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Showing posts with label Global Warming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Global Warming. Show all posts

7/20/2020

AS SEEN ON TWITTER 7/20/2020



1/14/2018

Dig uncovers Roman invasion coast

Via-BBC NEWS

An archaeological dig at a Kent fort has uncovered the coastline at the time of the Roman invasion of Britain in 43AD - two miles from today's shore. ( emphasis added) 

read here

I have written about this before but it never ceases to amaze me, that with such undeniable historical and common sense proof, the climate industry continues to spew out such erroneous conclusions.  

To reiterate the obvious, if a Roman harbor from two thousand years ago is now two miles inland, then it is obvious that the sea level was higher then than now. As I pointed out sea levels are one of the best indicator of global temperatures.

f there is one thing that truly represents a global thermometer it is water. Simply because when temperatures are colder there is more ice, and when temperatures are warmer there is more liquid water. 
This manifests itself in everything from polar ice caps to glaciers. When more of the Earths supply of water, which is constant, is locked up as ice, the lower sea levels will be.  Conversely, when temperatures are warmer the higher sea levels will be. Pretty simple really.  
Yet we continue to act as if what is undeniable is not true. Who are the deniers?

6/25/2013

The End of the World

Via-Front Page Magazine

By Daniel Greenfield

Two years ago, the media had a prolonged belly laugh at a group that predicted the end of the world. Now media outlets from The New York Times to The New Republic to The Economist are wrestling with the question of why their own ideology’s doomsday predictions are not coming to pass.

“If scientific models can’t project the last 15 years, what does that mean for their projections of the next 100?,” the New Republic asks. It means that the world isn’t going to end. Even as Obama exploits Global Warming to launch a War on Affordable Energy, the doomsday environmentalists look as foolish as any other group that set a date for the end of the world, only for the world to stubbornly go on existing.True believers in Gore would say that’s the difference between science and eschatology. But when bogus science warns us of an apocalypse if we don’t follow the tenets of their ideology, then how much difference is there anyway?Of course no one expects MSNBC to do sneering reports of global warming activists freezing at a protest or Al Gore being forced to watch a count down of a solidly frozen North Pole. Such mockery is only directed at people who believe in more unpopular forms of apocalypses. At least unpopular at the broadcasting studios of Manhattan. It’s fashionable to mock religious leaders for hypocrisy, but there isn’t a peep when the Vice President turned Prophet of Gaia lectures on watching our carbon footprint and then flies on jet fueled carbon wings to another concert on behalf of the planet.Other aspiring prophets like Prince Charles, who admires poverty, but lives in privilege, are no better. Or Obama who told Americans that they couldn’t heat their homes as they pleased, while keeping his thermostat up to Hawaiian standards.If the invariably prosperous believers in Death by Global Warming really believed in the creed, wouldn’t they be selling their homes and cars, and going off to live a simpler life in the Himalayan mountains. But it’s easier to believe in something than to practice it.Like all liberal social engineering projects, environmentalism is meant to change everyone’s life. And there’s no point in its proponents doing more than paying lip service to it, as they make it the law of the land. If Osama bin Laden could preach Islamic morality while stocking up on X rated tapes, surely Al Gore can foretell the doom of the North Pole and still take a private jet around the world.If liberals have turned to doomsday predictions, it’s because they have discovered that religion and the apocalypse can be a marvelously effective way of controlling human behavior. But their religion is materialistic, concerned with the human presence in the natural world. Even its materialism is consumeristic.

The Reds had no truck with environmentalism. To a Communist, the natural world was a mass of raw resources to be used to build socialism. But to the children of the capitalists, concerned more with what they buy, than with what they do, environmentalism restraints and directs their buying habits. As religions goes, environmentalism is the Consumer Reports of theologies.

For all the talk of apocalypse and melting poles, the environmentalists really only care about your economic activity. Buy or don’t buy. But preferably buy, so long as you’re buying green, or buying carbon credits along with whatever you’re buying.

The sinner fills up on paper towels, but the righteous man buys paper towels with a green stamp on the box. The man of little faith may drive an SUV, and the faithful may also drive an SUV, but the faithful man’s SUV has a bumper sticker warning everyone to conserve something or other. Such hypocrisies are constant, pervasive and little commented on.

What began as a movement for the responsible stewardship of the earth has been corrupted from the ethical to the fanatical. Conservationism kept humanity in the picture. Environmentalism rages at humanity. Behind its colorful drawings and its dolphin key chains is the vision of a world in which humanity and its fire sticks are the original sin.That primal rage has been channeled and diluted into a million businesses, into countless regulations and profitable ventures. The new environmentalists are regulatory robber barons like Al Gore, green rent seeking tycoons looking to use cap and trade, and a thousand mandatory revenue streams to fleece both the faithful and the unfaithful. There is no further way to corrupt environmentalism, its existence is already an abiding corruption. For the false prophets, the lab coated peddlers of junk science and the writers dreaming up ever more fanciful depictions of the day when the oceans rise and man finds himself paddling for safety besides the polar bear, there is nothing left but the lie.

The religious apocalypse is the break between a fallen world and a better world. But in the environmental apocalypse, it is only the end. Materialistic eschatology cannot see any way past the end or any purpose for it. Only a Waterworld in which some of us develop gills and others have to learn to kayak.

The threat of their end of days is meant to badger us into bowing our heads and opening our wallets. Buy Green or the North Pole will end in 5 years. Bicycle to work or a polar bear will chew your ear off. Their end of days lacks imagination and proof. It is constantly imminent, yet never arrives. It is held to be proven so thoroughly that it can never be disproven. And who would want to disprove it, except someone who doesn’t already have a grant to prove it.

There’s hardly a problem in the world that the media doesn’t blame on Global Warming. When it’s hot, they point to Global Warming. When it’s cold, they also point to Global Warming. Earthquakes, civil wars and the end of WiFi are all laid at the door of one single phenomenon. The difference between religion and science is that one is revealed truth and the other is theory. But when men and women in lab coats start predicting the end of days if the heretics don’t repent and cast out their incandescent light bulbs and SUV’s, then what you have is theory as revealed truth. An experiment in eschatology.

Science requires objectivity. Combine science with ideology and you get a mandatory belief in absurdity. Everyone who self-righteously insists that global warming is science misses the point. The scientific orthodoxy of every generation has embraced ridiculous and wrongheaded theories. Science is not a pure form of revealed truth, it is the trial and error process by which we crawl toward a better understanding. A less flawed picture of the universe. Turn the scientific orthodoxy of any era into a mandatory ideology and you have killed the science and left only another belief system.

Environmentalists parade around the corpse of science on their shoulders, mount it on their walls and proclaim that science is on their side. Once you completely murder a system of using trial and error experimentation to confirm a theory, then you might as well use it as a banner on a flagpole or a trophy in your living room. But the environmentalist’ science has as much relation to a living field, as the head of a dead moose mounted over a bed and breakfast’s fireplace does to a living creature.

Ideology has killed science and now claims its intellectual credibility for its own. But purging dissenting scientists, burning books and silencing all critics with jeers is not science, no more than what passed for it in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany was science. It is the fanaticism of an ideology, the championing of backwardness, the exploitation of titles and terminology to silence debate and betray the ethical trust of inquiry.

The end of the world? The same people who ridicule religious people waiting for the end, are waiting for their own end of the world without any real faith in it.

Their end of the world is only another consumeristic strategy for convincing people to buy the right brands and donate to the right causes. It is as hollow as everything else.


No one will hang around with a count down clock in 2014 and wait for the North Pole to end. Not even if Gore’s prediction were better known. Those who believe in Global Warming, paradoxically don’t really believe that the world could actually end. They may eat up the cinematic spectacle of oceans rising, cities sinking underwater and whales doing belly flops over the Grand Canyon, but it never really touches them.

To understand why is to understand the purpose of environmentalism. Its harsh criticism of consumerism turns it into a moral activity. The Whole Foods shopper is elevated above the Wal-Mart shopper. The woman who buys sneakers made of recycled tires isn’t shopping, she’s engaged in an ethical communion with the earth. Environmentalism is the theology of consumerism, uplifting it rather than proscribing it, taking a cut of ordinary economic activities in exchange for its blessing.

Environmentalism is the religion of the comfortable, and the theology of the convenient. It injects a false spirituality into the materialism of the faithless. There is nothing to it but greed. From the false prophets spinning tales of the end, to scientists doing a more elevated version of the same for grant money to scribes envisioning the end for a lucrative book or movie deal. It’s not the end of the world they’re waiting for, but a commercial break.

9/28/2012

Blast From The Past

Via-Jer's Notes

Originally posted at Skeptics Corner 1/22/1

As is usual in the ever expanding field of climate change flimflammery we have conflicting analysis of doomsdayism ( I know I just made it up).

I assume it it is still an acceptable scientific principle that animal habitats are primarily determined by their need for sustenance. In other words animals tend to hang out where the vittles are. Which if true, its true isn't it?, brings forth a confliction of flimflammery.

We now have a shocking development in the flimflam community, where it has been determined that in spite of previous model induced hypothesis, real world evidence points to the conclusion that plant life rather than fleeing to the mountain heights to escape MAN MADE GLOBAL WARMING it is instead moving down hill.

For years researchers have watched plants and animals migrate to cooler quarters in response to global warming. But a new study suggests some plants are moving downhill, drawn by increased precipitation.

Not wanting to throw another hypothesis into the mix, but I will anyway, perhaps the plants are coming down out of the mountains to suck up some of that SUV exhaust (CO2) they thrive on. I actually have no proof of that other than millions of years of plant life on Earth fiendish respiratory craving of that devilish element mined from depths of hell by humankind's insatiable desire to feed it's energy lust. But I digress.

So plants are moving down the mountains, why? Other than my CO2 hypothesis, the scientist in this study of northern California mountains say it has to do with increased precipitation. From another narrative article on the study:
Individual plants don't move, of course, but the optimal range of many different species in the area studied has been creeping downhill. That means more new seeds sprouted downhill, and more new plants took root. This was true not just for annual plants but also for bushes and even trees.

Why would that be, Dobrowski wondered, considering that the area has warmed up. He and his colleagues say the answer lies not in the temperature, but in the amount of life-giving rain and snow. It turns out this region has been getting wetter.

"These plants are tracking water availability more so than temperature," he says.
Well that makes sense right? Although plants hate .5 degC of global averaged temperature increase over the past century as determined by scientist with overwhelming financial interest and ideological prejudices, they still must have water. I wonder if anyone told the plants in the tropical rain forest they need to head to higher ground? Again I digress.

Again I find a confliction in the flimflam. This clearly says  "It turns out this region has been getting wetter."  However it seems to me that California was supposed to burn away in drought turning it into a dust bowl of Biblical proportions:
California's farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said Tuesday.

In his first interview since taking office last month, the Nobel-prize-winning physicist offered some of the starkest comments yet on how seriously President Obama's cabinet views the threat of climate change, along with a detailed assessment of the administration's plans to combat it.
YES, YES, YES !!! So saith the amazing Dr. Chu, he a high priest of the flimflam community and Laurette of the NOBEL most high:
Chu warned of water shortages plaguing the West and Upper Midwest and particularly dire consequences for California, his home state, the nation's leading agricultural producer.

In a worst case, Chu said, up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture.

"I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen," he said. "We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California." And, he added, "I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going" either.

Doomsdayism at its apocalyptic best! But he does not speak only on his own NOBEL authority , oh no, the amazing Dr. Chu relies on studies published in the oracle journal Science
A pair of recent studies raise similar warnings. One, published in January in the journal Science, raised the specter of worldwide crop shortages as temperatures rise. Another, penned by UC Berkeley researchers last year, estimated California has about $2.5 trillion in real estate assets -- including agriculture -- endangered by warming.
Interesting, wasn't this most recent study about the migrating plant life published in the same oracle journal?
But a new study in Science has found that plants in northern California are bucking this uphill trend in preference for wetter, lower areas.
Why yes it was. Wetter lower areas? The amazing Dr. Chu and the oracle Science proclaimed that California was doomed, DOOMED I TELL YOU DOOMED! But now we have scientist sacrilegiously making statements to the oracle NPR:
Loarie says the new study underlines just how important precipitation can be. Unfortunately, in many parts of the world, scientists simply can't say whether climate change in the long run will bring more moisture or more drought. Loarie says California is a case in point — the various climate forecasts disagree.

"So it's really a crapshoot in California whether we're facing a drier or a wetter future," he says
A crapshoot!? Has this man not heard of the amazing Dr Chu? But we have confirmed something very important here, MAN MADE GLOBAL WARMING will either cause drier or wetter weather, now we can prepare.

I know you think I have gotten off on a Chu tangent and forgotten about the animals, I assure you I have not. Because while a new narrative has emerged to explain plants moving downhill the old one persist about animals moving uphill. "Moutain species at risk in climate change" putting aside that the once venerable UPI does not even spell check its headlines and thus we end up with moutains rather than mountains, this is a story about animals fleeing to the mountains to escape the heat. Yes that same .5 degC which both the animal and plant kingdom of Earth are totally incapable of adapting too. I know, I know its going to get worse, but they say it already affecting them.

Some scientists predict a 20 percent to 30 percent species loss if temperatures rise by 3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit, and if some of the more extreme warming prediction come to pass the loss rate could approach 50 percent, a United Nations climate change panel says.

Tens of thousands of species that live on or near mountains are vulnerable, scientists say. These species, living in habitats from the high plateaus of Africa to the jungles of Australia to the Sierra Nevada in the United States, are already experiencing climate pressures, they say.

In response to warming, animals classically move to cooler ground, but mountain species face drastic limitations.
Oh those some scientist they seem to be everywhere now don't they?

May I suggest that perhaps the animals fleeing the intense heat of lower altitudes as they come upon the trees and bushes moving downhill to suck up CO2  find moisture, stop and enjoy the shade, not to mention the berries. Perhaps this brief respite from the sweltering world we have inflicted upon them will allow these poor creatures time to adapt to this new climate. Perhaps they may shed a little fur as they relax under the boughs of the weeping willows and listen to the sweet melody of the Meadow Larks in the branches overhead.

Or they could listen to the advice of some scientist who have determined their future:
"It's a really simple story that at some point you can't go further north or higher up, so there's no doubt that species will go extinct," Walter Jetz, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale, said.
And so it goes in the flimflam community of Doomsdayism. But in the real world

SING IT LOUD!

9/23/2012

Blast From The Past

Via-Skeptics Corner
 For some reason this is my most read post at Skeptics Corner, It was originally posted on May 1, 2009 but it still gets lots of hits. I figure I would re-post it here for kicks and giggles.




Spit and Pie Charts

I find that visual representations sometimes are very enlightening, after all "a picture is worth a thousand words" right? I thought I'd paint a picture of one of my favorite global warming quotes. The late Reid Bryson who was considered to be the father of modern climatology once said


"You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide".


What did he mean?


9/16/2012

Blast From The Past

Via-Jer's Notes

I was going through some old articles when I came upon the following which I originally posted on my Skeptics Corner Blog on September 4 2009. I had forgotten about it but it appears my predictive powers were right on target here. Here is the post in its entirety.

Jer


Not a market- a cause


Consider these two stories and how the global warming hysteria has so terribly maligned the market system. The first from Silicone Valley/San Jose Business Journal

Report: Lights out next year for many in solar industry

Massive inventory buildup and Chinese competition could put half of all solar manufacturers out of business next year, according to a market research firm.

The report from The Information Network said inventory is averaging 122 days in 2009 versus 71 days in 2008.

Further, it reports that production has dropped to 27.9 percent of potential capacity in 2009 from 48 percent in 2008.

"As many as 50 percent of the more than 200 solar manufacturers, mired in red ink with current selling prices above $2 per watt, may not survive," the report said. Making matters worse, lower cost products from China are projected to drop to below $1 per watt in 2010 and 50 cents in 2011.

A number of solar panel manufacturers have reported losses in recent weeks including Energy Conversion Devices Inc., JA Solar, LDK Solar Co., Q-Cells, ReneSola Ltd., Solar Power Inc., and Yingli Green Energy Holding Co. Ltd.
************
Now any reasonable person would read that and surmise that the solar power panel business was not a good investment at this time. The market, for the reasons explained , "is way down" and "inventories are up". But solar power is not a market, it is a cause. from Silicone Valley Mercury News :

With $535M federal loan, Solyndra begins work on Fremont solar-panel plant

Solyndra, a privately held Fremont company, is using a $535 million loan from the U.S. Treasury to build its second solar-panel factory.

Solyndra celebrated the boost for solar power with star power: an event with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu — and, via satellite from the White House, Vice President Joe Biden.

"We have adopted policies in California that have driven demand for solar and other renewable technologies, and our businesses and entrepreneurs are rising to the challenge," Schwarzenegger said, according to a statement from his office.

Construction on the fabrication plant, or "fab," began today next to the company's first factory in Fremont, Solyndra said in a statement. The new fab is designed to produce enough rooftop photovoltaic solar panels to generate 500 megawatts of power a year.

"The economy needs clean-tech alternatives to help it recover, but our planet requires clean-tech solutions in order to survive," Solyndra CEO Chris Gronet said in a statement.

The second factory "will allow us to meet customer demand while making a positive impact on the world's energy and environmental needs," Gronet said.

Solyndra said it was the first company to secure a loan backed by the U.S. Department of Energy under a 2005 law to encourage the production of renewable energy. The $535 million loan was combined with $198 million in funding led by Argonaut Private Equity, Solyndra said.

The company said about 1,000 people will work at the plant once construction is done.

*******************
The disconnect here seems to be obvious. Not only is taxpayers money being used to subsidize an industry that can not be self supporting, it is subsidizing an industry that is "mired in red ink" and "may not survive". Even the potential "stimulus" generated by the subsidy is not warranted if as the first story makes clear there is no market for what they are subsidizing, thus no jobs.

Everything about the second story is a sham, from the Governator " "We have adopted policies in California that have driven demand for solar and other renewable technologies, and our businesses and entrepreneurs are rising to the challenge,"

If that is the case why is there such a glut of product and more importantly why do the businesses and entrepreneurs need subsidies? If you have created a market then the businesses ought to be able to support themselves-huh?

Then we have this from one of those alleged entrepreneurs:

The second factory "will allow us to meet customer demand while making a positive impact on the world's energy and environmental needs," Gronet said.

Well if you have such demand why do you need The Governator and Nobel Laureate Chu to write you checks to meet it? Just another casualty in the global warming mirage-the market system.

3/07/2010

Crime, punishment and Climategate


Via-The Daily Caller

By J. Peder Zane

If you want to know what’s really behind the international Climategate scandal you need to know about Greg Taylor.

Taylor isn’t a renowned scientist or a powerful politician. He’s a former crack addict who spent 17 years in a North Carolina prison after being convicted of murdering a prostitute. Taylor was released last month when a three-judge panel declared him innocent

Like many people falsely accused of a crime, Taylor was the victim of good intentions gone bad.

His abandoned truck was found near the victim’s body. There seemed to be blood on the fender. Another prostitute said she had seen the victim with two men that night—perhaps Taylor and his buddy, who were out on a binge.

The evidence was thin, but it pointed toward Taylor. Police arrested him the day after the murder. They had no vendetta against him. There were not trying to frame him or settle a score. The cops simply decided that he was their man. This decision became a form of proof, coloring their view of the case. There was no need to pursue other leads or question holes in their case. They knew he was guilty.

The prosecutors believed their version of the truth. The trial judge raised no objections. The jury pronounced him guilty.

All were wrong as wrong could be. They failed in every respect. But, the reporting suggests, however lazy, misguided and negligent they may have been, they believed they were acting in good faith. Even at the recent hearing, when Taylor’s innocence was clear, the district attorney pressed his guilt because his office was so deeply invested in it.

I am neither apologizing for nor defending their actions. Taylor was harmed beyond words. His story, however, is instructive precisely because he was not the victim of extraordinary circumstances. It reflects, instead an all-too-common—and all-too-human—dynamic fuels so many of our bitter debates.

Al Gore and his Climategate colleagues in the academy and the press are like the North Carolina police officers and prosecutors who put an honest man behind bars. Almost all of them began with open minds and the best intentions. At some point they honestly concluded that the Earth was in great peril. They began viewing evidence through this lens, accentuating data that bolstered their view, discounting findings at odds with the “truth.”

As their investment in the idea of global warming increased—their careers, good names and sense of themselves—their minds closed. Dissension, debate and doubt became too dangerous. Members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change trumpeted faulty data, climate scientists stifled legitimate inquiry and influential journalists likened those who questioned global warming to Holocaust deniers in the name of truth.

In a recent column, James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal found it “amusing” that the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert had rejected the seriousness of the Climategate scandal in a recent podcast. “She sounds extremely defensive,” Taranto wrote, “as if she feels personally threatened by questions about global-warmist doctrine.”

Of course she does. Kolbert has written numerous articles and a celebrated book, “Field Notes On a Catastrophe,” detailing the threat of global warming. Her investment in it is immense. It cannot be easy for her to even entertain the possibility that she—so smart, so accomplished—might have been duped, even a little bit.

This is not how journalism or science is supposed to work, but it is how human thought has always functioned. History shows that the vast majority of people almost always defend the status quo because they believe in it. It is how they see the world. It is only overthrown when the weight of a new idea is so compelling that it can withstand the brutal attacks lodged against it. In the interim, Socrates drinks the hemlock and Galileo is imprisoned. As Albert Einstein said, “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

We like to think that the best and the brightest—us included!— are ever open to new ideas. But this view is at odds with human nature. We think, we decide, we harden. When challenged, we circle the wagons.

Old people do not lead revolutions. Conversions are rare. The road to Tarsus gets little traffic.

This observation is obvious. Yet, it is almost always forgotten. It is a major reason why our politics in Washington is so poisonous. Despite the contentious contention of talking heads, most liberals and conservatives have come to their views honestly. Experience, education and self-interest have led each side to see the world differently.

As someone who has spent 25 years in journalism I can tell you that yes, most reporters and editors are liberal. But this is not the result of some cabal or conspiracy. It reflects their best effort to understand the world around them. The problem is, too many journalists admit this fact and too few are able to willing to fully engage views at odds with their own.

Instead of recognizing that people of good faith can reach different conclusions, critics on the left and right tend to demonize their opponents as corrupt or delusional. They assert that there is only one truth—their truth—that is plain for all to see. And when others do not accept it, they figure that base and ugly motives must be at work.

This nastiness is exacerbated by the fact that our debates have largely been framed in moral terms since the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Even as our culture has become more secular, the language of sinners and saints, of good and evil, the righteous and the damned, persists. The spirit of Jonathan Edwards lives on in the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

There are dishonest, evil people among us, including rogue cops and politicians on the take. But they are rarities. Most failures, lapses and misjudgments occur when good intentions go awry.

Even as we hold accountable the law enforcement officials who sent Greg Taylor to jail and the Climategate crew who have tried to smother dissent, we should admit how much the rest of us have in common with them.

J. Peder Zane is journalist who has worked at The News & Observer of Raleigh and The New York Times. His writing has won several national awards including the Distinguished Writing Award for Commentary from the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

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