Title: Global Warming Did Not Cause The Japanese Earthquake (new "Whirlpool" carbon tax) Source:
Infowars.com URL Source:http://www.infowars.com/global-warm ... cause-the-japanese-earthquake/ Published:Mar 11, 2011 Author:Paul Joseph Watson Post Date:2011-03-11 16:29:48 by Hondo68 Keywords:enviro-fascist agenda, must pay an indulgence tax, own carbon trading schemes Views:13949 Comments:14
Just hours after the horrific earthquake and tsunami devastated coastal areas of Japan, global warming alarmists like the BBC are already injecting climate change propaganda into their coverage of the story, hastily exploiting the tragedy as a vehicle through which to push their increasingly desperate and discredited enviro-fascist agenda.
If you thought that climate change alarmists wouldn’t be so insensitive as to build their warped argument on the bodies of freshly dead corpses, then think again. Within 24 hours there’ll be a whole slew of neo-libs pointing to the suffering in Japan as a reason why we should hand over more untold trillions to globalists in the form of a carbon tax.
The BBC is already at it – in a discussion about a whirlpool caused by the tsunami, BBC reporter Humphrey Hawksley hastily piggy backs a dubious argument about the tiny South Pacific nation of Tuvalu disappearing under the threat of global warming on the back of dramatic pictures out of Japan. By making this completely disjointed connection, Hawksley implicitly suggests that man-made climate change also contributed to the Japanese earthquake.
In reality, alarmists’ lies surrounding Tuvalu are well documented. Al Gore’s claim in his Inconvenient Truth film that the residents of Tuvalu all had to evacuate to New Zealand as climate refugees because rising sea levels were swallowing up their homes was ruled incorrect by a British judge.
“There was no evidence of climate refugees from the Pacific having to be evacuated to New Zealand or anywhere else to escape rising seas,” explains Andrew Bolt.
While environmentalists like Professor Mohammed Dore ignorantly claim that Tuvalu is already completely uninhabited due to climate change, the 12,000 residents of the island must not have been paying much attention as their number has doubled in the past three decades.
As Bolt explains, the government of Tuvalu has cleverly exploited the doomsday proclamations of alarmists to milk grants and aid money paid for by western taxpayers, laughing all the way to the bank as the land mass of the island actually expands.
It was already clear from the Australian-funded South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project that sea levels in the region were rising only microscopically, much as they’d done for centuries before the invention of the motor car or the light bulb.
But now New Scientist reports that however fast the seas are rising, Tuvalu and many other low-lying Pacific islands are so far rising even faster, thanks to coral debris, coral growth, land reclamation and deposits of sediment. Some have grown by as much as a third.
Auckland University’s Associate Prof Paul Kench, one of the two authors of the study, said he compared historical pictures from the past 60 years to satellite images of 27 Pacific islands.
“Eighty per cent of the islands we’ve looked at have either remained about the same or, in fact, (grown) larger,” he said.
But the facts don’t come into the equation when you’re trying to enforce the doctrine of what amounts to a religious dogma.
So before the likes of Al Gore, Danny Glover, and the San Francisco Chronicle, who all blamed last year’s Haiti earthquake on global warming, along with the rest of the climate change cultists attempt to exploit the latest natural disaster for political grist, it is important to stress that earthquakes are caused by tectonic plate movements and have been for thousands of years – they are not caused by Bubba driving his SUV down the highway.
An earthquake occurs in Japan every 5 minutes because, as the Telegraph’s Aislinn Laing explains, “Tokyo is situated on Japan’s main Honshu island which is turn sits at the intersection of three continental plates, the Eurasian, Pacific and Philippine Sea plates, which are slowly grinding against each other, building up enormous seismic pressure that every so often is realised with ferocious force.”
Massive earthquakes were killing humans in staggering numbers before the onset of heavy industry, ubiquitous car ownership and increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, and they will continue to kill humans as long as we are on the planet. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake was similar in strength to today’s Japanese quake and it killed over 3,000 people, the greatest loss of life from a natural disaster in California’s history.
The horrifying consequences of the biggest earthquake to hit Japan since records began are only just beginning to be discovered, with the tsunami that followed causing massive devastation and engulfing cities and airports, and leading to the declaration of a nuclear emergency.
But that won’t stop climate change alarmists from offensively hijacking the opportunity to lecture the rest of us about how we caused the carnage by daring to maintain a decent standard of living, and how we must pay an indulgence tax to the likes of Al Gore, Maurice Strong, the Rothschilds and a gaggle of other globalists who own the carbon trading schemes.
Earthquakes are called natural disasters for a reason – they are not caused by emissions of that deadly, poisonous, toxic, hateful gas known as carbon dioxide, the life-giving substance that humans exhale and plants breathe.
However, this fact won’t give pause to alarmists desperate to sink their teeth into a new tragedy to reinvigorate momentum behind their failing effort to completely eviscerate the western middle class and concurrently destroy the third world’s hopes of ever lifting themselves out of poverty.
Poster Comment:
Beware, there's a enviro-fascist "whirlpool" about to suck all the money out of your wallet!
Al Gore's movie is probably more factual than your article.
"The bottom line is that it is 90 percent accurate," says Foley. "Compare that to the garbage put out by the global warming skeptics, which is ninety nine percent inaccurate." Parry described An Inconvenient Truth as "pretty accurate." He added a slight qualification. "For the American movie industry."
In their zeal to draw attention to the cause, even Nobel peace prize laureates can make mistakes or shade the truth a little. I award Al Gore one Pinocchio.
Definition: One Pinocchio
Some shading of the facts. Selective telling of the truth. Some omissions and exaggerations, but no outright falsehoods.
You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you. Ludwig von Mises in a letter to Ayn Rand
Parry described An Inconvenient Truth as "pretty accurate." He added a slight qualification. "For the American movie industry."
Well, THERE'S a ringing endoresment - yessirree.
That's a 'qualification' wide enough for even Michael Moore to fit through.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________ Political tags -- such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth -- are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” -- Robert A Heinlein
"The bottom line is that it is 90 percent accurate," says (uber moonbat climatologist) Foley.
"An INconvenient Truth" Is a Pack of Lies
Before we get too hyped up about this move, understand that it's a piece of political propaganda.
Here is information from an article by someone who is fairly sold on human-induced global warming:
http://www.reason.com/rb/rb061606.shtml
Take sea level rise for example. Gore spends a lot of time talking about how dramatic melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps that could raise sea level by 20 feet by 2100.
Well, the "consensus" of climate scientists as represented in the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is that sea level is likely to rise between 4 inches to 35 inches with a central value of 19 inches. Nineteen inches is not nothing and is 3 times greater than the sea level rise the world experienced during the 20th century, but Manhattan and most of Florida will most likely still be above water in 2100.
Gore shows that many mountain glaciers are melting away all around the world—glaciers in Alaska, Europe and Mount Kilimanjaro—are responding to increased warming. (Though the glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro seem to be melting away because of changes in rainfall patterns rather than to increased heat. Of course, it is possible that the shift in rainfall is the result of global warming.)
As further evidence of warming, Gore notes that permafrost is melting in parts of Alaska and Siberia. The temperatures in central Siberia are thought to have increased by 3 degrees Celsius over the past 40 years. A Russian study in 2004 found that the average temperatures in Siberia during the Holocene Climatic Optimum around 6000 years ago warmed up by 3 to 9 degrees celcius in the winter, and by 2 to 6 degrees celcius in the summer. Due to changes in the earth's orbit which affect how much sunlight reaches the surface, pretty much the entire Arctic was warmer than now 6000 years ago. Which brings me to the polar bears.
Gore shows an animation of a polar bear (very reminiscent of the Coca Cola bears) swimming pitifully in the sea trying to haul itself up onto the last piece of ice floating in the Arctic Ocean. In 2002, the World Wildlife Fund issued a report warning that global warming was endangering polar bears. Arctic sea ice is thawing sooner and this means that the bears who hunt seals on the ice have fewer opportunities to feed themselves. This week saw an alarming report that hungry polar bears are turning cannibal. Yet, the WWF report itself found that most bear populations are either stable or increasing (see page 9 of the report). And remember, polar bears evidently survived when Arctic temperatures were warmer 6000 years ago. Of course, if predictions that the entire Arctic Ocean will be ice free in 100 year turn out to be right, then the polar bears will have a problem. For example, he pointed the heat wave that hit Europe in 2003 that killed some 35,000 people with temperatures hitting 104 degrees Fahrenheit. But historically such temperatures are not unknown to Europe. In July 1921, a heat wave hit much of Western Europe with the temperature reaching 104 degrees Fahrenheit in Strasbourg, France. Gore also pointed to the monsoon storm in 2005 that dumped 37 inches of rain in 24 hours on Mumbai India. But storms like that have happened before—even in the United States. In 1921, Thrall, Texas experienced a 24-hour downpour of 38 inches and Alvin, Texas was soaked with 43 inches over a 24-hour period in 1979.
Gore points to the devastation of the Hurricane Katrina and flatly says that global warming is increasing the intensity of hurricanes. But that claim is hotly contested by climate scientists. For example, a recent study in Geophysical Research Letters finds "based on data over the last twenty years, no significant increasing trend is evident in global ACE [accumulated cyclone energy] or in Category 4–5 hurricanes."
At a climatic moment (pun intended) in the film, Gore traces a red temperature line inexorably increasing while he declares that 10 of the hottest years on record occurred in the last 14 years. Then he asserts that 2005 was the hottest ever. Pause for effect. Basically, Gore's general point is right but it's just irritating for him not to acknowledge that 2005 is statistically indistinguishable from 1998. But doing that would not have had the quite the same dramatic effect in the film.
Of course, the increase of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels is thought to be the chief contemporary driver of global warming. All things being equal higher carbon dioxide levels lead to higher temperatures. Gore illustrates the relation between carbon dioxide and temperatures with a chart showing data taken from ice cores from Antarctica. These ice cores contain tiny bubbles of air from the earth's atmosphere all the way back to 650,000 years ago. Scientists measure them to see the proportion of various gases that were in the atmosphere when the bubbles were trapped. Gore points out that temperatures and carbon dioxide go up in tandem over the last four ice ages. But wait—Gore fails to mention something interesting. Temperatures go up first and then the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases some 800 or more years later.
In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore makes a big deal about how his Harvard professor, oceanographer Roger Revelle, influenced his views about the dangers of global warming. A genuinely gifted scientist, Revelle was responsible for the creation of the Mauna Loa Observatory that has been measuring the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since 1958. However, Professor Revelle co-authored an article in the house journal of the Cosmos Club in Washington, DC in 1991 which concluded, “The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.”
I give An Inconvenient Truth a tepid 2 stars.
That is just one writer. There are plenty of others who find that the movie is a piece of hype and not a great movie at that.
Here is some interesting data:
http://forums.lohud.com/viewtopic.php?t=975
Antarctica has been cooling and gaining mass. A miniscule section, the Antarctic Peninsula, has been warming and is the focus of most of the studies.
Was it inconvenient to consider that glacial retreat on Kilimanjaro is caused by a reduction in moisture that began in the early 1900’s and deforestation, not by warming (2004 articles in International Journal of Climatology and the Journal of Geophysical Research)? Or Nature magazine ("African Ice Under Wraps" - 11/24/03): “Although it's tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain's foothills is the more likely culprit.”
The quacks had a different calamity in the 70’s. Newsweek’s “The Cooling World” (4/28/75) noted “ominous signs Earth’s weather” was changing “dramatically” and may portend “a drastic decline in food production… perhaps only 10 years from now. …” The evidence was so massive that meteorologists, who were “almost unanimous” were “hard-pressed to keep up with it.” It seem that that April had “the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded” and reports by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fanned the flames.
What is not moral is to distort the truth for political ends — which is precisely what has been done with the ice-caps story. Here’s what you haven’t read.
The world has two major ice sheets, one covering most of Greenland and the other covering most of Antarctica. While melting sea ice has captured its share of attention, it’s the land sheets that matter. Sea ice is already in the water, so its melting doesn’t raise ocean levels. But if land ice melts, the sea gets higher. Time wants you to be very worried about this: “By some estimates, the entire Greenland ice sheet would be enough to raise global sea levels 23 ft., swallowing up large parts of coastal Florida and most of Bangladesh. The Antarctic holds enough ice to raise sea levels more than 215 ft.” Farewell, Dhaka, we shall miss thee.
Or not. Those numbers sound impressive, but the chances of the ice caps’ fully melting are about as high as the chances of Time’s giving you an honest story on global warming. The truth is that there’s no solid evidence supporting the conclusion that we’ve locked the ice caps in to a melting trend. Let’s look at Antarctica and Greenland in turn.
About Antarctica, University of Virginia climate scientist Patrick J. Michaels is direct: “What has happened is that Antarctica has been gaining ice.” He explains that there has been a cooling trend over most of Antarctica for decades. At the same time, one tiny portion of the continent — the Antarctic Peninsula — has been warming, and its ice has been melting. The peninsula constitutes only about 2 percent of Antarctica’s total area, but almost every study of melting Antarctic ice you’ve heard of focuses on it.
So what about the rest of the continent? In 2002, Nature published a study by Peter Doran that looked at Antarctic temperature trends from 1966 to 2000. What it found was that about two-thirds of Antarctica got colder over that period. At the same time, Antarctica has gotten snowier, and as the snow has accumulated the ice sheet has grown. Snowfall is probably rising because water temperatures around Antarctica have gotten slightly — repeat, slightly — warmer. As a result, there is more surface evaporation, making for higher humidity and more precipitation. Higher humidity also means more clouds, which might explain the cooler weather.
How much ice has Antarctica gained? In a 2005 study published in Science, Curt Davis used satellite measurements to calculate changes in the ice sheet’s elevation, and found that it gained 45 billion tons of ice per year between 1992 and 2003. Far from flooding the coasts, that’s enough to lower sea levels by roughly 0.12 millimeters annually.
This doesn’t mean the trend of increasing Antarctic ice will continue forever. Science captured headlines in March when it published a study by Isabella Velicogna arguing that, between 2002 and 2005, Antarctica has been losing ice mass. Velicogna used a pair of satellites to measure the gravitational pull exerted by the Antarctic ice sheet, which in turn allowed her to calculate its mass. Her data suggest that, over the past three years, the sheet has lost about 152 cubic kilometers of ice per year. That would be the equivalent of about 0.4 millimeters of annual sea-level rise.
But three years do not a trend make. To begin with, such a short sampling period is a blip in the slow rhythms of climate change. Moreover, 2002 — the year in which the study began — was a high-water mark for Antarctic ice, so it’s not too surprising to see some decline since then. Alarmism over Velicogna’s study is on the order of going to the beach at high tide, drawing a line at the water’s edge, and fretting a few hours later that the oceans are drying up.
And Greenland? Various studies show that warmer temperatures are causing the ice sheet there to lose mass at the margins. But, as in Antarctica, higher sea temperatures are also causing greater snowfall and building up ice in the interior. As Richard Lindzen of MIT observes, “If you’re just going to look at what’s falling off the sides and ignore what’s collecting on top, that’s not exactly kosher.” The question is whether the net change is positive or negative.
Earlier this year, Eric Rignot and Pannir Kanagaratnam published a study in Science that used satellite measurements to calculate ice loss around Greenland’s coasts. They also used models to determine how much ice was vanishing from surface melt, and how much was accumulating from greater snowfall. Adding it all up, they got a decade of deficits: 91 cubic kilometers of ice lost in 1996, rising to 224 cubic kilometers in 2005. That translates to a sea-level rise of 0.23 millimeters in 1996 and 0.57 millimeters in 2005.
But, as the web publication CO2 Science has pointed out, their model-based estimate of the ice gain in Greenland’s interior was implausibly small. In fact, Science had earlier published a study by Ola Johannessen that used satellite measurements to determine how much the ice sheet was growing. Johannessen found that, between 1992 and 2003, it was gaining on average 5.4 centimeters of elevation per year.
That may not sound like a lot, but it adds up. Michaels, the University of Virginia professor, calculates that it amounts to about 74 cubic kilometers of ice per year. Rignot and Kanagaratnam could have subtracted that number from their estimate of coastal ice loss, which would have given them a negative total only for the past five years: 17 cubic kilometers lost in 2000, rising to 92 cubic kilometers in 2005. That would be equivalent to only 0.04 millimeters of sea-level rise in 2000 and 0.23 millimeters in 2005.
Add all the numbers from Greenland and Antarctica up, and you get a rather piddling total. In 2005, Jay Zwally of NASA published a study in the Journal of Glaciology that looked at the ice-mass changes for both Greenland and Antarctica from 1992 to 2002. He concluded that the total ice loss was equivalent to a sea-level rise of just 0.05 millimeters per year. At that rate, it would take the oceans a millennium to gain 5 centimeters, and a full 20,000 years to rise by a meter. To the hills, anyone? A LONGSTANDING PATTERN Granted, the Zwally study doesn’t include the last three years — years in which, according to some measurements, Antarctica has switched from gaining ice to losing it, and Greenland’s rate of loss has accelerated. But you don’t need to invoke man-made global warming to explain what’s going on.
Consider Greenland again. Yes, temperatures there are warmer than they were a decade ago. But many climate scientists think this is the result of a phenomenon called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) — a pattern of slow, repeating changes in the ocean’s surface temperatures. The AMO affects both the Atlantic tropics and the regions farther north. When the AMO is in its positive phase, temperatures rise in both places — which should cause more Caribbean hurricanes, and increase the speed at which Greenland’s glaciers discharge into the sea. This appears to be just what is happening. “The AMO changed from negative to positive in 1995,” Michaels wrote on Tech Central Station. “Since then hurricanes have become very active and glacier output has been accelerating.” Is this man’s fault? Models suggest that the AMO has been going on for at least 1,400 years. Maybe things would have turned out differently had Charlemagne signed the Kyoto Protocol, but the odds are against it.
In fact, we have temperature records indicating that Greenland was as warm as it is today during the first half of the 20th century. From 1920 to 1930, Greenland saw significant warming, and temperatures stayed high through the ’40s. A team of scientists led by Petr Chylek looked at Greenland’s temperature record in a study forthcoming from Geophysical Research Letters. They write that the increase in Greenland’s temperature between 1920 and 1930 was “of a similar magnitude” to the increase between 1995 and 2005. But the earlier warming happened faster: “The rate of warming in 1920–1930 was about 50% higher.” 2003 was a hot year, but “the years 2004 and 2005 were closer to normal[,] being well below temperatures reached in [the] 1930s and 1940s.” Moreover, “although . . . 1995–2005 was relatively warm, almost all decades within 1915 to 1965 were even warmer.”
Roman Genn
If today’s temperatures are causing Greenland’s coastal ice to slide into the sea, it must have been positively galloping there 80 years ago. That’s significant, because the warming period in the early 20th century took place well before fossil-fuel burning could have triggered global warming. So we can’t say with any confidence that what we’re seeing in Greenland today is our fault. Chylek’s team concludes its study with the observation, “We find no evidence to support the claims that the Greenland ice sheet is melting due to increased temperature caused by increased atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.”
As with Greenland, so with the world. There is no consensus that human activity is the main cause of climate change. Reluctant though one is to question Time’s authority in matters scientific, it’s simply wrong when it declares: “In the past five years or so, the serious debate has quietly ended. Global warming, even most skeptics have concluded, is the real deal, and human activity has been causing it.”
What we know is that the global average temperature has risen by about 1 degree Celsius or less since the late 1800s. We also know that industrial activity has raised atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations, and that this increase should make things warmer. But there is wide disagreement about the extent to which carbon-dioxide emissions are responsible for the warming we’ve seen so far, and how much warming they will cause in the future. Fred Singer of George Mason University points out that “we have historic [temperature] records in Europe going back a thousand years. It was much warmer then than today. The Arctic was much warmer a thousand years ago than it is today. Polar bears survived. The ice caps survived.” And data from ice cores suggest that previous interglacial periods were warmer than the one we’re going through now.
Moreover, the models scientists use to predict the effects of carbon-dioxide emissions are biased to overpredict global warming. They assume that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will increase by about 1 percent a year. In fact, this is more than twice the observed rate. In the last ten years, the average increase was 0.49 percent; in the decade before that, it was 0.42 percent; and in the decade before that, it was 0.43 percent. But scientists keep feeding the models 1 percent. That’s more than a 100 percent margin of error. Three cheers for precision.
It’s not surprising, then, that actual warming in recent years has been lower than the models say it should have been. By creating a false sense of alarm, the models make the ice-cap debate much shriller than it should be. For example, the authors of the Science study that Time refers to were able to predict a sea-level rise of several meters only because they took as Gospel the 1 percent–per–year CO2 increase. That gave them a tripling of atmospheric CO2 by 2100 and a quadrupling by 2130. But as Michaels points out, observed data suggest this quadrupling won’t happen till 2269. “By then,” he writes, “energy-production technology will probably have turned over two or three times and this will never have become an issue.”
THE WORSE THE BETTER Why are scientists using the wrong numbers? Richard Lindzen of MIT thinks that, while most scientists were originally agnostic on the question whether human activity was causing global warming, “environmentalists and the media would exaggerate.” That eventually built up a public concern, and politicians responded by throwing research dollars at scientists. If global warming turned out not to be a problem, those dollars would go away. Better to keep us worried: “You’ve developed a scientific community that will do whatever it needs to do to make sure the answer isn’t obtained. Why should taxpayers pay for people not to find an answer?”
Lindzen doesn’t mean that there is a conspiracy among scientists, but rather that the funding process gives an incentive toward pessimism. If you have doubts about this, consider how frequently climate scientists tell us that things are worse than we thought. If a scientific study isn’t biased in such a way as to look for an alarming outcome, the odds that its findings will be better than expected are equal to the odds that they will be worse than expected. In other words, it’s a coin toss; an unbiased research process should produce better-than-expected results and worse-than-expected results in roughly equal proportion. Michaels got interested in this notion. He looked at a single day last December when 15 findings on global warming were released to the press. Fourteen fell into the worse-than-expected category. But if none of the studies that produced the findings was biased, the odds of getting a 14-to-1 ratio are less than 1 in 2,000.
Of course, even if man-made global warming is the primary cause of the mild temperature and sea-level rises being observed, this doesn’t settle the question of what to do about it. The environmental lobby’s answer is: Ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Time isn’t even subtle about it, calling George W. Bush’s environmental record “dismal” and specifically citing his abandonment of Kyoto. But he abandoned it for good reason. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the treaty would cost the American economy $300 billion to $400 billion a year. Any decision about whether to pay such a price should be based on cost-benefit analysis. What, then, is the benefit?
In a word, nothing. Kyoto wouldn’t stop whatever warming is caused by greenhouse-gas emissions; it would just slow it. And it would barely do that. Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research calculated that the full global implementation of Kyoto would prevent 0.07 degrees Celsius of global warming by 2050, an outcome that is all but undetectable. To put a dent in CO2 levels, you’d need much greater emissions reductions than Kyoto calls for. Jerry Mahlman of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, for example, has called Kyoto a “first step” and said that “30 Kyotos might do the job.”
Thirty Kyotos would also come at the price of economic collapse. When it’s not even clear that the warming we’ve seen is hurting us — many argue that it’s a boon, citing its benefits to agriculture and its potential to make severe climates more hospitable — such draconian solutions should be unthinkable. And if it turns out that carbon dioxide is hurting the planet, it’s probably doing so at such a gradual pace that the best solution is to wait for markets to produce new innovations in energy technology. (And are we finally far enough away from Three Mile Island to utter the word “nuclear”?)
In the meantime, let’s stick with what we know — about melting ice, and about global warming generally. We’re not sure that we have a problem. If we do, we don’t know that we’re the ones causing it.
There is much less of a "consensus" on the matter than Gore claims.
Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."
Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. "Climate experts" is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field.
"While many are highly skilled researchers, they generally do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate change," explains former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball. "They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies." Here is a small sample of the side of the debate we almost never hear:
Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years." Patterson asked the committee, "On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"
Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and "hundreds of other studies" reveal: on all time scales, there is very good correlation between Earth's temperature and natural celestial phenomena such changes in the brightness of the Sun.
Dr. Boris Winterhalter, former marine researcher at the Geological Survey of Finland and professor in marine geology, University of Helsinki, takes apart Gore's dramatic display of Antarctic glaciers collapsing into the sea. "The breaking glacier wall is a normally occurring phenomenon which is due to the normal advance of a glacier," says Winterhalter. "In Antarctica the temperature is low enough to prohibit melting of the ice front, so if the ice is grounded, it has to break off in beautiful ice cascades. If the water is deep enough icebergs will form."
Dr. Wibj–rn KarlÈn, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden, admits, "Some small areas in the Antarctic Peninsula have broken up recently, just like it has done back in time. The temperature in this part of Antarctica has increased recently, probably because of a small change in the position of the low pressure systems."
But KarlÈn clarifies that the 'mass balance' of Antarctica is positive - more snow is accumulating than melting off. As a result, Ball explains, there is an increase in the 'calving' of icebergs as the ice dome of Antarctica is growing and flowing to the oceans. When Greenland and Antarctica are assessed together, "their mass balance is considered to possibly increase the sea level by 0.03 mm/year - not much of an effect," KarlÈn concludes.
The Antarctica has survived warm and cold events over millions of years. A meltdown is simply not a realistic scenario in the foreseeable future.
Gore tells us in the film, "Starting in 1970, there was a precipitous drop-off in the amount and extent and thickness of the Arctic ice cap." This is misleading, according to Ball: "The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology."
KarlÈn explains that a paper published in 2003 by University of Alaska professor Igor Polyakov shows that, the region of the Arctic where rising temperature is supposedly endangering polar bears showed fluctuations since 1940 but no overall temperature rise. "For several published records it is a decrease for the last 50 years," says KarlÈn
Dr. Dick Morgan, former advisor to the World Meteorological Organization and climatology researcher at University of Exeter, U.K. gives the details, "There has been some decrease in ice thickness in the Canadian Arctic over the past 30 years but no melt down. The Canadian Ice Service records show that from 1971-1981 there was average, to above average, ice thickness. From 1981-1982 there was a sharp decrease of 15% but there was a quick recovery to average, to slightly above average, values from 1983-1995. A sharp drop of 30% occurred again 1996-1998 and since then there has been a steady increase to reach near normal conditions since 2001."
Concerning Gore's beliefs about worldwide warming, Morgan points out that, in addition to the cooling in the NW Atlantic, massive areas of cooling are found in the North and South Pacific Ocean; the whole of the Amazon Valley; the north coast of South America and the Caribbean; the eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caucasus and Red Sea; New Zealand and even the Ganges Valley in India. Morgan explains, "Had the IPCC used the standard parameter for climate change (the 30 year average) and used an equal area projection, instead of the Mercator (which doubled the area of warming in Alaska, Siberia and the Antarctic Ocean) warming and cooling would have been almost in balance."
Gore's point that 200 cities and towns in the American West set all time high temperature records is also misleading according to Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. "It is not unusual for some locations, out of the thousands of cities and towns in the U.S., to set all-time records," he says. "The actual data shows that overall, recent temperatures in the U.S. were not unusual."
Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, "The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."
In April sixty of the world's leading experts in the field asked Prime Minister Harper to order a thorough public review of the science of climate change, something that has never happened in Canada. Considering what's at stake - either the end of civilization, if you believe Gore, or a waste of billions of dollars, if you believe his opponents - it seems like a reasonable request.
Again, this is a piece of political propaganda promoting an agenda that many people think would most likely be economically harmful to the United States, based on science that is questionable. Yet everybody is getting alarmed about it as if it were indisputable truth.
Now, I know I’m not going to change the minds of any of the True Believers…those who read all of Reverend Al’s sermons, and say things like, “You know, global warming can mean warmer OR colder, wetter OR drier, cloudier OR sunnier, windier OR calmer, …”. Can I get an ‘amen’??
Talk about putting red meat in front of a raging bull . . .
And that sound you hear is some poster's heads exploding
_____________________________________________________________________________________________ Political tags -- such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth -- are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” -- Robert A Heinlein
There has to be glabull warming. There was snow on the ground just 2 days ago. It is now all gone.
Have you noticed that the hours of daylight are increasing, too?
Maybe the Earth's rotation is slowing down, or we're moving closer to the Sun. . . .
_____________________________________________________________________________________________ Political tags -- such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth -- are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” -- Robert A Heinlein
I have this theory. My theory is that the sun causes global warming and that the moon causes global cooling. The thing I am still studying and trying to figure out is one anomaly. You see some nights the moon isn't out but it still gets colder. I expect to have this problem solved someday in the future.
"The bottom line is that it is 90 percent accurate," says (uber moonbat climatologist) Foley.
Here is information from an article by someone who is fairly sold on human-induced global warming:
"On balance Gore gets it more right than wrong on the science (we'll leave the policy stuff to another time), but he undercuts his message by becoming the opposite of a global warming denier. He's a global warming exaggerator." Ronald Bailey
Hmmm - pretty much what the other guy said.
You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you. Ludwig von Mises in a letter to Ayn Rand
How is "more right than wrong" from another GW exaggerist himself getting it 90% right?
Now, I know I’m not going to change the minds of any of the True Believers…those who read all of Reverend Al’s sermons, and say things like, “You know, global warming can mean warmer OR colder, wetter OR drier, cloudier OR sunnier, windier OR calmer, …”. Can I get an ‘amen’??
How is "more right than wrong" from another GW exaggerist himself getting it 90% right?
"More right than wrong" is more than half, he just doesn't say how much more than half. Maybe he means 90%, and maybe not - that's why I said "pretty much" which means similar but not exact.
I do realize this gray area stuff is difficult for ideologues.
You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you. Ludwig von Mises in a letter to Ayn Rand
