Posts Tagged ‘ global warming ’

What Ever Happened to Al Gore?

January 29, 2012
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What Ever Happened to Al Gore?

We may have reached a watershed moment in American culture. As I made my morning trek to the LA Times website yesterday, I saw a headline that made me a bit suspicious, “U.S. seems to have largely escaped winter.” I live in the Chicago area, and as a native southern Californian I do not state it too strongly when I say I hate the weather here, and I hate winter more than the other seasons (btw, late summer/early fall is the time to visit Chicago). After three horrible winters it’s been nice to get a reprieve this winter. We actually played golf on January 11! It was mid-50s that day. Crazy.

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Pray for More Global Warming — It’s a ‘Crisis’ We Can Live With

December 21, 2011
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Pray for More Global Warming — It’s a ‘Crisis’ We Can Live With

In today's political climate, telling somebody to cool it might be a bad idea.

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The Archbishop of Sydney Gets It — Man-Made “Global Warming” Is Yet to Be Proven

October 28, 2011
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The Archbishop of Sydney Gets It — Man-Made “Global Warming” Is Yet to Be Proven

Here's some proof religious people can often speak more wisely about science than many scientists The jury's out, says Cardinal George Pell of Sydney, on what's really happening with the climate, and precipitous action is ill-advised, at best:

"My appeal is to reason and evidence," he says, "and in my view the evidence is insufficient to achieve practical certainty on many of these scientific issues."

Any "appeal to the consenual view among qualified scientists . . . is a category error, scientifically and philosophically. In fact, it is also a cop-out, a way of avoiding the basic issues. The basic issue is not whether the science is settled but whether the evidence and explanations are adequate in that paradigm."

Indeed, "he complacent appeal to scientific consensus is simply one more appeal to authority, quite inappropriate in science or philosophy."

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You’re More Likely to Survive a Hurricane If You’ve Got a Fat Wallet

September 28, 2011
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You’re More Likely to Survive a Hurricane If You’ve Got a Fat Wallet

At least, that’s what a study from the Reason Foundation seems to imply: Proponents of drastic curbs on greenhouse gas emissions claim that such emissions cause global warming and that this exacerbates the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, including extreme heat, droughts, floods and storms such as hurricanes and cyclones. But what matters is not the incidence of extreme weather events per se but the impact of such events—especially the human impact. To that end, it is instructive to examine trends in global mortality (i.e. the number of people killed) and mortality rates (i.e. the proportion of people killed) associated with extreme weather events for the 111-year period from 1900 to 2010. — Indur M. Goklany and Julian Morris With more people than ever before roaming the planet, you’d think there would be more deaths proportionally. However: Aggregate mortality attributed to all extreme weather events globally has declined by more than 90% since the 1920s, in spite of a four-fold rise in population and much more complete reporting of such events. The aggregate mortality rate declined by 98%, largely due to decreased mortality in three main areas: * Deaths and death rates from droughts, which were responsible for

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“Sometimes Science Goes Into the Background” — Politics Dominates Climate Science

September 11, 2011
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“Sometimes Science Goes Into the Background” — Politics Dominates Climate Science

The possibility that rays coming from the sun might have a determining effect on the earth’s climate should provoke interest, not dread, but in some circles the very idea is politically discomfiting: In April 1990, Al Gore published an open letter in the New York Times “To Skeptics on Global Warming” in which he compared them to medieval flat-Earthers. He soon became vice president and his conviction that climate change was dominated by man-made emissions went mainstream. Western governments embarked on a new era of anti-emission regulation and poured billions into research that might justify it. As far as the average Western politician was concerned, the debate was over. But a few physicists weren’t worrying about Al Gore in the 1990s. They were theorizing about another possible factor in climate change: charged subatomic particles from outer space, or “cosmic rays,” whose atmospheric levels appear to rise and fall with the weakness or strength of solar winds that deflect them from the earth. These shifts might significantly impact the type and quantity of clouds covering the earth, providing a clue to one of the least-understood but most important questions about climate. Heavenly bodies might be driving long-term weather trends. — Anne

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55 Reasons Why Carbon Dioxide Is Good for the World

August 20, 2011
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55 Reasons Why Carbon Dioxide Is Good for the World

Carbon dioxide (CO2) has been designated as an atmospheric pollutant and a threat to life on Planet Earth by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). To see how much of a threat it really is, read this summary of a report (PDF, 14 pages, 2.03 MB) that explains the “55 Benefits of Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment”. The areas in which carbon dioxide actually helps the environment are listed below: Air Pollution Stress (Non–Ozone) Air Pollution Stress (Ozone) Avoiding Human Starvation and Plant and Animal Extinctions Bacteria Biodiversity Biogenic Volatile Organic Compounds Biomass C4 Plants CAM Plants Carbon Sequestration Diseases of Plants Early Growth Earthworms Evolution Flowers Fluctuating Asymmetry Glomalin Health-Promoting Substances Herbivory Hormones Human Longevity Human Mortality (All Causes) Human Mortality (Cardiovascular) Human Mortality (Respiratory) Iodocompounds Isoprene Light Stress Lipids Medicinal Plants Monoterpenes Nectar Net Primary Productivity Nitrogen Fixation Nutrient Acquisition Phosphorus Acquisition Photosynthesis Progressive Nitrogen Limitation Reactive Oxygen Species Root Exudation Root Production Salinity Stress Seeds Soil Erosion Soil Toxicity Starch Tannins Temperature Stress Thylakoid Membranes Transpiration UV-B Radiation Stress Vegetative Storage Proteins Water Stress Water-Use Efficiency Weeds Wood Density  

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“Confirmation Bias Is Everywhere”

July 20, 2011
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“Confirmation Bias Is Everywhere”

By Mike Gray A new study suggests that your values, not science, determine your views about climate change. — Ronald Bailey The study produced by a major university suggests: The more scientifically literate you are, the more certain you are that climate change is either a catastrophe or a hoax, according to a new study from the Yale Cultural Cognition Project. Many science writers and policy wonks nurse the fond hope that fierce disagreement about issues like climate change is simply the result of a scientifically illiterate American public. If this “public irrationality thesis” were correct, the authors of the Yale study write, “then skepticism about climate change could be traced to poor public comprehension about science” and the solution would be more science education. In fact, their findings suggest more education is unlikely to help build consensus; it may even intensify the debate. Led by Yale University law professor Dan Kahan, the Cultural Cognition Project has been researching how cultural and ideological commitments shape science policy discourse in the United States. To probe the public’s views on climate change, the Yale researchers conducted a survey of 1,500 Americans in which they asked questions designed to uncover their cultural values,

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Quote of the Day: Agenda 21 — Grassroots Socialism That Could Presage One-World Government

July 14, 2011
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Quote of the Day: Agenda 21 — Grassroots Socialism That Could Presage One-World Government

Agenda 21 promotes European socialist goals that will erode our freedoms and liberties. Most of its vague, lofty sounding phrases cause the average person’s eyes to glaze over, making it easier to sneak into our communities. The environmentalist goals include atmospheric protection, combating pollution, protecting fragile environments, and conserving biological diversity. Agenda 21 goes well beyond environmentalism. Other broad goals include combating poverty, changing consumption patterns, promoting health, and reducing private property ownership, single-family homes, private car ownership, and privately owned farms. It seeks to cram people into small livable areas and institute population control. There is a plan for “social justice” that will redistribute wealth. Once these vague, overly broad goals are adopted, they are being interpreted to allow massive amounts of new, overreaching regulations. Joyce Morrison from Eco-logic Powerhouse says Agenda 21 is so broad it will affect the way we “live, eat, learn and communicate.” Berit Kjos, author of Brave New Schools, warns that Agenda 21 “regulation would severely limit water, electricity, and transportation — even deny human access to our most treasured wilderness areas, it would monitor all lands and people. “No one would be free from the watchful eye of the new global tracking and

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“There Is No Economic Sense to These Cars”: Why Buying a Plug-In Vehicle Is Solely a Political Statement

June 30, 2011
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“There Is No Economic Sense to These Cars”: Why Buying a Plug-In Vehicle Is Solely a Political Statement

By Mike Gray Only an affluent society driven by ideologues would consider blowing forty grand on an empty gesture as a reasonable thing to do: There might be a case for buying the Volt or other hybrids, but it isn’t based on economics. It is based on bragging rights, on showing everyone how concerned you are about Mother Earth. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with any of these things, but you have to be pretty darn rich to afford them. And when it comes to the intrinsic hidden costs (such as subsidies for them), the Greens pushing this technology studiously ignore “that which is not seen”: How much energy is going into making the batteries that go into these hybrids? How much energy is spent transporting the batteries from China? How much will be spent recycling those batteries at end of life? When you see one of the “Save Mother Earth” projects that requires federal tax credits and is still a bad economic deal for the buyer, my immediate suspicion is that it is hiding an enormous energy input that destroys most of the ecological reason for doing it. Clayton E. Cramer crunches the numbers in his Pajamas Media article

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Sometimes It Takes a Lawsuit: Christopher Horner Sues NASA

June 22, 2011
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Sometimes It Takes a Lawsuit: Christopher Horner Sues NASA

By Mike Gray Dr. Hansen engages in high-profile public advocacy with regard to global warming and energy policy, directly trading on his platform as a NASA astronomer to gain interest and attention. This outside employment and other activities relating to his work have included consulting, highly compensated speeches, six-figure “prizes”, a commercial book, advising Al Gore on his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” and, lately, advising litigants on suing states and the federal government. — Christopher Horner Horner’s intention is to get at information about Hansen which may prove a conflict of interest: This afternoon I am filing a lawsuit against the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in federal district court in the District of Columbia on behalf of The American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center. On the heels of obtaining a court order earlier late last month compelling the University of Virginia to produce the long-sought ‘Hockey Stick’-related records, ATI’s transparency project now seeks to force NASA to release ethics records for taxpayer-funded global warming activist Dr. James Hansen, specifically those pertaining to his outside employment, revenue generation, and advocacy activities. NASA seems to think some folks might be above the law due to how high a perch

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$13 Quadrillion to Forestall Global Warming by One Degree Celsius — A Bargain, Huh?

May 16, 2011
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$13 Quadrillion to Forestall Global Warming by One Degree Celsius — A Bargain, Huh?

By Mike Gray Consider the Oldbury wind turbine, installed a couple of years ago by the local authorities of Sandwell in the English Midlands at a cost of £5000 sterling plus Vicious Additional Taxation (a hideously complicated and thus easily evaded EU version of Danegeld, as we historians call it) at the then 17.5% rate (it’s now a bargain-basement 20%, so you get more in return for your missing-trader fraud than you did before). — Christopher Monckton You’d think the folks who gave us Magna Carta, Isaac Newton, Shakespeare, and P. G. Wodehouse would possess enough native intelligence not to fall for global warming alarmism: As WattsUpWithThat.com has recently revealed, in the first full year of the Oldbury White Elephant’s 20-year life it generated a gratifying 209 KWh of electricity — enough to power a single 100W reading lamp for less than three months. The rest of the year you’ll have to find something else to do in bed. Gross revenue for the year, at 11p/KWh, was, um … almost £23. Assuming that there are no costs of finance, installation, insurance, or maintenance, and after subtracting 20 years’ revenue at last year’s rate, the net undiscounted and unamortized capital cost

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Notable Quote: David Solway on Global Warming Climatologists

April 12, 2011
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Notable Quote: David Solway on Global Warming Climatologists

By Mike Gray Some are credulous do-gooders who truly believe in the delusion of global warming and will fudge or obscure the facts they find inadmissible in order to preserve their messianic agenda. Soothsayers with an ostensibly noble mission whose auguries are constantly trumped by reality, they are impervious to doubt or reason — just as in the 1970s when they were earnestly warning that the earth was about to freeze over and we should all stock up on parkas and Coleman heaters. These poor people stagger around like late-night party-goers with a pre-dawn hangover, squinting into the unaccustomed light. But the majority, I suspect, are out-and-out schemers and defalcators who have stumbled on a growth industry and have no intention of getting off the gravy train, which they wish to render, as in a recent movie, unstoppable. They will not surrender the advantages and remunerations that accrue to their shady and canting profession and will fall back on every means at their disposal to stay in business. They will suppress countervailing data. They will slander their opponents. They will “disinvite” authoritative scientists from climate conferences. They will caulk the leaks continually springing in their theories rather than engage in

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"Culture is the expression of the guiding philosophy of the day."—Murray Rothbard
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