Blatant Reality

Out of all the things that Obama could have gone and done, this is one that I definitely wish he wouldn’t have. If his definition of energy ‘czar’ even remotely resembles the James Hansen’s (the guy whose Institute messed up NASA’s temperature report), we all might be in a load of hurt.  Take a look at how he defines it:

Yep, you heard him right. If the price of oil fell from from a record high of $147/barrel to roughly $50/barrel, this “carbon czar” would be there to make sure you, the consumer, wouldn’t reap the benefits of lower prices. Wouldn’t want those pesky, inexpensive fossil fuels getting in the way of the expensive alternative energy sources, now would we?

At least someone at the Capitol already has an idea of what this will do with energy costs.

“I look forward to learning more about the position of an ‘energy czar’ in the new administration,” Senator Inhofe said. “Certainly Carol Browner’s record as the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under former President Clinton is well known. She is a proud liberal who has long advocated  an environmentalist agenda that would drive-up energy costs on families and put thousands of Americans out of jobs. At a time when the economy is already suffering, it will be interesting to see how President Obama will reconcile what seems to be conflicting agendas in the White House.”

On a different note, why in the world would they use the word ‘czar‘ to describe this position? You know where that word comes from? It’s roots trace all the way back to the word ‘Caesar’ which basically means emperor, an autocratic ruler. So it appears that Obama has appointed someone to a position whose title precludes them from having to take orders from a lowly president. Doesn’t sound like there will be a lot of oversight or ‘checking and balancing’ going on with this new office.

Oh, but who needs Democracy anyways when our government only has our best intentions in mind.

If you care to see what else James Hansen said in that speech, you can see more video and my take on it here.

Today, Alan Caruba wrote an article for Canada Free Press arguing that Obama’s environmental policies and plans would basically destroy the US economy.

The worst and most dangerous aspect of Obama’s objectives is the imposition of limits on greenhouse gas emissions in the name of ending a “global warming” that is not happening. Cutting 80-90% of U.S. carbon emissions would result in the closing of a comparable amount of U.S. industries. It would so weaken the U.S. economy that it would render it a Third World nation. The European Union nations that agreed to such reductions via the Kyoto Protocol are seeking to alter or end these commitments.

Not only that, but he calls out Obama for making a blatantly false remark. Take a look:

Here are Obama’s words: “Few challenges facing American and the world are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane seasons. Climate change and our dependence on foreign oil, if left unaddressed, will continue to weaken our economy and threaten our national security.”

 

Every single word of this statement is false in whole or in part.

 

To begin with, there is no problem with regard to climate change, a term adopted by environmentalists as the public becomes more and more aware that there was and is not dramatic global warming. Indeed, the world is now into a cycle of global cooling that has been in effect since around 1998. A number of solar scientists are predicting we are in for at least fifty years of global cooling and its effects will be far more destructive to modern societies than any fictitious warming.

 

Nothing, absolutely nothing should be done to deal with a non-existent global warming. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old and climate changes have occurred throughout all that time. Humans have been around for about 200,000 years and the Industrial Revolution began just over two hundred years ago. In the process, the ordinary lives of humans have been extended and enhanced in ways that were unimaginable even in my youth.

 

Briefly, the sea levels during the twentieth century rose worldwide by less than eight inches, nor are the coastlines “shrinking.” Obama is engaging in scare mongering by saying that there has been record drought. There were far worse U.S. droughts in the early part of the last century. Even the intentionally flawed UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns against attributing droughts or floods to “global warming.” The natural cycles of hurricanes are well known and attributing more of them to “global warming” is utterly false.

Pretty good article. You should read the rest of it.

It looks like climate change realism might be gaining some ground since CNN has dropped Miles O’Brien, a very vocal climate change alarmist.
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Now, did they drop him and his entire segment because their theory of man made global warming is losing popularity with the public? Could it have been for some other reason, such as economic reason? Maybe CNN needs more money for all those flashy ‘holograms’ they had election night. Whatever the reason may be, it’s a nice move in the right direction.
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Click here for the whole NewsBusters article

This guy obviously needs to stick with science fiction writing. He makes so many false assumptions about skeptics that I feel I should point a few of them out.
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First off, Bova makes the assumption that skeptics are “climate change doubters.” This is patently misleading. If anything, we skeptics are firm believers in climate change. It’s the alarmists who seem to believe that the environment is static so ay warming is unnatural and must be stopped. Deniers believe in a constant, natural change in temperature, climate, etc.
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Next, he misrepresents what the whole problem is with Goddard’s recent temperature mishap. If I’m remembering it correctly (since I’m typing this from my cell phone and don’t have a computer to check), the problem most of us deniers had about this incident is that the Institute admitted that they don’t verify any of the temperatures before they published their findings. This makes basically all their finding suspect.
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Other than that, he just states that the earth is warming without ever linking it to humans. Sure the earth has warmed over the past century and sure CO2 has risen but correlation doesn’t neccesarily mean causation.
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Click here for Ben Bova’s article

Today, The Australian attacked its fellow media brethren, particularly ABC, for continually promoting gobal warming alarmism even in the face of mounting global cooling facts.
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Click here for The Australian article

Philip Stott of Global Warming Politics wrote a great article today discussing the Green’s crazy Economic schemes (some of which I discuss here). In that article, Stott makes an amazing comparison between George Orwell’s 1984 and the current trash being spewed by the Global Warming Alarmists.

 The second tactic has been to try to manufacture, in the style of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1947), an all-encompassing external threat against which there must be perpetual war. The prime example of this is ‘global warming’, which has been likened in gravity to the Great World Wars.

 

Such a perpetual threat demands the downplaying of democracy, the legitimising of ‘Green’ totalitarianism, the destruction of markets, and the establishment of Ministries of Truth. The last are increasingly serviced by a regiment of civil servants who are locked into the current belief system. I find it not only amusing, but also a tad terrifying, that, in the UK, we have actually created a Climate Department [Newspeak: Miniclim?] to maintain the perpetual war.

 

It is worth recalling that Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, an Outer Party member, was set the task of rewriting historical documents to match the party line, the orthodoxy of which could change weekly. This process included destroying evidence [cf. “There was no Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age”], amending newspaper articles [“Cooling is Warming”], and deleting the existence of people identified as “unpersons” [“Global Warming Denial is a Thought Crime”]. Interestingly, one of our finest novelists e-mailed me recently to inveigh against her local council’s creation of precisely such a Winston Smith post, namely a Climate Change Officer on a large salary paid for by us good citizens out of an ever-increasing Council Tax.

Brilliant, utterly brilliant.

This past Thursday, October 23, 2008, Dr. James Hansen came to the University of South Carolina to speak on his favorite topic, Man Made Global Warming. This event was sponsored by USC’s School of the Environment and is part of a series of talks on the environment and climate.

As one might expect, the place was packed with Hansen fans and the questions after the initial speech were very friendly towards his position. I was tempted to ask a question but that would have involved me not getting a videotaped response which wouldn’t have been worth it..

The goal of this article is not to be a complete rebuttal to his speech but instead to point out some flaws I found in his argument. If you wish to watch the whole 45 minute long speech, it can be viewed here:

James Hansen Speech Part 1
James Hansen Speech Part 2
James Hansen Speech Part 3
James Hansen Speech Part 4
James Hansen Speech Part 5

Planet Temperature for the Past 65 Million Years

Dr. Hansen claims that that this drastic drop in temperature experienced around 50 million years ago was due to the drop in CO2 at the same time. However, there is another theory out there that would explain the drop in temperature. This theory, proposed by Nir Shaviv, takes into account the position of our planet in relation to the rest of the galaxy. Take a look:

“About 60 million years ago, the Sun with the Earth in company encountered that region, which was populated then as it is now by bright, short-lived stars. The Solar System came from the far side of the bright arm, as we see the Milky Way now. It emerged on the near side about 30 million years ago. There, the number of exploding stars was at a peak, and so was the intensity of cosmic rays generated by them.

 

“Shaviv adopted the Danish findings about the climatic effect of cosmic rays, and their capacity to chill the world by increasing the low cloud cover. In this interpretation, global temperatures fell between 60 and 30 million years ago and Antarctica acquired its ice sheet. As the Sagittarrius-Carina Arm receded, the cooling hesitated, and it would have reversed if the wanderers through the Galaxy had not run into an extra fragment of concentrated bright stars called the Orion Arm.

 

“Published in 2002, Shaviv’s analysis accounted not only for the most recent hothouse-to-icehouse transition but altogether for four major chilling events since animals first became conspicuous on the planet, a little over 500 million years ago.” (Svensmark, 136).

Much of the historical warming and cooling stated by Hansen in this section of his speech could be explained by this cosmic rays theory.

You can read a little bit more on the cosmic ray theory here or check out Henrik Svensmark’s book The Chilling Stars.

Arctic Summer Sea Ice

The problem that I have about this is that it leaves the viewer with the idea that there is less and less ice without stating the fact that even though more and more is melting in the summer, the past winter we are getting all of it come back. In fact, because of extremely cold temperatures last winter, the sea ice has expanded and gotten thicker in some areas.

Also, these measurements Hansen cites only go from 1979 to the present, a woefully short amount of time to declare that the sea ice is getting dangerously low in a historic perspective. Just look at historical accounts of early to mid 1900s captains navigating ice free northern waters.

Also, during his whole spiel on the arctic ice, he doesn’t really address Antarctica. The reason this is important is that Antarctica ice, as a whole, is growing and has grown roughly 5mm/year (Solomon, 41). In fact, during this period of warming, Antarctica is acting as a water sink that is actually contributing to lowering the sea level an estimated .08mm/year (Solomon, 41).

He didn’t even bother to acknowledge this fact or address this issue even though us “skeptics” often use this argument.

Read the rest of this entry »

Alright, I did get to go see James Hansen speak last night but its taking forever for me to get all the video stuff worked out so it might not be until Sunday that I am able to post an article. Hopefully it won’t take that long but I want to make sure I am fairly thorough in my analysis. Anyways, he did say some stuff that was fairly outrageous along with completely glossing over a lot of the arguments deniers tend to use so I hope to point those out when I post my analysis of his presentation.

Global warming alarmist James Hansen will be speaking tonight in USC’s Law School Auditorium tonight at 7:30pm. I’m going to be there and hopefully get the whole thing on video. It will be interesting to see if he even addresses the recent claims that we are beginning to enter a 30 year phase of global cooling.

I find this fairly unbelievable that USA Today has an article in the paper today discussing how we are seeing some of the ‘worst storms on record’ in the United States but doesn’t blame in on Global Warming at all. In fact, they have a quote by Dr. Landsea saying that the evidence of global warming affecting our past hurricane seasons is ‘tiny.’ Instead, they blame the destructiveness of the past couple hurricane seasons on natural variations and the growing populations on the coast. Take a look:

“We’ve had quite an intense increase in hurricane activity,” said Kevin Trenberth, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “We may be in this cycle for another 20 years.”

 

The increased populations in coastal communities and the loss of wetlands, which serve as a natural buffer against hurricanes, mean the USA is confronting one of the more dangerous and expensive hurricane periods ever, Trenberth said.

 

(…)

 

Some meteorologists say the increased storm activity is caused by a naturally occurring cycle of activity that hatches more storms in the Atlantic.

 

These are likely due to a natural climate fluctuation in the Atlantic,” said Chris Landsea, a scientist with the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

 

Kerry Emanuel, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied climate effect on hurricanes, says global warming and human-caused climate change is contributing. But Landsea has said evidence that global warming is affecting hurricanes “is pretty darn tiny.”

And I think it’s ‘pretty darn’ amazing that USA Today actually gave the last words about the global warming/hurricane connection to a skeptic.