Climate Change Fraud site syndication http://www.climatechangefraud.com 2008-05-13T02:13:39+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/images/M_images/joomla_rss.png text/html 2008-05-12T11:59:28+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1123/223/ Iowa agriculture is booming now, but disaster looms on the horizon. An anti-ethanol media storm threatens to further destabilize commodities markets by undermining political support for biofuels. After a long decline, agriculture in Iowa is surging, in part because Congress ordered the eventual production of 15 billion gallons of ethanol, distilled from corn. As a result, land given to corn for fuel now competes with land given to corn for grain and food. The increase in demand helped push corn prices to record levels, which is why Iowa farmers are thriving. As such, the Corn Belt owes much of its good fortune to congressional politics, rather than market forces. But in an age of the 24/7 news cycle and poll-driven policy, political support for ethanol is even more volatile than the price of commodities on the Chicago Board of Trade, and ethanol's political situation has worsened dramatically in the past few months. That should worry Iowa farmers. After all, government giveth, government taketh away. text/html 2008-05-12T08:26:04+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1121/225/ New Scientist, which revealed (http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19426105.600-how-the-obesity-epidemic-is-aggravating-global-warming.html) last year that obesity causes global warming, now tells us that global warming will make days longer (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1915-global-warming-will-lengthen-the-day.html), which has been confirmed by NASA (http://www-spof.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/StarFAQ18.htm#q311). So not only is at least one global warming hysteric worried that efforts to stop global warming may slow the rotation of the earth (http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/05/wont_we_eventually_stop_the_ea.html), but the hysterical New Scientist reports that global warming itself slows it: Global warming will make days longer as well as hotter, say Belgian scientists. A team led by Olivier de Viron of the Royal Observatory of Belgium has calculated the impact of global warming from the build-up of greenhouse gases in the air on the angular momentum of the planet. So we might at well get used to longer and longer days. Who needs Daylight Savings Time anymore? text/html 2008-05-12T08:21:50+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1120/224/ THE CARBON EXPO, an annual jamboree for emissions traders which your correspondent visited last week, says a lot about the peculiar state of the business of fighting global warming. Like any trade fair, it abounded in stalls with eager salespeople peddling their wares: projects that would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, financing for and auditing of such projects, and advice about how this whole burgeoning new business works. And work it does. In 2007, emissions trading grew into a $60 billion business. Much of that came from within the European Union, which has capped the emissions of big factories and power plants, but allows firms that exceed their allocation to buy unused pollution rights from those that have some to spare. Carbon ExpoUnclear and future danger text/html 2008-05-12T07:24:30+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1119/225/ UN agencies, especially the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) and its offspring the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), were orchestrated to achieve the goal of convincing public and policy makers that warming and climate change were a human created disaster. Manipulation of the process was first publicly exposed in the Chapter 8 issue (here). Sadly, it was just the first of several that established the pattern of IPCC behavior. It was not the first time the unsupportable claim that humans were causing global warming had made the news. A major incident occurred in 1988 when James Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), appeared before Senator Al Gore’s committee and said he was “99 percent” certain the Earth had warmed. text/html 2008-05-12T07:11:58+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1118/225/ Protecting the environment is a noble cause, although the consequences can be costly. Back in August 1973, a biologist found a humble fish called the snail darter (pictured) in the Little Tennessee River. At the time, it was believed that this species would be pushed to extinction if the Tennessee Valley Authority finished its Tellico Dam. The snail darter became a celebrity, as environmentalists used the Endangered Species Act (http://epw.senate.gov/esa73.pdf) to halt the project. It took six years and an act of Congress to complete the dam. Since then, the snail darter has been the poster child of endangered species litigation. The fish, which subsequently was found in other Tennessee waters, established the conventional wisdom about the interaction between endangered species and development. The pattern is familiar. Someone discovers a rare species in a local area. It is declared endangered, and then local projects are blocked. text/html 2008-05-11T14:54:04+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1117/225/ Do today’s soaring food prices and Third World food riots mean we’re headed for global famine? Not any time soon—if we suspend the biofuels mandates quickly. Unfortunately, if we keep burning corn, wheat, and palm oil in our vehicles, there’s no limit to the hunger, malnutrition, wildlife extinction and political disruption we can cause. The problem is simple: Food demand is inelastic. People need about the same number of calories whether they’re expensive or cheap. But the demand for biofuels is almost without limit. An acre of corn produces only 50 gallons worth of gasoline per acre, while humans worldwide burn more than a trillion gallons of gasoline per year. text/html 2008-05-11T14:46:02+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1116/225/ Thursday is the deadline set by a federal judge in Alaska for the Fish and Wildlife Service to decide whether the polar bear is a threatened or endangered species. All the evidence shows the polar bear doesn’t need his help. Environmental groups petitioned for such a listing and sued when a decision was not forthcoming by the deadline. They claimed that global warming had already diminished polar ice, would continue to do so and doom the estimated 23,000 or so bears to extinction by perhaps 2050. text/html 2008-05-11T14:11:01+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1115/225/ Civilization's last chance (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-mckibben11-2008may11,0,7434369.story), McKibben solemnly declares that the world looks a little terminal right now and it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth. OK. Just so long as it's nothing serious. McKibben's lament is based in important part on a paper that James Hansen and several co-authors have submitted to Science magazine which concludes that if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm. text/html 2008-05-10T08:01:39+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1113/225/ Never mind that in 2006 it was reported that levels of the second most important greenhouse gas, methane, have stabilized. Scientists are now working to create a new “tootless” grass for bovine enjoyment which will help cut methane emissions from the bovine tailpipes. What next? A moratorium on baked beans at BBQs? According to the Scientific American article: “During the two decades of measurements, methane underwent double-digit growth as a constituent of our atmosphere, rising from 1,520 parts per billion by volume (ppbv) in 1978 to 1,767 ppbv in 1998. But the most recent measurements have revealed that methane levels are barely rising anymore — and it is unclear why.” From NewScientist: “Although this is good news, it does not mean that methane levels will not rise again, and that carbon dioxide remains the 800-pound gorilla of climate change.” text/html 2008-05-10T07:30:20+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1112/225/ It must be nice to be on Old Media's free pass list. For years, Apple Computer has been on that list (disclosure: yours truly is a 23-year Mac user). Apple has been the cool, innovative tech darling, the noble foil of big, bad monopolist Microsoft. Another free-pass beneficiary is Al Gore, who sits on Apple's Board of Directors (http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/gore.html). Wait until you see what ClimateCounts.org (http://www.climatecounts.org/) thinks of Apple's record (http://www.climatecounts.org/scorecard_score.php?co=7) on fighting global warming, especially in comparison to its industry peers (HT InfoWorld (http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis A=/article/08/05/09/Apple-slammed-on-climate-change_1.html) via Kevin at Pundit Review (http://www.punditreview.com/2008/05/09/al-gores-rotten-apple-part-2/#comment-1735289)): text/html 2008-05-09T12:22:35+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1111/225/ (h/t to Sharon) B.C. [British Columbia] is about to be hit with new taxes to achieve the government’s greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goal of 33% below current levels by 2020. But the BC Liberals were elected to reduce taxes and burdensome regulations, not increase them. So just how did the premier come up with this goal and what is the outlook for B.C.? While in Hawaii for his Christmas 2006 vacation, the premier is said to have read a couple of books on catastrophic climate change, including Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Tellingly, the British High Court ruled showing the movie version of that book, and misleading students into believing it accurately represented climate science, was in violation of the political indoctrination section of the country’s Education Act. The experience in Europe goes beyond propaganda, however. The experience in Europe is one of job losses with little, if any, GHG reduction. text/html 2008-05-09T12:07:56+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1110/228/ When climatologists talk about the Quaternary Period, you probably think they are referring to events that occurred thousand of years ago. You would likely be right, but for the official record, the Quaternary Period is the geologic and climatic time period that began roughly 1.8 million years ago and includes the present. The Quaternary includes two major geologic epochs including the relatively cold Pleistocene when glaciers ruled the Earth and the Holocene period that began approximately 12,000 years ago when the glaciers retreated. We see the climate alarmists sometimes arguing that we have left the Holocene and entered the Anthropocene – a time when the human impact has significantly altered the Earth. So, we are currently living in the Quaternary, Holocene, and Anthropocene, all at the same time. text/html 2008-05-09T11:43:52+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1108/218/ offered odds (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/global-cooling-wanna-bet/) on future temperature changes, which is great because it gives us a sense of their confidence in predictions of future global average temperatures. Unfortunately, RCs foray into laying odds is not as useful as it might be. The motivation for this bet is the recent Keenlyside et al. (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7191/abs/nature06921.html) paper that has caused a set of mixed reactions among the commenters in the blogosphere. Some commenters here (http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/001413global_cooling_consi.html) have stridently argued that the predictions in the Keelyside et al. paper are perfectly consistent with predictions of climate models in the IPCC. However, when one such commenter here was asked to show a single IPCC climate model run showing no temperature increase for the 2 decades following the late 1990s he submitted an irrelevant link and disappeared. Others have argued that the Keenlyside et al. projections (and this includes Keenlyside) are inconsistent with the IPCC predictions. Real Climate apparently falls into this latter camp. text/html 2008-05-09T11:27:44+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1107/225/ Students at a California public school have written a series of letters to Chicago's Heartland Institute, which works to discover and develop free-market solutions to society's problems, attacking its members for destroying our planet by refusing to endorse the politics of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth film. According to students in the sixth-grade class of teacher Michael Steria at David A. Brown Middle School, the institute consists of fools and horrible people. I think your (sic) fools for denying G.W. you know it could kill us all you're just adding to it. I want you to help stop G.W. not increase it, said one letter. We are going to tell you about global warming. I don't care if you don't want to read, but I'm making you read it you horrible people, said another. text/html 2008-05-09T07:37:22+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1105/218/ Cyclone 'is a sign of things to come' (http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23667400-25837,00.html) text/html 2008-05-09T07:29:23+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1103/223/ You may have wondered why there has been no Congressional effort to actually legislate the “global warming” policies that will supposedly save the planet from itself. For six years, the Democratic minority indulged in often nasty rhetoric, with the gist being: We know the problem. We know the solution. Your hearings are a delaying tactic. We. Must. Act. Now! After winning the majority, Dems muttered for a while about how that mean George Bush would just veto their legi-salvation anyway: Why bother? We’ll just work for a bigger majority — and the White House. Though, as I have noted on Planet Gore before, Bush had threatened no veto — and on those occasions since January 2007 when he did threaten a veto, in other policy contexts, the Dems typically took it as a challenge to pass something. So there seemed to be something missing from their political calculation, or at least their public rhetoric. text/html 2008-05-09T02:41:03+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1102/225/ (h/t to Jacob) Great Britain is a decade ahead of Canada in the global warming debate and what's happening there today is instructive for us. Former British prime minister Tony Blair was a major booster of the Kyoto Accord. A 2006 report his Labour government commissioned from British economist Sir Nicholas Stern, predicting world-wide environmental and financial disaster if immediate steps weren't taken to combat global warming, is the Holy Grail of the international green movement. Initially, Great Britain thought it would have a relatively easy time implementing Kyoto because of its dash for gas starting in the 1980s, during which coal-fired energy plants were replaced by natural gas facilities. text/html 2008-05-09T02:12:05+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1100/236/ A recent issue of Time magazine has a cover story about global warming. How original. It’s just one of hundreds of messages that drip on our heads and our children’s heads each day about global warming. Drip-drip-drip. Hundreds of other messages drip on us about Big Oil, evil corporations, rampant racism, rising income inequality, and the glories of diversity. The drops come from the media, K-12 schools, universities, and, amazingly, even from corporate advertising. Drip-drip-drip. The torrent contains some facts, but most of it is hyperbole and hysteria. I’d rather be water-boarded than endure this form of water torture. text/html 2008-05-09T02:05:53+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1099/225/ (h/t to Stefanie) An anti-nuclear, Toronto-based, urban-loving, 1970s peace activist who opposes subsidies to the oil industry might be the last person expected to detail cracks in the science of global warming. But Lawrence Solomon has done just that in a short book with a long subtitle: The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud (and those who are too fearful to do so). The spark for the book came after an American TV reporter compared those who question the Kyoto Protocol to Holocaust deniers. But Solomon wondered about that so he sought out the experts in specific fields to garner their views. Consider Dr. Edward Wegman, asked by the U.S. Congress to assess the famous hockey stick graph from Michael Mann, published by the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which purported to show temperatures as mostly constant over the past 1,000 years -- except for a spike in the last century. text/html 2008-05-08T22:00:00+01:00 http://www.climatechangefraud.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/1114/228/ Noted Connecticut weatherman Art Horn has a habit of vacationing in places that are later hit by major hurricanes, from Jamaica to Nova Scotia, but not including Myanmar whose cyclone hit four days before Horn gave his talk on Hurricane! The Ultimate Storm, Tuesday at Greenwich Library. He arrived with the latest Myanmar statistics of more than 22,000 dead and 40,000 or more missing. He proceeded with dire images of the power of hurricanes to wreak havoc, the latest predictions of what foul weather was in store, and finally shared his contrary-to-popular opinion views on global warming. The real inconvenient truth, he said, disputing the current weather prognosticators, was that hurricanes are not increasing in numbers or frequency. The devastation in New Orleans was not caused by Katrina, he said, but by the fact the city's levees had not held. Had the levees held, there would not have been anything (damage) of any consequence. It wasn't from the wind.