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Energy and the Environment Archive

Saturday

12

December 2009

0

COMMENTS

Wired: Global Warming Heretics Suffer Mental Illness

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

Those who react with skepticism to the proclamations from the high priests of global warming are not really skeptical.  Listen up, because maybe you can learn something about yourself.  Your reaction is not based on the shoddy and misleading “science” behind so-called climate change.  You actually believe it, but are just too scared to admit it to yourself:

Norgaard: Climate change is disturbing. It’s something we don’t want to think about. So what we do in our everyday lives is create a world where it’s not there, and keep it distant.

It’s a paradox. Awareness has increased. There’s been a lot more information available. This is much more in our face. And this is where the psychological defense mechanisms are relevant, especially when coupled with the fact that other people, as we’ve lately seen with the e-mail attacks, are systematically trying to create the sense that there’s doubt.If I don’t want to believe that climate change is true, that my lifestyle and high carbon emissions are causing devastation, then it’s convenient to say that it doesn’t.

This continues a long standing pattern from the left, where they choose not to argue on the basis of ideas, but seek to marginal opponents as either industry lackeys or mentally unfit.  NPR also tried to sell the same bilge from Norgaard.  It is simply inconceivable to them that anyway could honestly weigh the facts and reach a different conclusion.

It’s pathetic and debasing to intellectualism that these people pretend to be thoughtful participants in the realm of ideas.  They are nothing more than quacks.

Thursday

10

December 2009

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COMMENTS

Tuesday

1

December 2009

0

COMMENTS

Baghdad Gibbs: Global Warming "Not In Dispute"

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

Robert “Baghdad Bob” Gibbs chimes in on Climategate:

“[O]n the order of several thousand scientists have come to the conclusion that climate change is happening.  I don’t think that’s anything that is, quite frankly, among — most people — in dispute anymore.”

Here are 450 peer-reviewed papers questioning the indisputable consensus.

Robert-Gibbs-the-Info-OfficerThere are no infidels in Baghdad.  Global warming is not in dispute.

Monday

30

November 2009

0

COMMENTS

We’re All Gonna Die! Pt. 28

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

Just in case you didn’t think I was serious about the propaganda push leading up to Copenhagen, we now get a new level of hysterics even for the chicken little crowd:

Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, believes only around 10 per cent of the planet’s population – around half a billion people – will survive if global temperatures rise by 4C.

Anderson’s warning comes just eight days before global leaders meet in Copenhagen for the most crucial talks on climate change reversal since the Rio summit in 1992. Current Met Office projections reveal that the lack of action in the intervening 17 years – in which emissions of climate changing gases such as carbon dioxide have soared – has set the world on a path towards potential 4C rises as early as 2060, and 6C rises by the end of the century.

Anderson, who advises the government on climate change, said the consequences were “terrifying”.

“For humanity it’s a matter of life or death,” he said. “We will not make all human beings extinct as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive.

When I began the “we’re all gonna die!” series, it was at least somewhat of an exaggeration.  Now it’s just a plain ol’ factual description of what they alarmists are saying day in, day out.

Sunday

29

November 2009

0

COMMENTS

Climategate, Part II

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

The next round of Climategate is upon us.  The Climategate emails exposed the unscientific behavior of those behind the so-called global warming consensus.  But the emails were only part of the story.  Also released was a wealth of data and computer programs, which require longer to analyze and digest.  Now they are starting to paint a similarly disturbing picture:

Since these documents are more technical than the emails, however, analysis has been slower in coming. And, as in the case of the emails, there’s unmistakable evidence of fudging and book-cooking, all designed to give the impression that the warming in the twentieth century is unprecedented. The evidence is all the more damning because of the expletive-laced complaints of programmers tasked with altering code to corral unruly, unreliable, and sometimes cherry-picked data in a pre-determined direction. At one point, a poor, exasperated programmer, “Harry,” bemoans “the hopeless state of our databases.” (See telling examples and good analysis of these code notes here, here, here, and here.)

Hiding and manipulating data and code are especially serious in climate science because, as Willis Eschenbach has pointed out, “unlike all other physical sciences, [climate science] does not study things—instead it studies averages . . . This is because climate by definition is the average of weather over a suitably long period of time (typically taken as a minimum of 30 years).” So without the background information, it’s almost impossible for other scientists to verify—or falsify—your results.

…We may just now be seeing the potential for this new way of transferring and analyzing information. In Memogate, remember, we were talking about a single one-page Word document. With Climategate, we’re dealing with thousands of detailed, often technical documents. They may even have been compiled internally at the CRU in response to a Freedom of Information request and were then leaked instead. So the revenge of the nerds could be especially brutal and prolonged. Already, insights and analyses are proliferating on the climate blogosphere so quickly that it’s becoming impossible for even the best consolidators to keep up.

On top of this comes the revelation that raw data used to construct the temperature record has been destroyed, and all the remains is the adjusted numbers.

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

Some manner of adjustment of the data is expected and part of the process, but without the raw data to compare it to, we can never verify the accuracy of the methodology used, or even whether it was a good faith effort to correct for other flaws or simply cynical manipulation of the data to achieve the desired result.  And on the cynical manipulation front, the evidence against the warmists is piling up.

Sunday

22

November 2009

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COMMENTS

Sunday

22

November 2009

0

COMMENTS

We're All Gonna Die! Pt. 27

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

We’re all gonna die a little bit inside once the women turn to prostitution:

The effects of climate change have driven women in communities in coastal areas in poor countries like the Philippines into dangerous work, and sometimes even the flesh trade, a United Nations official said.

Suneeta Mukherjee, country representative of the United Nations Food Population Fund (UNFPA), said women in the Philippines are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change in the country.

“Climate change could reduce income from farming and fishing, possibly driving some women into sex work and thereby increase HIV infection,” Mukherjee said during the Wednesday launch of the UNFPA annual State of World Population Report in Pasay City.

Then we’ll all die from AIDS.

Hat-tip: Stop The ACLU

Saturday

21

November 2009

2

COMMENTS

Climategate: Global Warming Conspiracy Exposed

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

This is a major scientific scandal. A hacker breached the network of a government-funded, so-called “leading Climate Research Unit” in Britain, and the resulting email exposure has given the global warming community a collective black eye.  The emails demonstrate a clear pattern of data manipulation, organized resistance and obstruction to disclosure, and private admissions to publicly denied faults in the research.

The New York Times naturally couldn’t resist a little spin and damage control:

The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument. However, the documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists.

Ridiculous.  The evidence has been so thoroughly discredited and dunked that it is unconscionable for a major media organ, even one as biased as the New York Times, to engage in this level of spin.  But while the media doesn’t get it, the public increasingly does.

Opinion polls show faith in AGW continues to be the minority position.  Meanwhile, Al Gore is facing an increasingly emboldened public backlash for both his views and his hypocrisy.

Wednesday

18

November 2009

0

COMMENTS

We're All Gonna Die! Pt. 26

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

Today comes an Al Gore edition of We’re All Gonna Die!

First, the Goracle impresses us with his knowledge of the earth sciences, declaring on Conan O’Brien that the Earth’s core reaches a temperature of “several million degrees.”  Our actual best estimate? 4,000-5,000 degrees Celsius.  As NRO’s John Derbyshire puts it, “If the temperature anywhere inside the earth was ‘several million degrees,’ we’d be a star.”

Now comes word of how Gore plans to open his next apocalyptic book.  He will use the following quote:

I’m offering you the choice of life or death. You can choose either blessings or curses.
–Deuteronomy Chapter 30, Verse 19

The cover art even manages to be over-the-top hysterical.  As the so-called science of global warming is increasingly rejected, expect the likes of Al Gore to hyperventilate about the coming doom at even greater frequencies.

Sunday

15

November 2009

0

COMMENTS

We're All Gonna Die! Pt. 25

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

And by “we,” I mean the turtles:

This resort town was long known for Leatherback Sea Turtle National Park, nightly turtle beach tours and even a sea turtle museum. So Kaja Michelson, a Swedish tourist, arrived with high expectations. “Of course we’re hoping to see turtles — that is part of the appeal,” she said.

But haphazard development, in tandem with warmer temperatures and rising seas that many scientists link to global warming, have vastly diminished the Pacific turtle population.

Only it turns out that warming isn’t really the issue:

Even before scientists found temperatures creeping upward over the past decade, sea turtles were threatened by beach development, drift net fishing and Costa Ricans’ penchant for eating turtle eggs, considered a delicacy here. But climate change may deal the fatal blow to an animal that has dwelled in the Pacific for 150 million years.

So let me get this straight.  You had diminishing turtle populations before any supposed warming, while warming only “may” hurt them.  Yet you run the story as “Turtles Are Casualties of Warming in Costa Rica.” Yep, that sounds like the New York Times to me.

Guess what? Climate changes throughout history.  If one location no longer suits the turtles, they’ll move somewhere else. That’s how nature works.  You cannot take a static snapshot of it and preserve it that way for all time.