly exaggerated.
Forests have long been seen as an effective way of absorbing the greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, which are thought to trap the sun’s heat in the atmosphere, causing global warming.
Celebrities, including the Rolling Stones and Leonardo DiCaprio, the film actor, have signed up to schemes to plant trees to offset their own emissions.
However, the new research found that trees bathed in extra carbon dioxide grew more tissue, but did not necessarily store significant extra quantities of carbon. Instead, the tree’s capacity to absorb the gas depended on water and nutrient levels.
The news will come as a blow to the carbon-offsetting industry, which has expanded rapidly as individuals and companies try to atone for their carbon dioxide emissions by paying companies to plant trees for them.
[…]
But Ru Hartwell, the director of Treeflights, an offsetting company planting trees in Wales and Peru, said: “There are problems with tree planting but it is only one way in which we are going to get on top of the problems of global warming. I have complete faith that tree planting is positive and we should not just chuck away our spades and do nothing.”

I’ve a better idea. Let’s just ban rock concerts, speaking tours, and movies and move the Madonnas, Gores and DiCaprios of the planet into 800 sq.ft. bungalows.

Tommy Douglas: Zero Tier Health Care, Revisited

(As the Calgary quad incident begins to receive international attention, I thought today would be a good time to revisit my 2005 piece on zero-tier health care for newer readers to SDA.)


After my mother died, my brother quipped sarcastically that no one should be admitted to Regina General unless they first survived two hours on a vibrating gurney.
Saskatchewan spends $4 billion a year on health – 44% of the total provincial budget – on a population of under one million, and those dollars are increasingly directed to more centralized systems of delivery. While debate about “wait times” tends to revolve around diagnostics and scheduling of surgery (especially “elective” surgery such as knee and hip replacement), few consider the “wait time” facing the farmer in Val Marie with a crushed pelvis or severed artery.
For when it is decreed that your local hospital is no longer “economically viable” (a curious complaint to put forward under not-for-profit ideology), bureaucrats gather a few hundred miles away, debate the best way to release the bad news, and with a big red pen, draw a line through your town. They will apologize, quite properly, while they advise you, quite improperly, to be grateful that health care is still “free.” You’ll just need to start out a little earlier in the morning to get to it.
Welcome to zero-tier health care.
While the sacred cow of “universality” grazes on in the world of the reality-challenged, vast regions of the country are being transformed into zones of health care prohibition.
With every new cut, more and more rural Canadians are faced with travelling long distances over crumbling roads to seek emergency care – the “vibrating gurney” of the rural ambulance. The only thing “universal” about the system is the rate of taxation and the powerlessness of the very people who pay the bills – the taxpaying patients. The patient taxpayers.
After waiting 10 days on oxygen in an intensive care ward, where it was more likely that a knowledgable visitor would tend to a distressed patient or dysfunctioning equipment than any of the five nurses charged with holding down chairs, we began to wonder when the lung specialist planned to show up to discuss our mother’s condition.
He had to be reminded, as it turned out. Standing over the duct-taped linoleum, he shared the diagnosis and advised it was terminal. With no hope of treatment, we arranged for her return by ambulance the 120 miles to our local rural hospital, where she was finally treated for pain and was tended to by a nurse she knew as a friend. Thank heaven for small mercies – for it had been slated for closure earlier that year.
The “not for profit” lie is so bold, so obvious, so outrageous, that it’s difficult to understand how it’s survived this long.
The truth is precisely the opposite. Everyone in the Canadian health-care system, from top to bottom – from doctor, to nurse, to bureaucrat, to cleaner, to kitchen staff – has a guaranteed profit, guaranteed payment, often in wages that eclipse those in the private sector, regardless of quality or timeliness of patient care.
And even this isn’t enough for some – they demand guaranteed patients, through the eradication of what private sector competition there is.
The only participant who lacks a guaranteed return under this “not-for-loss” monopoly is the one paying the bill, the patient whose assets are involuntarily seized through taxation to keep the hulking, insatiable bovine alive and belching. The most powerful check and balance of all – the ability of the customer to refuse payment to protest inadequate service – has been removed from the equation.
Discussing the abysmal quality of care my mother received with a friend who works in the bureaucracy, I suggested that the imbalance might be partially restored through a holdback system, in which a percentage of wages or fees would be released only upon patient or family signoff – in the way that holdbacks are used in the construction industry to ensure the job is well and truly complete.
She disagreed with the idea, for, as she correctedly argued, “Some people might withhold payment unfairly.”
To which I replied; “Welcome to the world the rest of us live in.”


More – a doctor turns number cruncher. “The main reason socialists love public health care is because they know they can get rich off of it. “

Diyala: Sunni vs. al Qaeda

Bill Roggio;

The degree to which Sunni insurgent groups have turned against al Qaeda and are working with US troops and Iraqi security forces is an underreported story in the war. Approximately 25,000 Sunni insurgents from groups such as the 1920s Revolution Brigades, the Jaysh Mohammed, and the Islamic Army of Iraq have turned against al Qaeda at the behest of their tribal leaders. “Tribe members and others who agree to support Iraq’s government have to sign a pledge form and consent to biometric scans of their fingerprints and retinas so their data can be kept on file,” USA Today reported on August 6. “They are also vetted by the Iraqi government.”
The strategy of turning the tribes and insurgent groups has been successful in Anbar, and is being applied inside Baghdad, Diyala, Salahadin, Ninewa, and Babil province. This is reconciliation at the micro level. Al Qaeda is threatened by this development and is actively targeting members of groups that have turned on them.

Lots more at the link.
(Via Newsbeat1)
Related –

U.S. Rep. Brian Baird said Thursday that his recent trip to Iraq convinced him the military needs more time in the region, and that a hasty pullout would cause chaos that helps Iran and harms U.S. security.
“I believe that the decision to invade Iraq and the post-invasion management of that country were among the largest foreign-policy mistakes in the history of our nation. I voted against them, and I still think they were the right votes,” Baird said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.
“But we’re on the ground now. We have a responsibility to the Iraqi people and a strategic interest in making this work.”

Flugtag: The VRWC

The diversity of SDA readers never ceases to amaze me. Or perhaps I’m thinking of “alarm”.
Gord Marsden explains;

Flugtags are homebuilt human powered airplane flying contests that are held around the world every year for the past 15 years.
Flugtag is German for Fly Day and is sponsored by Red Bull – the energy drink, “Red Bull gives you wings”, thus the sponsorship.
The first Red Bull Flugtag took place in Vienna, Austria, in 1991. Since then, more than 35 Flugtags have been held around the world — from Ireland to San Francisco — attracting up to 300,000 spectators at each event. The record for the farthest flight-to-date currently stands at 195 feet set in 2000 at Flugtag Austria. The U.S. record stands at 155 feet set in Nashville, TN in 2007.
Teams are judged on three criteria: distance, creativity and showmanship. What constitutes a craft is purely up to the imagination of the participating teams. Past Red Bull Flugtag entries have included a pregnant cow, a diaper-delivering stork, a pimped-out Cadillac, a giant Oompa Loompa, and yes folks — a lobster named Larry. This years North American Flugtags are held in Nashville TN and Austin TX. The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (thanks Hillary Clinton) is the only foreign entry into the US flugtags this year.

And based on this set of Youtube videos, maybe the last.

“We’re the only foreigners in the competition,” declares Gord. “We live in the Great White North – America’s Hat – where the temperature averages 1 degree Celsius over the year.” The team’s politics are purportedly as icy as their homeland. “We’re driving almost 5,000 miles round trip to be at the event,” says Gord in reference to the teammembers’ residences in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the Alberta towns of Calgary, Lethbridge (where Heather attends the University of Lethbridge), Strathmore, and the “Redneck Riviera” of Eagle Lake (aka, “the test site”). Gord adds, “Our skit is based on the most iconic right-wing politicians – Ronnie Reagan, Maggie Thatcher, and Donald Rumsfeld – overcoming the bad green influence of Al Gore on the young Stephen Harper.” In case that final name leaves you out in the cold, Flugtag faithful, Stephen Harper is the prime minister of Canada.

In the tradition of the truly goofy, a time waster if ever there was one. But as they’re advertising SDA to Flugtaggers worldwide on the side of their trailer, I owe them. So, try to be complimentary, eh?

Tony Blair’s Britain

The Labour Party’s legacy grows;

Essex-based firm BladeRunner produces clothing lined with the material for police and security guards.
But inquiries from parents have now prompted it to modfify school uniforms.
Barry Samms, one of the firm’s directors, said the company initially produced stab-proof hooded tops that were bought by teenagers.
It was then asked by parents about the possibility of strengthening school uniforms with Kevlar.
The firm now offers to line blazers and jumpers with the material if pupils send in their uniforms.
Blazers cost £120 to stab-proof and jumpers £60 to £70.

“initially produced stab-proof hooded tops that were bought by teenagers.”.
Nice.
(submitted by reader “Larry” who ponders the market potential here in the “land of the living knives”.)
Comment of the day;

“Its like reading the Dune series all over again.”

Tommy Douglas: Away In A Manger

Because high risk pregnancies come with so little warning;

Well, you can’t expect a G7 economy of only 30 million people to be able to offer the same level of neonatal ICU coverage as a town of 50,000 in remote rural Montana. And let’s face it, there’s nothing an expectant mom likes more than 300 miles in a bumpy twin prop over the Rockies.

More on the Calgary quartet at BBC.
More reaction: Don Surber strikes a similar theme.

Self-Lobbying In The Finest Liberal Tradition

Steve Janke;

No-Gun-No-Funeral is a group dedicated to having handguns banned outright in Canada. The group will apply pressure to the federal government.
It implies that it is a grassroots organization.
If so, why is it that the only information I can find out about this group points to the Liberal Party, both the federal and Ontario wings of the party. Very interesting is the fact that the phone number for the site goes to the riding association for Michael Bryant, Attorney General of Ontario, who has promised to lobby for a handgun ban.

That’s just the teaser. Steve will be on Corus radio with Roy Green later today. Details at the link.
A link to the site was mailed to me earlier in the week, with the suggestion that our usual readers get in on the petition fun.
Heh. (Saddam – you still out there?)

The Sound Of Settled Science

Another star of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth has left the building;

The media release for the 2005 Nature study ominously read, “The ocean currents that help to maintain Northern Europe’s relatively clement climate are weakening, according to a new survey carried out in the Atlantic Ocean. The new data shows that the system of currents that moves warm waters north and returns cooler waters to more southerly latitudes has weakened by 30 percent since 1957.”
Researchers aboard a 2004 voyage led by the UK National Oceanography Centre’s Harry Bryden surveyed the strength of currents at various depths at latitude of 25 degrees north. Although Bryden found no change to the Gulf Stream — the northward flow of warm water near the surface — he reported a 50 percent reduction in the amount of cold, deep waters flowing southwards and a 50 percent increase in the amount of water recirculating within subtropical regions without reaching higher latitudes. These changes, according to Bryden, showed that less water is completing a full circuit of the entire Atlantic current system.
The Nature study spawned a tidal wave of scary headlines around the world that December, including “Scientists Say Slow Atlantic Currents Could Mean a Colder Europe” (New York Times); “Fears of Big Freeze as Scientists Detect Slower Gulf Stream” (The Independent, UK); “Shifting Currents Renew Fears of Freezing” (The Gazette, Montreal); “Europe Faces Feal Day After Tomorrow” (Courier Mail, Australia); and “Ocean Flow Findings Indicate Harsher Winters for Europe” (Press Trust of India).
[…]
But now Bryden’s finding has been exposed as a nothing burger — although this should have come as no surprise.
Bryden worked with only very limited oceanic data — five sets of ship-based temperature and salinity measurements from the north Atlantic collected during research cruises between 1957 and 2004. His prediction of a much larger slowdown of the Atlantic current than made by climate model simulations is the sort of extreme outlier result that often occurs with the use of incomplete and inadequate data.

More at BBC.

Dog Bites Bush

As a news consumer, stories like this raise an obvious question – why wasn’t this a firing offense?

JOE SCARBOROUGH: There was a story out of Seattle, and the reason I love it is that it’s transparency in the news. You have an editor who was actually outing his own people. The Seattle Times newsroom broke into applause when Karl Rove resigned. And of course that’s bad. What I like about it is that the editor actually wrote about it and went in and told the people in the newsroom that was unacceptable.
And I’ve got to say, my first night here at MSNBC was the President’s State of the Union address in 2003, and I was shocked because there were actually people in the newsroom that were booing the president actually from the beginning to the end. And I actually talked to [NBC/MSNBC executive] Phil Griffin about it, and he said “how was it last night?” Because he was the one that called me out of the Ace Hardware store, got my vest on. He said “how was it last night?” I said “well, it’s OK, I understand it’s a little bit different up here than it is down in northwest Florida, but you had people in the newsroom actively booing the President of the United States. Phil turned red very quickly. That didn’t happen again.

Read the whole entry. There’s an amusing update, as well.
Flashback“I’ve also been witness to two shocking acts that literally define America’s liberal media – a media so radical, so extreme, with an agenda so out of the mainstream and a prejudice against conservative Republicans so strong and so vicious that it borders on outright hate and loathing. “

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