Freezing weather with light snow flurries greeted about 200 climate activists gathered on the steps of the state Capitol noon Monday to demand the state Legislature get serious about climate change.The above photos of the shivering crowd were captured from this video taken at the event. More about the rally can be found here and here.
Targets for carbon reduction are set by the California State laws known as AB32 and SB375. These laws are intended to show that California is doing its part to lessen the effects of global warming on the environment.(These quotes were collected by Prof. S. Fred Singer. Hat tip: Ed Driscoll.)
- “The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.” -Prof. Chris Folland, Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
- “The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful.” -Dr David Frame, Climate modeler, Oxford University
- “It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” -Paul Watson, Co-founder of Greenpeace
- “Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.” -Sir John Houghton, First chairman of the IPCC
- “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony … climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” -Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment
Liberal journalists can also be just downright ridiculous as this headline from Adelaide Now (since modified) shows:
They seem to have lost track of the meaning of words.
Hat tips to NewsBusters and WattUpWithThat.
Since the world population in 2007 was only 6.6 billion, the claim that 4.5 billion of us would die by 2012 is non-trivial.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) was a Harvard Sociology professor, UN Ambassador, US Senator (D-NY), as well as advisor to US Presidents from JFK to Ford. As a Democrat working in the Nixon White House, he wrote a memo on September 17, 1969, declaring that Global Warming would cause disaster by the year 2000 (the full text (PDF) is available from the Nixon Library):Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has the effect of a pane of glass in a greenhouse. The C02 content is normally in a stable cycle, but recently man has begun to introduce instability through the burning of fossil fuels. At the turn of the century several persons raised the question whether this would change the temperature of the atmosphere. Over the years the hypothesis has been refined, and more evidence has come along to support it. It is now pretty clearly agreed that the C02 content will rise 25% by 2000. This could increase the average temperature near the earth ' s surface by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. This in turn could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter. We have no data on Seattle. [Emph. added]While CO2 levels did increase from 1970 to 2000, there has been nothing like a 7 deg. temperature increase, the rise of sea level has not changed from its historical trend, and NY and DC are not underwater. The only thing that is under water is the credibility of predictions made by global warmists.
In science, one makes a hypothesis and then tests it against experiment. If the hypothesis fails to agree with experiment, it must be discarded. So, let us consider the predictions (hypotheses) made by environmentalists on Earth Day in 1970 and how they compare with experiment (reality) 41 years later:“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”Clearly, environmentalism is not a science; it is an emotion.
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist
“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”
• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist
“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” • New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day
“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University
“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970
“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.”
• Martin Litton, Sierra Club director
“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson
“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
Most U.S. voters continue to be concerned about global warming but still are more inclined to think it's caused by planetary trends rather than human activity.REMINDER: Over 30,000 American scientists, including over 9,000 Ph.D.s, have publicly signed this petition skeptical of global warming alarmism.A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters finds that 41% think global warming is caused primarily by human activity, while 47% say long-term planetary trends are to blame. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Who ever said the environmental left wasn't religious?With United Nations climate negotiators facing an uphill battle to advance their goal of reducing emissions linked to global warming, it's no surprise that the woman steering the talks appealed to a Mayan goddess Monday.
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, invoked the ancient jaguar goddess Ixchel in her opening statement to delegates gathered in Cancun, Mexico, noting that Ixchel was not only goddess of the moon, but also "the goddess of reason, creativity and weaving. May she inspire you -- because today, you are gathered in Cancun to weave together the elements of a solid response to climate change, using both reason and creativity as your tools."
She called for "a balanced outcome" which would marry financial and emissions commitments from industrialized countries aimed at combating climate change with "the understanding of fairness that will guide long-term mitigation efforts."
"Excellencies, the goddess Ixchel would probably tell you that a tapestry is the result of the skilful interlacing of many threads," said Figueres, who hails from Costa Rica and started her greetings in Spanish before switching to English. "I am convinced that 20 years from now, we will admire the policy tapestry that you have woven together and think back fondly to Cancun and the inspiration of Ixchel."
NASA climate scientist James Hansen has gotten himself arrested while protesting mountaintop coal mining. Again.
The Huffington Post reports that he was among about 100 people arrested outside the White House yesterday while protesting this particularly troublesome form of coal mining. The same thing happened last June, a few months after Hansen proclaimed his willingness to be arrested during another protest.
In the EU, it will soon be "an offence to import or manufacture 75W bulbs." Consequently, prices of 75W incandescent bulbs as panic buying spreads. This follows similar panic buying last year when 100W bulbs were outlawed. Next year, 60W bulbs are outlawed and in 2012, manufacture of any incandescent will be illegal. Consumers find that the global-warmist-approved replacements for these bulbs give off a "sickly light" and are often just plain "ugly." They can also be toxic.
Documents available to the Investigatory Committee:While Mann's famous hockey stick curve was exposed as false by both the National Academy of Sciences report and the Wegman committee report (PDF), the Penn State committee consulted neither. How could Penn State investigate whether the errors in Mann's work were honest mistakes or misconduct if they don't even know what those mistakes were? They can't.
· 376 files containing emails stolen from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia and originally reviewed by the Inquiry Committee
· Documents collected by the Inquiry Committee
· Documents provided by Dr. Mann at both the Inquiry and Investigation phases
· Penn State University's RA-IO Inquiry Report
· House of Commons Report HC387-I, March 31,2010
· National Academy of Science letter titled, "Climate Change and the Integrity of Science" that was published in Science magazine on May 7, 2010 Information on the peer review process for the National Science Foundation (NSF)
· Department of Energy's Guide to Financial Assistance
· Information on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's peer review process
· Information regarding the percentage of NSF proposals funded
· Dr. Michael Mann's curriculum vitae
April 12, 2010: Dr. William Easterling, Dean, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, The Pennsylvania State UniversityObserve what is missing: Penn State did not interview either McIntyre or McKitrick who are the two people most familiar with Mann's faulty science and with Mann's efforts to hide and disguise his mistakes.
April 14, 2010: Dr. Michael Mann, Professor, Department of Meteorology, The Pennsylvania State University
April 20, 2010: Dr. William Curry, Senior Scientist, Geology and Geophysics Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
April 20, 2010: Dr. Jerry McManus, Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University
May 5, 2010: Dr. Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
When told that the first three allegations against Dr. Mann were dismissed at the inquiry stage of the RA-lO process, Dr. Lindzen's response was: "It's thoroughly amazing. I mean these are issues that he explicitly stated in the emails. I'm wondering what's going on?" . . . .So they could have asked Prof. Lindzen what they should have been investigating but they didn't. They ignored him. Lindzen concluded, quite reasonably it seems, that the investigation was just a "whitewash." I predicted as much last year.
The Investigatory Committee members did not respond to Dr. Lindzen's statement. Instead, Dr. Lindzen's attention was directed to the fourth allegation, and it was explained to him that this is the allegation which the Investigatory Committee is charged to address. [Emph. added]
Dr. Pielke is not the only person to reports problems with Mr. Karl. Meteorologist Anthony Watts remembers Karl's attempts at faking climate change in his "disastrous NCDC Climate Change Synthesis report with photoshopped images of floods that didn’t happen."I documented the process by which Tom Karl excluded other viewpoints in my Public Comment
Pielke Sr., Roger A., 2005: Public Comment on CCSP Report “Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere: Steps for Understanding and Reconciling Differences“. 88 pp including appendices.
which I wrote after I resigned from the CCSP Committee (not the IPCC Committee as given in the article).
Excerpts from the Executive Summary of my report read
“The process for completing the CCSP Report excluded valid scientific perspectives under the charge of the Committee. The Editor of the Report [Tom Karl] systematically excluded a range of views on the issue of understanding and reconciling lower atmospheric temperature trends. The Executive Summary of the CCSP Report ignores critical scientific issues and makes unbalanced conclusions concerning our current understanding of temperature trends”
and
“The process that produced the report was highly political, with the Editor taking the lead in suppressing my perspectives, most egregiously demonstrated by the last-minute substitution of a new Chapter 6 for the one I had carefully led preparation of and on which I was close to reaching a final consensus. Anyone interested in the production of comprehensive assessments of climate science should be troubled by the process which I document below in great detail that led to the replacement of the Chapter that I was serving as Convening Lead Author.
Since the rise in atmospheric CO2 has only been significant for the recent few decades, these earlier warming periods, with warming rates just as high as today, occurred in the absence of man-made greenhouse gases and were thus likely natural. Climate scientists have long known about these earlier warming periods but, since most of the work at Jones' CRU was devoted to proving otherwise, this is a significant admission from him. The interview continues:A - Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?
[discussion of data quality omitted] .... So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.Here are the trends and significances for each period:
Period Length Trend
(Degrees C per decade)Significance 1860-1880 21 0.163 Yes 1910-1940 31 0.15 Yes 1975-1998 24 0.166 Yes 1975-2009 35 0.161 Yes B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Yes, but only just. ....
G - There is a debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global or not. If it were to be conclusively shown that it was a global phenomenon, would you accept that this would undermine the premise that mean surface atmospheric temperatures during the latter part of the 20th Century were unprecedented?Wow! After decades of efforts to deny the existence of the MWP, he now allows that there is "much debate."There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. ....
H - If you agree that there were similar periods of warming since 1850 to the current period, and that the MWP is under debate, what factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made?He admitted (above) that the current heating rate is the same as prior heating rates. So the case for man-made global warming now reduces to "we can't explain the warming" even though it is not much different from prior warmings that were unrelated to greenhouse gases.The fact that we can't explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing - see again my answer to D.
N - When scientists say "the debate on climate change is over", what exactly do they mean - and what don't they mean?So even one of global warming's most prominent and extreme advocates admits "I don't believe the vast majority of climate scientists think [the debate is over]." If there was any justice, the politicians and news reporters who had claimed that the "science was settled" and who called anyone who disagreed with Al Gore a "denier" would be held to account.It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don't believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well.
Flopping Aces has another good summary reviewing the IPCC predictions for declining snowfalls and the failed climate predictions of NASA's James Hansen.It's been a slow week for news because it's been a big week for weather. The East Coast is covered in snow, and Time magazine blames global warming. No, seriously: "There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm." The New York Times says the same thing, though two-sidedly: "The two sides in the climate-change debate are seizing on the mounting drifts to bolster their arguments."
The Time story notes that climate is not the same thing as weather:
Ultimately, however, it's a mistake to use any one storm--or even a season's worth of storms--to disprove climate change (or to prove it; some environmentalists have wrongly tied the lack of snow in Vancouver, the site of the Winter Olympic Games, which begin this week, to global warming). Weather is what will happen next weekend; climate is what will happen over the next decades and centuries. And while our ability to predict the former has become reasonably reliable, scientists are still a long way from being able to make accurate projections about the future of the global climate.Wait a minute, "scientists are still a long way from being able to make accurate projections about the future of the global climate"? We thought global warming was settled science, and anyone who doubted it was a knuckle-dragging lackey or handmaid of Big Oil! (Sorry for the mixed metaphors, but at least we're gender inclusive.)
To be sure, the global warmists are right to distinguish between weather and climate. A short-term condition sometimes can run counter to a long-term trend, as when a growing economy goes through a recession, or a generally healthy man suffers an acute illness (though in the long run, we're all dead).
The problem is that for years, global warmists have claimed that the weather proved their claims about the climate. This is a New York Times story from June 24, 1988:
The earth has been warmer in the first five months of this year than in any comparable period since measurements began 130 years ago, and the higher temperatures can now be attributed to a long-expected global warming trend linked to pollution, a space agency scientist reported today.Until now, scientists have been cautious about attributing rising global temperatures of recent years to the predicted global warming caused by pollutants in the atmosphere, known as the "greenhouse effect." But today Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told a Congressional committee that it was 99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere.Dr. Hansen, a leading expert on climate change, said in an interview that there was no "magic number" that showed when the greenhouse effect was actually starting to cause changes in climate and weather. But he added, "It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here."Breitbart.tv has a collection of clips from the past decade depicting Democratic congressmen blaming global warming for shortfalls of snow. But perhaps the classic of the genre is a piece from the Boston Globe, dated Aug. 30, 2005, which begins: "The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming."
The author, Ross Gelbspan, goes on to blame global warming for "a two-foot snowfall in Los Angeles"--something that never happened--along with high winds in Northern Europe, droughts in the American Midwest and Southeastern Europe, rain in India and even a heat wave in Arizona.
It gets better. Gelbspan faults the media for failing to take global warming seriously:
When the US press has bothered to cover the subject of global warming, it has focused almost exclusively on its political and diplomatic aspects and not on what the warming is doing to our agriculture, water supplies, plant and animal life, public health, and weather.For years, the fossil fuel industry has lobbied the media to accord the same weight to a handful of global warming skeptics that it accords the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the United Nations.It is now clear that even if Gelbspan had been describing the media's approach to the subject accurately, they still would have been assigning too much authority to the IPCC. Yesterday London's Guardian, a left-wing paper that has long been squarely in the global-warmist camp, carried a damning report titled "How to Reform the IPCC":
The IPCC says its reports are policy relevant, but not policy prescriptive. Perhaps unknown to many people, the process is started and finished not by scientists but by political officials, who steer the way the information is presented in so-called summary for policymakers [SPM] chapters. Is that right, the Guardian asked?"The Nobel prize was for peace not science . . . government employees will use it to negotiate changes and a redistribution of resources. It is not a scientific analysis of climate change," said Anton Imeson, a former IPCC lead author from the Netherlands. "For the media, the IPCC assessments have become an icon for something they are not. To make sure that it does not happen again, the IPCC should change its name and become part of something else. The IPCC should have never allowed itself to be branded as a scientific organisation. It provides a review of published scientific papers but none of this is much controlled by independent scientists."And of course the University of East Anglia emails showed that the so-called independent scientists manipulated data and tried to blacklist colleagues who did not accept the global-warmist hypotheses.
It's true that cold weather, while providing an occasion to mock global warming, does not disprove it. But the mocking would be far less effective had global warmists not spent the past quarter-century making a mockery of the scientific method.
That is a lot of agencies devoted to dealing with something that has been exposed as a hoax.1. NACo County Climate Protection Program
2. Institute for Local Government - Climate Change program
3. US Communities Go Green
4. California Climate Change Portal
5. California Energy Commission
6. CIWMB Green Buildings
7. California Air Resources Board
8. United Nations Environmental Program
The Jan. 25 article "Is the President Panicking" originally stated that Fox News led the charge against Bill Clinton in the '94 midterm elections. Fox News did not come into being until 1996. The story has been corrected. [Correction made 1/27/10]Facts, spin: when attacking an enemy, what's the difference?
The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny.Considering the amount of the world's resources that have been wasted on global warming alarmism, it is a shame that they won't be prosecuted for this.
The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.
The Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late, The Times has learnt. The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.
But all the evidence points to the same conclusion: The Himalayan glaciers are as a whole diminishing. So let’s put that to rest right away. No debate. It’s melting. Get used to it.Since the end of the little ice age, the Earth has been warming at a rate of roughly 0.5°C per century. Since this has been going on for centuries, it seems clear that this is unrelated man-made CO2 which has only been significant only for a few decades. So, simple statements that things are warming, or that glaciers are melting, do not, in any way, prove that the warming is caused by man-made greenhouse gases or that such gases will lead us to imminent disaster.
After receiving a Masters in Architecture, Karl earned a LEED certification and created one of the green building industry's first web-based design tools, the GreenMatrix, later adopted in California by the county of Alameda. Realizing the power of the web to illuminate the complex world of "green" he helped launch several websites including EVO.com, developed a variety of social network widgets, and lectured internationally on the subject of digital media, technology and the environment. Karl has his own blog called Greendig: real dirt on the environment, and he consults with both nonprofits and corporations. His goal -- to leverage the power of the internet to bring about a new age of solar-powered enlightenment, one in which people and nature happily coexist.So, "global warming" is his business: he sells "green" solutions. Mr. Burkart is not the only one making a profit off of "global warming." It is well known that Al Gore has made a large fortune from global warming. Also, IPCC chairman appears to have used the Himalayan glacier scam to make a small fortune.
