Posts tagged with "climate"
Tuesday, 27. October 2009, 06:28:30
humour, climate
Amusing poll results at Watts Up With That:
We’ve seen that man-made global warming has taken some hits in the opinion polls lately, and that its 10 minutes of fame may be over, but sharp eyed blogger Dave R. at Care2 spotted this zinger. I’ve posted the graphs and tables from the polls with highlights below.
Dave R writes:
In the United States, more people believe that houses
can be haunted by the dead than believe that the living can cause
climate change. Is this simply a scary Halloween tale or our
frightening future?
The latest Pew poll on global warming
shows a large drop in the percentage of Americans who say there is
solid evidence that global temperatures are rising, from 71% down to
only 57% in the last 18 months. And global warming due to human activity? The overall numbers have declined from 47% to 36%. To put this in perspective, a Gallup poll found that 37% of Americans believe that houses can be haunted.
Here’s the Pew poll graphics:
Pew Poll Data Table - note highlight
Wednesday, 21. October 2009, 23:23:32
climate, politics
Nils-Axel Morner, one of the world’s greatest authorities on sea levels, writes in dismay to Mohamed Nasheed, president of the Maldives, who last week held a meeting of his Cabinet underwater to hype the risks he says his country faces from global warming.
Mr. President,
You have recently held an undersea Cabinet meeting to raise awareness of the idea that global sea level is rising and hence threatens to drown the Maldives. This proposition is not founded in observational facts and true scientific judgments…
Your people ought not to have to suffer a constant claim that there is no future for them on their own islands. This terrible message is deeply inappropriate, since it is founded not upon reality but upon an imported concept, which lacks scientific justification and is thus untenable. There is simply no rational basis for it.
Let me summarize a few facts.
(1) In the last 2000 years, sea level has oscillated with 5 peaks reaching 0.6 to 1.2 m above the present sea level.
(2) From 1790 to 1970 sea level was about 20 cm higher than today
(3) In the 1970s, sea level fell by about 20 cm to its present level
(4) Sea level has remained stable for the last 30 years, implying that there are no traces of any alarming on-going sea level rise.
(5) Therefore, we are able to free the Maldives (and the rest of low-lying coasts and island around the globe) from the condemnation of becoming flooded in the near future.
When I was president for the INQUA commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, we spent much effort on the question of present-to-future sea level changes. After intensive field studies, deliberation within the commission and discussions at five international meetings, we agreed on a “best estimate” for possible sea level changes by the year 2100. Our figure was +10 cm ±10 cm. This figure was later revised at +5 cm ±15cm (as given in Fig. 1). Such changes would imply small to negligible effects.
Such a small rise would pose no threat for the Maldives. Rather, it would be a natural return to the conditions existing from 1790 to 1970; i.e. to the position before the sea level fall in the 1970s.
So, Mr. President, when you ignore available observational facts, refuse a normal democratic dialogue, and continue to menace your people with the imaginary threat of a disastrous flooding already in progress, I think you are doing a serious mistake.
Andrew Bolt
Of course the facts from a real expert will not stop the stunts or the clamour for inefficient and costly "green" energy.
Saturday, 5. September 2009, 20:56:53
climate, politics
You've probably heard it said so many times that you think it's fact- the greenies regulalry tell us that Australia is the most polluting or the second most polluting nation in the world in terms of CO2 per capita.
Well here's the real state of CO2 production per head- and it makes you wonder why Greenpeace is not protesting more in Qatar.
LIST OF COUNTRIES RANKED BY 2006 TOTAL CO2 EMISSIONS FROM FOSSIL-FUEL
DATA : Marland, G., T.A. Boden, and R. J. Andres. 2008. Global, Regional, and National CO2 Emissions.
In Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, Tenn., U.S.A.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/overview.html
(UNIT : Tons of CO2 per capita)
COUNTRY TONS OF CO2 PER CAPITA
Qatar 49.26
Kuwait 34.22
United-Arab-Emirates 32.94
Bahrain 28.62
Luxembourg 23.89
USA 18.95
Australia 17.93
Canada 16.65
Oman 16.03
Saudi-Arabia 16.03
Estonia 13.02
Finland 12.62
Kazakhstan 12.62
Singapore 12.51
Taiwan 11.93
Czech-Republic 11.16
Russia 10.94
Ireland 10.32
Netherlands 10.28
Japan 10.24
Belgium 10.17
Greenland 9.99
Israel 9.99
Denmark 9.91
South-Korea 9.8
Germany 9.77
Nor-ssb 9.59
United-Kingdom 9.04
South-Africa 8.74
Austria 8.67
Greece 8.63
Norway 8.6
Libya 8.27
Spain 7.97
Italy 7.72
New-Zealand 7.28
Iceland 7.24
Bosnia 7.13
Belarus 7.06
Malaysia 7.02
Slovakia 6.91
Ukraine 6.8
Iran 6.62
Venezuela 6.33
Bulgaria 6.22
France 6.18
Hungary 5.7
Portugal 5.67
Sweden 5.59
Switzerland 5.56
Croatia 5.3
Macedonia 5.3
China 4.64
Romania 4.53
Argentina 4.42
Uzbekistan 4.28
Lithuania 4.17
Thailand 4.17
Azerbaijan 4.13
Mexico 4.13
Lebanon 3.76
Jordan 3.69
Turkey 3.69
Chile 3.66
Mongolia 3.66
Syria 3.66
North-Korea 3.58
Latvia 3.25
Iraq 3.22
Botswana 2.78
Belize 2.67
Cuba 2.63
Egypt 2.26
Tunisia 2.26
Moldova 2.19
Uruguay 2.04
Brazil 1.86
Indonesia 1.5
Morocco 1.5
Namibia 1.39
Peru 1.39
Armenia 1.35
Columbia 1.35
India 1.35
Georgia 1.24
Vietnam 1.24
Bolivia 1.17
Kyrgyzstan 1.06
Yemen 1.02
Honduras 0.98
Guatemala 0.91
Pakistan 0.91
Angola 0.87
Swaziland 0.87
Western-Sahara 0.87
Zimbabwe 0.84
Palestine 0.76
Polen 0.76
Phillippines 0.76
Nigeria 0.69
Paraguay 0.65
Bhutan 0.58
Sri-Lanka 0.58
Congo 0.4
Ghana 0.4
Senegal 0.4
Benin 0.36
Kenya 0.32
Bangladesh 0.29
Cambodia 0.29
Sudan 0.29
Laos 0.25
Liberia 0.21
Zambia 0.21
Cameroon 0.18
Madagascar 0.14
Tanganyika 0.14
Tanzania 0.14
Eritrea 0.1
Mozambique 0.1
Nepal 0.1
Burkina-Faso 0.07
Ethiopia 0.07
Faroe-Islands 0.07
Rwanda 0.07
Burundi 0.03
Chad 0.03
Mali 0.03
(DATA : Marland, G., T.A. Boden, and R. J. Andres. 2008. Global, Regional, and National CO2 Emissions.
In Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, Tenn., U.S.A.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/overview.html)
Monday, 31. August 2009, 23:36:25
climate
Tim Blair notes:
Concern about global warming brings developing nations together:
India and China have a “complete convergence” of views heading into the climate change summit in Copenhagen in December …
Gorelings: “Yay!” “The people have spoken!” “It’s a consensus!” “High five!”
India and China have maintained that they will not accept legally-binding emissions reduction targets …
Gorelings: “ … “
Article:
Saturday, 29. August 2009, 00:05:40
climate
This is priceless- a computer to model climate change is itself one of Britain's biggest carbon "polluters"... next they will be flying it around the world to show how we must all consume less. Brilliant!
From "Watts Up With That."
Weather supercomputer used to predict climate change is one of Britain’s worst polluters
Excerpts from the story by the Daily Mail See WUWT’s original story on this
The Met Office has caused a storm of controversy after it was revealed their £30million supercomputer designed to predict climate change is one of Britain’s worst polluters.
The massive machine – the UK’s most powerful computer with a whopping 15 million megabytes of memory – was installed in the Met Office’s headquarters in Exeter, Devon.
It is capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second to feed data to 400 scientists and uses 1.2 megawatts of energy to run – enough to power more than 1,000 homes.
The machine was hailed as the ‘future of weather prediction’ with the ability to produce more accurate forecasts and produce climate change modelling.
However the Met Office’s HQ has now been named as one of the worst buildings in Britain for pollution – responsible for more than 12,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.
It says 75 per cent of its carbon footprint is produced by the super computer meaning the machine is officially one of the country’s least green machines.
Tuesday, 25. August 2009, 06:04:14
climate
One of the basic assumptions in the greenhouse/ climate change/ global warming hysteria hypothesis is that as CO2 levels in the atmosphere rise then overall temperature rises. This is sometimes called a runaway greenhouse effect or positive feedback.
Given the amount of information that scientists have been able to gather over recent decades about really long term temperature and CO2 measurements from Antarctic ice cores etc then it should be quite simple to test the hypothesis.
Here is the summary of one such survey:
In summary, the Vostok record indicates that CO2 is in lagged equilibrium with T and that, for the range of T in Vostok, the dependency of CO2 on T is essentially linear. Unnaturally high CO2 for the last 5,000 years has had no apparent effect on T.
This empirical evidence supports a conclusion that there cannot be any significant feedback between CO2 and T. Such feedback
would cause predicted T and CO2 to show fundamental disagreement with the lag, spectrum and amplitudes evident in the Vostok record.
In plain English, the temperature and CO2 work together in such a way as to keep each other more or less in balance.
You would never have guessed that a God who was clever enough to make everything with just a word could have factored in the effect of human industry.
Full article
Thursday, 13. August 2009, 05:42:27
climate
On Penny Wong's "Day of Reckoning" for climate change, the climate blog wattsupwiththat presents some very interesting data that suggests that despite first impressions the actual temperature data resembles a "random walk". The idea is that if you go on a walk and toss a coin at every intersection to determine which way to go, there may be quite long periods where it might appear that you are walking in a particular direction even though each choice is determined randomly.
Here are the latest climate data with the long-term trend drawn as a stragiht line:
Fair enough temperatures are generally increasing. But notice that the data actually spends extended periods of time both below and above the trend line. If the trend was a genuine trend with random variation about the trend line, you would expect there to be an above average figure followed usually by a below average figure or reasonably short runs below or above the trend line.
What if the month to month figures are skewed by seasonal effects? We could remove those effects to determine the real trend by comparing each month to the same month a year earlier. This then gives you the underlying annual rate of change. When we do that we get the graph below:
Not that looks rather like a random variation to me.
I won't bore you with the details, but you can use statistical analysis to work out whether it is truly random variation or whether it is moving towards or away from a mean. It turns out that this data set shows absolutely NO sign of anything other than true random variability.
I'm not a statistician so I can't pledge for the validity of this analysis, but it seems to make sense.
And we are spending trillions in transforming to a "low carbon economy" for this?
Full article
Wednesday, 29. July 2009, 05:38:01
climate
Note the irony of the fact that thicker than expected ice is causing these strange people to use more oil and produce more CO2.
From Andrew Bolt:
And so Greenpeace sent a ship off to the Arctic to protest against the melting ice and the fossil fuels that are to blame. From the ship’s log:
The sea ice is chasing us into the bay of large icebergs.... For the first time in this trip we do some real icebreaking… At first, it is pretty easy going. With 90% power on, we are just able to break through the 50cm ice. Then we have to stop, back up one ship length, and charge at it again. And again. And again.... Icebreaking is time consuming and sucks down tons of fuel.
(Thanks to reader Howard.)
UPDATE
A short primer from Dr David Evans on why Climate Change Minister Penny Wong still can’t show the world is warming, even though she’s given up on atmosphere temperatures, and told us to check sea temperatures instead. Conclusion:
The climate alarmists had to switch from air temperatures to ocean temperatures because by 2009 too many people are aware that air temperatures have been dropping since 2002 and that the warmest recent year was 1998. This latest position is possibly the last roll of the dice in the alarmist’s grab for political power and results, because if the long term pattern holds then the next decade or two will show cooling.
Article
Friday, 24. July 2009, 07:16:28
climate
An important scientific paper produced by real scientists has discovered that nearly all of the global warming since 1976 can be attributed to a massive El Nino effect that took place.
The research, by Chris de Freitas, a climate scientist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, John McLean (Melbourne) and Bob Carter (James Cook University), finds that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a key indicator of global atmospheric temperatures seven months later. As an additional influence, intermittent volcanic activity injects cooling aerosols into the atmosphere and produces significant cooling.
“The surge in global temperatures since 1977 can be attributed to a 1976 climate shift in the Pacific Ocean that made warming El Niño conditions more likely than they were over the previous 30 years and cooling La Niña conditions less likely” says corresponding author de Freitas.
Bob Carter, one of four scientists who has recently questioned the justification for the proposed Australian emissions trading scheme, says that this paper has significant consequences for public climate policy.
“The close relationship between ENSO and global temperature, as described in the paper, leaves little room for any warming driven by human carbon dioxide emissions. The available data indicate that future global temperatures will continue to change primarily in response to ENSO cycling, volcanic activity and solar changes.”
“Our paper confirms what many scientists already know: which is that no scientific justification exists for emissions regulation, and that, irrespective of the severity of the cuts proposed, ETS (emission trading scheme) will exert no measurable effect on future climate.”
Full article
Thursday, 23. July 2009, 01:53:27
climate
Remember the fuss about evil multi-national Exxon funding climate sceptics by the horrendous amount of $200,000?
Now we have, from Joanne Nova, a summary of what the U.S. Government is spending on behalf of its tax payers at the behest of the climate change hypers.
Massive Climate Funding Exposed
Climate Money
The Climate Industry: $79 billion so far - Trillions to come
For the first time, the numbers from government documents have been compiled in one place. It’s time to start talking of “Monopolistic Science”. It’s time to expose the lie that those who claim “to save the planet” are the underdogs. And it’s time to get serious about auditing science, especially when it comes to pronouncements that are used to justify giant government programs and massive movements of money. Who audits the IPCC?
The Summary
The US government has provided over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, foreign aid, and tax breaks.
Despite the billions: “audits” of the science are left to unpaid volunteers. A dedicated but largely uncoordinated grassroots movement of scientists has sprung up around the globe to test the integrity of the theory and compete with a well funded highly organized climate monopoly. They have exposed major errors.
Carbon trading worldwide reached $126 billion in 2008. Banks are calling for more carbon-trading. And experts are predicting the carbon market will reach $2 - $10 trillion making carbon the largest single commodity traded.
Meanwhile in a distracting sideshow, Exxon-Mobil Corp is repeatedly attacked for paying a grand total of $23 million to skeptics—less than a thousandth of what the US government has put in, and less than one five-thousandth of the value of carbon trading in just the single year of 2008.
The large expenditure in search of a connection between carbon and climate creates enormous momentum and a powerful set of vested interests. By pouring so much money into one theory, have we inadvertently created a self-fulfilling prophesy instead of an unbiased investigation?
Read the Full Report at the Science and Public Policy Institute.
Article
Friday, 3. July 2009, 01:02:47
climate, Australia
From Andrew Bolt
Dan Bishton discovers it’s not so Easy Being Green, after all, as another green scheme bites the dust:
For two years I worked for Easy Being Green, a Sydney-based carbon trading firm that operated under the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme. As a team leader there, I spruiked, cajoled and charmed members of the public into taking home free boxes of energy-saving CFL globes ...
“100 per cent free,” I’d say — “All you have to do is sign this form.”
The form was a nomination form, which stated that the hapless coal-fired electricity consumer could have the bulbs for free, if they promised to use them — as long as Easy Being Green could keep the saved energy. Or to put it more accurately, claim a certificate representing a tonne of saved carbon, which could be sold on one of the world’s oldest carbon markets, the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme…
Ex-Greenpeace Chairman Paul Gilding led the company with galvanising speeches about harnessing market forces… Many of the initial employees were ex-Greenpeace members…
Life was grand at first… The price for a tonne of carbon was at its peak of $25, and the nomination forms were rolling in at an incredible pace… Trade of demand-side certificates (carbon credits) mushroomed to almost 9 million throughout 2006, many times the previous year’s total…
The scheme’s administrator was IPART, the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal… (In 2006) IPART received the results from a Newspoll survey conducted on giveaway installation rates. Newspoll’s survey found that only four of every 10 bulbs found their way into light sockets — half the rate that the booming giveaway companies had been claiming credit for. Half-way through August, IPART made a shock announcement that slashed the installation discount factor accordingly to 0.4, halving the value of NGACs generated by giveaway programs....
The IPART announcement killed light bulb giveaways… Easy Being Green became insolvent and went into third-party administration in October 2007.
Carbon trading will give us countless more such stories, I’m afraid, only this time involving a lot more money transferred from you to them.
Article
This resonates with me. We have a couple of boxes of these things which I'm keeping as spares for bulbs already installed. The whole Carbon trading scheme will be found to be a mixture of naive optimism and outright fraud as opportunistic people set up carbon offset schemes that are never regulated or even inspected to see if they are real. At one stage recently I think it was the Russian Mafia that was running the majority of greenhouse reduction schemes in the EU beofre the price of carbon collapsed.
Friday, 3. July 2009, 00:40:49
climate, media
The ABC has been making a big fuss this morning of oil giant Exxon funding global warming sceptics.
Shock horror! Global multi-national wastes shareholders money on promoting real debate on the issue. As opposed to the Government wasting my money on promoting the green religion of looming apocalypse.
How much has Exxon spent on this heresy? Wait for it! The mind-blowing amount of $200,000.
How much is our Government giving to grops such as Greenpeace, various institutes for climate research? Millions... and that's just Australia.
Meanwhile in other mind-boggling news, a State Parliament task force has discovered that farmers are already taking up zero-till technology to "adapt to climate change." Well no, actually it's an adaptation to drought, to saving money, saving top-soil and improved yields which all works regardless of whether you believe in the Green Religion. Amazing, the way people can spin facts to fit their world-view.
Wednesday, 1. July 2009, 03:58:18
climate, politics, science
One of the scientists who participated in the discussions between Penny Wong and her scientists reports on the meeting here.It's a very interesting report that basically shows that bluster and arrogance have replaced debate in climate change policy.
Sunday, 28. June 2009, 23:03:27
environment, climate, society, Australia
Environmentalists have an unchanging modus operandi. They find an environmental problem and then blame people for causing it. Decades later true science finds that it's a natural cycle, and often what is thought to be a bad thing turns out to be a good thing.
Remember dry land salinity? It was going to destroy our agricultural land and make huge swathes of the country a desert. It was caused, we were told, by extensive land clearing. State governments, responding to what they were assured was incontrovertible science (we didn't yet have "scientific consensus", brought in draconian laws banning removal of native vegetation.
It turns out it was all wrong, but don't expect any apologies, or even changes in the law.
From the SMH:
Higher rainfall holds key to salinity
Ben Cubby Environment Reporter
June 29, 2009 CLIMATE and rainfall, not land-clearing, have emerged as the main drivers of salinity in south-eastern Australia, in a study that could overturn decades of research.
By studying historical records for thousands of water bores across NSW, researchers from the NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change and the University of NSW have shown that salinity is traceable to rising groundwater levels.
This means that the salinity crisis that threatened thousands of farms in the 1980s and '90s is now in retreat as the land dries out as a result of drought and climate change. Higher groundwater levels mean more water interacts with friable, sandy soil and forms the crust of salt that can accelerate erosion and destroy agricultural productivity.
"The mistake we made in the past was to assume that the kind of rainfall we were seeing from the middle of the 20th century was normal, whereas it was actually quite wet by historical standards," said Professor Ian Acworth, a University of NSW hydrologist who worked with the environment department researcher Aleksandra Rancic.
Long-term rainfall variability, separate from human-induced climate change, is expected to mean that slightly drier conditions will up to the middle of the century, followed by another period of higher average rainfall.
"Dry land salinity is not going to be a problem as much in the first half of this century than it was in the last half of the previous century," Professor Acworth said.
Full articlce
Saturday, 27. June 2009, 21:27:09
climate
Warmists deny Copenhagen access to polar bear scientist 27 06 2009 From the UK Telegraph 26 June 2009
Christopher Booker
POLAR BEAR EXPERT BARRED BY WARMISTS
Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen.
Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group, set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission, will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.
This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN’s major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December.
But one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week’s meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with the views of the rest of the group.
Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching into the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined. 
Read more:
Wednesday, 10. June 2009, 23:30:15
life, weather, climate
After a week in tropical Rockhampton and Yeppoon, we drove home yesterday to chilly Narrabri.
It wasn't really that warm up north, as everyone was complaining about the cold. In our meetings in Yeppoon we had the air conditioners running as the room was getting too warm for some. Margaret and I found ourselves sitting right in front of the AC so we found ourselves grabbing our jumpers.
So today in Narrabri, just 10 hours drive from tropical Rocky, we've had a severe frost and our hot water pipe froze for the first time this year.
The minimum this morning was -2 but it's now a brisk 7 degrees (C). The hot water is running again, so I think I'll go off and have a nice warm shower.
Australia is certainly a land of contrasts and variety! Usually all at the same time.
Monday, 25. May 2009, 23:56:25
climate, science
Climate "scientist" Dr Ben McNeil shows the logic of climate "science" here.
His argument is very simple- if you wear sunscreen you must believe in human caused global warming. Silly me- I thought it was because I believed in the link between exposure to ultra-violet radiation and risk of developing skin cancer.
The reason for this stupid line of thinking is that the guy who first discovered that CO2 can act as a kind of thermal blanket in the atmosphere also discovered that certain chemicals can absorb UV radiation by the same kind of process.
It's great to think that our global economy is being re-constructed demolished on the basis of this kind of nonsense.
If you are still worried about CO2 and the non-existent warming, consider these gems from "Heaven and Earth" by Ian Plimer:
* termites produce far more greenhouse gases than all the human outputs combined.
* the CO2 in the air is a tiny amount of that dissolved in the oceans and the amount "sequestered" in rocks is many billions of times more- all of these sinks for CO2 are in a dynamic equilibrium.
We have more to fear from the influence of "climate scientists" than we do from the effect of CO2 in the air.
Friday, 15. May 2009, 01:52:39
climate
Do you think we can dispense with the CO2 myths yet?
Wednesday, 13. May 2009, 11:24:03
climate
I have just finished reading "Heaven and Earth- Global Warming: The Missing Science" by Ian Plimer.
Here is a review I wrote on Facebook:
Ian Plimer is a professor of geology so he is used to looking at the "big picture." He is also used to rigorous science.
In 500 pages (with 2200 footnotes!) he systematically demolishes the "science" of global warming, with real science.
Plimer looks at history on the modern, archaeological and geological time scales to show that the Late 20th Century Warming period is what you would expect in the period of emerging from the Little Ice Age. Even in 1998, often called the warmest year on record, the temperatures were lower than those experienced in the Middle Ages and the Roman warm periods. He documents the total lack of correspondence between CO2 in the air and actual climate.
He then looks at the sun, the oceans, the atmosphere and volcanic activity and their individual impacts on climate. The systems that form our climate are extremely complex and interact with each other in ways that cannot yet be understood. The overall picture is that the climate we have grown up in was historically quite cool and that warming is better for life than colder times.
Here are a few facts that I had not heard before:
1. Termites alone produce far more methane (a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2) in the atmosphere than humans produce CO2.
2. The amount of CO2 trapped in rocks is millions of times as much as that in the oceans, which in turn is millions of times more than what is in the air. CO2 is exchanged between these sectors regularly and there is equilibrium such that any increase in one part is eventually absorbed into other parts.
3. One volcanic eruption will produce much more CO2 than humans in a year.
4. Periods of climate change can be closely correlated with solar activity. The 1980s and 1990s were a time of very active sun conditions, so it was warmer. The last few years have been cooler because the sun has been particularly inactive.
5. Climate can change very rapidly. For example there was a 20 year transition from the Middle Age Warming to the Little Ice Age. In comparison the period over the last 20 years has been remarkably stable.
6. The famous hockey-stick graph was so blatantly manipulated that it now has no credibility even amongst climate change activists.
7. One factor that always concerned me was the alleged acidification of the oceans. If more CO2 is dissolved into the ocean, it should make it more acidic, and sea creatures cannot make their shells, leading to a total collapse of the food chain. Apart from the fact that atmospheric CO2 levels were at times higher than present levels before industrialisation started, and these animals obviously survived, Plimer points out that oceans are part of a dynamic system which is in equilibrium with rocks, sediments etc, and all of this removes the acidity as it forms.
Plimer says that science is not about "consensus" but about dissent. Science never moves foward except by challenging existing theories and trying to disprove them. The present consensus which is about politics and not about true science stops real climate science from being done by deliberately assassinating those who dissent.
I am so glad to see that someone is writing a science-based book which puts forward the contrary position. It isn't easy reading, but it's well worth the effort.
Sunday, 10. May 2009, 05:11:04
environment, fear, climate, society
...
As I've noted in several posts, we live in a culture of fear- whether it is swine flu or global envirnomental acopalypse, there are whole industries dedicated to keeping you afraid.
Frank Furedi gives us this field guide to the fear mongers:
The protagonists in today’s market of fear have forcefully sought to demonise flu as a threat to the world, as something that might even be turned into a weapon of mass destruction. The prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology now advertises a course on ‘Pandemics and Bioterrorism’. It claims that ‘swine flu is only the most recent of the challenges posed by threats of bioterrorism and global pandemics’. The casual manner in which the threat of bioterrorism is introduced into the discussion of swine flu, by one of the most respected scientific institutions in the world, provides disturbing evidence that fearmongering has become a respectable pastime and pursuit.
Today, fear entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes. Some are moral crusaders who genuinely believe that the very fabric of society is threatened by evil forces. At the other end of the spectrum are the salespeople and hustlers of the market of fear. It is useful to distinguish between the different species of scaremonger, so here is your ‘Guide To Spotting The Different Actors In The Dramatisation Of Fear’.
Read full article
here:
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WIDGETIZE
The facts behind the Maldives stunt