Global Warming Scam

by read good books 105 Replies latest social current

• 

  besty

  This populist website was written by a weatherman (not a climate scientist) and is interesting but not authoratative on the subject of climate change.

  It doesn't reference any scientific papers, peer-reviewed or otherwise, but focuses on the political aspects of some of the interested parties from the 1950's onwards. Take an hour out of your life to watch Professor of Historical Science Naomi Oreskes discuss the history of climate change science dating back to the the 1850's which weatherman John conveniently ignores in favour of discussing how evil Al Gore is. Its an entertaining and informative video by someone who has the credentials to be truly authoratative.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T4UF_Rmlio

  Incidentally to rebut another common misconception it was the Republican Frank Luntz who lobbied for the phrase 'climate change' to be used instead of 'global warming' back in 2004. Kind of ironic now that anytime 'climate change' is mentioned the denier delayers all cry foul, it_used_to_be_global_warming.....

  OP - if you want to 'read good books' may I suggest starting with one by Professor Peter Ward - Ward is a paleontologist and Professor of Biology and of Earth and Space Sciences, and has published numerous books and papers in his chosen field. Hell, even the WTS quotes from him....
• 

  Black Sheep

  http://www.thesun.co.nz/The_Weekend_Sun/Rogers_Rabbits_IDL=6_IDT=218_ID=1124_.html

  Cows’ emissions are the least of our worries

  Today, learned readers, we are going back to school. Do you remember the days in the old school yard, we used to laugh a lot? Someone should write a song about it.

  And if you are lucky enough to be still at school, but by some bizarre quirk of the current education system, you can actually read this, congratulations. (Pull your socks up and tuck in your shirt.) Because the standard of reading, writing and that other subject with the numbers, is in steady decline. But’s that a rant for another day. Back to school… and today’s lesson: Carbon. Our atmosphere has a bit of carbon dioxide in it. A “bit”, a scientific measurement of exactly 0.038 percent of the atmosphere, is by an incredible coincidence the same amount of enjoyable television that is screened between the advertising breaks.
  The carbon cycle is a natural balance between plants, which absorb it from the air, during photosynthesis, which is similar to the process by which teenagers extract money from parents’ wallets; silent, invisible yet extremely efficient.
  Plants store this carbon dioxide, locking it up in plant tissue, until an animal, such as a cow or a Party Animal walking home from The Strand at 3.30am on a Saturday, eats it.
  At this point, some carbon dioxide is released back into the atmosphere during respiration. Sometimes, depending on the animal’s diet, there are distinct traces of burger patty, onion, mayo, and Woodie Bourbon emitted in respiration. The remainder goes to build up animal tissue, in the case of our party animal, belly fat.
  If the animal is a ruminant, such as a cow or sheep that chew cud, “friendly” bacteria break down the plant cellulose in multiple stomachs, emitting methane as a by-product.
  The “unfriendly” bacteria form protest groups, chain themselves to the railway tracks, chant rude slogans, drive Volvos, boo when the other team is taking a free kick, flip the bird, and let down the tyres on the friendly’s bus.
  Over about 10 years the methane breaks down into carbon dioxide and water. When plants and animals die, (run over by a Volvo) decomposition returns carbon dioxide to the atmosphere - except when it gets buried for thousands of years - when heat and pressure turns it into fossil fuels. Guys in hardhats with names like Hank and Leroy, who also like bourbon, drill for the oil. Just last week they found a particularly large deposit of crude. It turned out to be just Britney Spears. Naturally balanced The point here is that production of methane is a naturally balanced cycle.
  The rampant climate change zealots and the Kyoto Protocol view methane as a man-made gas; and say its production needs to be reduced to save the planet.
  But here’s something that doesn’t make sense: the Kyoto Protocol is so screwed, that it rates a lawn mower more environmentally friendly than a sheep!
  Our sister publication, Coast & Country, reports from New Zealand agricultural consultant Robin Grieve, who has calculated that according to Kyoto’s wacko numbers, mowing a lawn with a motor mower is six times better for the environment than letting a sheep graze it:
  “The environmental impact of my sheep, as defined by Kyoto, is 19.65kg carbon equivalent compared to a lawnmower’s 3.107kg carbon. This means my sheep is 6.3 times worse for the environment than a lawnmower, according to Kyoto.” Credit due Robin also reports that the cow, which has long been labelled the dastardly villain of all Kyoto gas creators, is actually a carbon sink.
  “The cow has removed 25kg of CO2 from the atmosphere and emits 6 to 10kg CO2 equivalents in methane. She is in credit between 15-19kg.”
  In other words, for each kilogram of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere through grazing, the cow discharges only one third of a kilogram of equivalent carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere, with the other two thirds being stored in milk, meat, and other bodily products. That means that livestock, rather than being regarded as net emitters of greenhouse gases, should be accounted for on the credit side of the Kyoto Protocol ledger!
  (Robin did not have any figures on the CO2 value of shrub-eating party animals.)
  Farm greenhouse gasses are supposedly responsible for a third of this country’s Kyoto obligations.

  The sooner New Zealand reviews the Emissions Trading Scheme, based on the chronically flawed climate change scam, the better.

  I don’t know about you, but there is no way a lawnmower can sensibly be assessed to be more environmentally friendly than a sheep. That is just stupid.
  But then so is most of the climate change nonsense. All this in a world where the temperature peaked in 1998 and has been cooling since.
  Global warming? What claptrap. We are heading for another ice age.
  Best we stock up on Woodies.

  http://www.thesun.co.nz/The_Weekend_Sun/Rogers_Rabbits_IDL=6_IDT=218_ID=1124_.html
• 

  besty

  Saying that global warming is a myth based on cooling since 1998 is a classic cherry-pick myth and has been shown as such time and time over.

  1998 was likely the hottest year this millenium. To use a single year as evidence for global warming being 'over' is inappropriate.

  Here is global temperatures in context:

  The black line represents the smoothed trend - yes there has been times when the line is trending down, apparently, only to continue its onward rise.

  The basic research material is here http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2005JD006548.shtml

  and the graph above is here http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/

  Yet again I ask why deniers (Black Sheep now as well as the OP) refer to media coverage and never cite scientific papers?

  Perhaps they have a political agenda as opposed to a scientific position.
• 

  Goshawk

  Here is the statistic I love. Numbers can be made to say most anything.

  

  Correlation does not always prove causation.
• 

  coffee_black

  But what is it about the global change debate that forces you to march in lockstep? The fact that the government is spending money to fund the research?

  No... it's reaction one usually gets when one questions global warming/climate change. It is exactly the reaction a jw gets when questioning the organization. I posted an email on another thread (Gregor's thread about doing all he can for global warming.) that I received from Richard Lindzen, a Professor at MIT regarding the cultic nature of the gw/climate change movement. I think you would find it interesting. Google him....He's no lightweight.

  The climate is changing... it has always been changing. The earth's temperature is not constant. Never has been. We have had ice ages and warming periods between them. Mars is going through a warming period now. I suppose that's caused by all the SUVs there....right? There are natural cycles...and things like volcanos that can spew more polutants than any factory.

  Like I said, I think finding alternative energy sources is important....for many reasons... but we are not in control of the climate.

  Coffee
• 

  besty

  Correlation is not causation - always handy to point out that different words mean different things

  I wasn't using numbers or graphs to 'prove' global warming - simply putting into context the 1998 figure thrown out there by Black Sheep

  The basic research I referred to uses the HadCRUT3 dataset and has itself been subsequently cited in 63 other papers.

  The numbers are what they are. Interesting source for the pirate data :-)
• 

  John Doe

  Feb 02, 2009
  Dissing Hansen
  
  By Peter Glover,
  Energy Tribune European Associate Editor in The American Thinker
  
  In November 2008, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), run by Dr James Hansen, and one of the four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that October 2008 was the “hottest on record”. Which must have come as something of a shock to the countless millions who trudged through the heavy snow and ice in what they had been told was an unseasonally cold October. But then Hansen should know. He is, after all, climate alarmism’s ‘Mr Big’. But then this is far from the first time Hansen has been caught ‘fiddling’ the climate figures.
  
  In October, two independent monitors at Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, performed their own detailed analysis of Hansen’s reported data. What they found should disturb us all. They discovered that the GISS readings from across a swathe of Russia that appeared to reveal a warming of 10 degrees above average were not readings for October at all. They were a repeat of September’s readings.
  
  A highly embarrassed GISS was forced to own up. GISS retracted the figures - and then immediately set about obfuscating its original error claiming they had discovered a new “hotspot” in the Arctic. This caused even more confusion. Intriguing as the new vacation prospect opened up by the GISS report might be, satellite indicators throughout the Fall consistently revealed the Arctic sea ice had undergone a remarkably fast, post-summer recovery with 30 percent more ice than for the same period in 2007.
  
  A GISS spokesman sought to explain the false Russian temperature figures by shuffling off blame to “other bodies” on whom GISS rely and over whom they have no means of “quality control”. The problem is it’s NASA’s GISS published figures that are mostly quoted precisely because they are regularly higher than those reported by other monitoring bodies. Not to mention they go a long way to underpinning the UN’s IPCC ‘end is nigh’ climate scenario, too. Neither is it the first time Hansen’s NASA figures have been challenged as at odds with other monitoring evidence.
  
  In June 2008, NASA temperature data was challenged again over its higher recordings of temperatures compared to the other official bodies. Back in 1998, satellite data from associate bodies at Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) were broadly in agreement with those at NASA. Tens years later, NASA’s reported figures are regularly higher than those published by RSS and UAH. One reason put forward for the NASA anomaly is that its figures are derived from a grid of ground-based thermometers (the less efficient method) and not by (the far more efficient) taking of satellite readings. But does it matter. Just what is at stake? Well, governments panicked into uneconomic measures; policies which mostly hurt the poor by avoiding the utilization of cheap and plentiful Western energy resources. Resources like plentiful and cheap coal - Hansen’s literal bete noir, which he believes is “the enemy of the human race”.
  
  In pursuit of his campaign to have the West abandoning its precious coal reserves, Hansen recently took it upon himself in a bid to influence the UK Government to refuse a licence for a coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent. Kingsnorth is prospectively the first of six coal-fired stations under consideration. Hansen knows only too well that if the UK greenlights the Kingsnorth plant it could kick start a similar program across Europe - and in turn create pressure to follow suit in the US (which has over 25 percent of the world’s highest quality coal reserves). If that were to happen, the resultant boost to global CO2 emissions would effectively send the chief climate alarmist message, quite literally, up in smoke. So Hansen took up his pen and wrote to lobby over the decisions with letters to the British PM and to the Queen herself.
  
  Next Hansen - ignoring the hypocrisy as do most leading alarmists - jetted to the UK to give evidence in defence of a group of Greenpeace activists in a British criminal case. The activists had invaded the existing Kingsnorth facility causing thousands of dollars worth of criminal damage. Ignoring the evidence of red-handed guilt, perversely, the jury acquitted whereupon Hansen expressed his public backing for the right to break the law in the cause of climate activism. Hansen didn’t say whether this was official NASA policy.
  
  Al Gore regards Hansen as an ‘objective scientist’, but in 2004 Hansen received a grant of $250,000 from the Heinz Foundation shortly before publicly endorsing Teresa Heinz’s husband, John Kerry, for the presidency. While those who argue the skeptics case are consistently accused of being in the pay of Big Oil, Hansen got a free pass from the liberal media on the Heinz grant. As Senator James Inhofe, of the US Committee on Environment and Public Works put it, “It appears the media makes a distinction between oil money and ketchup money.”
  
  NASA does fine work and there are fine people working for NASA. Some have even gone on record disparaging both Hansen and his publicity-seeking methods. In an article Science, Ignorance is not Bliss (Launch magazine, July/August 2008) former astronaut Walter Cunningham delivered a blistering denunciation of Hansen for fostering the “current hysteria” of climate alarmists by misusing NASA data. Cunningham states, “NASA should be at the forefront in the collection of scientific evidence and debunking the current hysteria over human-caused, or anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).” Nor is Cunningham happy at what Hansen is doing for NASA’s reputation as a serious player in scientific research. He says of NASA, “Unfortunately, it is becoming just another agency caught up in the politics of global warming, or worse, politicized science. Advocacy is replacing objective evaluation data, while scientific data is being ignored in favor of emotions and politics.”
  
  And, for good measure, Cunningham reminds us of yet another Hansen blunder. “After warning 2007 would be the hottest year on record,” says Cunningham, “what we experienced was the coolest since 2001.” Lamenting that the GW debate had deteriorated into a “religious war” between “true believers and non-believers” Cunningham astutely observes about those who follow Hansen’s logic, “it is impossible to reason a person out of positions they have not been reasoned into.” Cunningham states Hansen is “a political activist who spreads fear even when NASA’s own data contradicts him.” To drive home his point that Hansen is circumventing the real science, Cunningham highlights that, “warming in the upper atmosphere should occur before any surface warming effect, but NASA’s own data show that has not been happening.” Cunningham goes on to note how when Hansen’s boss, Michael Griffin, “a distinguished scientist in his own right, attempted to draw a distinction between Hansen’s personal and political views and the science conducted by his agency” he was “forced to back off”.
  
  In November, another former NASA astronaut, the award-winning Harrison ‘Jack’ Schmitt, the Apollo 17 moon-walker and former chair of NASA Advisory Chair, resigned from the Planetary Society. Schmitt’s resignation letter identified the Society’s new ‘roadmap’ that attempted to link space exploration and climate change research on earth. In his resignation letter Schmitt states: “You know as well as I, the ‘global warming scare’ is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, income and decision making. It has no place in the Society’s activities.” My guess is that Walt Cunningham and Jack Schmitt are not on Hansen’s Christmas card list.
  
  That James Hansen has a private fame-seeking agenda and is using NASA to peddle it as he makes predictive blunder after predictive blunder in their name is patently clear. Which begs the question: Why is James Hansen - a publicity-seeking leftwing political activist, responsible for issuing false climate data to the detriment of NASA’s reputation and against the public good - still picking up a pay check in a top public sector job? And just how much are Hansen’s headline grabbing, ultimately false, pronouncements helping to propel governments towards hugely expensive precipitous climate action?
• 

  moshe

  -it was shown for the week after 9/11 when airlines were grounded that airliner contrails cause global cooling. So what, nobody proposed doing away with airtravel, because it changes the world's temperatures. Climate science is too complicated for even scientists to agree on, let alone world governements.
• 

  besty

  In November 2008, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), run by Dr James Hansen, and one of the four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that October 2008 was the “hottest on record”.

  provide a primary source link to back up your claim please
• 

  besty

  it was shown for the week after 9/11 when airlines were grounded that airliner contrails cause global cooling

  presumably you are just scouring the web for the peer reviewed basic research backing up this claim and are about to post it here?