Al Bore Blather

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/opinion/09gore.html?_r=3&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

<nyt_headline version="1.0" type=" "> The Climate for Change </nyt_headline>

<nyt_byline version="1.0" type=" "> By
<alt-code idsrc="nyt-per" value="gore, al">AL GORE</alt-code></nyt_byline>

THE inspiring and transformative choice by the American people to elect Barack Obama as our 44th president lays the foundation for another fateful choice that he — and we — must make this January to begin an emergency rescue of human civilization from the imminent and rapidly growing threat posed by the climate crisis.

The electrifying redemption of America’s revolutionary declaration that all human beings are born equal sets the stage for the renewal of United States leadership in a world that desperately needs to protect its primary endowment: the integrity and livability of the planet.

The world authority on the climate crisis, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, after 20 years of detailed study and four unanimous reports, now says that the evidence is “unequivocal.” To those who are still tempted to dismiss the increasingly urgent alarms from scientists around the world, ignore the melting of the north polar ice cap and all of the other apocalyptic warnings from the planet itself, and who roll their eyes at the very mention of this existential threat to the future of the human species, please wake up. Our children and grandchildren need you to hear and recognize the truth of our situation, before it is too late.

Here is the good news: the bold steps that are needed to solve the climate crisis are exactly the same steps that ought to be taken in order to solve the economic crisis and the energy security crisis.

MORE BLATHER AT THE LINK

 

So you think it is blather and yet you want us to read it?

Why?

barfo

 

I thought you liked humor.

Not that it isn't funny that his schtick is 10 years out of date and totally wrong. The last sentence in the first post (by him) is good for a chuckle.

Hey Al - the World's been getting COLDER for the past 10+ years.

How about this:



ZERO credibility. Time to move on.

 

How big were the glaciers during the last ice age? They covered the great lakes for sure

They've been melting all along since then, ya think?

 

Way to accept what a politician tells you without questioning it.

 

First of all, I fully acknowledge that the climate changes. It gets warmer, it gets colder. It's been getting colder for the past decade - not warmer as you'd expect if carbon dioxide were the driving force behind the change. In the geological scheme of things, the climate has broadly gotten a lot warmer. As I said, 10,000 years ago we had an ice age with glaciers covering the great lakes which have melted and are all gone.

Second, carbon dioxide is not a bad thing. We breath out, there's more carbon dioxide. Plants use it and produce oxygen (among other things).

Third, in spite of all the misinformation out there, even with all the carbon dioxide man and machine produce, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 385 parts per million. As a fraction, it's .000385. Scary stuff? NO. A 10% increase puts it a .0004235.

Fourth, the focus on carbon dioxide as the driver of climate change is misplaced. There are other far more obvious reasons. The albedo of the earth is obviously declining as the glaciers have melted over the past 10,000 years - the lack of white stuff on the face of the earth simply reflects less heat. The sun's activity is far more directly linked by scientific evidence to global temperature than just about anything else (see the various global cooling periods including during the middle ages when there were no cars or industry). Water vapor is by far a more more effective greenhouse gas and man has literally changed the course of rivers and drained lakes to water crops and made lakes with dams. The Ozone Hole that had the chicken little crowd up in arms in the 1980s happens to be over where all the glaciers that are melting are (and yes, I concur that we royally screwed up with CFCs). The massive clear cutting of rain forest in the Amazon has wiped out hundreds if not thousands of square miles of vegetation that used to convert CO2 into O2 (ok, that's man made and something we should do something about for obvious other reasons). Just the paving of roads with asphalt over huge sections of land and megopolises (like the East Coast) absorb and throw off heat.

Fifth, the chicken little (Al Bore) crowd won't tell you that glaciers are growing in many places. The ones in India are growing, as are the ones in Alaska - to name two places. Perhaps simplistic, but we move large volumes of water (as stated previously) and where the glaciers grow changes.

Sixth, the worldwide funding for scientific research into global warming is more incentive to blow it out of proportion and get more funding than the actual science is. This is the danger of getting the politicians involved, since they control that funding.

Seventh, the IPCC is a political organization. It was politicians who voted and compromised science for the typical political reasons in making their reports. I'm skeptical for that reason alone.

Eighth, treaties like Kyoto are more designed to do harm to the USA and our economy than to deal with anything else. We may use 1/4 of the world's energy, but in return we produce 1/3 of the world's GDP - that indicates some real efficiency to me.

Ninth, the measurements used to support the man-made global warming theories are dubious. There's no real causal relationship shown between CO2 and climate change. In fact, CO2 measurements in ice cores and those sorts of things show that CO2 levels rise AFTER temperatures rise and not the other way around.

All that said, we probably would do better worrying about how to deal with the consequences of global warming. If coastal cities are in real jeopardy over the next 100 years, we better start figuring out how to shore those up or use that time to migrate people away. And I have zero problem with doing things smarter so we pollute less (I drive a Prius, how about you?) - but for the right reasons (I like to breath, not that I'm scared of global warming).

For Maris:

I went to school in the 1960s and 1970s and the science teachers I had feared a coming ice age, not global warming. The "data" back then indicated 3 decades straight of decreasing temperatures (through at least 1965).

[video=youtube;ttLBqB0qDko]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttLBqB0qDko[/video]

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/16/do1610.xml

The world has never seen such freezing heat

By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 16/11/2008


A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)

Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising "very much faster" than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.

Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.

 

The emperor has no clothes on!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/...ar-man-made-global-warming-was-disproved.html

<!-- googleon: all -->
2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved

Looking back over my columns of the past 12 months, one of their major themes was neatly encapsulated by two recent items from The Daily Telegraph.

By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 5:51PM GMT 27 Dec 2008

The first, on May 21, headed "Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts" , reported that the entire Alpine "winter sports industry" could soon "grind to a halt for lack of snow". The second, on December 19, headed "The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation" , reported that this winter's Alpine snowfalls "look set to beat all records by New Year's Day".

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.

Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.

As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now fast approaching from the fact that – unless we get on very soon with building enough proper power stations to fill our looming "energy gap" - within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt. After years of infantile displacement activity, it is high time our politicians – along with those of the EU and President Obama's US – were brought back with a mighty jolt into contact with the real world.

I must end this year by again paying tribute to my readers for the wonderful generosity with which they came to the aid of two causes. First their donations made it possible for the latest "metric martyr", the east London market trader Janet Devers, to fight Hackney council's vindictive decision to prosecute her on 13 criminal charges, ranging from selling in pounds and ounces to selling produce "by the bowl" (to avoid using weights her customers dislike and don't understand). The embarrassment caused by this historic battle has thrown the forced metrication policy of both our governments, in London and Brussels, into total disarray.

Since Hackney backed out of allowing four criminal charges against Janet to go before a jury next month, all that remains is for her to win her appeal in February against eight convictions which now look quite absurd (including those for selling veg by the bowl, as thousands of other London market traders do every day). The final goal, as Neil Herron of the Metric Martyrs Defence Fund insists, must then be a pardon for the late Steve Thoburn and the four other original "martyrs" who were found guilty in 2002 – after a legal battle also made possible by this column's readers – of breaking laws so ridiculous that the EU Commission has even denied they existed (but which are still on the statute book).

Readers were equally generous this year in rushing to the aid of Sue Smith, whose son was killed in a Snatch Land Rover in Iraq in 2005. Their contributions made it possible for her to carry on with the High Court action she has brought against the Ministry of Defence, with the sole aim of calling it to account for needlessly risking soldiers' lives by sending them into battle in hopelessly inappropriate vehicles. Thanks not least to Mrs Smith's determined fight, the Snatch Land Rover scandal, first reported here in 2006, has at last become a national cause celebre.

May I finally thank all those readers who have written to me in 2008 – so many that, as usual, it has not been possible to answer all their messages. But their support and information has been hugely appreciated. May I wish them and all of you a happy (if globally not too warm) New Year.