Posts with the tag 'global warming'
Here is the speech. John McCain says that climate change is real and we must act now to solve the problem. As for its reality, I’m still not convinced; as for acting now, I’m entirely unconvinced we need to do anything drastic. But, I’m also not the guy running for President. As a political observer, however, I’m well aware of Lincoln’s maxim - a generally held opinion, whether well- or ill-founded, cannot be lightly set aside. In my view, the acceptance of climate change and its human genesis is an ill-founded opinion, but it is generally held. It can be argued against, but it cannot be lightly set aside. In other words, the environmentalist whackos have won the climate change debate in the public square (by lies and slander, it goes without saying, but won it they have), and now we just have to work within the agreed framework.
Given that we are going to have at least some generalised effort to reduce green house emissions, the only question for we conservatives is just what sort of effort we’ll have - our choices run “onerous burden on economy” to “massive, America-killing government boondoggle”. McCain’s plan tends towards “onerous burden on economy”, while Hillay and Obama gravitate towards killing America - and when we take the whole McCain economic picture (ie, he’ll keep taxes low), it is clear that whatever the merits of McCain’s plan, it will be less damaging to America - even at its worst - than anything Hillary or Obama would do. Meanwhile, if we can show that serious efforts are being made to reduce green house emissions, we can steal environmentalist thunder and prevent anything worse from being done. All of this, plus McCain gets to position himself in the center, which is vital for his election prospects in November.
We can hate this program and do something nasty to our own side over it, or we can just live with it - and come up free market mechanisms which will take care of any adverse economic effects…and then just wait for global warming to be shown (by a failure of temperatures to rise) to be the hoax we’ve all suspected it to be all along. Meanwhile, we might actually get some excellent, new energy technologies and any reduction of pollution is always a good thing.
Tags: cap-and-trade, Climate Change, global warming, John McCain
May 13th, 2008
From NOAA:
The average temperature in April 2008 was 51.0 F. This was -1.0 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average, the 29th coolest April in 114 years.
We are all aware, aren’t we, that there hasn’t been any increase in global mean temperatures since 1998, right?
Tags: Climate Change, global warming
May 10th, 2008
Please note the revised title to this continuing thread…and its because of this:
Surge in fatal shark attacks blamed on global warming
Three decades have passed since the movie Jaws sent terrified bathers scrambling out of the ocean. But as any beach lifeguard knows, there’s still nothing like a gory shark attack to stoke public hysteria and paranoia.
Two deaths in the waters off California and Mexico last week and a spate of shark-inflicted injuries to surfers off Florida’s Atlantic coast have left beachgoers seeking an explanation for a sudden surge in the number of strikes.
In the first four months of this year, there were four fatal shark attacks worldwide, compared with one in the whole of 2007, according to the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.
‘The one thing that’s affecting shark attacks more than anything else is human activity,’ said Dr George Burgess of Florida University, a shark expert who maintains the database. ‘As the population continues to rise, so does the number of people in the water for recreation. And as long as we have an increase in human hours in the water, we will have an increase in shark bites.’
Some experts suggest that an abundance of seals has attracted high numbers of sharks, while others believe that overfishing has hit their food chain. ‘I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it’s a convenient excuse,’ Burgess said. Another contributory factor to the location of shark attacks could be global warming and rising sea temperatures. ‘You’ll find that some species will begin to appear in places they didn’t in the past with some regularity,’ he said.
It couldn’t possibly be, ya know?, that sharks pretty much eat whatever comes to hand and if you happen to be in the “shark lunch position” (that would be swimming in the ocean, for you liberals out there), you might well end up as, well, a shark’s lunch?
Global warming has, as they say, jumped the shark - it is now the single most idiotic thing in the world, simply by fact that people are idiotically blaming it for everything…including sharks acting like sharks.
Tags: Climate Change, global warming, liberal lies
May 4th, 2008
Never thought I’d see this:
Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore says there is no proof global warming is caused by humans, but it is likely enough that the world should turn to nuclear power - a concept tied closely to the underground nuclear testing his former environmental group formed to oppose.
The chemistry of the atmosphere is changing, and there is a high-enough risk that “true believers” like Al Gore are right that world economies need to wean themselves off fossil fuels to reduce greenhouse gases, he said.
“It’s like buying fire insurance,” Moore said. “We all own fire insurance even though there is a low risk we are going to get into an accident.”
The only viable solution is to build hundreds of nuclear power plants over the next century, Moore told the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday. There isn’t enough potential for wind, solar, hydroelectric, and geothermal or other renewable energy sources, he said.
I still hold that global warming is probably not happening to the extent the alarmists claim, but I’ve been long in favor of a crash nuclear program to end reliance on imported oil and coal-fired power plants…and, heck, if the enviro-whackos really want to un-dam some of those rivers, then the electrical power can be replaced by nuclear power plants. We’ve even got the place to put them where NIMBY’s are unlikely to complain - the Nevada Test Site; its already radioactive, after all, and most monitoring of the plant can be done remotely (naturally, we Nevadan’s will demand a quid pro quo here…some sort of surcharge on the rest of the nation which would, oh, cover about double our State budget - about $2.5 billion per year - so that we can have a gold-plated health and education system, and no taxes…).
Environmental problems must be tackled with common sense and hard science - which means that 99% of environmentalists will have to be excluded from any part in the debate. Nuclear power is cheap, safe and renewable, and we’ve been the world’s biggest dunderheads for following the “no nukes” demands of the late 70’s all the way into the early 21st century. Time to put aside such childish things, and start acting like adults in matters environmental and energy.
Tags: energy policy, global warming, nuclear power, oil price
April 25th, 2008
Happy Earth Day!
So much for global warming. Earth Day festivities went ahead despite the blast of frigid weather yesterday.
Vendors and presenters from various eco-friendly groups, including Bullfrog Power, CO2 Reduction Edmonton and the local solar energy society, crammed into a lone tent in Hawrelak Park after a blizzard forced them to abandon their original locations.
Organizers crammed over 40 groups in a space that would normally be occupied by half that number. Presenters’ booths were initially planned to have been spread out between at least five tents, with far larger displays.
“We’re normally here with a lineup of cyclists for our free bike repair service. No bikers came today. Big surprise,” said Chris Field of Mountain Equipment Co-Op.
A handful of visitors still took the time to inquire about several solar-powered products on display at the M.E.C. booth and browsed several others before running off toward the lone heater in the tent to warm up.
Weather, its just a son of a gun, ain’t it? Never seems to cooperate - you want to picnic, and it rains. You want to go sailing, and its a dead calm. You want to have a gloom-and-doom, we’re-all-gonna-die global warming scare, and you get a blizzard…
Tags: Climate Change, global warming
April 22nd, 2008
So, some are now saying that higher CO2 levels don’t cause warming:
When Global Warmingest-in-Chief Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, the media’s prideful gushing was so obvious it was almost sick-making.
Now, six months later, a fellow Nobel Peace Prize recipient is part of a group asking the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “admit that there is no observational evidence in measured data going back 22,000 years or even millions of years that CO2 levels (whether from man or nature) have driven or are driving world temperatures.”
Newsbusters has the entire letter sent to the IPCC, and I recommend going over to the site to read the whole thing. The most stunning thing in the letter, in my view, is this part:
We draw your attention to three observational refutations of the IPCC position (and note there are more). Ice-core data from the ACIA (Arctic Climate Impact Assessment) shows that temperatures have fallen since around 4,000 years ago (the Bronze Age Climate Optimum) while CO2 levels have risen, yet this graphical data was not included in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers (Fig. SPM1 Feb07) which graphed the CO2 rise. (emphasis added)
I’d like to say that it is surprising that contrarian data wasn’t included - but the whole global warming issue has been shot through with people refusing to include data which indicates that, just perhaps, CO2 isn’t the culprit or, if it is, that anthropogenic CO2 doesn’t account for the temperature increase. It is dead certain that this letter won’t make it far in the MSM - but it does indicate that we shall soon see the end of the global warming issue - as time goes on and the world doesn’t die due to American SUV’s (Chinese SUV’s are harmless, according to Kyoto, as are Indian), it will become ever harder even for Al Gore to sustain the “just so” story which is global warming.
The problem with environmentalism, as a whole, is not that it wants to clean up the environment - everyone wants that. The problem is that the movement has been largely absorbed by the political left, and that means it was forced to take on a leftwing politico-economic mindset. The result is that helping the environment has taken a back seat towards harming free market capitalism in general, and the United States in particular. Socialists just can’t seem to help themselves - pollution isn’t the enemy, America and free markets are…so, screw a bunch of actually cleaning up, say, a dirty river…there’s more leftwing interest in blaming the United States for killing the whole planet, with the resultant need to curb the United States and its pesky democratic institutions and annoying free market.
HAT TIP: Sister Toldjah
Tags: Climate Change, global warming
April 15th, 2008
Curious how normally recurring weather patterns are resulting in a cooler earth this year - wonder if anyone in the global warming community will look into this?
Global temperatures will drop slightly this year as a result of the cooling effect of the La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said.
The World Meteorological Organization’s secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC it was likely that La Nina would continue into the summer.
This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory.
But experts say we are still clearly in a long-term warming trend - and they forecast a new record high temperature within five years.
Five years being a long enough time frame for all but conservatives to forget that 2008 represented a 10 year non-warming-trend, and 2013 will likely be the 15th year of said trend…but, in 2013, most people having forgotten this years global warming news, will key into predictions that, really this time, we’re in for a record hot year in the next five.
The best thing about global warming: no proof required, and nothing which happens can discredit it, in the eyes of its zealots.
Tags: Climate Change, global warming
April 4th, 2008
Global warming zealotry as a threat to liberty - Vaclav Klaus in The Australian:
A WEEK ago, I gave a speech at an official gathering at Prague Castle commemorating the 60th anniversary of the 1948 communist putsch in the former Czechoslovakia. One of the arguments of my speech, quoted in all the leading newspapers in the country the next morning, went as follows: Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will nevertheless be identical: the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality. What I had in mind was, of course, environmentalism and its present strongest version, climate alarmism.
As an economist, I have to start by stressing the obvious. Carbon dioxide emissions do not fall from heaven. Their volume (ECO2) is a function of gross domestic product per capita (which means of the size of economic activity, SEA), of the number of people (POP) and of the emissions intensity (EI), which is the amount of CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP. This is usually expressed in a simple relationship: ECO2 = EI x SEA x POP. What this relationship tells is simple: If we really want to decrease ECO2 we have to either stop the economic growth and thus block further rise in the standard of living, stop the population growth, or make miracles with the emissions intensity.
I am afraid there are people who want to stop the economic growth, the rise in the standard of living (though not their own) and the ability of man to use the expanding wealth, science and technology for solving the actual pressing problems of mankind, especially of the developing countries. This ambition goes very much against past human experience which has always been connected with a strong motivation to better human conditions. There is no reason to make the change just now, especially with arguments based on such incomplete and faulty science. Human wants are unlimited and should stay so. Asceticism is a respectable individual attitude but should not be forcefully imposed upon the rest of us.
I am also afraid that the same people, imprisoned in the Malthusian tenets and in their own megalomaniacal ambitions, want to regulate and constrain demographic development, which is something only the totalitarian regimes have until now dared to experiment with. Without resisting it we would find ourselves on the slippery road to serfdom. The freedom to have children without regulation and control is one of the undisputable human rights.
There are people among the global-warming alarmists who would protest against being included in any of these categories, but who do call for a radical decrease in carbon dioxide emissions. It can be achieved only by means of a radical decline in the emissions intensity.
Did you exhale while reading that? Then you contributed to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. I recommend reading the whole article - it hits at the crux of the problem with global warming alarmism: the threat to liberty posed by those who say that the crisis in gigantic and they are the people who know how to fix it.
There seems to be latent within humanity a desire to control things - a desire, that is, to set everything to right and by a web of rules to make everything fair and square. Such plans are always doomed to failure because of human nature - we are a fallen people, and thus there is in us a desire to deliberately choose the wrong thing even though we know full well that it is wrong, and that we’d be better off chosing the right thing. As long as human beings are human beings, there will be nothing but approximations of equity and justice in human affairs. Enter the utopian idealist (100 years ago, a socialist; today, an environmentalist) who ignores all of human history, asserts that our problems are the results of the rules we use and if we could just alter the rules, everything will come together just fine. Of course, to obtain the control necessary to change the rules, the utopian idealist will puff up the problem to gigantic proportions (100 years ago, the horrors of the robber barons; today, the claim that the very earth will be wrecked), and will insist upon a totalitarian system under the utopians’ exclusive control.
Even the most benign of the global warming zealots contains within himself the seed of what I call “junior-league Leninism”; “junior league” because these people don’t contemplate murdering millions of people, as Lenin did from an early age; but “Leninist”, none the less, because like Lenin they aspire to a baby-out-with-the-bathwater overturning of society in the name of alleged human progress. The plain fact of the matter is that even if the global warming zealots are correct that the world is rapidly warming due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions there is no way short of the most radical, totalitarian program to reduce CO2 emissions to a point where global warming ceases and then starts to reverse itself. And I’m doubtful that even totalitarian efforts would do the trick - I think that as long as there are to be 9 to 12 billion of us a century or so hence, there is simply no way to reduce CO2 emissions to a point where more CO2 comes out of the atmosphere than goes in.
And so, only a collapse of the global economy resulting in a massive die-off of humanity will do the trick…and mark my words, good people, as the global warming zealts gain power and come to realise just what it would take to reverse what they view as the central problem of our times, there will be more and more of them willing to go that route. In my view, we should make efforts to pollute less and clean up our messes from the good stewardship mindset - and we should leave off any alarmism, just as we leave off any program to create heaven on earth.
Tags: Climate Change, global warming, Vaclav Klaus
March 13th, 2008
Interesting idea:
New derivation of equations governing the greenhouse effect reveals “runaway warming” impossible
Miklós Zágoni isn’t just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary’s most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was.
That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too. The theory was developed by another Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA’s Langley Research Center.
After studying it, Zágoni stopped calling global warming a crisis, and has instead focused on presenting the new theory to other climatologists. The data fit extremely well. “I fell in love,” he stated at the International Climate Change Conference this week.
“Runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations,” Miskolczi states. Just as the theory of relativity sets an upper limit on velocity, his theory sets an upper limit on the greenhouse effect, a limit which prevents it from warming the Earth more than a certain amount.
How did modern researchers make such a mistake? They relied upon equations derived over 80 years ago, equations which left off one term from the final solution.
Miskolczi’s story reads like a book. Looking at a series of differential equations for the greenhouse effect, he noticed the solution — originally done in 1922 by Arthur Milne, but still used by climate researchers today — ignored boundary conditions by assuming an “infinitely thick” atmosphere. Similar assumptions are common when solving differential equations; they simplify the calculations and often result in a result that still very closely matches reality. But not always.
So Miskolczi re-derived the solution, this time using the proper boundary conditions for an atmosphere that is not infinite. His result included a new term, which acts as a negative feedback to counter the positive forcing. At low levels, the new term means a small difference … but as greenhouse gases rise, the negative feedback predominates, forcing values back down.
NASA refused to release the results. Miskolczi believes their motivation is simple. “Money”, he tells DailyTech. Research that contradicts the view of an impending crisis jeopardizes funding, not only for his own atmosphere-monitoring project, but all climate-change research. Currently, funding for climate research tops $5 billion per year.
Naturally, we can expect the anthropogenic global warming zealots to disparage this - but I’ve done a bit of checking ’round the net on Miklós Zágoni and he really was an ardent advocate for global warming. Given this, he really can’t be just dismissed - his arguments have to be met, head on, by those who disagree; in other words, someone will have to demonstrate that his calculations are incorrect…and if no one can do that, then we’ll have to work from the assumption that, at the least, he’s on to something which requires a lot of research and which keeps open the whole global warming debate.
Tags: Climate Change, global warming, Miklós Zágoni
March 8th, 2008
The dratted snow is entirely messing up this global warm….errr, I mean…climate change thingy:
Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.
The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”
China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.
There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.
In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.
Looking out from my neighborhood, I’ve noticed that Mt. Charleston has a much thicker snow cover than usual (yes, we’re in sight of snow here in the Las Vegas valley) - started snowing up there earlier, and has snowed up there far more often than I’ve seen over my 13 years in Las Vegas. Heck, even the hills behind my house have received several dustings of snow this winter.
I wonder what it all means? Oh, I know - it doesn’t matter; more snow = climate change. Less snow = climate change. Higher temperatures = climate change. Lower tempuratures = climate change. The perfect theory of everything - climate change.
Tags: Climate Change, global warming
February 26th, 2008
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