Blatant Reality

Bjorn Lomborg, known as a skeptical environmentalist, wrote an article today that appeared in The Australian basically ripping the alarmist’s scare tactics to shreds. Here are some of the highlights:

– This decade has seen a temperature decrease of .01 to .1 degrees Celsius per year.
- The heat content of the world’s oceans have been dropping contrary to what is expected in a ‘warming world.’
- Antarctica is doing better than expected in a ‘warming world.’
- Sea levels have actually gone down in the past couple of years.

Other than those highlights, Lomborg goes after the alarmists for doing what they do best: making things seem so much worse than they actually are. All I got to say is keep up the good work Lomborg. Maybe one day you will actually find that the warming we are experiencing is completely natural (or at the very least mostly caused by natural phenomenon).
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Read Lomborg’s whole article here

Is it just me, or is it weird that Wisconsin’s Governor Jim Doyle signed a “memorandum of understanding” with the UK back in May and now he is forming alliances with Germany in order to fight climate change?

The statement says that both Doyle and German officials agree that climate change and fossil fuel dependence require immediate action. They say low-carbon technology and the reduction of greenhouse gasses must be pursued.

 

Doyle says he looks forward to strengthening Wisconsin and Germany’s combined efforts to confront climate change and energy policies.

 

In May, Doyle signed a memorandum of understanding with the United Kingdom on how to better address climate change issues.

Weird.

Today Philip Stott, who I just discovered the other day, wrote about the fracturing that can be seen in the Green Church and compares it to the current state of the Protestant “church”. As I am sure anyone who has taken European history is aware, the Protestant church has broken off into many and multiple sects.

For the Protestants, this really isn’t a problem since there isn’t a need to have strength in numbers in order to change some political agenda. For the Green Church however, every fracture causes more and more dillution to their overall ‘green’ message.

According to Stott, there are currently eight different sects. Take a look:

1. The General, or Pragmatic, Greens [believe that there may be many different pathways to heaven, to that Green Utopia. Often shares buildings with the Church of England];
2. The Particular Greens [reject nuclear power as a path option - often converts from The Old Church of CND, which was strong in the 1960s and 1970s];
3. The Particular and Strict Greens [reject nuclear power absolutely, and hold to a closed communion table of locally-produced ‘organic’ produce];
4. The Peculiar and Pure Greens [reject nuclear power absolutely, and hold to a closed communion table of vegan, or even fruitarian, food];
5. The Primitive Greens [reject all economic growth, and hold to a strict communion table of living in, and with, Nature. Use earth closets and grey water];
6. The Trustafarian Greens [wealthy churches which view being Green as a Sunday life-style choice. Key Biblical text: "It is easier for a Prius to go through the streets of Kensington, than for a poor man to enter into the Green Utopia." (The Gospel According To Charles: 19:24)];
7. The Church of Malthus, sometimes called the ‘Creationologists’: [commune with animals and trees, and wish to reduce sinful humans to small relict, subsistence populations living with Nature. Key Biblical text: “The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation.” (The Other Gospel According To Thomas: 19:14)]; and finally,
8. The Greens of The Latterday World [It is too late! We are all doomed, and we will burn with the Earth at Armageddon].

A little while ago, I wished that all the Environmentalists would emigrate from the US to the UK. Looking back on that statement, I feel I may have been a little too harsh; that is a fate that you shouldn’t wish on any country. Plus it seems that there are some reasonable people left in the UK. Take a look at this opinion piece in The Economist from a University of London Professor:

Your assertion that “global warming is happening faster than expected” exhibits a disturbing degree of cognitive dissonance (“Adapt or die”, September 13th). Since 1998 the world’s average surface temperature has exhibited no warming, according to all the main temperature records. The trend has been a combination of flatlining and cooling, with a marked plunge over the past year; many countries, including Australia, Canada, China and the United States, experienced severe winters.

 

Moreover, recent work demonstrates that the Earth’s temperature may stay roughly the same for at least a further decade through the impact of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. In addition, the next 11-year cycle of solar storms—Solar Cycle 24—is late by more than two years. The sun is currently spotless, conditions that obtained during the “Dalton Minimum”, an especially cold period that lasted several decades starting from 1790 and which was implicated in the rout of Napoleon’s Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812.

 

Finally, one expert, Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, has gone so far as to give warning that the Earth may enter a new “Little Ice Age” for up to 80 years because of decreases in solar activity. The immediate portents thus point in the direction of a cooling period.

Wow, Professor Philip Stott is my hero and you know what the best part of this is? Dr. Stott has a blog dealing with the fallacies of Global Warming! What a great guy.

Honestly, he may actually be appreciated there. Plus, in the UK he wouldn’t be advocating anything illegal like using “civil obedience” to stop coal plant construction because we all know how some environmentalists over here interpret “civil disobedience.” Honestly, these guys don’t need any more encouragement.

In some somewhat reassuring news, it seems that Sarah Palin has not drunk the “anthropological global warming is real” Kool-Aid just yet. This is good news considering that the GOP platform basically gives in to the environmentalist and admits that it’s real.

I don’t know what it is about Telegraph but the photos they pick to show how much trouble polar bears are in just aren’t working. Last time, they had a photo of a polar bear basically drowning in the downdraft of a helicopter. This time, it gets even better. Take a look at this beauty:

Besides the fact that this bear probably killed the photographer a second after he took this, its placement in this story is just wrong. See for yourself

Polar bears and other rare species are in danger of dying out, scientists fear, as latest figures show the Artic sea ice is at record lows.

 

Scientists from the World Wildlife Fund, who are recording the ice cover over the North Pole, said less ice is predicted in the Arctic this year than in any other.

Umm… Is it just me or do those look like trees in the background? I really don’t think trees grow on ice so this picture seems to contradict the whole ‘polar bears need ice’ argument. Wouldn’t it have been more fitting to have one of those classic pictures of polar bears clinging to a lone iceberg? I mean, this guy looks just fine and as I stated about, it seems to have already adapted to hunting on land.

I don’t know if you saw this but it seems that a jury in Britain has decided that man made global warming is such a threat that is justifies breaking the law.

The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.

 

Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a “lawful excuse” to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate change. The defence of “lawful excuse” under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 allows damage to be caused to property to prevent even greater damage – such as breaking down the door of a burning house to tackle a fire.

 

The not-guilty verdict, delivered after two days and greeted with cheers in the courtroom, raises the stakes for the most pressing issue on Britain’s green agenda and could encourage further direct action.

 

Kingsnorth was the centre for mass protests by climate camp activists last month. Last year, three protesters managed to paint Gordon Brown’s name on the plant’s chimney. Their handi-work cost £35,000 to remove.

My first response was anger and that thought that this would set a precedence for other acts like this in the future, but then it dawned on me. This happened in Britain which isn’t the United States. That means that for the Greens to get the same kind of treatment, they would have to go to Britain. All this led me to the conclusion that this ruling will lead to a massive exodus of Environmentalists to Britain (and more importantly, out of the United States).

Isn’t this wonderful? This Brits have given us a great gift: giving the Greens an incentive to leave our country (where it is illegal to do this kind of crap).

Thank you Britain, thanks for taking one for the team.

Oh and at the very least, I’m sure this ruling has helped the sign industry by spurring the energy plants into buying this sign.

H/T Drudge

Even though this sounds like it would be a benefit to consumer in the long run, I would like to see some figures on how much white roads and white roofs will cost. Plus concerning the whole Global Warming deal, I have a good feeling that this would be totally unnecessary considering Global Cooling is right around the bend.

With hurricane’s Gustav, Hannah, and Ike barreling towards the USA back to back, scientists are once again blaming  increased hurricane strength on Global Warming.

 A new study finds that the strongest of hurricanes and typhoons have become even stronger over the past two and a half decades, adding grist to the contentious debate over whether global warming has already made storms more destructive.

 

“I think we do see a climate signal here,” said James Elsner, a professor of geography at Florida State University who is the lead author of the paper, published Thursday in the journal Nature.

 

The study, which also found that more typical, less powerful tropical storms had not become stronger over the 26-year period studied, is consistent with other researchers’ hurricane models, Elsner said.

 

With oceans expected to continue warming, “one would expect more 4s and 5s,” he said of Category 4 and Category 5 hurricanes, those with maximum sustained winds of at least 131 miles, or 210 kilometers, per hour.

But wait, after reading all of this, the author inserts this little paragraph at the very bottom:

However, Thomas Knutson of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University said the data involved too short a period to draw long-term conclusions. “One is left with a very suggestive result and a very interesting result,” Knutson said, “but it’s not a definitive smoking gun for a greenhouse warming signal on hurricanes.”

Now I don’t know why they picked 26 years as the time period they studied. Maybe they didn’t have the measuring equipment before 1981? I don’t know. What I do know is that people are going ot automatically assume that this proves the manmade global warming theory. It really doesn’t. Even if 26 years is long enough to do this sort of study, it is just linked global warming to stronger hurricanes, it doesn’t specify between man made or natural (unless the actual study published in Nature does make this connection somehow).

That is one thing you have to remember whenever you are reading an article about Global Warming causing something. Most articles make the assumption that everyone believes Carbon Dioxide is to blame for all our warming but, if looked at closely, naturally occurring warming could also be culprit. Unless they specifically try link the Carbon Dioxide factor into the story, most of the time they are just going off temperature readings and the basic assumption that the earth is warming.

Moral of the story, don’t make assumptions.