Apocalyptic predictions are yielding fatal results; time to stop

Guest Post by Thomas Fuller

The deluge of catastrophic predictions regarding global warming and its consequences have reached almost everyone on the planet, and perhaps unintentionally have replaced Cold War bomb scares as the primary source of doomsaying.

The messages are well-thought out and prepared by professional communicators, with disturbing and graphic images of a post-apocalyptic scenario lifted from Mad Max, and with about as much connection to reality.

In March of this year, a couple in Argentina shot their two children before committing suicide over fears of global warming. On Wednesday, in Maryland, James Lee apparently committed ‘suicide by cop’ after taking three hostages in an attempt to force the Discovery Channel to alter its programming to suit his fears over the environment.

At what point will we call to account those who have preached ‘the end of the earth as we know it’ to countless people? How many people will be driven to desperation by those who distort the science?

The IPCC’s AR4, published in 2007, painted a future with global warming as a serious, multinational problem that we should face together. You may agree or disagree with their findings–I agree with most of it, not all.

But nowhere does the work of thousands of scientists in peer-reviewed literature say that we are doomed, that civilization is at risk, that there is no future for us.

That falls to several groups of committed lobbyists, scientists, environmentalists and politicians who began saying the IPCC report was too conservative almost the day it was published. The evidence they bring forward for that claim is nowhere near as robust as the science referenced by the IPCC.

They are scaring people to death. How many more lives will be blighted or destroyed before they understand that their propaganda has real world effects?

It’s hard to work up too much sympathy for Mr. Lee–he took hostages, threatened to detonate an explosive device, and pretty much guaranteed his fate. And his worries weren’t confined to global warming. He was equally concerned with overpopulation, another scare story put out by some of the same people pumping hysteria over global warming.

At any rate, what these people are doing is despicable, if not murderous.

Sea levels are not going to rise by 20 feet. Or 10. Or five. There is not going to be a climatic tipping point that pushes our planet into a spiral of ever-increasing temperatures. Global warming is not going to cause the extinction of half the species on this planet, or even 1%.

And it is long past time that respected members of the scientific community publicly acknowledge those facts and helped bring this debate back within the realm of reality.

My father met Jim Jones briefly before he moved to Guyana with his flock, and described him as intelligent and persuasive, able to talk reasonably about a multitude of subjects. We don’t need more smooth talkers preaching the language of despair. We can now see the results. In their zeal to communicate their fears of the effects of global warming that go far beyond the predictions of mainstream science, those who Anthony called ‘warmistas’ in his blog title and who I call alarmists and sometimes hysterics have created a library of disturbing words and images that can influence the vulnerable.

Are these people responsible for the tragedies in Argentina and Maryland? No. But did they act responsibly, caveating their predictions as personal fears instead of the verdict of science. No. They were trying to scare you. They succeeded too well.

It’s time to stop the hysteria.

Democrats looking for escape on issue of EPA power grab

Democratic leaders are scrambling to prevent the Senate from delivering a stinging slap to President Barack Obama on climate change.

They have offered a vote on a bill they dislike in the hopes of avoiding a loss on legislation Obama hates.

The president is threatening to veto a resolution from Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) that would ban the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating carbon emissions.

But if the president were forced to use his veto to prevent legislation emerging from a Congress in which his own party enjoys substantial majorities, it would be a humiliation for him and for Democrats on Capitol Hill.

So Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) and other Democratic leaders are doing what they can to stop it.

They are floating the possibility of voting on an alternative measure from Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from the coal state of West Virginia, which they previously refused to grant floor time, Senate sources say.

A spokeswoman for Reid declined to comment on the offer. But Democrats on Wednesday thought it was good enough to win a crucial vote on the Republican resolution.

Murkowski, ranking member on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is using the Congressional Review Act, an element of the Contract With America, which allows Congress to overturn executive branch regulations with simple majority votes in both chambers. The Review Act expedites a floor vote.

Republicans don’t have the two-thirds majority they would need in both chambers to overturn an Obama veto. But Republicans say passing the resolution through one chamber would be a big win.

“Anything close to half the Senate says this is a congressional responsibility and not the administration’s, that’s a strong message from the country to the president,” said Senate GOP conference Chairman Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), referring to the EPA plan to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act.

Democrats suffered a serious setback Tuesday when Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Commerce panel, announced he would vote for Murkowski’s resolution. He joined Democratic Sens. Ben Nelson (Neb.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) and Mary Landrieu (La.), who are co-sponsors of the measure.

If Republicans keep their conference unified, that would give them 45 votes for Murkowski’s proposal, with a handful Democrats, such as Sens. Mark Pryor (Ark.), Evan Bayh (Ind.) and Jim Webb (Va.), in play as potential allies.

Rockefeller said EPA regulation of carbon could have a “devastating” impact on West Virginia. He threw his support to Murkowski after his leaders denied him a vote on his alternative bill resolution, which would prevent the EPA curbing carbon emissions for two years from stationary sources, such as power plants and factories.

World's worst man-made catastrophe to issue new orders: forget climate change; save lakes, streams, the soil, clean air and water

The economic case for global action to stop the destruction of the natural world is even more powerful than the argument for tackling climate change, a major report for the United Nations will declare this summer.

The Stern report on climate change, which was prepared for the UK Treasury and published in 2007, famously claimed that the cost of limiting climate change would be around 1%-2% of annual global wealth, but the longer-term economic benefits would be 5-20 times that figure.

The UN's biodiversity report – dubbed the Stern for Nature – is expected to say that the value of saving "natural goods and services", such as pollination, medicines, fertile soils, clean air and water, will be even higher – between 10 and 100 times the cost of saving the habitats and species which provide them.

To mark the UN's International Day for Biological Diversity tomorrow, hundreds of British companies, charities and other organisations have backed an open letter from the Natural History Museum's director Michael Dixon warning that "the diversity of life, so crucial to our security, health, wealth and wellbeing is being eroded".

The UN report's authors go further with their warning on biodiversity, by saying if the goods and services provided by the natural world are not valued and factored into the global economic system, the environment will become more fragile and less resilient to shocks, risking human lives, livelihoods and the global economy.

"We need a sea-change in human thinking and attitudes towards nature: not as something to be vanquished, conquered, but rather something to be cherished and lived within," said the report's author, the economist Pavan Sukhdev.

The changes will involve a wholesale revolution in the way humans do business, consume, and think about their lives, Sukhdev, told The Guardian. He referred to the damage currently being inflicted on the natural world as "a landscape of market failures".

Is that South Carolina doomsday clock still ticking off the remaining seconds in Graham's term?

WASHINGTON — Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the chief sponsors of a nascent plan to address energy and climate change in the Senate, said Friday that the proposal had no chance of passage in the near term and called for a “pause” in consideration of the issue.

But his two co-sponsors, Senators John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, vowed to press forward with a broad energy and global warming plan next week. They have been working with the White House and an array of business and environmental groups to fashion a package designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce dependence on foreign oil and create millions of clean-energy jobs.

But Mr. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said that the current political climate had made it impossible to consider such a difficult subject. In a statement Friday, he said that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico had heightened concern about expanded offshore drilling, which he considers a central component of any energy legislation. Mr. Graham also said that Democratic insistence on taking up immigration policy before energy had chilled his enthusiasm for any global warming measure.

Without the support of Mr. Graham and at least a handful of Republicans, the measure may well be dead for the year. Mr. Graham praised Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lieberman for their efforts, but said he would not join them.

“As I have previously indicated, a serious debate on energy legislation is significantly compromised with the cynical politics of comprehensive immigration reform hanging over the Senate,” Mr. Graham said in a statement. “In addition to immigration, we now have to deal with a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which creates new policy and political challenges not envisioned in our original discussions. In light of this, I believe it would be wise to pause the process and reassess where we stand.”

Post-modern science has arrived, as have forecasts of boiling oceans and tree ring circuses

Once there was modern science, which was hard work; now we have postmodern science, where the quest for real, absolute truth is outdated, and "science" is a wax nose that can be twisted in any direction to underpin the latest lying narrative in the pursuit of power. Except they didn't call it ‘postmodern' science because then we might smell a rat. They called it PNS (post-normal science) and hoped we wouldn't notice.

This death sentence for science left me with the same enervating feeling I get at the precise moment I realize my hard drive is crashing. How could science, too, fall into the grasp of postmodernism's insanity? The author continues:

What has become of science? We thought that science was about the pursuit of truth. Then we became perplexed at how quickly scientists have prostituted themselves in the service of political agendas ... scientists refusing to share their data, fiddling their results, and resorting to ad hominem attacks on those who have exposed their work to be fraudulent.

Science has succumbed to the same virus that beset literature, art, economics, and the rest of the social sciences: postmodernism. Postmodernism is a progressive virus that negates reason, objectivity, and truth -- replacing them with relativism, subjectivism, and pragmatism. Having colonized every other branch of academics decades ago, postmodernism has now come for science.

How commonplace events become ominous omens

To a significant extent, the issue of climate change revolves around the elevation of the commonplace to the ancient level of ominous omen. In a world where climate change has always been the norm, climate change is now taken as punishment for sinful levels of consumption. In a world where we experience temperature changes of tens of degrees in a single day, we treat changes of a few tenths of a degree in some statistical residue, known as the global mean temperature anomaly (GATA), as portents of disaster.

Earth has had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a 100,000-year cycle for the last 700,000 years, and there have been previous interglacials that appear to have been warmer than the present despite lower carbon-dioxide levels. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th century, these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat, and, indeed, some alpine glaciers are advancing again.

White House admits cap-trade=social engineering

The White House has just acknowledged, implicitly, that the furore over climate change is rooted in social engineering - the pernicious, persistent tendency of elitists to mislead, fabricate and lie to persuade free citizens to submit to the policy preferences of elites.

Here is White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs: "The president's strong belief is that in order to transition ourselves away from our dependence on foreign oil and into a clean-energy economy, that we need a strong incentive to do that."

No mention of oceans boiling, glaciers melting or people being fried by sunlight. All we get is Obama providing "a strong incentive" for Americans to do something they are not presently inclined to do.

In other times and other places, this has been called fascism, socialism or dictatorship. Here it's just social engineering, but it's just as objectionable.

Cllimate change extravaganza is "doornail dead"

...the movement to stop climate change through a Really Big and Comprehensive Grand Global Treaty is dead because there is no political consensus in the US to go forward. It’s dead because the UN process is toppling over from its own excessive ambition and complexity. It’s dead because China and India are having second thoughts about even the smallish steps they put on the table back in Copenhagen.

Doornail dead.

Fool me once, etc.

Three major US companies said Tuesday they were leaving a coalition pushing for action on climate change, dealing a potential fresh blow to landmark legislation to cut carbon emissions.

The companies -- oil groups ConocoPhillips and BP America and equipment maker Caterpillar Inc. -- said they backed efforts for a green economy but felt that proposed laws were unfair to them.

The firms said they would not renew membership in the US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a coalition of business leaders whom President Barack Obama's Democratic Party often cites to bulwark its case on climate change.

Centrist Dems working on alternative that would kill U.S. exports more slowly than cap and trade

With the Senate cap-and-trade bill on ice for the foreseeable future, a key bloc of Democrats is agitating for a Climate Plan B: an existing energy policy bill they say would put the US on the path to a clean energy future. Make that a road to nowhere. The bill in question lacks any kind of cap on carbon, and contains so many concessions to the oil, coal, gas, and nuclear industries that one environmental group has dubbed it a "flashback to Bush energy policy."

For months, a gaggle of centrist Democrats has tried to convince the party's leaders that they should abandon their push for a cap-and-trade scheme and instead settle for passing the energy measure that was approved by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee last June. When Republican Scott Brown seized Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat in an upset victory, these Plan B proponents saw their chance. Since then, they've been vigorously arguing that capping carbon is a huge political risk that Democrats can't afford to take in an election year. "They're using uncertainty over the Obama agenda as a whole to reinvigorate their push," said Joe Mendelson, director of global warming policy at the National Wildlife Federation.

The Plan B crowd includes Democratic senators Jim Webb, Mary Landrieu, Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan, Mark Pryor, and Blanche Lincoln. It could also potentially pick up the Republicans who voted the energy measure out of committee: senators Lisa Murkowski, Sam Brownback, Bob Corker, and Jeff Sessions.

UN "expert" on climate change based claim of melting Himalayan glaciers on anecdotes

The United Nations' expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world's mountain tops on a student's dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.

Officials were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC's report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers. The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming.

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master's degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.

Climate watchdog knew before Copenhagen summit that Himalayan glaciers weren't melting

The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.

Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.

The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.

Dr Pachauri, who played a leading role at the summit, corrected the error last week after coming under media pressure. He told The Times on January 22 that he had only known about the error for a few days. He said: “I became aware of this when it was reported in the media about ten days ago. Before that, it was really not made known. Nobody brought it to my attention. There were statements, but we never looked at this 2035 number.”

Asked whether he had deliberately kept silent about the error to avoid embarrassment at Copenhagen, he said: “That’s ridiculous. It never came to my attention before the Copenhagen summit. It wasn’t in the public sphere.”

However, a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error. He said that Dr Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

The Himalayan glaciers are so thick and at such high altitude that most glaciologists believe they would take several hundred years to melt at the present rate. Some are growing and many show little sign of change.

Surveys show 14 % of scientists have witnessed misconduct by fellow scientists

The recent revelations of misrepresentation by CRU scientists about research on climate change should come as no surprise. Scientists, like all human beings, are sometimes tempted to lie or cheat and occasionally they succumb to those temptations.

Actually, scientists don't do too badly. According to a recent analysis of surveys of scientific misconduct:

In surveys asking about the behavior of colleagues, fabrication, falsification, and modification [of data] had been observed, on average, by over 14% of respondents, and other questionable practices [such as "dropping data points based on a gut feeling", and "changing the design, methodology or results of a study in response to pressures from a funding source"] by up to 72%.

That's probably a better track record than sociologists or economists could muster. I shudder to think what the corresponding percentages would be for politicians or journalists.

But it's not good enough. Scientists are worthless if their data and reasoning cannot be entirely trusted. They have in effect signed a contract with society, pledging honesty and objectivity. When a scientist is caught in a lie, it should rarely, if ever, be forgiven or forgotten. Then why did the scientists at CRU indulge in such reckless, career-shattering antics?

Global warming skeptics reel in a treasure trove, but its authenticity still is in question

Climate sceptics claim leaked emails are evidence of collusion among scientistsHundreds of emails and documents exchanged between world's leading climate scientists stolen by hackers and leaked online

Hundreds of private emails and documents allegedly exchanged between some of the world's leading climate scientists during the past 13 years have been stolen by hackers and leaked online, it emerged today.

The computer files were apparently accessed earlier this week from servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned centre focused on the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.

Climate change sceptics who have studied the emails allege they provide "smoking gun" evidence that some of the climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support the widely held view that climate change is real, and is being largely caused by the actions of mankind.

The veracity of the emails has not been confirmed and the scientists involved have declined to comment on the story, which broke on a blog called The Air Vent.

The files, which in total amount to 160MbB of data, were first uploaded on to a Russian server, before being widely mirrored across the internet. The emails were accompanied by the anonymous statement: "We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it."

London supercomputer used to predict climate change turns out to be leading British polluter

From London's Daily Mail

"The Met Office has caused a storm of controversy after it was revealed their £30 million 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."