What global warming..??

Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age
Lorne Gunter, National Post
Published: Monday, February 25, 2008

More On This Story
Carbon report says tax could save Canadians money

Climate change could be the next subprime meltdown

Most of country coping with winter storms

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.

But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.

And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.

lgunter@shaw.ca


Will Goreazuki weigh in on these newest weather developments..??
I'm sure they have a perfectly whacked response to this..

Al’s new-found wealth
Gore’s net worth is now ‘well in excess’ of US$100M
BY MILES WEISS
Bloomberg News
Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore left the White House seven years ago with less than US$2-million in assets, including a Virginia home and the family farm in Tennessee. Now he’s making enough to put US$35-million in hedge funds and other private partnerships.

Mr. Gore invested the money with Capricorn Investment Group LLC, a Palo Alto, Calif., firm that selects the private funds for clients and invests in makers of environmentally friendly products, according to a Feb. 1 securities filing.
Capricorn was founded by billionaire Jeffrey Skoll, former president of eBay Inc. and an executive producer of Mr. Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary film on global warming.

Since losing the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, Mr. Gore, 59, is best known for focusing attention on climate change through his book and movie, An Inconvenient Truth, which helped him win a Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Gore’s new-found wealth resulted, in part, from speaking engagements and ties to Silicon Valley firms with soaring stock market values, such as Google Inc. and Apple Inc.

“Gore got a lot of support from Silicon Valley when he ran for president because they knew the Internet was one of his primary concerns,” said Tony Coelho, a former congressman and investment banker who served as chairman of Mr. Gore’s 2000 campaign.

“It’s very legit that these people would pursue him” after he left office, Mr. Coelho said, adding that Mr. Gore received Google and Apple stock options before their shares “went into the stratosphere.”

Kalee Kreider, a spokeswoman for Mr. Gore and his wife, Tipper, declined to comment on the hedgefund investment or how Mr. Gore has made his money.
“He is a private citizen, and as a private citizen he has never commented on his private finances,” said Mr. Kreider, who works out of Nashville, Tenn.

Mr. Gore donated his proceeds from the global-warming book and movie to his Alliance for Climate Protection, Mr. Kreider added.
John Jonson, chief operating officer at Capricorn, also had no comment.

Mr. Gore’s investment, disclosed in a private-placement filing at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, was made through Carthage LP. The partnership, formed in December, has the same name as the ex-vice president’s home town in Tennessee.
Mr. Skoll founded Capricorn after deciding in late 2001 that he wanted to diversify his wealth, at the time comprised primarily of eBay stock. The firm began taking on a few outside clients last year, according to SEC filings.

In the last personal-finance report he filed as vice-president, Mr. Gore disclosed on May 22, 2000, that the value of his assets totalled between US$780,000 and US$1.9-million. In addition, Mr. Gore listed an interest in his father’s estate that included Occidental Petroleum Corp. stock worth as much as US$1-million.
He and Mrs. Gore released tax returns for 1998 showing they earned US$224,376 that year, less than half the income of then-president Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, news reports at the time said.
Now Mr. Gore charges a US$175,000 speaking fee and has a net worth “well in excess” of US$100-million, including pre-public offering Google stock options, according to an article in Fastcompany.com last year. Mr. Kreider said the speaking fees vary and Mr. Gore doesn’t disclose them.
Mr. Gore has served as a senior advisor to Mountain View, Calif.-based Google since 2001, shortly after leaving public office. Google spokesman Jon Murchinson said in an e-mail: “We have not provided comment on if or how we compensate Mr. Gore in his role as an advisor to Google.”

The former vice-president also served as vice-chairman of Metropolitan West Financial Inc., a money manager run in part by former Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc. executives, starting in 2001.
He co-founded Current Media Inc., a cable television and Internet company, in 2002 and is listed as its executive chairman in a January SEC filing for the company’s initial public offering. It said he earned US$1-million in salary and bonus last year, and owned 3.7 million shares of company stock.

Mr. Gore joined Apple’s board in 2003 and co-founded London-based Generation Investment Management in 2004. Last November, he became a partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
Capricorn, in managing Mr. Skoll’s fortune — estimated at US$4.2-billion by Forbes magazine last March — primarily allocates money to different private partnerships, including hedge funds and energy and realestate funds.

One of Capricorn’s clients, the Skoll Foundation, had almost US$264-million, or 78% of its assets, invested in more than 75 partnerships at June 30, 2006, according to its most recently available tax filing with the Internal Revenue Service.

Stephen George, Capricorn chief investment officer, previously worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. specializing in helping technology clients develop expertise in e-commerce.

New York-based Goldman underwrote San Jose, Calif.-based eBay’s initial public offering.

http://digital.nationalpost.com/epaper/viewer.aspx

McCain, Republicans, and "Global Warming"
By Austin Hill
Sunday, March 9, 2008

Think you can sidestep the issue of “global warming,” simply by voting Republican?

Think again.

Now that Senator John McCain is officially the Republican nominee for President, global warming is, whether anyone likes it or not, an “issue” for both of our nation’s dominant political parties. McCain has been gravitating towards this issue for several years, and made his mark with it during his chairing of the U.S. Senate hearings on global warming back in 2004.

Today, Mr. McCain articulates a position on the matter that is far more moderate and reasonable, and far more hospitable to our free market economy, than those of his two Democratic competitors. The question remains whether or not American voters, Republican voters in particular, will embrace McCain’s vision.

Before examining anybody’s policy proposals, it’s important to get a handle on just what, precisely, is the issue. And by now, it’s like that most thoughtful Americans have at a minimum been introduced to the idea that the earth’s average temperature is on the rise, and that this is a bad thing, and that this bad thing is brought about by human activity.

But beyond this starting point, the issue quickly devolves into a process of sorting out the “believers” from the “non-believers.” Either you believe that the global temperature is rising, or you don’t; and you either believe that the increase in temperature is brought about by human activity, or by the processes of nature itself; and you either believe that the rise in temperature will bring about destruction and calamity, or that it will not.

Former Vice President Al Gore is, of course, the leader of the “true believers.” On his personal website he states with absolute certainty what this alleged “problem” entails:

Carbon dioxide and other gases warm the surface of the planet naturally by trapping solar heat in the atmosphere. This is a good thing because it keeps our planet habitable. However, by burning fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil and clearing forests we have dramatically increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere and temperatures are rising.

But as Mr. Gore states the problem with certainty - - the earth’s temperatures are rising, and this rise is caused by human’s consumption of fossil fuels - - he ignores several details that detract from his strongly asserted “beliefs.”

It is true that the average global temperature has risen slightly (approximately 0.6% over the past century); and it is also true that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen during this same period of time.

Yet most of the temperature increase during this period occurred before 1940, while a majority of the carbon dioxide increase - - about 70% of it - - occurred after 1940. In short, the last century’s slight increase in temperature occurred mostly before the last century’s significant increase in air pollution, a fact that discredits the notion that human activity caused the temperature rise.

Aside from the fact that Mr. Gore and his disciples refuse to acknowledge this dilemma, there are plenty of other reasons for “non-believers” to be skeptical. One obvious item would be the numerous “coldest winter on record” declarations that have occurred in several regions of the country, just within the past six months. Another would be the interesting economic implications entailed in the proposed “remedies” for global warming - - the levying of “consumption taxes,” the abandoning of incandescent light bulbs in favor of much more expensive lighting, and, of course, the purchase of so-called “carbon offsets” from Al Gore’s for-profit corporation.

So what does all this confusion mean for our current presidential race? For starters, Obama and McCain have both essentially abandoned the term “global warming” in favor of “climate change” (Clinton has not made this shift), and all three of the candidates have connected their “climate agendas” to the pursuit of alternative energy sources.

But from there, the candidates diverge. Not surprisingly, Mrs. Clinton is proposing a dramatic, if not radical level of government intervention with America’s automobile manufacturers, and both she and Obama seem ready to bow to the United Nations’ environmental policy dictates.

But fortunately, McCain casts a very different vision. In a video segment on his website, he states “I believe that climate change is real…” ( it’s hard to disagree, so far as this statement goes); but from there asserts that good environmental policy and good economic policy are intertwined, and that the private sector can be incentivized to move away from fossil fuels. McCain also quite wisely ties environmental concerns together with the obvious geopolitical dilemma of our reliance on foreign oil, and makes it clear that, in his administration, the United States will determine its own environmental policy, and not the U.N.

Ultimately, McCain avoids the hysteria over an alleged impending calamity, and characterizes the issue as a matter of “environmental stewardship.” His approach is not only reasonable, but it is arguably “conservative” in its essence.

Whether or not American’s embrace this, remains to be seen.

link

I'm talking about his gig as the Goracle. Is it over?

Last Monday - on ABC Radio National, of all places - there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.
Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth stillwarming?"

She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."


So depending on your reference point (10 years ago or 6 years ago) you have either cooling or no change. Next question:

Duffy: "Is this a matter of any controversy?"
Marohasy: "Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued ... This is not what you'd expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you'd expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up ... So (it's) very unexpected, not something that's being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it's very significant."


Well actually I disagree. It is being discussed. But it is also being pretty roundly ignored. Vested interest and all.

Duffy then turned to the question of how the proponents of the greenhouse gas hypothesis deal with data that doesn't support their case. "People like Kevin Rudd and Ross Garnaut are speaking as though the Earth is still warming at an alarming rate, but what is the argument from the other side? What would people associated with the IPCC say to explain the (temperature) dip?"
Marohasy: "Well, the head of the IPCC has suggested natural factors are compensating for the increasing carbon dioxide levels and I guess, to some extent, that's what sceptics have been saying for some time: that, yes, carbon dioxide will give you some warming but there are a whole lot of other factors that may compensate or that may augment the warming from elevated levels of carbon dioxide.

"There's been a lot of talk about the impact of the sun and that maybe we're going to go through or are entering a period of less intense solar activity and this could be contributing to the current cooling."


For the most part, those of us who've continued to point out that the big old firey hot yellow thing that hangs in the sky everyday might have a whole bunch to do with whatever climate change happens here were mostly derided as know-nothing kooks. It has to be that infinitesimal, by comparison, bit of CO2 we contribute, of course.

Duffy: "Can you tell us about NASA's Aqua satellite, because I understand some of the data we're now getting is quite important in our understanding of how climate works?"
Marohasy: "That's right. The satellite was only launched in 2002 and it enabled the collection of data, not just on temperature but also on cloud formation and water vapour. What all the climate models suggest is that, when you've got warming from additional carbon dioxide, this will result in increased water vapour, so you're going to get a positive feedback. That's what the models have been indicating. What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite ... (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they're actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you're getting a negative rather than a positive feedback."


And yet when the skeptics pointed out the dearth of knowledge about cloud formation and albedo, and that clouds were badly modeled or not modeled at all, we were again told we simply didn't have a clue.

Duffy: "The climate is actually, in one way anyway, more robust than was assumed in the climate models?"
Marohasy: "That's right ... These findings actually aren't being disputed by the meteorological community. They're having trouble digesting the findings, they're acknowledging the findings, they're acknowledging that the data from NASA's Aqua satellite is not how the models predict, and I think they're about to recognise that the models really do need to be overhauled and that when they are overhauled they will probably show greatly reduced future warming projected as a consequence of carbon dioxide."


You mean that reductions in that convenient single source "blame-all" gas that could be attributed to increased human activity probably isn't the way to defeat global warming? Wow. There go a whole boat load of "green jobs" in politics on such things as "Global Warming Commissions". And the cap and trade programs - oh, the humanity. Not to mention those 1,000 "Climate Change Messengers" Al Gore has out there spreading the word? Will it be the unemployment line for them as well? This could be catastrophic!

Duffy: "From what you're saying, it sounds like the implications of this could be considerable ..."
Marohasy: "That's right, very much so. The policy implications are enormous. The meteorological community at the moment is really just coming to terms with the output from this NASA Aqua satellite and (climate scientist) Roy Spencer's interpretation of them. His work is published, his work is accepted, but I think people are still in shock at this point."


Well we'll see how shocked they really are when we see them actually admit that not only isn't the science settled, it may be all wrong. In the meantime, the policy implications of CO2 caused AGW continue to be planned for and, as with all such things political, it's like trying to turn a battleship around going full speed - it takes a very long time to slow it down enough to do that.

My concern, if all of the above is accurate - and as I read more and more there seems to be a good number of scientists recognizing the current AGW data is bad and the models are deficient in may important ways - the policy implications are enormous.

Whether you are convinced or not about what Marohasy is saying, it is more than enough to give pause and by that I mean pause in both an intellectual and policy execution way.

It is far to early, given the new data that seems to be coming available, for anyone to claim that we must "save the earth" by reducing carbon dioxide out put through severe cut-backs - far too early.

Pity - Al Gore was just cashing in too.
_________

First published at QandO.

http://www.rightwingnews.com/

It is far to early, given the new data that seems to be coming available, for anyone to claim that we must "save the earth" by reducing carbon dioxide out put through severe cut-backs - far too early.

Zoofer wrote:Is Al Gore out of a job?

I'm talking about his gig as the Goracle. Is it over?

Last Monday - on ABC Radio National, of all places - there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.
Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth stillwarming?"

She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."


So depending on your reference point (10 years ago or 6 years ago) you have either cooling or no change. Next question:

Duffy: "Is this a matter of any controversy?"
Marohasy: "Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued ... This is not what you'd expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you'd expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up ... So (it's) very unexpected, not something that's being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it's very significant."


Well actually I disagree. It is being discussed. But it is also being pretty roundly ignored. Vested interest and all.

Duffy then turned to the question of how the proponents of the greenhouse gas hypothesis deal with data that doesn't support their case. "People like Kevin Rudd and Ross Garnaut are speaking as though the Earth is still warming at an alarming rate, but what is the argument from the other side? What would people associated with the IPCC say to explain the (temperature) dip?"
Marohasy: "Well, the head of the IPCC has suggested natural factors are compensating for the increasing carbon dioxide levels and I guess, to some extent, that's what sceptics have been saying for some time: that, yes, carbon dioxide will give you some warming but there are a whole lot of other factors that may compensate or that may augment the warming from elevated levels of carbon dioxide.

"There's been a lot of talk about the impact of the sun and that maybe we're going to go through or are entering a period of less intense solar activity and this could be contributing to the current cooling."


For the most part, those of us who've continued to point out that the big old firey hot yellow thing that hangs in the sky everyday might have a whole bunch to do with whatever climate change happens here were mostly derided as know-nothing kooks. It has to be that infinitesimal, by comparison, bit of CO2 we contribute, of course.

Duffy: "Can you tell us about NASA's Aqua satellite, because I understand some of the data we're now getting is quite important in our understanding of how climate works?"
Marohasy: "That's right. The satellite was only launched in 2002 and it enabled the collection of data, not just on temperature but also on cloud formation and water vapour. What all the climate models suggest is that, when you've got warming from additional carbon dioxide, this will result in increased water vapour, so you're going to get a positive feedback. That's what the models have been indicating. What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite ... (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they're actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you're getting a negative rather than a positive feedback."


And yet when the skeptics pointed out the dearth of knowledge about cloud formation and albedo, and that clouds were badly modeled or not modeled at all, we were again told we simply didn't have a clue.

Duffy: "The climate is actually, in one way anyway, more robust than was assumed in the climate models?"
Marohasy: "That's right ... These findings actually aren't being disputed by the meteorological community. They're having trouble digesting the findings, they're acknowledging the findings, they're acknowledging that the data from NASA's Aqua satellite is not how the models predict, and I think they're about to recognise that the models really do need to be overhauled and that when they are overhauled they will probably show greatly reduced future warming projected as a consequence of carbon dioxide."


You mean that reductions in that convenient single source "blame-all" gas that could be attributed to increased human activity probably isn't the way to defeat global warming? Wow. There go a whole boat load of "green jobs" in politics on such things as "Global Warming Commissions". And the cap and trade programs - oh, the humanity. Not to mention those 1,000 "Climate Change Messengers" Al Gore has out there spreading the word? Will it be the unemployment line for them as well? This could be catastrophic!

Duffy: "From what you're saying, it sounds like the implications of this could be considerable ..."
Marohasy: "That's right, very much so. The policy implications are enormous. The meteorological community at the moment is really just coming to terms with the output from this NASA Aqua satellite and (climate scientist) Roy Spencer's interpretation of them. His work is published, his work is accepted, but I think people are still in shock at this point."


Well we'll see how shocked they really are when we see them actually admit that not only isn't the science settled, it may be all wrong. In the meantime, the policy implications of CO2 caused AGW continue to be planned for and, as with all such things political, it's like trying to turn a battleship around going full speed - it takes a very long time to slow it down enough to do that.

My concern, if all of the above is accurate - and as I read more and more there seems to be a good number of scientists recognizing the current AGW data is bad and the models are deficient in may important ways - the policy implications are enormous.

Whether you are convinced or not about what Marohasy is saying, it is more than enough to give pause and by that I mean pause in both an intellectual and policy execution way.

It is far to early, given the new data that seems to be coming available, for anyone to claim that we must "save the earth" by reducing carbon dioxide out put through severe cut-backs - far too early.

Pity - Al Gore was just cashing in too.
_________

First published at QandO.

http://www.rightwingnews.com/

calmage wrote:We had snow the other day... and it's way too cold to plant garden...

It should be raining by now..

More from Fox on climate change.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,352241,00.html

They wanna bulldoze the snow in Siberia and Canada to make the snow less reflective...







I wonder how they can justify the carbon...

Sunspot activity has not resumed up after hitting an 11-year low in March last year, raising fears that — far from warming — the globe is about to return to an Ice Age, says an Australian-American scientist.

Physicist Phil Chapman, the first native-born Australian to become an astronaut with NASA [he became an American citizen to join up, though he never went into space], said pictures from the U.S. Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) showed no spots on the sun.

He said the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7 degrees Centigrade.

32,000 deniers
That's the number of scientists who are outraged by the Kyoto Protocol's corruption of science

Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post
Published: Saturday, May 17, 2008


Question: How many scientists does it take to establish that a consensus does not exist on global warming? The quest to establish that the science is not settled on climate change began before most people had even heard of global warming.

The year was 1992 and the United Nations was about to hold its Earth Summit in Rio. It was billed as -- and was -- the greatest environmental and political assemblage in human history. Delegations came from 178 nations -- virtually every nation in the world -- including 118 heads of state or government and 7,000 diplomatic bureaucrats. The world's environmental groups came too -- they sent some 30,000 representatives from every corner of the world to Rio. To report all this, 7,000 journalists converged on Rio to cover the event, and relay to the publics of the world that global warming and other environmental insults were threatening the planet with catastrophe.

In February of that year, in an attempt to head off the whirlwind that the conference would unleash, 47 scientists signed a "Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming," decrying "the unsupported assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from the burning of fossil fuels and requires immediate action."
To a scientist in search of truth, 47 is an impressive number, especially if those 47 dissenters include many of the world's most eminent scientists. To the environmentalists, politicians, press at Rio, their own overwhelming numbers made the 47 seem irrelevant.

Knowing this, a larger petition effort was undertaken, known as the Heidelberg Appeal, and released to the public at the Earth Summit. By the summit's end, 425 scientists and other intellectual leaders had signed the appeal.
These scientists -- mere hundreds -- also mattered for nought in the face of the tens of thousands assembled at Rio. The Heidelberg Appeal was blown away and never obtained prominence, even though the organizers persisted over the years to ultimately obtain some 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners.
The earnest effort to demonstrate the absence of a consensus continued with the Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change -- an attempt to counter the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Its 150-odd signatories also counted for nought. As did the Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship in 2000, signed by more than 1,500 clergy, theologians, religious leaders, scientists, academics and policy experts concerned about the harm that Kyoto could inflict on the world's poor.

Then came the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine's Petition Project of 2001, which far surpassed all previous efforts and by all rights should have settled the issue of whether the science was settled on climate change. To establish that the effort was bona fide, and not spawned by kooks on the fringes of science, as global warming advocates often label the skeptics, the effort was spearheaded by Dr. Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences and of Rockefeller University, and as reputable as they come.
The Oregon petition garnered an astounding 17,800 signatures, a number all the more astounding because of the unequivocal stance that these scientists took: Not only did they dispute that there was convincing evidence of harm from carbon dioxide emissions, they asserted that Kyoto itself would harm the global environment because "increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant
and animal environments of the Earth."

The petition drew media attention, but little of it was for revealing to the world that an extraordinary number of scientists hold views on global warming diametrically opposite to those they are expected to hold. Instead, the press focussed on presumed flaws that critics found in the petition. Some claimed the petition was riddled with duplicate names. They were no duplicates, just different scientists with the same name. Some claimed the petition had phonies. There was only one phony: Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, planted by a Greenpeace organization to discredit the petition and soon removed. Other names that seemed to be phony -- such as Michael Fox, the actor, and Perry Mason, the fictional lawyer in a TV series -- were actually bona fide scientists, properly credentialled.

Like the Heidelberg Appeal, the Oregon petition was blown away. But now it is blowing back. Original signatories to the petition and others, outraged at Kyoto's corruption of science, wrote to the Oregon Institute and its director, Arthur Robinson, asking that the petition be brought back.
"E-mails started coming in every day," he explained. "And they kept coming. " The writers were outraged at the way Al Gore and company were abusing the science to their own ends. "We decided to do the survey again."

Using a subset of the mailing list of American Men and Women of Science, a who's who of Science, Robinson mailed out his solicitations through the postal service, requesting signed petitions of those who agreed that Kyoto was a danger to humanity. The response rate was extraordinary, "much, much higher than anyone expected, much higher than you'd ordinarily expect," he explained. He's processed more than 31,000 at this point, more than 9,000 of them with PhDs, and has another 1,000 or so to go -- most of them are already posted on a Web site at petitionproject.org.

Why go to this immense effort all over again, when the press might well ignore the tens of thousands of scientists who are standing up against global warming alarmism?
"I hope the general public will become aware that there is no consensus on global warming," he says, "and I hope that scientists who have been reluctant to speak up will now do so, knowing that they aren't alone."
At one level, Robinson, a PhD scientist himself, recoils at his petition. Science shouldn't be done by poll, he explains. "The numbers shouldn't matter. But if they want warm bodies, we have them."

Some 32,000 scientists is more than the number of environmentalists that descended on Rio in 1992. Is this enough to establish that the science is not settled on global warming? The press conference releasing these names occurs on Monday at the National Press Center in Washington. You'll know soon enough if anyone shows up.

LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com - Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers. www.energyprobe.org

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=522276

Global Warming: Playing It Cool
Rich Tucker
Friday, May 16, 2008

Sorry, but is this a bad time to discuss global warming?

Here in the mid-Atlantic, the month of May has been a washout. Record rainfall has made last year’s drought seem like a distant memory. And the temperature just can’t seem to warm up. It feels more like March than May.
But maybe one month isn’t a fair sample. “When you look at climate change, you should not look at any particular year,” cautions Michel Jarraud, the World Meteorological Organization’s secretary-general and a global-warming proponent.

Well, then. Is 10 years long enough? As BBC news put it last month, “temperatures have not risen globally since 1998 when El Nino warmed the world.”
Oh, but Jarraud has an answer to that, too. “La Nina is part of what we call ‘variability.’ There has always been and there will always be cooler and warmer years,” he explained, “but what is important for climate change is that the trend is up; the climate on average is warming, even if there is a temporary cooling because of La Nina.”

Well, few people are meteorologists. But almost anybody can identify the key word in Jarraud’s explanation: “variability.” The weather in New York is different from the weather in L.A., which is different from the weather in Chicago. And tomorrow, the weather will be different in all three places. Weather “varies.”
But scientists aren’t celebrating our decade of cooling. Since the planet hasn’t been getting any hotter, they now talk about how the problem is “global climate change.” But that shouldn’t be a concern. The climate is always changing, and there’s simply no way for humans to alter that.

Oh, but we’re going to try.
Next month, lawmakers in Washington (which might have warmed up to summer temperatures by then) will take up a bill called “America’s Climate Security Act.” It aims to control global warming by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide (you’re exhaling some right now) our country emits.

The bill’s complicated, of course. But it would do what government does best: Attempt to address a problem by creating a bureaucracy to manage it. That approach has failed completely with, say, education policy. But maybe it’ll work to cool the planet.
Tellingly, the proposed climate change bill relies heavily on a technology known as “carbon capture and sequestration,” where carbon from fossil fuels is, instead of being released into the air, collected and buried. But the technology to do this doesn’t exist yet, and may never exist.

Ironically, the entire bill is unnecessary.
Americans are increasingly interested in protecting the environment. We don’t want to lose our jobs to do so (one study predicts that this bill would cost hundreds of thousands of jobs, especially manufacturing jobs). But everyone wants to live in a clean world.

If CO2 is a problem, American inventers will solve it. The market’s demand for a cleaner planet will force us to find ways to remove CO2. Meanwhile, we’ll move past the internal combustion engine and find a fuel that burns cleaner.
It’s worth noting that our country could reduce its energy use right away -- but the government stands in the way.

In the May edition of The Atlantic, Lisa Margonelli noted that “A 2005 report by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that U.S. industry could profitably recycle enough waste energy -- including steam, furnace gases, heat, and pressure -- to reduce the country’s fossil-fuel use (and greenhouse-gas emissions) by nearly a fifth.”
Why don’t we? Overregulation is a big reason. “The Clean Air Act has succeeded spectacularly in reducing some forms of air pollution,” Margonelli writes, “but perversely, it has chilled efforts to reuse energy: because many of these efforts involve tinkering with industrial exhaust systems, they can trigger a federal or local review of the plant, opening a can of worms some plant managers would rather keep closed.”

Of course, the scope of the Clean Air Act pales in comparison to that of the Climate Security Act. Imagine the government attempting to manage the output from every manufacturing and power plant, under the guise of reducing global warming. It’s a disaster in the making.
Around 1900, many forward thinkers worried about the future. How, they wondered, would the United States deal with all the horses its urbanizing culture would require in the 20th century? They couldn’t foresee that the automobile would completely replace the horse and solve that problem.

Today, in a country with more cars than drivers, we can’t imagine an economy that doesn’t depend on oil. But we’ll develop one.
Washington should encourage that, perhaps by setting up some sort of prize for the person who invents an effective hydrogen engine. But mostly by staying out of the way and letting the market work.

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