Ted Turner -- A Big Chicken Little

Whatever happened to the Scientific Method? When it comes to Globa Warming, it seems that a lot people think method of developing and validating scientific hypotheses is just hot air.

In short, Global Warming is a conclusion based on hypothesis that has never been tested. It's too complex to test. It's so complex we cannot identify and factor in all the components that are supposed to bring us to the Global Warming conclusion. In other words, the conclusion that Global Warming will destroy life on Earth is a guess. A wild one. And it's as valid as the recent Doomsday Rapture prediction. Or Y2K. Silliness. Utter silliness.

When it comes to predictions of mass death and global catastrophe, the predictors have a bad record. They're 0 for, well, you pick the number of predicted Doomsdays. I suppose the Global Warmists remind themselves that even a broken watch is right twice a day. But even that old bit of sophistry has failed them.

The Global Warming believer, Ted Turner, thinks the reason people fail to grasp the issue is due to its complexity. He's got it backwards. To validate a hypothesis predicting Global Warming means that scientists would have to correctly predict the outcome of every action -- every change -- occurring on Planet Earth for decades to come. It's impossible. We are incapable of such a feat. The Environment is too complex.

Ted Turner: Climate Change ‘Most Serious ... Problem Humanity Has Ever Faced’

June 24, 2011

Ted Turner and members of the board of UN Foundation. (Photo: UN Foundation)
(CNSNews.com) – Media mogul Ted Turner says climate change is “probably the most serious--and, in all fairness, the most complex--problem that humanity has ever faced.”

He added: “It is really easy to understand how some people don’t get it, because it’s so complex and complicated.”

Turner took part in a telephone news conference on Thursday, held by his United Nations Foundation on the island of Svalbard, one of the northernmost regions of Norway.

His comments came in response to a question posed by reporter Sunny Lewis of the Environment News Service about how to change the minds of climate change skeptics.

“A few climate skeptics and deniers seem to be holding up action to curb climate change,” Lewis said. “What can be done to convince and persuade these holdouts as to actually realize what so many scientists know and are telling us in urgent terms?”

Turner applauded the question.

“That’s a very good question," he said, "and if we knew the answer to it, we’d already have an energy policy in the United States. You know, my good friend Boone Piockens points out, and absolutely correctly, that the United States, in its history, has never had an energy policy including during the Arab oil shocks of the ‘70s, and we still don’t have (one), and we need to.

“The only thing I can think of, is we just have to keep working, just like we are doing now, and get as much publicity as we possible can for the issue, and increase the amount of the debate, and persuade people with both the evidence, which is overwhelmingly in favor of climate change being a serious problem, probably the most serious--and in all fairness--the most complex problem that humanity has ever faced,” Turner said.

Referring to climate change skeptics, Turner added: “It's really easy to understand how some people don’t get it because it’s so complex and complicated. But that doesn’t mean we have to do, all of us, do what we can to try to convince people to do the right thing and then motivate them to take the action.”

Turner is the founder and chairman of the United Nations Foundation, and presided over the organization’s semi-annual meeting, which took place June 19-25 in Oslo.

Fever over Global Warming is Cooling

How Scientific Is Climate Science?

What is arguably the most important reason to doubt global warming can be explained in plain English

By DOUGLAS J. KEENAN
For years, some researchers have argued that the evidence for global warming is not nearly as strong as has been officially claimed. The details of the arguments are often technical. As a result, policy makers and other people outside the debate have relied on the pronouncements of a group of climate scientists. I think that is unnecessary. I believe that what is arguably the most important reason to doubt global warming can be explained in terms that most people can understand.

Consider the graph of global temperatures in Figure 1, which uses data from NASA. At first, it might seem obvious that the graph shows an increase in temperatures. In fact the story is more involved.

Imagine tossing a coin ten times. If the coin came up Heads each time, we would have very significant evidence that the coin was not a fair coin. Suppose instead that the coin was tossed only three times. If the coin came up Heads each time, we would not have significant evidence that the coin was unfair: Getting Heads three times can reasonably occur just by chance.

In Figures 2 and 3, each graph has three segments, one segment for each toss of a coin. If the coin came up Heads, then the segment slopes upward; if it came up Tails, then it slopes downward. In Figure 2, the graph on the far left illustrates tossing Heads, Tails, Heads; the middle graph illustrates Tails, Heads, Tails; and the last graph illustrates Heads, Tails, Tails. Figure 3 illustrates Heads, Heads, Heads.

Three Heads is not significant evidence for anything other than random chance occurring. A statistician would say that although the graph shows an increase, the increase is "not significant."

Suppose now that instead of tossing coins, we roll ordinary six-sided dice. We will roll each die three times. If a die comes up 1, we will draw a line segment downward; if it comes up 6, the segment is drawn upward; and if it comes up 2, 3, 4 or 5, the segment is drawn straight across. Figure 4 gives some examples of possible outcomes.

Now consider Figure 5, which corresponds to rolling 6 three times. This outcome will occur by chance just once out of 216 times, and so offers significant evidence that the die is not rolling randomly. That is, the increase shown in Figure 5 is significant.

Note that Figure 3 and Figure 5 look identical. In Figure 3, the increase is not significant; yet in Figure 5, the increase is significant. These examples illustrate that we cannot determine whether a line shows a significant increase just by looking at it. Rather, we must know something about the process that generated the line. But in practice, the process might be very complicated, which can make the determination difficult.

Consider again the graph of global temperatures in Figure 1. We cannot tell if global temperatures are significantly increasing just by looking at the graph. Moreover, the process that generates global temperatures—Earth's climate system—is extremely complicated. Hence determining whether there is a significant increase is likely to be difficult.

***
This brings us to the statistical concept of a time series, which is any series of measurements taken at regular time intervals. Examples include prices on the New York Stock Exchange at the close of each business day, the maximum daily temperature in London, the total wheat harvest in Canada each year and the average global temperature each year.

In the analysis of time series, a basic question is how to determine whether a given series is significantly increasing (or decreasing). The mathematics of time-series analysis gives us some tools to do this, requiring us first to state what we believe we know about the series in question. For example, we might state that we believe the series goes up one step whenever a certain coin comes up Heads, and that the series in question comprises three upward steps, as in Figure 3. Next, we must complete some computations based on what we have stated. For example, we compute that the probability of a coin coming up Heads three times in a row is ½ × ½ × ½ = 1/8, or a 12.5% probability of occurring randomly. From that, we conclude that the three upward steps in the coin-toss time series can be reasonably attributed to chance, and thus that the increase shown in Figure 3 is not significant.

Likewise, in order to determine if the global temperature series is increasing significantly, we must first state what we know about what causes those temperature movements. Because our understanding of the dynamics of global temperature is incomplete, we must make some assumptions. As long as the assumptions are reasonable, we can at least be confident that the conclusions drawn from our time-series analysis are reasonable.

***
This is standard practice, but is it always adhered to in the work of climate scientists? The latest report from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was published in 2007. Chapter 3 of Working Group I considers the global temperature series illustrated in Figure 1. The chapter's principal conclusion is that the increase in global temperatures is extremely significant.

To draw that conclusion, the IPCC makes an assumption about the global temperature series, known as the "AR1" assumption, for the statistical concept of "first-order autoregression." That assumption implies, among other things, that only the current value in a time series has a direct effect on the next value. For the global temperature series, it means that this year's temperature affects next year's, but that the temperature in previous years does not. Intuitively, that seems unrealistic.

There are standard checks to (partially) test whether a given time series conforms to a given statistical assumption; if it does not, then any conclusions based on that assumption must be considered unfounded. For example, if the significance of the increase in Figure 5 were computed assuming that the probability of a line segment sloping upward were one in two instead of one in six, then that would lead to an incorrect conclusion. The need for such checks is taught in all introductory courses in time series. The IPCC chapter, however, does not report doing any such checks.

That is a startling omission, one with consequences for how the IPCC's recommendations should be interpreted. A fairly elementary alternative assumption that some researchers and I have tested fits the actual temperature data better than the IPCC's AR1 assumption—so much better that we can conclude that the IPCC's assumption has no support. Under the alternative assumption, the data do not show a significant increase in global temperatures. We don't know whether the alternative assumption itself is reasonable—other assumptions might be even better—but the improved fit does tell us that until more research is done on the best assumptions to apply to global average temperature series, the IPCC's conclusions about the significance of the temperature changes are unfounded.

None of this is opinion. This is factual and indisputable. It applies to any warming—whether attributable to humans or to nature. This assumption problem is not unique to the IPCC, either. The U.S. Climate Change Science Program, which advises Congress, published its report on temperature increases in 2006, and relied on the same insupportable assumption.

***
This is not the only instance of serious incompetence in climate science.

Over many millennia, the most important cycles in Earth's climate have been those of the ice ages, which are caused by natural variations in Earth's orbit around the sun. These variations alter the intensity of summertime sunlight. The relevant data are presented in Figure 6: One line represents the amount of ice globally and the other line represents the intensity of summertime sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere, where the effects are greatest. But notice that the similarity between the two lines is very weak.

To understand what's going on, we have to consider the changes in the amount of ice globally. For example, if the amount of ice at different times were 17, 15, 14, 19, . . . , then we must subtract adjacent amounts to obtain the changes: 2, 1, -5, . . . . One line in Figure 7 shows these changes, while the other, as before, shows the intensity of summertime sunlight. Now we see that the similarity between the two lines is strong: one excellent piece of evidence that ice ages are indeed caused by orbital variations.

Serbian astrophysicist Milutin Milankovitch first proposed a connection between ice ages and orbital variations in 1920, though data on the amount of ice present in past millennia didn't become available until 1976. But not until 2006 did scientists first study the changes in the amount of ice. That is, it took 30 years for scientists to think to do the subtraction needed to draw the second line in Figure 7. During these three decades, scientists analyzing Milankovitch's proposed link based their studies on graphs like Figure 6, and they considered a variety of assumptions to try and explain the weak similarity of the two lines.

***
We have already seen that the authors of the IPCC report have made one fundamental mistake in how they analyze their data, drawing conclusions based on an insupportable basic assumption. But they commit another error as well—the same one, in fact, that hindered the scientists working to verify Milankovitch's hypothesis. Nowhere in the IPCC report is any testing done on the changes in global temperatures; only the temperatures themselves are considered. The alternative assumption I tested does make use of the changes in global temperatures and obtains a better fit with the data.

To be sure, there have been other studies that consider other alternative starting points and thereby reach different conclusions about the temperature data. The IPCC report nods toward such work, but without really acknowledging how crucially the soundness of its conclusions rests upon its choice of assumptions. Making the right choice, the one that best corresponds to physical reality, requires further, difficult research, and accepting conclusions based on shaky premises risks foreclosing upon such work. That would be gross negligence for a field claiming to be scientific to commit.

Mr. Keenan previously did mathematical research and financial trading on Wall Street and in the City of London; since 1995, he has been studying independently. He supports environmentalism and energy security. Technical details of this essay can be found at http://www.informath.org/media/a41/b8.pdf.

A New Sky Must Fall

Seems our Chicken Littles are running short on creativity. Where are all those inventive Crisis Mongers?

What's the Next 'Global Warming'?

Herewith I propose a contest to invent the next panic.

So global warming is dead, nailed into its coffin one devastating disclosure, defection and re-evaluation at a time. Which means that pretty soon we're going to need another apocalyptic scare to take its place.

As recently as October, the Guardian reported that scientists at Cambridge had "concluded that the Arctic is now melting at such a rate that it will be largely ice free within ten years." This was supposedly due to global warming. It brought with it the usual lamentations for the grandchildren.

But in March came another report in the Guardian, this time based on the research of Japanese scientists, that "much of the record breaking loss of ice in the Arctic ocean in recent years is [due] to the region's swirling winds and is not a direct result of global warming." It also turns out that the extent of Arctic sea ice in March was around the recorded average, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The difference between the two stories has little to do with science: There were plenty of reasons back in October to suspect that the Arctic ice panic—based on data that only goes back to 1979—was as implausible as the now debunked claim about disappearing Himalayan glaciers. But thanks to Climategate and the Copenhagen fiasco, the media are now picking up the kinds of stories they previously thought it easier and wiser to ignore.

This is happening internationally. In France, a book titled "L'imposture climatique" is a runaway bestseller: Its author, Claude Allègre, is one of the country's most acclaimed scientists and a former minister of education in a Socialist government.

In Britain, environmentalist patron saint James Lovelock now tells the BBC he suspects climate scientists have "[fudged] the data" and that if the planet is going to be saved, "it will save itself, as it always has done."

In Germany, the leftish Der Spiegel devotes 15 pages to a deliciously detailed account of "scientists who want to be politicians," the "curious inconsistencies" in the temperature record, the "sloppy work" of the U.N.'s climate-change panel and sundry other sins of modern climatology.

As for the United States, Gallup reports that global warming now ranks sixth on the list of Americans' top 10 environmental concerns. My wager is that within a few years "climate change" will exercise global nerves about as much as overpopulation, toxic tampons, nuclear winters, ozone holes, killer bees, low sperm counts, genetically modified foods and mad cows do today.

Something is going to have to take its place.

The world is now several decades into the era of environmental panic. The subject of the panic changes every few years, but the basic ingredients tend to remain fairly constant. A trend, a hypothesis, an invention or a discovery disturbs the sense of global equilibrium. Often the agent of distress is undetectable to the senses, like a malign spirit. A villain—invariably corporate and right-wing—is identified.

Then money begins to flow toward grant-seeking institutions and bureaucracies, which have an interest in raising the level of alarm. Environmentalists counsel their version of virtue, typically some quasi-totalitarian demands on the pattern of human behavior. Politicians assemble expert panels and propose sweeping and expensive legislation. Eventually, the problem vanishes. Few people stop to consider that perhaps it wasn't such a crisis in the first place.

This is what's called eschatology—a belief, or psychology, that we are approaching the End Time. Religions have always found a way to take account of those beliefs, but today's secular panics are unmoored by spiritual consolations or valid moral injunctions. Instead, we have the modern-day equivalent of the old Catholic indulgence in the form of carbon credits. It's how Al Gore justifies his utility bills.

Given the inescapability of weather, it's no wonder global warming gripped the public mind as long as it did. And there's always some extreme-weather event happening somewhere to be offered as further evidence of impending catastrophe. But even weather gets boring, and so do the people who natter about it incessantly. What this decade requires is a new and better panic.

Herewith, then, I propose a readers' contest to invent the next panic. It must involve something ubiquitous, invisible to the naked eye, and preferably mass-produced. And the solution must require taxes, regulation, and other changes to civilization as we know it.

The winner gets a beer and a burger, on me, at the 47th street Pig N' Whistle in New York City. (Nachos for vegetarians.) Happy panicking!

More Evidence of Global Warming? Cooling? What?

Every day more proof piles up. Record snowfalls. Ice. Yeah, there's no doubt the planet is getting hotter. No doubt at all. Or maybe the planet is getting cooler? Or possibly it is going along as it always has while humans go a little crazy.

More than 50 ships stuck in Baltic Sea ice: maritime authorities

Mar 4, 2010

More than 50 ships, including large ferries reportedly carrying thousands of passengers, were stuck in ice in the Baltic Sea Thursday evening, and many were not likely to be freed for hours, Swedish maritime authorities said.

OOOPPS -- Well, It COULD have Happened...

The sky is falling. The sky is falling. Or, more accurately, the sea is rising. The sea is rising. Run for your lives before you are swept away by the killer waves about to wash over Hawaii, Tonga, the Galapagos Islands and Japan.

If scientists cannot come close to predicting the size of tsunamis or tidal waves following an earthquake, why should anyone believe scientists can predict the impact of other activities, especially when the prediction says the impact is 100 years in the future?

Sounds rather silly. Wave propagation in water is a well understood phenomenon -- or so we had believed. Shock waves passing through a fluid have been studied for a long long time. But the real-world inputs always alter the results in ways that challenge the reliability of the predictions.

Clearly, reality will intrude on the nightmare scenario predicted by the Global Warming crowd. Our inability to map the response of the planet to a discrete event that has been seen many times before is strong evidence that scientists have no idea what lies ahead for more complex interactions involving the atmosphere and never-before-seen outcomes.

Scientists defend warning after tsunami nonevent

HONOLULU (AP) — The warning was ominous, its predictions dire: Oceanographers issued a bulletin telling Hawaii and other Pacific islands that a killer wave was heading their way with terrifying force and that "urgent action should be taken to protect lives and property."

But the devastating tidal surge predicted after Chile's magnitude 8.8-earthquake for areas far from the epicenter never materialized and by Sunday, authorities had lifted the warning after waves half the predicted size tickled the shores of Hawaii and tourists once again jammed beaches and restaurants.

Scientists acknowledged they overstated the threat, but defended their actions, saying they took the proper steps and learned the lessons of the 2004 Indonesian tsunami that killed thousands of people who didn't get enough warning.

"It's a key point to remember that we cannot end the warnings. Failure to warn is not an option for us," said Dai Lin Wang, an oceanographer at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii. "We cannot have a situation that we thought was no problem and then it's devastating. That just cannot happen."

Hundreds of thousands of people fled shorelines for higher ground Saturday in a panic that circled the Pacific Rim after scientists warned 53 nations and territories that a tsunami had been generated by the massive Chilean quake.

It was the largest-scale evacuation in Hawaii in years, if not decades. Emergency sirens blared throughout the day, the Navy moved ships out of Pearl Harbor, and residents hoarded gasoline, food and water in anticipation of a major disaster. Some supermarkets even placed limits on items like Spam because of the panic buying.

At least five people were killed by the tsunami on Robinson Crusoe Island off Chile's coast and huge waves devastated the port city of Talcahuano, near hard-hit Concepcion on Chile's mainland.

But the threat of monster waves that left Hawaii's sun-drenched beaches empty for hours never appeared — a stark contrast to the tidal surge that killed 230,000 people around the Indian Ocean in 2004 and flattened entire communities.

This time, waves of more than 5 feet were reported in Kahului Bay in Maui and in Hilo, on the eastern coast of Hawaii's Big Island, but did little damage. Predictions of wave height in some areas were off by as much as 50 percent.

In Tonga, where up to 50,000 people fled inland hours ahead of the tsunami, the National Disaster Office had reports of a wave up to 6.5 feet hitting a small northern island, with no indications of damage.

And in Japan, where authorities ordered 400,000 people out of coastal communities, the biggest wave was a 4-foot surge that hit the northern island of Hokkaido, flooding some piers.

Still, scientists offered no apologies for the warning and defended their work, all while worrying that the false alarm could lead to complacency among coastal residents — a disastrous possibility in the earthquake-prone Pacific Rim.

A similar quake in Chile in 1960 created a tsunami that killed about 140 people in Japan. The same surge hit Hawaii and devastated downtown Hilo, on the Big Island, killing 61 residents and wiping out more than 500 homes and businesses.

"If you give too many warnings and none of them materialize, then you lose your credibility," Wang said. "That's something that we have to deal with and we have to improve."

Despite some of the panic in Hawaii, public officials called the evacuation "perfect" and said it was a good test case that proved the system worked.

Chaos was at a minimum as people heeded evacuation orders and roads were free of the gridlock that can paralyze a region before a disaster. The smooth response occurred largely because the state had so long to prepare; Hawaii is nearly 7,000 miles from where the quake hit, and it took 15 hours for the tsunami to arrive.

"I hope everyone learned from this for next time, and there will be a next time," said Gerard Fryer, a geophysicist for the warning center.

The science of predicting tsunamis is difficult, given the vast size of the ocean and the volatile forces at work miles below the surface.

Scientists use an earthquake's magnitude and location as the basis for their predictions and then refine it constantly with data from more than 30 deep-water sensors stationed across the Pacific as the shock wave sweeps across the ocean floor.

The sensors, located at 15,000 to 20,000 feet beneath the surface, measure the weight of the water and beam it to buoys floating on the surface. Scientists then use the data to pinpoint where the surge is and when it will make landfall.

Coastal inundation models based on topographic mapping add another layer of analysis, helping scientists make assumptions about how the surge will behave in shallower waters and how it might affect shoreline communities.

"There are all sorts of assumptions that we make in trying to figure out how big the waves are going to be. If we can avoid some of those assumptions, maybe we can do a better job," said Fryer.

"If this event happened tomorrow, even with this knowledge, we would be forced to do the exact same thing."

Those models could be more accurate if scientists had more deep-water sensors and could build coastal inundation models for vast parts of the Pacific Rim where the topography hasn't yet been well-surveyed, Wang said.

Because complete data doesn't exist for every coastal area, scientists must play it safe in their wave predictions, he said.

"Even for Hawaii, we only have a forecast for less than 10 locations, we don't have inundation models for every coastal point in Hawaii and it's the same story for the U.S. mainland," Wang said. "We've got to be a little conservative. One point doesn't tell you that's going to be the maximum everywhere else."

In areas were inundation models exist, scientists' predictions were close to accurate, Wang said.

Residents and tourists alike in Hawaii said they weren't bothered by the evacuation and supported the scientists' actions — even though the waves never showed up.

Eugene Okamoto, 33, said he came to Honolulu from Hilo to visit some tourist attractions with his father and was disappointed the two had to cancel their plans because of the evacuation orders.

But Okamoto said his family understands the tsunami threat better than most because some of his relatives lived through the tidal surge in 1960. They remember how the water was sucked down the beach moments before the wave hit.

"My uncle was on the top floor when all the water washed away and all the kids ran out to grab the fish and before they could get back, the wave came. He was way up top, he saw all his friends get washed away and none of them were found, ever," Okamoto said, as he sat with his father in a hotel lobby. "They did the right thing."

bin Laden backs Democrats' Climate Initiatives

It looks as though Osama bin Laden wants to take action against Global Warming. The big question is whether he will hire Al Gore to take his case to the world. Reporters hope to question bin Laden on his views about the Cap-and-Trade proposals now before Congress. But, so far, he has refused to grant any interviews, preferring, instead, to voice his complaints about the world through the president of the US.

Bin Laden blasts US for climate change

Jan 29, 7:46 AM (ET)

By SALAH NASRAWI

CAIRO (AP) - Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has called for the world to boycott American goods and the U.S. dollar, blaming the United States and other industrialized countries for global warming, according to a new audiotape released Friday.

In the tape, broadcast in part on Al-Jazeera television, bin Laden warned of the dangers of climate change and says that the way to stop it is to bring "the wheels of the American economy" to a halt.

He blamed Western industrialized nations for hunger, desertification and floods across the globe, and called for "drastic solutions" to global warming, and "not solutions that partially reduce the effect of climate change."

Bin Laden has mentioned climate change and global warning in past messages, but the latest tape was his first dedicated to the topic. The speech, which included almost no religious rhetoric, could be an attempt by the terror leader to give his message an appeal beyond Islamic militants.

The al-Qaida leader also targeted the U.S. economy in the recording, calling for a boycott of American products and an end to the dollar's domination as a world currency.

"We should stop dealings with the dollar and get rid of it as soon as possible," he said. "I know that this has great consequences and grave ramifications, but it is the only means to liberate humanity from slavery and dependence on America."

He argued that such steps would also hamper Washington's war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The new message, whose authenticity could not immediately be confirmed, comes after a bin Laden tape released last week in which he endorsed a failed attempt to blow up an American airliner on Christmas Day.

Please -- Let's Have Some Global Warming

It's ffffrrrreeeezzzziiiinnnngggg out there...

January 7, 2010 Headlines:

Midwest bracing for heavy snow -- wind chills of 50 below!
Next Arctic Blast blows even colder...
Persistent cold tightens grip on nation...
CHILL MAP...
Britain's big snow shuts cities...
Arctic blast freezes Texas...
Weekend Freeze Looms for Gulf Coast...
Florida races to save crops...
ICE DELAYS FLIGHTS IN TAMPA...

January 4, 2010 Headlines:

Winter Could Be Worst in 25 Years for USA...
CHILL MAP...
3 Deaths Due To Cold in Memphis...
PAPER: GAS SUPPLIES RUNNING OUT IN UK...
Vermont sets 'all-time record for one snowstorm'...
Iowa temps 'a solid 30 degrees below normal'...
Seoul buried in heaviest snowfall in 70 years...
Historic ice build-up shuts down NJ nuclear power plant...
Beijing -- coldest in 40 years...
Miami shivers from coldest weather in decade...

The Fiction Of Climate Science

It has been said that it is always possible to sell more books and articles about Abraham Lincoln, Diets, and Doom & Gloom. A few decades ago the Doom coming our way was coming as a cold spell. Nuclear Winter. Then there was the Population Bomb. Mathusian arguments predicting shortages due to the overwhelming number of humans consuming declining quantities of vital resources always kicks up the blood pressure and anxiety of millions of Americans. We are still at it. Nothing new under the Sun.

Why the climatologists get it wrong.

Many of you are too young to remember, but in 1975 our government pushed "the coming ice age."

Random House dutifully printed "THE WEATHER CONSPIRACY … coming of the New Ice Age." This may be the only book ever written by 18 authors. All 18 lived just a short sled ride from Washington, D.C. Newsweek fell in line and did a cover issue warning us of global cooling on April 28, 1975. And The New York Times, Aug. 14, 1976, reported "many signs that Earth may be headed for another ice age."

OK, you say, that's media. But what did our rational scientists say?

In 1974, the National Science Board announced: "During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade. Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end…leading into the next ice age."

You can't blame these scientists for sucking up to the fed's mantra du jour. Scientists live off grants. Remember how Galileo recanted his preaching about the earth revolving around the sun? He, of course, was about to be barbecued by his leaders. Today's scientists merely lose their cash flow. Threats work.

In 2002 I stood in a room of the Smithsonian. One entire wall charted the cooling of our globe over the last 60 million years. This was no straight line. The curve had two steep dips followed by leveling. There were no significant warming periods. Smithsonian scientists inscribed it across some 20 feet of plaster, with timelines.

Last year, I went back. That fresco is painted over. The same curve hides behind smoked glass, shrunk to three feet but showing the same cooling trend. Hey, why should the Smithsonian put its tax-free status at risk? If the politicians decide to whip up public fear in a different direction, get with it, oh ye subsidized servants. Downplay that embarrassing old chart and maybe nobody will notice.

Sorry, I noticed.

It's the job of elected officials to whip up panic. They then get re-elected. Their supporters fall in line.

Al Gore thought he might ride his global warming crusade back toward the White House. If you saw his movie, which opened showing cattle on his farm, you start to understand how shallow this is. The United Nations says that cattle, farting and belching methane, create more global warming than all the SUVs in the world. Even more laughably, Al and his camera crew flew first class for that film, consuming 50% more jet fuel per seat-mile than coach fliers, while his Tennessee mansion sucks as much carbon as 20 average homes.

His PR folks say he's "carbon neutral" due to some trades. I'm unsure of how that works, but, maybe there's a tribe in the Sudan that cannot have a campfire for the next hundred years to cover Al's energy gluttony. I'm just not sophisticated enough to know how that stuff works. But I do understand he flies a private jet when the camera crew is gone.

The fall of Saigon in the '70s may have distracted the shrill pronouncements about the imminent ice age. Science's prediction of "A full-blown, 10,000 year ice age," came from its March 1, 1975 issue. The Christian Science Monitor observed that armadillos were retreating south from Nebraska to escape the "global cooling" in its Aug. 27, 1974 issue.

That armadillo caveat seems reminiscent of today's tales of polar bears drowning due to glaciers disappearing.

While scientists march to the drumbeat of grant money, at least trees don't lie. Their growth rings show what's happened no matter which philosophy is in power. Tree rings show a mini ice age in Europe about the time Stradivarius crafted his violins. Chilled Alpine Spruce gave him tighter wood so the instruments sang with a new purity. But England had to give up the wines that the Romans cultivated while our globe cooled, switching from grapes to colder weather grains and learning to take comfort with beer, whisky and ales.

Yet many centuries earlier, during a global warming, Greenland was green. And so it stayed and was settled by Vikings for generations until global cooling came along. Leif Ericsson even made it to Newfoundland. His shallow draft boats, perfect for sailing and rowing up rivers to conquer villages, wouldn't have stood a chance against a baby iceberg.

Those sustained temperature swings, all before the evil economic benefits of oil consumption, suggest there are factors at work besides humans.

Today, as I peck out these words, the weather channel is broadcasting views of a freakish and early snow falling on Dallas. The Iowa state extension service reports that the record corn crop expected this year will have unusually large kernels, thanks to "relatively cool August and September temperatures." And on Jan. 16, 2007, NPR went politically incorrect, briefly, by reporting that "An unusually harsh winter frost, the worst in 20 years, killed much of the California citrus, avocados and flower crops."

To be fair, those reports are short-term swings. But the longer term changes are no more compelling, unless you include the ice ages, and then, perhaps, the panic attempts of the 1970s were right. Is it possible that if we put more CO2 in the air, we'd forestall the next ice age?

I can ask "outrageous" questions like that because I'm not dependent upon government money for my livelihood. From the witch doctors of old to the elected officials today, scaring the bejesus out of the populace maintains their status.

Sadly, the public just learned that our scientific community hid data and censored critics. Maybe the feds should drop this crusade and focus on our health care crisis. They should, of course, ignore the life insurance statistics that show every class of American and both genders are living longer than ever. That's another inconvenient fact.

Dr. Climatology -- Or How We Learned to Stop Worrying About Real Problems Killing People NOW and Love the Imaginary

If Climatology has accomplished anything, it has put peoples heads in the clouds. Rather than solve problems plaguing billions of people around the world TODAY, Climatology has led people to ignore the present to focus on some distant future that will never arrive. Quite a trick. But, that's the essense of religious belief. We are now living the movie.

Global Warming and Mt. Kilimanjaro
The glaciers on the famous peak, receding for more than a century, attract many tourists; the people of Tanzania attract much less attention..

By BJøRN LOMBORG

Climate change has captured the attention of politicians around the world. The following article is part of a series, leading up to the United Nations conference on global warming in Copenhagen that starts this week, on how ordinary people in different countries view the issue:

Every year, more than 10,000 tourists are drawn to Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, driven in no small part by the fear that the mountain's magnificent ice will soon melt.

Mary Thomas lives not far from their path, on the southwestern slopes of that mountain, but tourists do not come to her town of Mungushi.

At 45, Mrs. Thomas is a widow. Her husband died of complications from HIV/AIDS; she too was diagnosed as HIV positive. "When my husband's family found out that I had HIV, they isolated me and took my house," she told a Copenhagen Consensus researcher in June. "Before I got HIV I never expected to live like this and be so poor. I had a good house and food on the table and I was living a good life."

Today, Mrs. Thomas lives in a small, two-room house with no electricity. The toilet is a hole in the ground outside the house. Her three children, all HIV negative, have been taken away by relatives. She worries about their care after her death.

She has heard talk of melting ice on Mount Kilimanjaro, and she has noticed less snow and rain and drier conditions since she was a child. "It worries me."

This, according to climate groups, is a critical and urgent problem. Greenpeace warns there could be no ice left on the mountain within just eight years. "This is the price we pay if climate change is allowed to go unchecked," warns the group.

Climate activists claim the receding ice is evidence of the need for developed countries to reduce carbon output. Actually, the glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro have been receding since 1890, according to research by G. Kaser, et al., published in the International Journal of Climatology (2004). They note that when Ernest Hemingway published "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" in 1936, the mountain had already lost more than half its surface ice area in the previous 56 years. This is more than it has lost in the 70 years since.

According to this study, and another published in Geophysical Research Letters (2006) by N.J. Kullen, et al., the reason the ice is disappearing is not warming temperatures, but a shift around 1880 toward drier climates. What we see today is a hangover from that climactic shift.

Even if some of their claims are questionable, climate activists have managed to promote local tourism and have done a great job at bringing the world's attention to the mountain's glaciers. But they are doing a poor job at bringing attention to the actual people of Tanzania.

For Mrs. Thomas, arguments over the state of the ice are irrelevant. When she was asked by a Copenhagen Consensus Center researcher what donors and the Tanzanian government should do, she doesn't think for long. "Education is the first priority," she says, "and it should provide proper understanding of HIV and reduce the stigma. The next priority is micro-finance so people can have the chance to become self-reliant."

As she puts it, "There is no need for ice on the mountain if there is no people around because of HIV/AIDS."

Truth Storms Over Global Warming Hoax

James Delingpole
James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including Welcome To Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future And It Doesn't Work, How To Be Right, and the Coward series of WWII adventure novels. His website is www.jamesdelingpole.com Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?

By James Delingpole Politics
Last updated: November 20th, 2009

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:

“In an odd way this is cheering news.”

But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

Manipulation of evidence:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” – Hadley CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. Hadley CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.

I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that’s sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.

The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view is now also the majority view.

Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.

But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true, it’s a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.

Taking the Heat of Global Warming

Looks like India and China, with almost half the world's population, prefer economic development to punishing regulations. What a shock. Meanwhile, even if the average global temperature rises a degree or two or three, who will complain? The citizens of China? Of India? Residents of Africa? Will Americans notice a difference?

If the average global temperature actually rises two or three degrees, the amount of moisture in the atmosphere will also increase. What does that mean? It means more rainfall. More fresh water dropping from the sky, available for drinking, irrigating fields and increasing crop yields.

In Africa more fresh water is desperately needed for drinking and to increase food supplies. In fact, the US needs more for the same reasons. There's more of us every day and we're eating a lot.

How do we ensure our continuing abundance of food here in the US? We can import some of it like we import oil. Or we can grow more here. But that will take more water. However, we cannot import fresh water. We can easily clean and treat waste water -- recycle it -- but we cannot increase the world's supply of fresh water. Only Nature can to that.

Global Warming would help.

Poorer Nations Reject a Target on Emission Cut

L’AQUILA, Italy — The world’s biggest developing nations, led by China and India, refused Wednesday to commit to specific goals for slashing heat-trapping gases by 2050, undercutting the drive to build a global consensus by the end of this year to reverse the threat of climate change.

As President Obama arrived for three days of talks with other leaders of the Group of 8 nations, negotiators for 17 leading polluters abandoned targets in a draft agreement for the meetings here. But negotiators embraced a goal of preventing temperatures from rising more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and developing nations agreed to make “meaningful” if unspecified reductions in emissions.

The mixed results underscored the challenges for Mr. Obama as he tries to use his first summit meeting of the Group of 8 powers to force progress toward a climate treaty. With Europe pressing for more aggressive action and Congress favoring a more restrained approach, Mr. Obama finds himself navigating complicated political currents at home and abroad.

If he cannot ultimately bring along developing countries, no climate deal will be effective.

Al Gore Praises North Korean Environmentalism

Though holding two Americans, North Korea has shown it is good for the Planet

The United States might send former US vice president Al Gore to Pyongyang to negotiate the release of two American journalists on trial in North Korea for illegal entry while he also reports on the nation's environmental successes.

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly did not rule out such a possibility when asked if it would make sense to send environmentalist Gore, who is also chairman of the California station Current TV, which employs the two journalists.

"It's a very, very sensitive issue, I'm not going to go into it," Kelly told reporters who pressed him on the matter. "But he wants to let the world know about the benefits of the North Korean environmental model while attempting to free the journalists," he added.

The two women, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, went on trial in North Korea Thursday on charges that could send them to a labor camp for years and further raise tensions with Washington following last week's nuclear test.

The TV reporters were detained by North Korean border guards on March 17 while researching a story about refugees fleeing the hardline communist state.

In a column published May 9 in the Washington Post, Victor Cha, a former adviser to president George W. Bush on North Korea, suggested that President Barack Obama's administration should send Gore to Pyongyang.

"The North Koreans would respect someone of his stature, and his stake in the issue would make his mission eminently credible," he added.

During his visit Gore will study and report on the country’s environmental efforts and policies. As many know, North Korea has been a leader in reducing and eliminating bad environmental habits that define the existence of all democratic and capitalistic nations.

Gore has previously commended North Korea for minimizing the damage done by its industrial organizations.

“North Korea”, he said, “has shown that it’s possible for a nation to exist with only a few factories that produce simple products. You won’t see vast industrial parks where large quantities of hazardous materials are used to construct products that are of little value to the people of this great nation.”

He also praised North Korea for its agricultural policies.

“Farmers in this great nation know that it is best to treat Mother Nature with kindness. That’s why they plant their fields by walking them with a seed bag over their shoulders and a sharp stick to put the seeds in the Earth.”

He also noted that obesity is not a problem in North Korea. Best of all, however, is the view of North Korea from the sky.

"At night", said Mr. Gore, "when our spy satellites pass over North Korea, they show a country with its lights turned out. These people know how to save energy. Unlike their South Korean neighbors, who live in a country lit up like Times Square on New Year's Eve."