Across Australia, the “wet nappy cooling effect” is no longer effective in protecting babies from dangerous overheating;

The two-year study at a major children’s hospital showed that for every five-degree rise in temperature two more children under six years old were admitted with fever to that hospital.
The University of Sydney research is the first to make a solid link between climate changes and childhood illness.
“And now global warming is becoming more apparent, it is highly likely an increasing number of young children will be turning up at hospital departments with these kinds of common illnesses,” said researcher Lawrence Lam, a paediatrics specialist.
“It really demonstrates the urgent need for a more thorough investigation into how exactly climate change will affect health in childhood.”
Dr Lam said the results, collated from The Children’s Hospital at Westmead admissions, back up beliefs that children are less able to regulate their bodies against climate change than adults.
The brain’s thermal regulation mechanism is not as well developed in children, making them more susceptible to “overheating” and at risk of developing illness, he said.
“They’re particularly at risk of extreme changes, much more than other people.”

This of course, is why mothers in Canada careless enough to expose children under 4 to sub-zero winter air always warm them slowly in the refrigerator or a cool basement before exposing them to the artificially high temperatures of homes with central heating – to keep them from bursting into goddamn flame.
Another drop kick for science through the goal posts of crazy.

David Suzuki, on the John Oakley show:

I’m not getting any money from my foundation. I’m getting my money, the foundation gets its money, from ordinary people. We don’t take government money, corporations have not been interested in funding us. We get it from ordinary Canadians across the country. 40,000 thousand of them and we get some foundations in both Canada and the United States. So that’s my agenda. We speak on behalf of the people that fund us.

(To hear the audio clip click here.)
Joseph C. Ben-Ami;

Corporations uninterested? Is it possible that the Great Suzuki has failed to attract a single corporate donation to his feel-good campaign to save the earth? Not one?
Actually, the David Suzuki Foundation’s annual report for 2005/2006 lists at least 52 corporate donors including: Bell Canada, Toyota, IBM, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Microsoft, Scotia Capital, Warner Brothers, RBC, Canon and Bank of Montreal.
The David Suzuki Foundation also received donations from EnCana Corporation, a world leader in natural gas production and oil sands development, ATCO Gas, Alberta’s principle distributor of natural gas, and a number of pension funds including the OPG (Ontario Power Generation) Employees’ and Pensioners’ Charity Trust. OPG is one of the largest suppliers of electricity in the world operating 5 fossil fuel-burning generation plants and 3 nuclear plants… which begs the question – is Suzuki now pro-nuclear power?
If I were less generous I might be tempted to accuse Suzuki of hypocrisy for accepting donations from corporations that he must believe contribute significantly to the production of greenhouse gases, but that would miss the point entirely. The real issue is that, contrary to his clear assertion, the David Suzuki Foundation does receive funding from corporations.

Via Lisa at DMB.
Related: Steve Janke;

You might remember John Duffy from the last election. He was the Liberal mouthpiece who threatened CTV’s Mike Duffy off the air, then was chewed out by the Duffster on national television (see the video of that encounter). Robert Asselin was a colleague of John Duffy’s in StrategyCorp and formerly a special advisor to Paul Martin.
Robert Asselin was a lobbyist for BSEF throughout 2005.
John Duffy was a lobbyist for BSEF from 2004 until January 2007, just a few weeks ago.
What did these two Liberals do for the BSEF? They fought tooth and nail against the definition of bromines as toxic…

Joe Carter crunches the carbon footprint numbers on Al Gore’s globe-trotting global warming concert tour;

* The concert will produce more CO2 in one day than Zimbabwe produced in any month in 2003.
* The concert will produce more CO2 in one day than the total daily fossil fuel emissions for Austria, Chile, Finland, Greece, Iraq, Kuwait, New Zealand, Philippines, Portugal, Sweden, the Virgin Islands, and a dozen other countries combined.
* The concert will produce more CO2 in one day than the entire nation of Afghanistan produces in a year.

Upon reviewing the calculations, however, it’s important to note that one important variable has not been included. With the Gore Effect factored in, one can anticipate at least half of the planned events will be cancelled due to cold.

When are they gonna come down?
Take me back off the land?
You should have stayed off my farm
It didn’t go according to plan
You know I can’t feed you forever
(I didn’t RoundUp for you)
Won’t be present when the market opens
No future growing organics for you
So goodbye greenie dirt road
Where the dogs of Kyoto now howl
You can’t plant that in your greenhouse
We’re back to the pesticides now
Back to the clones in the factory barns
Genetically modified grain
Oh they’ve finally decided your dinner plate lies
Beyond the greenie dirt road
*

Stays mainly in the made-up world of computer models;

The just-released Summary for Policymakers of the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report (AR4) states that “The frequency of heavy precipitation events has increased over most land areas, consistent with warming and observed increases of atmopsheric water content” and “is very likely” that “heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent” during the 21st century. The last we checked our atlas, Portugal and Spain are certainly land areas. When we saw the title of the article “Changes in frequency and intensity of daily precipitation over the Iberian Peninsula,” we took a hard look…

Canadian Blue Lemons on the Suzuki machine’s attack on science;

In a previous post I brought to CBL readers’ attention how the Suzuki Foundation’s PR firm is running a blog (www.desmogblog.com) that is dedicated to smearing the reputations of scientists who disagree with the fantasy-based strategies of Suzuki and his ilk.
This smear campaign is being run by Hoggan Public Relations, whose principal, interestingly enough, wrote this article slamming PR firms for doing work for organizations that he refers to as skeptic-scammers (SS). I guess in his world, only one side of a debate (his) can ever be represented by his profession. Hypocrite, because their side of the debate certainly is calling upon PR pros to manipulate public opinion (as revealed by Ranting Stan).
The duplicitous nature of this exercise is fascinating. They impugn the credentials of every person who draws a different conclusion from available data and go so far as to try and destroy lives for their nevarious cause.

I wonder – just what kind of ethical contortions were necessary within Suzuki Foundation walls to come up with an honorary board membership for the director of a company mining uranium in Argentina?

The Globe and Mail is late to the game and a few megatonnes short, but finally providing a few facts beyond those pulled from CBC Fruit Fly Guy press releases;

The opposition parties, led by the Liberals, have pushed legislation through the House of Commons to force the government to meet Canada’s obligations under the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse-gas emissions. No responsible government could come even close to reaching those targets without bankrupting the treasury. But in an effort to score political points, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion has stubbornly plodded ahead, smearing the gloss of virtue on this economic and political folly.
[…]
It’s the impossible nightmare. Last May, after years of Liberal inaction, the Conservative government conceded that the level of emissions in 2004 was 34.6 per cent above Canada’s Kyoto target of an average of 563 million tonnes annually between 2008 and 2012. Canada’s emissions have since sailed even higher, probably reaching 780 million tonnes a year.
Suppose Alberta eliminated all tar-sands development. That’s a saving of 30 million tonnes a year. Suppose Ontario shut down all of its coal-fired power plants. That’s 24 million tonnes. To cover the shortfall, Canada would have to go abroad to buy emission credits or sponsor carbon-reduction initiatives in other countries. Most experts put the price tag for that splurge at a minimum of $10-billion. It could go far higher as the market gets tighter, squeezing federal funds for everything from health care to retraining programs.

It’s a start. One wonders though, how much the informative quality of their editorials might improve if the G&M yanked a few of those parliamentary press gallery foot soldiers from the “green beat” in Ottawa and assigned them to Google.

If current trends continue…

A new report on climate over the world’s southernmost continent shows that temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as had been predicted by many global climate models.
This comes soon after the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that strongly supports the conclusion that the Earth’s climate as a whole is warming, largely due to human activity.
It also follows a similar finding from last summer by the same research group that showed no increase in precipitation over Antarctica in the last 50 years. Most models predict that both precipitation and temperature will increase over Antarctica with a warming of the planet.
David Bromwich, professor of professor of atmospheric sciences in the Department of Geography, and researcher with the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, reported on this work at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at San Francisco.

Nearer the end of the article, the researcher explains that while incomplete data combined with poorly understood “competing effects” of circumpolar westerlies, ozone depetion and ocean mixing may negate the predictions of computer models for specific regions – that should not lead one to discount the ability of these same models to predict outcomes on the global scale.

Bromwich said the disagreement between climate model predictions and the snowfall and temperature records doesn’t necessarily mean that the models are wrong.
“It isn’t surprising that these models are not doing as well in these remote parts of the world. These are global models and shouldn’t be expected to be equally exact for all locations,”

In the same way that accuracy on the gun range can be expected to improve as distance from the target increases, or that small errors in interest charged disappear when the sums they are applied to go over the million dollar mark.
Yowza.

An article recently published in “Scientific America” makes the important announcement that the climate of the North American continent is gradually getting warmer notwithstanding the influence of certain “Sun Spots”. There would appear to be some foundaiton for such a belief, for only lately the Guardian carried an item calling attention to the fact that in Alaska the flowers are now in bloom and the farmers there are breaking the soil for this season’s crop. Similar news has appeared in other journals corroborating the truth of this important discovery.

The rest at Pumpkin Watch.
UPDATE – “You will SUBMIT or I will crush your scientific dissent like a petulant fruit fly between my nails…” (link fixed)
Dr. Mugabe would be so proud.

Hendrik Tennekes, retired Director of Research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, former Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University and internationally recognized expert in atmospheric boundary layer processes.

Why is it so difficult to make precipitation forecasts fifty years into the future? Most precipitation in the middle latitudes is associated with low-pressure systems, which move along storm tracks carved out by the jet stream. The ever-shifting meanders in the jet stream occur at the edge of the slab of cold air over the poles. The specialists call this slab the Polar Vortex, and have christened the meandering behavior of the jet stream in the Northern hemisphere the Arctic Oscillation. Thirty years ago I worked with Mike (John M.) Wallace and his PhD student N.C. Lau at the University of Washington in Seattle on problems concerning eddy-flux maintenance in the North Atlantic storm track. It is evident to all turbulence specialists that the dynamics of very slowly evolving states is different from the dynamics of instantaneous states. So the moment one asks what keeps the jet stream going, one encounters the kind of problem that is at the core of all turbulence research. But the mainstream of dynamic meteorology refuses to study the slow evolution of the general circulation. It has become so easy to run General Circulation Models on supercomputers that most atmospheric scientists shy away from matters like a thorough study of the interaction between the Polar Vortex and the Arctic Oscillation. Mike Wallace mailed me a year ago, saying that there is not a beginning of consensus on a theory of the Arctic Oscillation. This was one of the highlights in an advanced senior-citizens’ class on climate change I taught a year ago. It was announced as “A Storm in the Greenhouse”, referring primarily to the increasingly bitter debates of the past fifteen years.
How does this problem affect climate forecasts? If there is not even a rudimentary theory of the Polar Vortex, much less an established relation between rising greenhouse gas concentrations and systematic changes in the Arctic Oscillation, one cannot possibly make inferences about changes in precipitation patterns. We do not know, and for the time being cannot know anything about changing patterns of clouds, storms and rain. Holland’s national weather service KNMI circumvented this impasse last year by issuing climate change scenarios with and without changes in the position of the North Atlantic storm track. It did not occur to the KNMI spokesmen that they should have been forthright about their lack of knowledge. They should have said: we know nothing of possible changes in the storm track, so we cannot say anything about precipitation. But it is entirely consistent with the IPCC tradition to weasel around such issues. One of my contacts at KNMI recently explained to me that their choice was based on the increasing agreement between simulations run with different GCM’s. I had to answer that the IPCC spirit of consensus apparently was invading their supercomputers as well. It is bad enough that computer simulations cannot be checked against observations until after the fact. In the absence of a robust stochastic-dynamic theory of the general circulation, one cannot even check climate simulations against fundamental insights.
[…]
I want to lobby for decency, modesty, honesty, integrity and balance in climate research. I hope and pray we lose our obsession with climate forecasting. Climate simulations are best seen as sensitivity experiments, not as tools for policy makers.

Read the whole thing.

The “Global Warming Deniers” are beginning to speak up.
The chilling effect on free speech;

Earlier this year, when a correspondent for the American current affairs show 60 Minutes was asked why his various feature programmes on global warming did not include the views of global warming sceptics, he replied: ‘If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?’ Here, climate change deniers are explicitly painted as the bad guys. He also argued that, ‘This isn’t about politics…this is about sound science’, and went so far as to claim that it would be problematic even to air the views of climate change sceptics: ‘There comes a point in journalism where striving for balance becomes irresponsible.’

Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist – “An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change”

So one awkward question you can ask, when you’re forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is “Why is east Antarctica getting colder?” It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. While you’re at it, you might inquire whether Gordon Brown will give you a refund if it’s confirmed that global warming has stopped. The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.

Tom Brodbeck on “pack journalism”;

It’s not because there aren’t qualified scientists out there who are skeptical about the findings or who reject them entirely. There are plenty. I’ve heard from them before. But for some reason, reporters and editors chose not to tell that side of the story.

Is environmentalism the new religion?

“The track record of any kind of long-distance prediction is really bad, but everyone’s still really interested in it. It’s sort of a way of picturing the future. But we can’t make long-term predictions of the economy, and we can’t make long-term predictions of the climate,” Dr. Orrell said in an interview. After all, he said, scientists cannot even write the equation of a cloud, let alone make a workable model of the climate.

And public response? Watch not what they say. Watch what they drive.
That’s just a small sampling of what I’ve seen and received. Use the comments for your own on-topic links.

It appears Czech President Vaclav Klaus has a lukewarm view of the global warming hysteria:

Q: IPCC has released its report and you say that the global warming is a false myth. How did you get this idea, Mr President?
A: It’s not my idea. Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is unfair to refer to the U.N. panel. It’s not a scientific institution: it’s a political body, a kind of non-government organization of green flavor. It’s neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment. Also, it’s an undignified slapstick that people don’t wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond in such a serious way to the summary for policymakers where all the “but’s” are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses. …
Environmentalism and green ideology is something very different from climate science. Various findings and screams of scientists are abused by this ideology.…
Q: Don’t you believe that we’re ruining our planet?
A: I will pretend that I haven’t heard you. Perhaps only Mr. Al Gore may be saying such a thing: a sane person can’t.

Professor Klaus doesn’t seem to have much respect for the politically correct fashionable doomsaying sweeping the rest of Europe. The rest of the interview is well worth the read.

Finally. Maurice Strong is plopped front and center in the Kyoto debate, and in a Canadian newspaper. That said, there’s the sense of an editorial black pen at work;

The Liberals’ commitment to Kyoto is economic suicide, and I believe that the whole exercise was cynical and a favour to Liberal insider Maurice Strong.
Now the Liberals are leading a charge to force the Tories to live up to commitments that the Liberals never did in four years. That’s because they realized the commitments were not realistic.
But Kyoto wasn’t renegotiated because Mr. Strong is a buddy of former Prime Ministers Jean Chretien and Paul Martin. When he was involved in United Nations operations, he organized the UN’s Earth Summit to deal with pollution. He asked for, and got, Canada’s unconditional support for Kyoto.

Bless Diane Francis and whatever God granted her the ovaries lacking in the rest of Canadian media. Even our local radio talk hosts cut callers off when they try to bring his name into the debate, citing “conspiracy theories”.
They must not read the Wall Street Journal.

“Somebody should be compiling a list of these scientists so 2 decades from now when temperatures go down, we can ruin their careers.”

Click for full size
h/t reader Jim.

Wait five minutes;

In evaluating industrial impact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used GDP estimates based on exchange rates rather than purchasing power: As a result, they assume by the year 2100 that not only South Africans but also North Koreans will have a higher per capita income than Americans. That’s why the climate-change computer models look scary. That’s how “solid” the science is: It’s predicated on the North Korean economy overtaking the United States.

Friday update – Cosh explains.

Open a garbage dump.
Or trust them to save themselves. Again.

The contention of climate alarmists that the late-20th century warming is unprecedented over the past two millennia has been contested with contrary scientific evidence over and over, especially in the high latitudes. As the geologic timeline that is available to the global warming crusade gets spottier, one thing is clear – they can only shorten their sights. Going back to Earth’s last interglaciation is not an option for building their argument that much of the recent warmth is unnatural—because back during the last interglacial warm period, temperatures in the Arctic were higher, and polar bears survived (obviously).
[…]
The group found evidence that the LIG persisted for 10,000-12,000 years and that Arctic summer air temperatures during the LIG were 4-5ºC (Figure 1) above present for much of the region, which was well above the LIG average temperature for the rest of Earth. The warming seems to have occurred rapidly, peaking in the early portion of the LIG. The group contends that Arctic summer temperatures were warm enough “to melt all glaciers below 5 km elevation, except the Greenland ice sheet, which was reduced by ca 20-50%.” In regard to Arctic Ocean sea ice, the group states that the margins of the permanent ice “retracted well into the Arctic Ocean basin” and the ice was of an extent that was smaller than during the highly publicized ice retreat of the Holocene. When examining evidence of vegetation changes, the group concluded that “boreal forests advanced to the Arctic Ocean Coast across vast regions of the Arctic currently occupied by tundra.” In fact, across most of northern Russia, they report that forests were displaced northward by as much as 400 to 1000 km.

Bear-scare might be more convincing had the population of the arctic carnivore not quadrupled in the past fifty years,
Related:
Iceland – “What memo?” – While the rest of the world shudders at the prospect of global warming and all that it threatens to bring in the form of floods and soaring temperatures, Iceland has been bucking the trend – and it is having a dramatic effect on fishing activity around the island.

If you are looking for a more informative view of the UN’s latest batallion of intergalactic smoking missiles on global warming hype, check out this response by Lord Monckton. The whole thing is worth reading for those following this issue, but here are a few excerpts:

FIGURES in the final draft of the UN’s fourth five-year report on climate change show that the previous report, in 2001, had overestimated the human influence on the climate since the Industrial Revolution by at least one-third.
UN scientists faced several problems their computer models had not predicted. Globally, temperature is not rising at all, and sea level is not rising anything like as fast as had been forecast. Concentrations of methane in the air are actually falling.
Sources at the center of the drafting say that, though the now-traditional efforts are being made to sound alarmist and scientific at the same time, key projections are being quietly cut.
Computer models heavily relied on by the UN did not predict the considerable cooling of the oceans that has occurred since 2003 – a cooling which demonstrates that neither the frequency nor the intensity of the hurricanes in the year of Katrina was attributable to “global warming”.
The UN’s models also failed to predict the halt to the rise in methane concentrations in the air that began in 2001. And they did not predict the timing or size of the El Nino which hiked temperature in 1998.
What the UN says: Paleoclimate suggests recent warming is unusual. Past warming has shrunk ice sheets and raised sea level. Recent studies show more variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures than the 2001 report.
Monckton’s response: The UN casts doubt upon the integrity of its climate change reports by failing to apologize for the defective and now-discredited “hockey-stick” graph of world temperatures since 1000 AD.

Update: And for more background on Lord Monckton’s work, his 40-page paper titled Apocalypse cancelled is also worth reading for a detailed debunking of the so-called “consensus” on global warming.

Here’s a freebee for those of you in media who get close enough to Stephane Dion to query him directly. It’s one of those questions that is so remarkably simple, so breathtakingly obvious, that I can’t believe no one has challenged him on it yet.
Call it the Kyoto Purity Test.

Mr. Dion – if global warming requires the urgent action you say it does, why are we waiting for introduction of techology and fuels not yet available? Why limit fuel efficiency standards to new vehicles that will take years to replace millions of gas guzzlers, when, with the stroke of a pen, we could achieve significant reductions in the gasoline consumption – and CO2 emissions – of every vehicle on the road today ?
Why, Mr. Dion, have you not introduced a bill in Parliament to lower the speed limit to 80 km/hr nationwide?”

Related: Gerry Nichols suggests Dion rename his dog. (link fixed)

Via Halls of Macademia, a Margaret Wente Q&A at the Globe on climate activism and the Kyoto protocol.

Edward Thomas from Kingston Canada writes: Ms. Wente, why is media treatment of climate change dominated by people with little to no expertise in science let alone climate-related disciplines? Why does the science need to be ‘sexed up’ by TV personalities, political pundits and PR flaks engaged in adversarial debate over things they barely understand? Isn’t this precisely why the discussion is shrill and unproductive? What media guidelines would you propose to emphasize science instead of theatrics?
Margaret Wente: Mr. Thomas, you’ve raised a pet peeve of mine. I think the media have done a generally miserable job on this topic. Several reasons. One, most of us are scientifically illiterate (as is the general public). Two, we like headlines that attract attention. A recent favourite of mine was a headline story in The Guardian that said “Global warming will increase world terrorism.” Three, we tend to rely too much on activists, so we have led the public to believe that there’s no middle ground between people who warn that global warming is a planetary emergency and people who deny it’s happening at all. In fact, most experts on the subject believe that human-caused global warming is definitely for real, but also say there’s been a terrific amount of overdramatization. And fourth, sometimes the media assign reporters to environmental coverage who are themselves activists.
There’s another factor. This stuff is genuinely complicated. The media deal in sound bites. So global warming is the ultimate media-unfriendly story. Far easier to show pictures of allegedly drowning polar bears.

There’s a reason activists find room on the plane for know-nothing, high profile entertainers.
(This is fun, too.)
When I learned that the Liberals had released a years-old Stephen Harper letter criticizing the accord, I thought this might happen. By pushing Kyoto front and center, they may have just cut themselves off at the knees. Probably fewer than 1 in 10,000 Canadians has any knowledge at all about Kyoto, much less what the costs and implications are for a growing, resource-based economy like ours. They’ve created a perfect opening to bring the facts to the debate (if the Conservatives are quick enough to exploit it) and I’m not so sure that’s in Did Little’s interest.
And consider this. When polled, Canadians express concern for the environment, and agree they’d make the sacrifices it takes to “meet our obligations” to reduce CO2 emissions – except when they’re asked if they’d pay higher gasoline prices.
That should tell us something – concerns over “the environment” may be a mile wide, but it’s a millimeter deep. When push comes to shove, Canadians expect other Canadians to make the sacrificing.
NIMBY.
Which jogs my mind about something else. The “megatonnes of money” thats promised to change hands in the carbon credit trade under Kyoto, brings me back round in a way to the CWB – Gordon Machej – Eagle Sterling – Iriana Resources questions. Digging about, I discovered that in 2004 Iriana amalgamated with Polaris Geothermal.

On April 28, 2006, the Company announced that Polaris Energy is now registered to sell its carbon credits produced from its SJT geothermal project. For the first year of production, which concludes at the end of June 2006, over 20,000 tonnes of carbon credits will be produced. Eventually, when the Company generates 66 MW annually, it will generate approximately 340,000 tons of carbon credits each year. Carbon credits are currently being sold for up to US$20 per tonne depending on the terms and conditions of delivery. At these prices carbon credit revenue would generate in excess of $6 million per annum for the Company at a 66MW level of production. The SJT geothermal power project is the 157th project in the world to qualify and be registered to sell carbon credits and ranks as the 16th largest to be so registered.

I have no idea whether any of the key players of Iriana still play roles or have ownership in Polaris, but it would be interesting to find out.

Gone horribly …ungreen.