Blatant Reality

And no, it doesn’t have anything to do about science anything at all in the Goracle’s presentation. The lesson is a fairly simple one that almost everyone who has ever made a powerpoint presentation can appreciate and the lesson is this: Duarte Design can take the most asinine and crappy ideas and use them to create a presentation that sells.

It may be the most famous slide show of all time. “An Inconvenient Truth,” the movie staring environmental activist and former Vice President Al Gore, is at its heart a slide show, hardly the format for a box office hit. The movie’s popularity was not the only surprise, it’s also generated $23 million in DVD sales and 1.8 million DVDs sold.

 

So how did a slide show garner millions of viewers? Duarte Design provided some of the answers in an event at its headquarters titled “Think Outside the Slide.” Gore had worked with Duarte years before the film idea came out to develop a presentation on the dangers of global warming.

 

Gore’s shown the resulting PowerPoint slide show more than 1,800 times; it’s also reportedly been delivered some 30,000 times worldwide by volunteers in the environmental movement.

You can’t argue with the numbers people, Duarte Design is good and pretty darn good to be able to design a presentation that is being swallowed hook, line, and sinker all over the world despite it being riddled with errors.

So businesses, entrepreneurs, and college students, if you want to cover up your skewed facts or shoddy research in your next PPP, just remember to call up Duarte Design. I’m sure they will be able to throw in some cartoons of drowning polar bears or something that will make your presentation a smash hit at your next meeting and/or class.

Charlotte, NC just broke the its July 2 low temperature record that has stood for 123 years.

The temperature at Charlotte/Douglas International Airport was 56 at about 5:30 a.m., breaking the July 2 record of 58, set in 1885. The normal low for this time of year is 70.

The Astronomical Society of Australia has issued a warning about global COOLING within the next decade. Read more about it at the link below.
-
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/3709

People always tend to look at the down side of Global Warming (be it man made or natural), but there are some benefits to it as well. Now, before I start going into what all the benefits are, I would like to preface it with saying that too much of anything is a bad thing. Therefore, there will come a point where too much warming will stop creating benefits and create more problems. With that being said, I don’t believe we are at that point where the world is too warm.

Also, I believe the warming we may be experiencing now is due to a natural variability (yes, I am a “skeptic”) and any of the drastic measures proposed in treaties like Kyoto or legislation like the Lieberman/Warner Act will not do anything to stop global warming.

Another thing to note is that I am by no means a climate scientist and the following is somewhat an amalgamation of several other scientists/economists/researchers ideas. Since even the best climate models have no idea exactly what the future will bring, some of the benefits listed below might not pan out but the flip side to that is there may be some unexpected benefits that we have not yet predicted.

Now, on to the list. Keep in mind the above paragraphs along with the fact that some of these benefits are only benefits if we act upon them.

1. Overall, Fewer Deaths Caused by Cold: Most people would agree that if the earth is warming, then the average temperature will be higher. This increase in temperature will lead to less deaths from cold related complications. Now before you get all up in arms saying that there will be more deaths caused by heat, you must understand that cold related deaths greatly outnumber heat related deaths each year.

    

   In Bjorn Lomborg’s book “Cool it,” he argues that an increase in temperature by just 3.6 degrees F would increase heat related deaths in Britain by about two thousand but decrease cold related deaths by twenty-thousand. Thats good news when you consider that for the 2005/2006 winter, 25,700 people died in cold related deaths which is much more than the predicted 6,000 heat related deaths in the coming years.

2. More Water Overall: If the world does warm by 3.6 degrees F, the average precipitation worldwide will increase by 7%. Now Gore would have you believe that this water is going towards places where we really don’t need water that much and away from areas that do need the precipitation. However, Lomborg would make the point that a warming world will have even less people that are water stressed. Here is a map that shows the water availability of most the world.

    

   Lomborg states that without global warming, people living in water stressed regions will increase to 3 billion (by 2100) but with global warming, the number will be at 1.7 billion, 300 million lower than today. With fresh water becoming one of the major issues in the world, this definitely sounds like a benefit.

3. Warmer Winters: When looking at the trend for when the warming is happening, one will find that the good majority of the warming is occurring during the winter. Not only will this lead to less deaths as stated above, it will also potentially lead to longer growing seasons. This of course is on the whole a good thing with increased food production being one of the benefits.

    

   However, one must take into account that this past winter was one of the coldest and most snow field winters we have had in a while so we might not be able to count on “warmer winters” in the future.

4. More CO2 = Better Growing Seasons: Another thing that people miss is the fact that more CO2 in the air will contribute to more plant life (Photosynthesis 101). Now some people tend to think that we are the reason for the increase CO2 (which we are to an extent) but there are other factors involved too. A warmer world also releases more CO2 into the atmosphere because the oceans (one of the main sources of CO2) won’t be able to hold as much dissolved CO2 in them (Chemistry 101).

    

   Already we are beginning to see this with the world becoming greener than in the past. According to Fred Singer and Dennis Avery in the book “Unstoppable Global Warming,” wheat production alone could increase by 70% with an increase of 100ppm of CO2.

    

   And while I am on this topic of CO2, there is no such thing as CO2 “pollution.” The CO2 that comes out of your car is exactly the same that we, along with (almost) every other creature on this planet, exhale. Its chemically identical. So if your car is polluting by emitting CO2, so is Al Gore and all the other greens by just breathing. “Anthropological” CO2 and “natural” CO2 are the exact same molecule.

5. Warmer Temps = More arable land: Another things that is often cited is that we will lose a lot of arable land do to global warming. What people don’t take into account is that we will also gain a lot more land to cultivate. This is good news for the folks living in the colder regions. For example Greenland is now able to support cattle for the first time in hundreds of years and it is largely contributed to global warming.

    

   If you look on a map, you will notice that there is a lot of land in the north that is fairly uninhabitable and almost completely useless in growing crops. This land in Canada and Russia will greatly benefit from a warmer climate.

Now do these benefits outweigh the negative impacts of a warming world? In my mind they do. A warmer world seems to offer more chances of opportunity which may help the world benefit as a overall. Will there be changes we will have to deal with? Sure, but the world isn’t static (never has been and never will be) so change is something that we will never be able to get rid of.

Overall, if our world does warm by a couple of degrees, there will be changes. However, one mustn’t only think about the gloom and doom aspects because there are benefits as well. Now will these benefits truly outweigh the negatives? Only time will tell but I believe that the ingenuity of man will be able to make the best out of any situation nature may deal to us.

Yea, a new intelligence report is stating that global warming could possibly be a threat to our national security by destabilizing countries and making them more susceptible to extremism. Take a look:

Global warming is likely to have a series of destabilizing effects around the world, causing humanitarian crises as well as surges in ethnic violence and illegal immigration, according to a U.S. intelligence assessment debated Wednesday.

 

“Logic suggests the conditions exacerbated [by climate change] would increase the pool of potential recruits for terrorism,” said Tom Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence, who testified Wednesday before a joint hearing of two House committees.

 

Climate change alone would not topple governments, but it could worsen problems such as poverty, disease, migration and hunger that could destabilize already vulnerable areas, Mr. Fingar said.

 

But he warned that efforts to reduce global warming by changing energy policies “may affect U.S. national security interests even more than the physical impacts of climate change itself.

 

“The operative word there is ‘may.’ We don’t know,” he said.

I’m glad that they admit that they do not know the future because otherwise I would definitely want to know who will win the coming election so I can plan accordingly.

Anyways, the problem with this report (or it might just be the article since the actual intelligence report is still classified) is that it assumes that fixing global warming would help stabilize these regions. The fact is that we could help these countries more and at a cheaper cost by giving them direct humanitarian aid to help with the affects climate change (not man-made of course). This is what Bjorn Lomborg basically proposes in his newest book “Cool It.”

One of these days I will get around to writing a nice long article describing how outrageously expensive and economically inefficient trying to combat climate change is but today is not the day.

Global Warming has struck again, this time blessing the Costa Rican highlands with the ability to grow coffee in higher altitudes.

In Costa Rica, the temperature increases may help transform mountainous land that was once too chilly for delicate coffee trees into prime coffee-planting territory.

 

The strictly hard-bean Arabica coffee sought by specialty roasters is only found at high altitudes, so the shift could mean more opportunities for a country already known for its quality coffee.

 

“We can now plant at 2,000 meters (6,562 feet). We didn’t plant there before,” said Daniel Urena, an agronomist for the Coopedota coffee cooperative, which sells its high-altitude coffee to buyers such as Starbucks Corp.

 

Urena said the cooperative’s coffee plants traditionally have not survived above 1,800 meters (5,906 feet).

Of course the article had to add some gloom and doom aspects like “unusual cold snaps” which has me scratching my head (If we are actually experiencing global warming, shouldn’t there be less “unusual cold snaps”?). The article goes on to say that many farms in Africa and Brazil will be hurt by a warming world, but does hint on the fact that a lot of the “problems” can be mitigated by simply educating farmers on better agricultural methods.

Anyways, it was nice to see that the media is beginning to acknowledge that rising global temperatures do have some benefits (which I think outweigh the negative impacts)

It looks like Peru must have missed the memo that that we are experiencing a Global Warming phenomenon because they have just declared a state of emergency for record COLD.

Peru President Alan Garcia enacted a legislative decree to declare a 60-day state of emergency in 11 of Peru’s 24 departments Thursday as temperatures in the Andes region continue to drop dramatically and claim the lives of residents.

 

As Peru remains in the grip of intense cold — meteorologists have registered temperatures dipping to -22°C, or 7.60 F — the cold weather death toll continues to rise. Sixty-one children have died since April 13.

 

And, according to Peru’s Health Ministry, more than 50,000 suffer from acute respiratory tract infections and 4,851 from pneumonia.

 

“Those who are most at risk live in the high Andean regions (3.000 metres or more above sea level) where, since April 15, we have registered the pneumonia-related deaths of 61 children,” Cergio Espejo, a Health Ministry staff responsible for the monitoring of respiratory diseases, told daily Peru21.

Hat Tip Gateway Pundit

If you remember, it came out about a year ago that Gore’s house in fact used 20x more energy than the average household. This fact cannot be debated because even the all knowing snopes.com found that this claim was true. Now this fact in itself is worthy enough to be brought up every year in order to celebrate the hypocrisy it represents. However, this is not the reason I bring up this year old fact; the reason is that this saga gets so much better.

During this past year, Gore has worked to try to make his home more energy efficient in order to lesson some of the outright hypocrisy in his life. Did he succeed in his mission, you ask? Nope. He failed miserably. The end results of his efforts was a house that consumed 10% more energy on average than previously.

In the year since Al Gore took steps to make his home more energy-efficient, the former Vice President’s home energy use surged more than 10%, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research.

 

“A man’s commitment to his beliefs is best measured by what he does behind the closed doors of his own home,” said Drew Johnson, President of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. “Al Gore is a hypocrite and a fraud when it comes to his commitment to the environment, judging by his home energy consumption.”

 

In the past year, Gore’s home burned through 213,210 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, enough to power 232 average American households for a month.

 

(…)

 

After the Tennessee Center for Policy Research exposed Gore’s massive home energy use, the former Vice President scurried to make his home more energy-efficient. Despite adding solar panels, installing a geothermal system, replacing existing light bulbs with more efficient models, and overhauling the home’s windows and ductwork, Gore now consumes more electricity than before the “green” overhaul.

 

Since taking steps to make his home more environmentally-friendly last June, Gore devours an average of 17,768 kWh per month –1,638 kWh more energy per month than before the renovations – at a cost of $16,533. By comparison, the average American household consumes 11,040 kWh in an entire year, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Stories like this make me laugh and laughing is good, right? They say it adds years to your life, years that Gore said aren’t going to be there due to global warming. Know what I say to that? Utter BS. Judging by the way he is living, he doesn’t seem too worried. I think I am going to follow Gore’s example (not his message).

Hat Tip Right Wing News

Here is McCain’s latest global warming ad.

Sometimes I wonder if Gore endorsed the wrong person.

Hat tip New York Times.

He took his sweet time in deciding who to endorse but now Gore has finally paused to take a moment from his crusade to endorse Obama.

In a letter to be e-mailed to Obama supporters, the former vice president and Nobel Prize winner wrote, “From now through Election Day, I intend to do whatever I can to make sure he is elected president of the United States.”

 

(…)

 

“Over the past 18 months, Barack Obama has united a movement. He knows change does not come from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or Capitol Hill. It begins when people stand up and take action,” Gore wrote. “With the help of millions of supporters like you, Barack Obama will bring the change we so desperately need in order to solve our country’s most pressing problems.”

 

The former vice president also asked for donations to help fund Obama’s effort - the first time he’s asked members of his Web site AlGore.com to contribute to a political campaign.

It really does make me cringe to think of all the mayhem Gore is going to be able to accomplish with a Democrat President and a Democrat controlled congress.