My six year-old, parroting her teacher, proclaimed, “If we don’t fix Climate Change, we’re all gonna die!” At that moment, I decided to write YOU’VE BEEN GORED, the book that lampoons Al Gore and his hypocritical ‘ALpostles.’
The environment has become the hottest political issue of our time. And when anything is politicized, falsehood flourishes. The volume of lies, disinformation, propaganda, hypocrisy and exaggeration far exceeds the quantity of material pollutants and is more hazardous.
Green has become the convenient, safe, lucrative cause for politicians, corporate weasels, celebrity eco-frauds, power-hungry government agencies and fast-buck swindlers hustling everything from gas-to-water engine conversion plans to carbon offset credits.
There’s a combination gold-rush/Armageddon’s a-comin’ zeitgeist that’s very troubling. It’s like watching the panicked crowd flee from Godzilla. Their mindless fear is more dangerous than the monster.
Statistics of doom are conjured and accepted without vetting. Idiotic “solutions” are clutched in desperation. Most terrifying of all, leaders are anointed and followed without scrutiny.
By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and the other explorers who followed may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate for centuries.The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University.
“We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident with the European arrival,” says Nevle, who described the consequences of this change October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting.
Tying together many different lines of evidence, Nevle estimated how much carbon all those new trees would have consumed. He says it was enough to account for most or all of the sudden drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide recorded in Antarctic ice during the 16th and 17th centuries. This depletion of a key greenhouse gas, in turn, may have kicked off Europe’s so-called Little Ice Age, centuries of cooler temperatures that followed the Middle Ages.
Bill Clinton turned up the heat on the leading Republican presidential contenders Tuesday, saying their opposition to acknowledging climate change makes the country “look like a joke.â€
“If you’re an American, the best thing you can do is to make it politically unacceptable for people to engage in denial†about climate change, the former president said on the first day of the Clinton Global Initiative’s seventh annual meeting in New York City.
“I mean, it makes us — we look like a joke, right? You can’t win the nomination of one of the major parties in the country if you admit that the scientists are right? That disqualifies you from doing it? You could really help us there,†Clinton added.
Kicking off the three-day conference, Clinton called the lack of debate in America on climate change “really tragic.â€
“We need the debate in America and every country between people who are a little bit to the right and people who are a little bit to the left about what the best way is to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, what is the best , most economical way to do it, what will get more done quicker,†he said.
We’ve all heard of the ravaged rain forests and the plight of the polar bear. But as far as reasons for saving the planet go, the one offered by scientists Thursday is truly out of this world.
A team of American researchers have produced a range of scenarios in which aliens could attack the earth, and curiously, one revolves around climate change.
They speculate that extraterrestrial environmentalists could be so appalled by our planet-polluting ways that they view us as a threat to the intergalactic ecosystem and decide to destroy us.
Kill a camel, earn cash for cutting greenhouse gases: That offer may be coming soon in Australia, where vast numbers of the nonnative, methane-belching animals have been trampling the Outback for more than a century.
The government has proposed that killing camels be officially registered as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Australia has the world’s largest population of wild camels — an estimated 1.2 million — and considers them to be a growing environmental problem.
Energy efficiency standards to expand scope of product confiscation
Washinton Times Editorial
Ice makers are the latest target in the left’s ongoing war against the conveniences of modern life. Earlier this month, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) issued a report that may condemn this essential household item to the contraband list that already includes functional light bulbs, toilets, washing machines and showerheads.
Those looking for an easy way to cool down their drinks with ice cubes are guilty of increasing their refrigerator’s energy consumption by about 12 to 20 percent. That’s unacceptable to global-warming alarmists at the Department of Energy (DOE) who are hard at work finalizing regulatory standards for the fridge. The proposed changes will increase prices by an estimated $2 billion per year, but DOE justifies this added expense by claiming consumers would save $37 in electricity costs over the lifetime of a typical side-by-side.
Cars will be banned from London and all other cities across Europe under a draconian EU masterplan to cut CO2 emissions by 60 per cent over the next 40 years.
By Bruno Waterfield
The European Commission on Monday unveiled a “single European transport area” aimed at enforcing “a profound shift in transport patterns for passengers” by 2050.
The plan also envisages an end to cheap holiday flights from Britain to southern Europe with a target that over 50 per cent of all journeys above 186 miles should be by rail.
Top of the EU’s list to cut climate change emissions is a target of “zero” for the number of petrol and diesel-driven cars and lorries in the EU’s future cities.
Siim Kallas, the EU transport commission, insisted that Brussels directives and new taxation of fuel would be used to force people out of their cars and onto “alternative” means of transport.
“That means no more conventionally fuelled cars in our city centres,” he said. “Action will follow, legislation, real action to change behaviour.”
There has been an increase in the numbers of earthquakes over 6.0, over the last few years. For the first half decade till 2006, there were about 13 earthquakes a year over 6.0 according to statistics at the USGS (13, 13, 13, 12, 13).
But in the last few years, the frequency of major earthquakes (over 6.0) increased to 20, 17, 21, 25, and in just the first 3 months of this year we already have had 7 large earthquakes.
At last year’s American Geophysical Union meeting geologists were already questioning whether there was a climate change link underlying the increasing frequency of unusually large earthquakes, according to Mathew McDermott at Treehugger. The Haiti earthquake was then just the latest example.
Willis Eschenbach’s recent guest post at Watts Up With That? on the current state of ‘Climate science’ should be made compulsory reading in every classroom, every university science department, every eco-charity, every environmental NGO and in every branch of government. They won’t like it up ‘em, that’s for sure.
What Eschenbach says is so pure and simple and obvious you’d need to be as dumb as Chris Huhne not to get it:
The theory linking man-made CO2 with dangerous global warming is dead. It has been falsified. It has run smack bang into a “null hypothesis.†It has met its Waterloo. It has bought the farm. It has gone for a Burton. It has cashed in its chips, fallen off its perch, gone south, gone west, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the Choir Invisible. Man-made Global Warming has ceased to exist.
Eschenbach wrote his post in response to a bizarre speech prepared by Dr Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which he intended to deliver to the American Meteorological Society. Trenberth is the arch-warmist perhaps best known for writing the Climategate email which went:
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.
When Trenberth’s speech was pre-published on the internet it caused something of a stir, both for the way large chunks of it had been taken almost verbatim from another scientist and for its use six times of the word “denierâ€. (Thanks to some kindly advice proferred by Steve McIntyre, Trenberth has now significantly altered his speech. “Deniers†has been altered to “sceptics.†Probably quite sensibly since many in the AMS, being meteorologists rather than “climate scientists†tend very much to fall into the sceptic camp).
What Eschenbach focuses on, though, is Trenberth’s absurd demand that the “null hypothesis†on AGW theory be reversed. That is, instead of having to prove AGW exists, what people should now be required to prove that it doesn’t exist. (!)
I am writing out of concern, because you may have to move from the North Pole due to the dramatic melting of Arctic sea ice. The Navy’s chief oceanographer says that by the summer of 2020 the North Pole may not have summer ice and other scientists project that an ice-free Arctic is possible as soon as 2012!
Scientists overwhelmingly agree that polar ice is melting because of greenhouse gas pollution and I am working hard to reduce these emissions. But there is probably nothing we can do in time to save the North Pole. I am worried about your safety and your ability to deliver billions of Christmas gifts if the ice cap on the North Pole no longer stays frozen all year. What will happen to your house, your workshop, the elves’ houses and your reindeer barns?
Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide and Destabilize US Econommy?
From CFACT
Some people will sign anything that includes phrases like, â€global effort,†“international community,†and “planetary.†Such was the case at COP 16, this year’s United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Cancun, Mexico.
This year, CFACT students created two mock-petitions to test U.N. Delegates. The first asked participants to help destabilize the United States economy, the second to ban water.
The first project, entitled “Petition to Set a Global Standardâ€Â sought to isolate and punish the United States of America for defying the international community, by refusing to bite, hook, line and sinker on the bait that is the Kyoto Protocol. The petition went so far as to encourage the United Nations to impose tariffs and trade restrictions on the U.S. in a scheme to destabilize the nation’s economy. Specifically, the scheme seeks to lower the U.S. GDP by 6% over a ten year period, unless the U.S. signs a U.N. treaty on global warming.
This would be an extremely radical move by the United Nations. Even so, radical left-wing environmentalists from around the world scrambled eagerly to sign.
The second project was as successful as the first. It was euphemistically entitled “Petition to Ban the Use of Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO)†(translation water). It was designed to show that if official U.N. delegates could be duped by college students into banning water, that they could essentially fall for anything, including pseudo-scientific studies which claim to show that global warming is man-caused.
Global warming is now such a serious threat to mankind that climate change experts are calling for Second World War-style rationing in rich countries to bring down carbon emissions.
By Louise Gray
In a series of papers published by the Royal Society, physicists and chemists from some of world’s most respected scientific institutions, including Oxford University and the Met Office, agreed that current plans to tackle global warming are not enough.
Unless emissions are reduced dramatically in the next ten years the world is set to see temperatures rise by more than 4C (7.2F) by as early as the 2060s, causing floods, droughts and mass migration.
In one paper Professor Kevin Anderson, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said the only way to reduce global emissions enough, while allowing the poor nations to continue to grow, is to halt economic growth in the rich world over the next twenty years.
An Australian software developer grew tired of debating climate realists on Twitter so he created spambot to wear down his opponents. The bot responds to anyone who expresses skepticism about man-made global warming by posting one of hundreds of canned replies in an attempt to frustrate skeptics.
From CFACT
Nigel Leck, an Australian software developer, grew tired of debating climate realists on Twitter so he created a spambot to “wear down†his opponents. The bot, @AI_AGW, scans Twitter every five minutes looking for key phrases commonly used by those who challenge the global warming orthodoxy. It then posts one of hundreds of canned responses hoping to frustrate skeptics. CFACT’s Twitter account @CFACT (follow us!) often receives many of these unsolicited messages each day. Since the bot became active on May 26, 2010, it has sent out over 40,000 tweets, or an average of more than 240 updates per day!
Technology Review gushed that Leck’s bot “answers Twitter users who aren’t even aware of their own ignorance.â€Â Leck claims that his little bit of trollware is commonly mistaken as a genuine Twitter user leading the unsuspecting to sometimes debate it for days. Eventually it wears people down.
Leck’s bot is an innovative, yet appalling new tactic in the ongoing campaign by global warming proponents to stifle debate and end discussion of climate science and policy. Spamming Twitter users is a tactic that is likely to backfire, as have so many of the ploys alarmists have tried in the past. There is nothing internet users find more annoying than trolls using spam to shut down online discussions.Â
Well 10:10.org apparently is not only embarrassed about their bloody schoolroom splatter flick, but also by the first “apology” they issued for it, as it’s been removed from their Website. “Oh well, live and learn” has been replaced by something a little more serious (which was posted on Monday — for a while both “apologies” were online simultaneously).
The first “sorry” certainly had an “Age of Stupid” tone about it, which is the title of high-flying Franny Armstrong‘s aviation-causes-global-warming crockumentary from last year. 10:10′s Franny helped make the Splattergate video as well, which she was extremely giddy about as Friday’s release date approached.
My six year-old, parroting her teacher, proclaimed, “If we don’t fix Climate Change, we’re all gonna die!” At that moment, I decided to write YOU’VE BEEN GORED, the book that lampoons Al Gore and his hypocritical ‘ALpostles.’
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