Showing posts with label Activism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Activism. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

The Plot Thickens


A True Inquiry Into Climate & Weather (2/2): The Plot Thickens

by KIM GREENHOUSE on NOVEMBER 14, 2009
The plot really does thicken as we continue our inquiry into climate and weather. The verifiable data offered in this interview is both fascinating and disturbing. Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and climatologist Dr. David Legates (University of Delaware) brief us on key scientific data that cannot be overlooked or dismissed.
This conversation covers an extensive array of climate topics, including the sun’s role in the global climate system, the obstruction and politicization of science, and an honest look at polar bear populations.
Dr. David Legates
Dr. David Legates
I deeply appreciate the gift of real knowledge that these men have brought us. Speaking with clarity and passion, they identify numerous factors that leave the average activist and global warming advocate with a totally different understanding of what is really occurring. They display a rare courage in standing up for the integrity of verifiable science as they continue to speak truth to power against vicious attacks. Tune in and explore this incredibly complex field of inquiry with us!


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Monday, July 5, 2010

James Delingpole

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.

'Climate change sceptics have smaller members, uglier wives, dumber kids' says new study made up by warmists

 
Are there really no depths to which ManBearPig-worshippers will not stoop in order to shore up their intellectually, morally and scientifically bankrupt cause?
Apparently not, as we see from the latest “study” – based on a petty, spiteful, Stasi-like blacklist produced by an obscure Canadian warmist – outrageously aggrandised by being published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)
The study examined 1,372 scientists who had taken part in reviews of climate science or had put their name to statements regarding the key findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Scientists were grouped as “convinced” or “unconvinced”, and researchers examined how many times they had published papers on the climate.
The results showed that “unconvinced” scientists accounted for just three of the 100 most prolific authors on the subject, while papers by “convinced” scientists were more frequently cited in other research.
Well, no s***, Sherlock. And might this have anything to do, perchance, with the fact that – as the Climategate emails made abundantly clear – “unconvinced” scientists were deliberately shut out of the peer-review process by the “convinced” ones?
And how many scientists, with bachelor of science degrees or higher, have signed the Oregon Petition expressing doubts about Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW)? 31,000 plus.
And how many  of the supposed 2500 climate scientists responsible for the IPCC “consensus” were actively involved in the sections to do with AGW? 53.
And how many scientists does it require to successfully falsify – ie prove wrong – a shabby, tired old theory like “Phlogiston”, or “Geocentrism”, or “Dangerous, unprecedented Man Made Global Warming?” One.
But guess how BBC Radio 4 reported the story this morning? Yep. “98 per cent of scientists support global warming theory.” (Hat tip: Nick Mabbs)
Then again, since when did we expect any kind of honesty or decency from the Warmists? Have a look, for example, at this great analysis by the National Post’s Lawrence Solomon on how Warmist propagandists are using their useful idiots in the MSM to exaggerate the level of public credulousness in AGW.
In a New York Times op-ed, which has been much crowed-over by warmists, a Stanford university professor called Krosnick argued that – contrary to the impression given by every other opinion poll in the last three years – the majority of the US public is fully behind measures to ruin their economy in the name of combatting climate change.
In our survey, which was financed by a grant to Stanford from the National Science Foundation, 1,000 randomly selected American adults were interviewed by phone between June 1 and Monday. When respondents were asked if they thought that the earth’s temperature probably had been heating up over the last 100 years, 74 percent answered affirmatively. And 75 percent of respondents said that human behavior was substantially responsible for any warming that has occurred.
For many issues, any such consensus about the existence of a problem quickly falls apart when the conversation turns to carrying out specific solutions that will be costly. But not so here.
Fully 86 percent of our respondents said they wanted the federal government to limit the amount of air pollution that businesses emit, and 76 percent favored government limiting business’s emissions of greenhouse gases in particular. Not a majority of 55 or 60 percent — but 76 percent.
Solomon explains here how Krosnick rigs his questions in order to “hide the decline” in public support for AGW lunacy.
The best question of all, Krosnick found, came from adding an assumption of pessimism:” What do you think will be the most serious problem facing the world in the future if nothing is done to stop it?” When put this way, 25% of the public responded with “Global warming/the environment.” Krosnick doesn’t tell us how many of that 25% choose global warming versus the myriad of other environmental issues, such as air pollution, food and drinking water safety, wildlife and species protection, farmland or woodlands protection.
Krosnick recommends that pollsters ask his 25% question, believing it will obtain a result more useful for policy makers. He also chastises the press for interviewing global warming sceptics along with global warming advocates, saying this creates in the public mind the impression that the science is not settled on global warming. 6% of articles on global warming last year included the views of sceptics, a percentage Krosnick evidently views as too high.
Krosnick gets different results than other pollsters do by asking questions that some might consider bizarre. For example, when people told him that they didn’t believe global warming was happening, he asked them to pretend they did by asking them, “Assuming that global warming is happening, do you think a rise in the world’s temperature would be caused mostly by things people do, mostly by natural causes, or about equally by things people do and by natural causes? He then lumped the pretend response from people who don’t believe in global warming with a similar question asked of people who weren’t pretending about their belief in global warming. The result of the merger of these two groups was: 30% blame global warming on humans, 25% blame global warming on natural causes, and 45% believe humans and natural causes are about equally to blame. In the New York Times oped, Krosnick summarized this finding by pretenders and believers as “75% of respondents said that human behaviour was substantially responsible for any warming that has occurred,” even though many of those 75% didn’t believe that global warming was happening at all.
So when dealing with the Warmist lobby, always remember these helpful tips: sup with a long spoon, know that they’re lying from the fact that their lips are moving, and when they leave, make sure to count your fingers and your silverware.

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Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Global Warming Sceptics and the Gaia theory


Why some scientists are global warming sceptics

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By BETTY CAPLANPosted Sunday, January 3 2010 at 18:41

NOT SURPRISINGLY, THE COpenhagen summit was not a great success, partly because there are so many disputes about the nature of the problem itself.
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Climate change sceptics believe the earth is a self-regulating mechanism that will adapt to changes, regardless of human activity and that the earth’s history is full of variations in temperature.
Many trace their belief back to James Lovelock’s Gaia theory (gaia means earth in Greek) which came to him in 1965 when the astrologer Carl Sagan told him of the “faint young sun paradox”.
This states that while the sun was 25 per cent cooler when the earth was young, it never froze as it should have. “It was then that the image of the earth as a living organism was able to regulate its temperature and chemistry at a comfortable steady state emerged in my mind,” he writes in his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning.
THE HISTORY OF CLIMATE SCIENCE goes back a long way, but it was the Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenius, who first realised in 1904 that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was increasing because of the burning of coal, which must eventually affect earth’s climate.
Today, a whole scientific discipline called Earth System Science is devoted to understanding the way life regulates conditions such as the temperature on the earth surface. So does the earth have mechanisms to restore its own balance?
It is said that rain forests like the Amazon actually generate their own rainfall and coral reefs increase cloudiness in the air above them through the production of cloud-seeding chemicals, thereby shading themselves from dangerous ultraviolet radiation.
Palaeontologist Peter Ward in The Medea Hypothesis (whose title derives from the mythical Greek heroine who, when jilted by her lover Jason, killed their children in revenge) says: “Earth life is inherently selfish and ultimately biocidal”. He insists that the unit of evolution is the species, not the biosphere “and from this accrues a vicious uncaring lethality toward other species that is one of the three most basic characteristics of life itself.”
From the great methane disaster of 3.7 billion years ago (when the spread of early methane-producing life-forms is thought to have created a “cold buffer” in the atmosphere, which almost ended life on Earth) to the last of the ice ages 20,000 years ago, Ward declares it was life itself that destabilised the climate.
Thus our over-population, destruction of biodiversity and greenhouse gas pollution will soon bring about another great extinction. Lovelock argues that the earth’s system of self-regulation is, however, being overwhelmed by greenhouse gas pollution and that in one of the jumps that is characteristic of its behaviour, it will soon evolve from its “current cool state” into a dramatically hotter one.
Chaos theory prevents scientists from calculating exactly when this might happen, but Lovelock predicts that a new climatic leap will occur in the next few years or decades and will involve an abrupt increase in average global surface temperature of 9°C, triggering the collapse of our global civilisation and the near extinction of humanity itself.
He differs from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which predicts a lesser figure of 2-3°C, because this has not taken into account the habitual temperature jumps of the past. There are indications that Lovelock’s gloom is justified: prior to the Industrial Revolution, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million. Today it is 390ppm.
HE ARGUES THAT IT IS NOT TOO LATE to save the planet — we will just have to adapt. Cutting back damaging land practices such as forest clearance is helpful, but he doesn’t think that developing biofuels and renewable energy is much use because they involve more land clearance and thus a diminution of food supply.
But although this may be true in the case of ethanol, it is not true of more advanced techniques that derive biofuels from algae or crop and other waste. Wind and solar sources are dismissed as unable to deliver a sufficiently large and consistent power supply; nuclear energy is seen to be the only salvation.
But there are “smart grid” solutions for using intermittent sources of supply and Lovelock, at 91, has not taken on board the improvements that have been made to wind and solar energy. Nevertheless, as the great guru whose perspective is broad enough to include ethics, philosophy and moral values, he is still worth listening to. We need to change our way of life regardless. Ms Caplan is a freelance writer and education consultant (betty.caplan1@gmail.com)

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