Dash of Calabash

Bjorn Lomborg argues that many of the elaborate and expensive actions now being considered to stop global warming will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, are often based on emotional rather than strictly scientific assumptions, and may very well have little impact on the world’s temperature for hundreds of years. Rather than starting with the most radical procedures, Lomborg argues that we should first focus our resources on more immediate concerns, such as fighting malaria and HIV/AIDS and assuring and maintaining a safe, fresh water supply-which can be addressed at a fraction of the cost and save millions of lives within our lifetime. He asks why the debate over climate change has stifled rational dialogue and killed meaningful dissent.

You can find a link to the Lomborg’s website by clicking here

An interesting question from John Baden at TCS Daily:

We have just ended the season when every environmental group to whom we’ve contributed, the NWF, WS, Sierra Club, and others, sends appeals for more funds. If you have ever contributed to these groups, you’ve no doubt been approached to join the Global Warming Crusade.

Will this crusade become America’s Fourth Great Awakening? The First Awakening fostered the American Revolution by providing pre-Revolutionary America with a radical and democratic social and political ideology. The Second applied Christian teaching to politics. Stressing social reform as part of God’s plan, it amplified abolitionist sentiments and helped precipitate the Civil War. The Third Great Awakening of the late 1800s and early 1900s gave rise to the reforms of the “social gospel” movement and fostered Progressive Era reforms.

Climate change has generated a movement to unite secular Greens who revere Gaia with Christian followers. A decade ago, Carl Pope of the Sierra Club, suggested it: “The environmental movement for the past quarter of a century has made no more profound error than to misunderstand the mission of religion and the churches in preserving the Creation.” He and other Green leaders found common cause in the recent Bali climate conference.
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Bloomberg.com has an interesting bit about global warming sceptics in France:

The most conspicuous doubter in France is Claude Allegre, a former education minister and a physicist by profession. His new book, “Ma Verite Sur la Planete” (“My Truth About the Planet”), doesn’t mince words.

He calls Gore a “crook” presiding over an eco-business that pumps out cash. As for Gore’s French followers, the author likens them to religious zealots who, far from saving humanity, are endangering it. Driven by a Judeo-Christian guilt complex, he says, French greens paint worst-case scenarios and attribute little-understood cycles to human misbehavior.

Read the whole story here.

Prediction is hard, especially about the future, said Neils Bohr. So why not try to predict the past? A study in the Royal Metereological Society journal did just that, focusing on the best available evidence of the past 25 years. Measuring instruments have improved immensely in accuracy and coverage in recent decades, using satellites, weather balloons and surface sensors.

Alas, all 22 math models use by the United Nations failed to predict the last twenty-five years.

“The usual discussion is whether the climate model forecasts of Earth’s climate 100 years or so into the future are realistic,” said the lead author, Dr. David H. Douglass from the University of Rochester. “Here we have something more fundamental: Can the models accurately explain the climate from the recent past?  It seems that the answer is no.”

“The 22 climate models used in this study are the same models used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC), which recently shared a Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.”

“We suggest …  that projections of future climate based on these models should be viewed with much caution,”  said Dr. Fred Singer from the University of Virginia.

And give back that Nobel Peace Prize, would you, Al?  We demand a recount!

James Lewis blogs at http://www.dangeroustimes.wordpress.com/

REQUEST TO THE IPCC
Syun Akasofu [sakasofu@iarc.uaf.edu] International Arctic Research Center University of Alaska Fairbanks

We encounter scientific terms, such as climate change, global warming, the greenhouse effect, and carbon dioxide a few times every day in newspapers, radio broadcasts, TV news, as well as in conversations among people. It must be the first time in the history of science that a specific scientific field has gotten so much attention from the public. As a scientist, I am pleased about the public’s interest in science. Unfortunately, however, I am afraid that this great interest by the public in climatology is largely the result of a proliferating number of confusing stories in the media that are based on misinterpreted information about the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide.
If the IPCC wants to represent this particular scientific field to the world, they are responsible for rectifying the great confusion and misinterpretation of scientific facts in the mind of the public.

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Congress Seeks Praise from Environmental Activists for Pushing Bill With Little Chance of Becoming Law

DALLAS (December 4, 2007) - The U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Wednesday is expected to debate amendments to a bill proposed by Sens. Lieberman (I-CT) and Warner (R-VA) that would create a “cap and trade” system designed to cut total U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet an expert with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) says the cap and trade system would slow economic growth with little if any environmental improvement to show for it.

“Back in 1997 the Senate took the sensible position that the U.S. should not adopt any climate treaty that would either harm the economy or that didn’t include meaningful participation by major developing countries,” said H. Sterling Burnett, senior fellow at the NCPA. “Now, with an election year fast approaching, many of the same Senators are rushing to adopt a unilateral bill that violates both of those principles. The good news is this proposal has little chance of becoming law.”

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Washington, D.C. - The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is inflating the count of tropical storms and aiding a political campaign to regulate energy use in the process, according to The National Center for Public Policy Research. Today marks the official end of the 2007 hurricane season, and for the second year in a row the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s forecast for the season was wrong. NOAA had predicted there would be seven to nine hurricanes, three to five major hurricanes and 13-17 “named storms.” The season ended with just five hurricanes, two of which were major (category three or above) and 14 named storms.

“NOAA correctly predicted the number of named storms, but it’s not clear this statistic has any meaning, as the agency is inflating today’s storm numbers relative to storms in the past,” said David A. Ridenour, vice president of The National Center for Public Policy Research and author of a forthcoming new report on this year’s hurricane season. “NOAA is doing so both by changing the criteria for naming storms and by failing to account for changes in technology that make detection of storms much easier.”

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It’s probably not a “date movie,” but it’s interesting nonetheless. Check out “The Great Global Warming Swindle,” a 75-minute documentary which debunks the concept of man-made global warming, originally airing on Channel 4 in Great Britain in March. Numerous meteorologists, climatologists, and other scientists in the video explain that the sun — not humans — is the reason for climate change.

Click here to watch this important documentary.

Alternative energy sources don’t seem to live up to the hype:

(From Agence France-Presse)

“Some alternative vehicle fuels such as liquid coal can cause more harmful greenhouse gas emissions than polluters such as petrol or diesel, scientists warned in a US study released Tuesday.

‘Liquid coal, for example, can produce 80 percent more global warming pollution than gasoline,’ said the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit environmental group, in a statement introducing its study.

Liquid coal is viewed as a potential replacement to the oil on which countries rely heavily to fuel vehicles.

‘Corn ethanol, conversely, could be either more polluting or less than gasoline depending on how the corn is grown and the ethanol is produced,’ the report said.

Read more here.

This article ran as the lead piece in the September 12 GIR. We hope you will find it as alarming as we did. Why don’t we hear more about this side of the Global Warming issue?

“People here have no jobs,” Mark Fenn admitted, after taking documentary producers on a tour of his $35,000 catamaran and the site of his new coastal home. “But if you could count how many times they smile in a day, if you could measure stress”–and compare that to “well-off people” in London or New York–“then tell me, who is rich and who is poor?”

Use link to read the whole article by Roy Innis, national chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). This article first appeared on Townhall.com, and is reprinted with permission.

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