Richmond Tea Party » global warming

Scientists Condemn Climate Alarmists

Longshoreman — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:52:13 +0000

Sixteen leaders of the scientific and technical communities have signed a statement in the Wall Street Journal condemning the man-made climate-change movement as nothing but an enterprise to increase the wealth and power of its leaders. Their statement is timely in view of the fact that most voters still believe in man-caused global warming despite the accumulating evidence that it’s a hoax. As pollster Scott Rasmussen reported earlier this month: “Belief that global warming is a serious problem is at its highest level in two-and-half-years…. (A) survey of likely voters finds that 64% say global warming is at least a somewhat serious problem, including 30% who say it’s very serious.” The signers of the statement refuting the hoax wrote in part:

Why is there so much passion about global warming?…. There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question ‘cui bono?’ Or the modern update, ‘Follow the money.’ Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet…. (T)he oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed…. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts. Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now…. Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse…. Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy… Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of ‘incontrovertible’ evidence.

Misfortune Tellers

Longshoreman — Tue, 31 May 2011 01:54:00 +0000

When true believers in man-made global warming look into their crystal balls, they tell us that nothing but misfortune awaits. In an op-ed for the May 25 Forbes.com blog, James M. Taylor, senior fellow for environment policy at the Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News, wrote about several gloomy predictions that these misfortune tellers have made and compared them with what actually happened: Prediction (1979)–The west Antarctic ice sheet will melt before the year 2000 and inundate American coastlines with up to 25 feet of sea level rise.

Result—The ice sheet is little changed and many of us still vacation at the sea shore, also little changed.

Prediction (2000)—After just a few years, snow will never again fall in England.

Result—The past two years were some of the snowiest on record.

Prediction (2007)—The glaciers in the Himalayas will melt by 2035.

Result—The prediction was withdrawn when it was analyzed and found to lack any scientific evidence, while a good deal of evidence runs counter to the claim.

Prediction (June 2008)—There’s a 50-50 chance the North Pole will be ice-free in a year. “The media reported the prediction with a frenzy rarely equaled even among media-created global warming scares. Adding fuel to the fire, global warming alarmists lined up in droves to add their John Hancock to the claim,” Taylor said. One believer claimed it was quite likely the north pole would be exposed in just a few months.

Result—Nothing happened.

“(S)pectacularly wrong global warming predictions, about polar ice and many other global warming-related issues, (are) par for the course for global warming alarmists,” Taylor said.

Environmentalist Says Environmentalism Is Anti-Capitalist; UPDATE: Video Added

Longshoreman — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 21:31:01 +0000

In a recent fascinating Fox news segment, the erudite host Stuart Varney interviewed Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, the influential and once-responsible environmental group that’s become an organ of left-wing extremism. Moore quit the organization when, he said, “Greenpeace was hijacked by social and political activists.” He talked with Varney for 10 minutes about the nature of the current environmental movement, especially as it relates to global warming. His revelations are all the more interesting because the Obama administration bases its energy and environmental policies on the alarmism and pseudo-science that Moore decries:

(Environmentalism today is) more about globalism and anti-capitalism than it is about science or ecology…. We do not have scientific proof that we are the cause of global warming….(The global warming movement is) a powerful convergence of interests, not only environmentalists but also scientists seeking grant money, media seeking headlines, universities seeking grants from major institutions, and foundations, environmental groups, (and) politicians wanting to make it look like they’re saving future generations. All of these people have converged on this issue. Even the scientific community has become politicized on the subject of climate change. But there are many thousands of scientists, particularly in the earth sciences…who are not convinced that we have proof of climate change.”

Some recent news tends to support his views. In a scientific study of Himalayan glaciers, the researchers found that more than half the observed glaciers were advancing or stable and that global warming is not the deciding factor in whether a glacier survives or melts. This contradicts a UN report that the glaciers would soon melt away. In January, Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, Prof. of meteorology at MIT, published an article on global warming that’s worth reading for technically savvy people. The article has one long paragraph that anyone can understand and everyone should be aware of:

(O)ne may reasonably ask why there is the current alarm, and, in particular, why the astounding upsurge in alarmism of the past 4 years. When an issue like global warming is around for over twenty years, numerous agendas are developed to exploit the issue. The interests of the environmental movement in acquiring more power, influence, and donations are reasonably clear. So too are the interests of bureaucrats for whom control of CO2 is a dream-come-true. After all, CO2 is a product of breathing itself. Politicians can see the possibility of taxation that will be cheerfully accepted because it is necessary for ‘saving’ the earth. Nations have seen how to exploit this issue in order to gain competitive advantages. But, by now, things have gone much further. The case of ENRON (a now bankrupt Texas energy firm) is illustrative in this respect. Before disintegrating in a pyrotechnic display of unscrupulous manipulation, ENRON had been one of the most intense lobbyists for Kyoto. It had hoped to become a trading firm dealing in carbon emission rights. This was no small hope. These rights are likely to amount to over a trillion dollars, and the commissions will run into many billions. Hedge funds are actively examining the possibilities; so was the late Lehman Brothers. Goldman Sachs has lobbied extensively for the ‘cap and trade’ bill, and is well positioned to make billions. It is probably no accident that Gore, himself, is associated with such activities. The sale of indulgences is already in full swing with organizations selling offsets to one’s carbon footprint while sometimes acknowledging that the offsets are irrelevant. The possibilities for corruption are immense. Archer Daniels Midland (America’s largest agribusiness) has successfully lobbied for ethanol requirements for gasoline, and the resulting demand for ethanol may already be contributing to large increases in corn prices and associated hardship in the developing world (not to mention poorer car performance). And finally, there are the numerous well meaning individuals who have allowed propagandists to convince them that in accepting the alarmist view of anthropogenic climate change, they are displaying intelligence and virtue For them, their psychic welfare is at stake.

In mid February, Robert Tracinski, editor of The Intellectual Activist and TIADaily.com., wrote a column criticizing a liberal political writer who said global warming alarmists are like Galileo. Tracinski said that in fact it’s the responsible scientists who are like Galileo:

Galileo was persecuted–threatened with torture and forced to recant–for advocating the theory that the planets revolve around the Sun, which contradicted the Church-sanctioned dogma that the Sun and planets revolve around the Earth.

Tracinski detailed how Galileo would not simply accept Copernicus’s mathematical model of heliocentrism. He insisted on doing experiments to prove it.

But physical explanations and observational evidence are precisely the weak points of the global warming dogma. The whole global warming theory began with mathematical computer models. But the actual observational data isn’t there. Climategate helped produce revelations about the corruption and unreliability of global temperature data, which in any case has shown a lack of continued warming over the past decade. In one of the Climategate e-mails, a consensus scientist complains that it is a “travesty” that they cannot explain recent cooling. In another, Michael Mann gives the most notorious line of the scandal, explaining how he is manipulating a graph of proxy temperature data to “hide the decline” it shows in recent decades…. (T)he left uses science, not as a vital thinking method, but as a political pose. They drag out science as a prop, without understanding the basic method and attitude of science…. Part of the reason why Galileo is remembered as one of the fathers of modern science is his thoroughgoing rejection of …subordination to authority….The idea is that even if a Galileo or a Newton were to present a new theory, his prestige should count for nothing. He still has to show his data and prove it. The same goes for climate scientists, environmentalist activists, and hack political writers.

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Is Global Warming Hysteria Fading?

Longshoreman — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:21:33 +0000

As I write this, I’m inspired by an unusual rock that sits on the desk beside my computer. It’s unusual in two ways. One, it looks like a chunk of wood, with clear layers formed by tree rings, and in fact it’s from a petrified tropical tree. Two, the tree grew near the south pole millions of years ago, when the whole world, including the polar regions, was tropical. I got it when I was with the U.S. antarctic expedition. I once showed it to a liberal friend, a true believer in the doctrine that the earth is warming now only because of society’s—particularly America’s—profligacy and that we have to adopt the entire left-wing agenda in order to set things right. He was astounded—he hadn’t known that the earth naturally undergoes continuous cycles of warming and cooling. It’s ignorance like this that allowed the man-made global warming hoax to catch on with so many people over the last several years, a hoax perpetrated by scientists seeking grant funds for research on the subject; corporations seeking profits from technological “solutions” to the problem; media outlets and freelancers like Al gore seeking to attract and influence readers, viewers, and listeners with sensational stories; politicians seeking the votes of alarmed citizens; and left-wing ideologues seeking to impose their vision on the world. The latest big conclave of warmers, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, with 194 countries represented, took place in the resort town of Cancun, Mexico, from Nov. 29 to Dec. 10. Ever since, I’ve been looking for a major article by a conservative author summing up the meeting in hopes of discussing it here. But I’ve seen nothing like that—the conference generated little news and few articles. A column by Christoper Booker described the preaching at the rally as “stale.” I wonder if it’s too much to hope that the air has gone out of the warming movement. Maybe the public wised up after this year’s explosive climate-gate revelations, when leaked e-mails showed key scientists in the movement scheming to make the case for climate change seem stronger than it is and punishing dissenters from the warming faith. This was the most damning of a mounting body of evidence—perhaps it reached a critical mass this year—that warmers are perverting science to advance their agenda. Previous posts here this year have highlighted some of this evidence. One concerned the charge by an eminent physicist that a prestigious scientific organization supports global warming “fraud” in order to make money at the expense of scientific truth. Another reported the admission by a leader of the UN climate change group that “We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy….The climate summit in Cancun…is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War.” Indeed, the conference concluded with an agreement by participants that prosperous countries such as the U.S. should give $100 billion a year for the next 10 years to less prosperous countries so they can fight global warming. According to one speaker, the director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, the only way to achieve sufficient reductions in global emissions while allowing the poor nations to continue to grow is to halt economic growth in the rich world over the next 20 years. He proposed a rationing system similar to the one imposed during World War II. In a nice bit of irony, the conference took place during a period of record-setting cold in Cancun, and many attendees flew there from countries experiencing extremely low temperatures in what is already a bad winter in the northern hemisphere. More significantly, warmers have had to admit grudgingly that world temperatures have been essentially flat for the last 15 years (except for one El Nino year)—no global warming (see this report). This may not disprove global warming, but it does at least indicate that the cries for urgency—“Give us heaps of money and radically change your politics right now!”—are misplaced. Two reports on the Cancun confab pithily characterized the global warming crusade: Christopher Booker’s column said it’s “One of the greatest collective flights from reality in the history of the human race,” and a column by Christopher Monckton called it “The strangest intellectual aberration of our age.” But, as Shakespeare said, “The truth will out,” and maybe that’s happening now. What a nice Christmas present for we the people if the ho-hum that greeted the Cancun conference really does signify the beginning of the end of this incredible hysteria.

Science Body Charged With Global-Warming Scam

Longshoreman — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:34:32 +0000

An eminent physicist recently resigned from the American Physical Society (APS), the professional association of physicists and one of the world’s leading scientific organizations, charging the body with supporting the man-made global warming “fraud” in order to make money at the expense of scientific truth and integrity. His resignation letter reinforces the view that man-made global warming, the specious reason for radical legislation such as the Obama administration’s cap-and-trade proposal, is a hoax perpetrated by the elites to increase their wealth and power. Dr. Harold Lewis, Emeritus Professor at the University of California, often advised the federal government on science & technology policy. In his letter, an indictment of APS’s fall from grace, he described global warming as “the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life.” In the kind of story familiar to those who have paid attention to thuggish global warming politics, Dr. Lewis charged APS with using muscle to shut up dissenters in its membership. Anthony Watts wrote in his science blog that the letter is “on the scale of Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door.” Dr. Lewis’s letter was reproduced in full by the UK Telegraph.

Climate Change and U.S. Sovereignty

richteaparty — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 05:16:45 +0000