ABC, NBC connect recent storms to man-made CO2 emissions

As goes the cyclical nature of tropical weather goes the cyclical nature of the media tying tropical weather to anthropogenic global warming.

Both the September 7 “NBC Nightly News” and ABC “World News Sunday” included segments that suggested the spike in named tropical storms in 2008 is due to climate change caused by carbon dioxide emissions.

“A succession of dangerous storms [is] leading some to wonder if global warming, caused by manmade carbon dioxide pollution, is making a bad situation worse,” NBC chief environmental affairs correspondent Anne Thompson said. “This is the theory: carbon dioxide raises the ocean’s temperature, both at and below the water’s surface, providing more fuel for any storm.”

Are cows to blame for global warming?

BEEF farmers have launched a stinging attack on a climate change expert who will tonight urge consumers to abandon meat diets in favour of vegetarianism.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is calling on individuals to cut their carbon footprints by transforming their diets at a lecture hosted by Compassion in World Farming lecture in London.

He will claim that current global animal production is responsible for 18% of all human-induced greenhouse gas emissions - and the figure is set to double by 2050.

Dr Pachauri said that although people are cutting car and air journeys, insulating their homes and recycling, they are yet to fully realise the impact of livestock production on climate change.

He said an average household could more effectively cut their emissions by halving their meat consumption rather than halving their car usage.

The Global warming theory is going into the freezer, some climate experts say.

The first half of this year was the coolest in at least five years, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). And the global warming that has taken place during the past 30 years is over, says geologist Don J. Easterbrook, a professor emeritus at Western Washington University.

Easterbrook, who has written eight books and 150 journal publications, predicts that temperatures will cool between 2065 and 2100 and that global temperatures at the end of the century will be less than 1 degree cooler than now. This is in contrast to other theories saying that temperatures will warm by as much as 10 degrees by 2100.

In March, Easterbrook said he was putting his “reputation on the line” by predicting global cooling.

“The average of the four main temperature measuring methods is slightly cooler since 2002 (except for a brief el Niño interruption) and record breaking cooling this winter. The argument that this is too short a time period to be meaningful would be valid were it not for the fact that this cooling exactly fits the pattern of timing of warm/cool cycles over the past 400 years,” Easterbrook wrote on March 1.

Teach children the path to follow, and even when they are old, they will not stray from it. (Proverbs 22:6)

Childhood indoctrination.  It’s a dirty word.  Hitler did it.  Stalin did it.  It can never happen here in the free world, now can it?  Of course not.

In the past few days, I have had a couple of disturbing conversations about AGW with the younger generation, including my own daughter.  Particularly striking is the one I had with the 12-year old daughter of a friend.

(Warning: The following transcript may incite anger in libertarians and parents).

Dee:  So, do you believe in Global Warming?

Melissa: Oh, yes!

Dee:  Oh?  Do you think that people are responsible?

Melissa:  Uh huh.  They put all that junk in the air and it has to be causing the world to get warmer.

CCF Note: The following is an excerpt from a book review of Thomas L. Friedman's "Hot, Flat, and Crowded."

Friedman embraces worst-case scenarios for climate change, warning not just of global warming but "global weirding." Yet his factual assertions are impossible to weigh, since Hot, Flat, and Crowded contains no footnotes or source notes. Friedman asserts, for instance: "In fact, the American pet food industry spends more each year on R&D than the American utilities industry does." Good luck figuring out the "in fact" part. Supposing this Paul Harvey-like line is true, it is also silly, because utilities do not build power-plant systems—vendors such as General Electric and Combustion Engineering perform the technical R&D.

Friedman devotes several pages to asserting that the strength of Hurricane Katrina was caused by greenhouse gases, a claim that is first sourced to "many climatologists," none of whom he pauses to name; later in the book, his authority is an anchorwoman for the Weather Channel. That global warming causes strong hurricanes, however, is far from a settled scientific view. In May 2008, Science magazine reported that climate models suggest "a modest increase or even a decrease in the frequency and intensity of Atlantic tropical cyclones." (Subscription required for full text.)

Simple Question, Simple Answer… Not

I often get emails from scientifically trained people who are looking for a straightforward calculation of the global warming that greenhouse gas emissions will bring. What are the physics equations and data on gases that predict just how far the temperature will rise? A natural question, when public expositions of the greenhouse effect usually present it as a matter of elementary physics. These people, typically senior engineers, get suspicious when experts seem to evade their question. Some try to work out the answer themselves (Lord Monckton for example) and complain that the experts dismiss their beautiful logic.

The engineers' demand that the case for dangerous global warming be proved with a page or so of equations does sound reasonable, and it has a long history. The history reveals how the nature of the climate system inevitably betrays a lover of simple answers.

LAST week Environment Minister Sammy WIlson caused anger among some environmentalists by questioning whether global warming was caused by man. The Green Party has already hit back - now NIGEL CALDER, former editor of the New Scientist defends Mr Wilson's position.

There are warnings of gales in Shannon, Rockall, Malin ... .' When shipping forecasts like that occur repeatedly in summertime, you have to wonder if the global cooling feared by the best-informed climate experts has already begun to bite. The UK's rotten summer weather of 2007 and 2008 is a good reason to reopen the debate about global warming, as Northern Ireland's Environment Minister Sammy Wilson proposes.

Unseasonable storms plagued the Spanish Armada too. After the fights in the English Channel, it escaped homeward around Scotland and Ireland. But high winds, in the late summer of 1588, wrecked two dozen ships on the north and west coasts of Ireland. As Queen Elizabeth's Armada medal put it 'God blew and they were scattered'.

A fellow with the American Meteorological Society says the increase of Atlantic hurricanes has nothing to do with alleged man-made, carbon-driven global warming.

In the wake of Hurricane Gustav, six scientists contacted by The Associated Press have stated that the recent uptick of Category 4 and 5 storms in the Atlantic "shows some effect of global warming." But Joseph D'Aleo of IceCap.us disagrees.

"There is certainly an increase in activities since the mid-1990s in the Atlantic – more storms and stronger storms – but they have nothing at all to do with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," he contends.