Psychological Warfare. Are we the Last to Know? Gang-green Uses it on Us!

June 2, 2014 / 1957chev / 6 Comments

June 2, 2014

Psychological Warfare for Dhimmis

An Islamist religious judge recently sentenced a Christian woman to hang, for being a Christian. Militant Islam has declared war on the entire civilized world, which it calls openly the Dar-el-Harb (House of War). The Harbis, the inhabitants of the Dar-el-Harb, are dhimmis, who have no right to own property, govern their own affairs, or even live.

How can the “dhimmis” respond? By joining forces to take out the world’s trash. There exists a weapon of war it is legal for anybody, whether civilian or military, to use during peacetime. This weapon is psychological warfare, and its deployment involves three steps.

Identify our objectives. Our goal is to totally discredit and demonize militant “Islam” throughout the Western World, and convince its adherents to self-deport if they won’t assimilate into their surrounding societies.
Identify the Propaganda Men, or the audiences we wish to persuade. These include people in our camp, neutrals, and the enemy rank and file.
Deploy arguments that are simple, visceral, and forceful. Sally Hogshead, an expert on the power of fascination in business relationships, states that a communication has about nine seconds in which to capture the attention of the person to whom it is directed. Germany learned the hard way in World War I that long-winded intellectual arguments from Professor-Doctors don’t work, while pictures of murderous “Huns” with babies on their bayonets do.

Anti-German Propaganda: “For God, Fatherland, and King”

Define the Objective and the Enemy

The goal of our propaganda is to counteract the Islamist campaign to subjugate Jews, Christians, Hindus, and the wrong kinds of Muslims. The enemy strategy begins with calls for “tolerance,” demonizes enemies as Islamophobes, continues with speech-code legislation to criminalize discussion of Islamist violence andmisogyny, with the goal of imposing dhimmitude and Sharia law. Islamist invaders have already created “no-go” zones that are off limits to unarmed Europeans, including police officers.

Our goal is not, however, to protest these outrages, or defend ourselves against them. Propaganda is, like the lance and saber of the horse and musket era, an almost exclusively offensive weapon. As stated by General Patton,

The saber is solely a weapon of offense and is used in conjunction with the other offensive weapon, the horse. In all the training, the idea of speed must be conserved. No direct parries are taught, because at the completion of a parry the enemy is already beyond reach of an attack. The surest parry is a disabled opponent.

Charles M. Province added, “The cavalryman rides at a man to kill him. If he misses, he goes on to another, moving in straight lines with the intent of running his opponent through.” Good propaganda similarly makes little effort to fend off the enemy’s arguments, and seeks instead to discredit him so thoroughly that nothing he does is relevant. If we prove to the Propaganda Man (the individual we wish to persuade) that Islamists are woman-beating misogynists,child rapists, and human traffickers, the Islamists’ propaganda will cease to matter. The surest parry is indeed a disabled opponent.

Identify the Propaganda Man

The Propaganda Men are clearly identifiable as:

People in our camp whom we wish to engage or mobilize. We want to turn everybody on our side into an engaged, enthusiastic, and active participant instead of a passive bystander.
Neutrals, such as the John Doe of public opinion. In Europe, these neutrals often tolerate the Islamist infestation, and are afraid to speak up about it. This does not mean they won’t follow those who set the right example.
The enemy rank and file, whom we want to disengage, desert, or even change sides.

Colonel Paul Linebarger’s Psychological Warfare adds that it is bad policy to define the enemy too widely. Consider, for example, Steve Benson’s cartoons of “NRA members.” The NRA should purchase Benson’s cartoons, and publish them in every issue of The American Rifleman. This would mobilize currently unengaged gun owners to the point where they will vent their fury on anything that vaguely resembles an enemy of the Second Amendment in every election.

Advocates of blanket attacks on Islam add that the Koran sanctions violence against infidels, and that all Muslims believe in the Koran. The Old Testament, in which God allegedly tells the Hebrews to commit genocide, is equally bad. Modern Jews do not behave like Old Testament Hebrews. Modern Christians do not conduct Inquisitions or witch trials, or slaughter the wrong kinds of Christians as took place during the Thirty Years War. Civilized Muslims do not imitate Mohammed by engaging in murder, banditry, and child rape, although problem Muslims do.

The problem Muslims are easily identifiable from their actions and statements. Note the noxious expressions of the Islamists who are calling for the bombing of Denmark, along with their threats to take Danish women as war booty. It would require very little of this to turn Western bystanders into full participants in the war against Jihad.

Deploy Arguments that are Simple, Visceral, and Forceful

War propaganda is simple, persuasive, and easy to understand in seconds. Our goal is to demonize easily identifiable Islamist behaviors the way wartime propaganda once demonized Spaniards, Germans, Imperial Japanese, and Nazis.

Propaganda Posters: Spanish-American and World Wars

The Propaganda Man, or more precisely Propaganda Woman, for the next one is the female American college student who believes in women’s rights, but has some deluded and starry-eyed notions about the true nature of the Muslim Student Association on her campus.

Waste Not, Want Not: Another Off the Shelf Public Domain Image

It is also important to deploy short, simple, and accurate names for the enemy. During the Second World War, Americans were encouraged to “slap a dirty little Jap.” Hitler’s soldiers became Krauts, Huns, and Boche, and here are some phrases to describe today’s enemy:

Islamist: the modern counterpart of a Nazi who believes his ideology gives him the right to subjugate, kill, and/or rape outsiders.
Jihadi: which identifies bith the ideology and the technique.
Green Plague, from green as the color of Islamism.

The Black Plague and the Green Plague

The bottom line is that we are, whether we like it or not, in a war that the enemy has declared on us. We must therefore fight him with weapons of war, which include propaganda during peacetime. Our methods must be limited only by the need for truthfulness, and also the ethical duty to direct them solely against the self-declared enemies of our civilization.

William A. Levinson is the author of several books on business management including content on organizational psychology, as well as manufacturing productivity and quality.

Wind Turbines do Nothing to Improve our Air Quality!!! Money Wasted!

June 2, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Gordon Fulks, Physicist, shows some sense on Wind Turbines

Posted on June 1, 2014 by john1282

Gordon Fulks PhD Physics, explains the silliness of the Cuisinarts.

This is an OP ED in the Oregonian, the newspaper of record in the state as I understand..

Green Energy – Green Deception
Wealthy corporate giants like Apple and Google now hawk not only their innovations in the virtual world but an ever greater commitment to ‘Green Energy.’ Even Portland General Electric relentlessly hawks their Green Energy. What amazing virtue! What progress! But is it? There are dark clouds on the horizon, as we turn away from objective science and engineering to a look-alike promoted by the politically connected but scientifically challenged.

One of the dark clouds is certainly climate hysteria, which once motivated societies to sacrifice virgins to appease the climate gods, and today seems intent on merely sacrificing industrialization. But that is not my concern here.
I wonder why we are abandoning ‘Efficient Energy’ in favor of ‘Virtual Energy’ and why we are abandoning ‘Efficient Fuels’ in favor of ‘Politically Correct Fuels.’ I wonder why we are sacrificing our last open spaces to post-modern industrialization, why we are burning our food for fuel via ethanol, and
why we are destroying the earth’s last remaining rainforests to grow ‘bio-diesel.’
For someone who has long championed science and the environment, the utter folly I see before me is heartbreaking.

The Sierra Club I once admired is now taking money from the natural gas industry to
drive competing coal out of business and move us into the ‘Brownout Age.’
But how can that be? Surely, the natural gas industry will be driven out of business too, if green wins over fossil fuel. Not so! Technology is more complicated than simplistic good versus evil. The game with green is to ignore the fatal downside and keep subsidizing the corruption and stupidity.
If subsidies end, the nonsense will stop. Free markets quickly determine what makes sense. There would be no need for me to explain complexities to those sold on slogans. Thank god we still have competent engineers fighting to keep the lights on. For all others, let me continue.
Wind is very diffuse, requiring a vast environmental and financial footprint to generate significant power. Even then the power is far inferior to that produced by conventional means, because it is intermittent and comes when least needed. This can be solved by pumped storage, by backup from conventional sources or by tailoring usage to the availability of the wind. All of these are prohibitively
expensive with wind, because wind is already prohibitively expensive.

Pumped storage works well with cheap nuclear power, because it allows power plants to run continuously, storing power at night for use the next day. Who cares if this increases the wholesale cost of power from 2 to 3 cents/kw-hr? But the equivalent 50% increase in the cost of wind power is prohibitive.
Backup of wind power by conventional sources is greatly inefficient. Hydroelectric systems do not like to be constantly turned on and off in response to fickle wind. And migrating salmon suffer nitrogen induced fatalities, if water has to spilled without going through the turbines. Besides, we just end up trading inexpensive hydro for expensive wind.
Backup by nuclear or fossil fuel is extremely inefficient. Large thermal plants can take days to come up to steam, forcing operators to keep them running constantly to backup wind.

Building specialized natural gas-fired power plants that can be switched on quickly is also foolish, because they are inefficient. We would be much better off scraping wind altogether and building super efficient gas-turbine power plants that run continuously. Birds and bats would live longer. Those
concerned about their ‘carbon footprint’ would certainly thank us too.
Unfortunately, too many captains of modern industry live in a virtual world, selling gadgets, services, and even real power while promoting only the virtual.

Gordon J. Fulks, Ph.D. lives in Corbett, Oregon, and can be reached at gordonfulks@hotmail.com. He holds a doctorate in
physics from the University of Chicago, Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research. He does not work for any energy or climate industry.

The Wind Scam is Sucking Billions of Dollars out of our Economies…..All for Naught!

May 30, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Big Wind’s Totally Bogus Subsidy Adventure

May 29, 2014 by stopthesethings

If time-travelling teens from the future (a world where wind farms had long since been cut up for scrap) lobbed into 2014, they’d be “totally bummed out” at what must have happened to our collective intelligence to end up with giant fans at centre-stage of today’s “modern” energy policy.

They’d think the idea of trying to run first world economies on wind power “a most heinous error”.

And they would, quite rightly, regard the idea of pouring $billions of tax payers’ and power consumers’ money at these things to be “totally bogus, dude”.

Here’s the US News on “Big Wind’s Totally Bogus Subsidy Adventure”.

Big Wind’s Bogus Subsidies
US News
Nancy Pfotenhauer
12 May 2014

Giving tax credits to the wind energy industry is a waste of time and money.

Despite being famous for touting the idea that the rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes, investor Warren Buffet seems to be perfectly fine with receiving tax breaks for making investments in Big Wind. “I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire’s tax rate,” Buffet told an audience in Omaha, Nebraska recently. “For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”

But while the wind production tax credit may be great for Buffet’s bottom line, it’s harmful for American taxpayers and energy consumers.

The credit’s proponents say that tax breaks for green energy technologies will encourage innovation, but they fail to acknowledge that Washington’s history on these handouts and tax breaks for green energy have consistently failed. For example, we cannot control when or how much the wind blows, and it just so happens that it tends to blow when we need it least. On average, wind energy facilities operate at just 30 percent of their capacity and must be backed up by more reliable forms of energy such as natural gas. Instead of producing energy solutions that can survive and thrive in the marketplace, we’re left with botched green energy projects that have brought us no closer to our energy goals.

If private companies like Berkshire Hathaway are not willing to jump in without government incentives, it is a sign that the energy technology is a bad investment. It simply does not make sense for the government to subsidize energy technologies that are economically unviable, while attempting to restrict other options that provide reliable and affordable energy for everyday Americans.

We’ve all heard the saying, “there is no such thing as a free lunch,” and the very same adage applies to government subsidies. By arguing that that tax credits are needed to create jobs, proponents overlook what the rest of the economy gives up in exchange.

When lawmakers give special tax breaks to their friends and favorite industries, they shift the burden onto everybody left in the tax base. While subsidies may allow wind turbine makers to pump up their payrolls, the rest of the economy suffers as a result. The subsidy diverts labor and capital away from productive areas of the economy, which slows overall economic growth. With only a 0.1 percent GDP growth rate in the first quarter of 2014, slowing down is not a viable option.

Despite the statements of subsidy supporters, artificially propping up industries has a very real cost.

Not only are federal wind subsidies a colossal waste of money and detrimental to the economy, but they subsidize an industry that is actually harmful to the environment. The alleged goal of incentivizing “green energy” industries is to help protect the environment, but with wind energy comes a slew of environmental problems. For example, it is estimated that wind turbines in the U.S. kill up to 328,000 birds annually, and, last year alone, wind turbines killed 600,000 bats. What’s more, the amount of land needed for wind farms to be effective is staggering. For New York City to be powered by wind alone, every square meter of Connecticut would need to become a wind farm.

After expiring at the end of last year, Big Wind’s bread and butter subsidy – the production tax credit – is moving through Congress again. The Senate Finance Committee recently agreed to a measure that would retroactively extend it, which is likely to pass on the Senate floor. On the other side of Capitol Hill, the House Ways and Means Committee is poised to consider similar legislation later this summer – a package that extends the expired tax breaks. Unlike their colleagues in the Senate, representatives on the committee should hold firm and ensure that this handout for the wind energy industry stays out of the package.

Outside the Beltway, people are starting to notice the tax credit’s negative effects. Led by groups like Americans for Prosperity and the American Energy Alliance, there is an overwhelming opposition to wind subsidies at the grassroots level. (Full disclosure: I sit on AFP’s Board of Directors.) Leading up to the tax credit’s scheduled expiration last November, a diverse coalition of more than 100 organizations sent a letter to Congress, asking them to let the credit expire. American families are increasingly upset that subsidies for wind energy make them pay more and more when their energy bills come due each month.

Congress should stand up to special interests in the wind energy industry and oppose efforts to resurrect expired wind subsidies. Their constituents didn’t send them to Washington to enact policies that cost jobs, distort the energy market, and drive up energy bills – but by repeatedly extending the tax credit, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

At the end of the day, competition and free markets should shape U.S. energy policy, not handouts or favors for special interests like Big Wind.

But while the wind production tax credit may be great for Buffet’s bottom line, it’s harmful for American taxpayers and energy consumers.
US News

Alarmists Claim that CO2 is a Harmful Gas….Because they have their Own Agenda!

May 30, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

May 30, 2014

The regulatory death of energy in America

By Alan Caruba

Before President Obama took office in 2009, the amount of electricity being produced by coal-fired utilities was approximately fifty percent of the total. Today it is approximately forty percent and, when the Environmental Protection Agency regulations take effect as of June 2, more such utilities are likely to close their doors. The basis for the regulations is utterly devoid of any scientific facts.

Environmentalism, as expressed by many of the organizations that advocate it is, in fact, an attack on America, its economic system of capitalism, and its need for energy to maintain and grow its business and industrial base. Electricity, of course, is also the energy we all use daily for a multitude of tasks ranging from heating or cooling our homes to the use of our computers and every other appliance.

The EPA regulations are said to be necessary to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2) which the Greens deem to be a “pollutant” in our atmosphere. It is not a pollutant, despite a Supreme Court decision that identifies it as such, but rather a gas vital to all life on Earth, used by all vegetation for its growth. CO2 is to vegetation what oxygen is to all animal life. Humans, all seven billion of us, exhale CO2!

Viv Forbes, the Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition and a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, notes that the Earth’s atmosphere “is not a greenhouse” and “does not have a glass roof. It uses convection to redistribute heat very quickly.” The claim for several decades has been that CO2 has an effect on the Earth’s surface temperature, but Forbes points out that “water vapor is a far more effective agent for insulating the Earth and preserving its warmth than carbon dioxide,” adding that “there is no evidence that man-made carbon dioxide is a significant cause of global warming.”

Indeed, even though the amount of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere has increased, Forbes points out that “Close examination of past records shows that temperature tends to rise before carbon dioxide content rises, sometimes centuries earlier.” Significantly, at the same time Greens have been crying out against emissions of CO2 from coal-fired utilities and other sources, the Earth has been in a cooling cycle now verging on eighteen years!

The EPA is lying to Americans regarding carbon dioxide and, worse, its proposed regulations will reduce the number of coal-fired utilities and drive up the cost of electricity for Americans.

One of the many Green organizations, Earthjustice, claims that “Climate change threatens the world as we know it – and the chief culprit is fossil fuel burning. To avert ecological disaster, Earthjustice is pushing for a shift from dirty to clean energy to stabilize our climate and build a thriving sustainable world.”

There is literally nothing that mankind can do to “stabilize” the Earth’s climate. While the Earth has been going through climate change for 4.5 billion years, there is no evidence that anything mankind does has any effect on it. The change the Earth has encountered, as mentioned, is a cooling, a far different scenario than the “global warming” claims of the past three decades or more.

Tom Richard, the editor of ClimageChangeDispatch.com, notes that “Arctic sea ice has rebounded to higher and higher levels each year. Antarctica is actually gaining in size and there has been no increase in droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, ‘extreme weather,’ flooding, et cetera.”

Reducing CO2 would have zero benefits while, at the same time, the EPA regulations would have a dangerous and totally unnecessary effect on CO2 emissions from plants producing electricity. Other nations around the world are actually abandoning “clean energy.” i.e., wind and solar power, in favor of building many more coal-fired plants to meet their need to provide energy for their populations and their economic growth. China and India are just two examples.

To support its claims of the forthcoming EPA regulations, EarthJustice is claiming that climate change “hits people of color the hardest” and that power plants “disproportionately impact Latino communities.” It noted “the moral obligation of faith community to act on climate change and support carbon pollution limits.” This has nothing to do with the actual facts of climate change and CO2 as noted here and is a blatant political campaign to secure support from these groups.

The reality, as noted by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a policy research organization founded by former Senate leaders from both parties, was quoted in the May 26 edition of The Wall Street Journal saying “A 25% reduction (of CO2) with a 2015 baseline might make it impossible for some companies to operate,” noting that the cap-and-trade policies of emissions allowances that the EPA is putting in place “amounts to a hidden tax” on a whole range of electrical generation and industrial plants that produce CO2 emissions. The EPA will likely use the term “budget program” to avoid “cap-and-trade,” a proposal that was rejected by Congress.

Writing in Commentary, Jonathan S. Tobin, said that the new regulations on carbon emissions “will have a potentially devastating impact on America’s more than 600 coal-fired power plants” noting that “the move was made possible by Supreme Court decisions that ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency had the right to regulate (CO2) emissions, giving the President virtual carte blanche to remake this sector of our economy without requiring congressional consent.”

In July, the Heartland Institute, a free market think tank, will hold its ninth international conference on climate change. Previous conferences have brought together some of the world’s leading authorities on meteorology and climatology to debunk the decades of lies Greens have told about climate change and global warming.

The President has put “climate change” high on his list of priorities and it is an attack on the nation’s ability to affordably and extensively provide the energy needed to meet current needs for electricity and reducing our capacity to meet future needs.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is on record saying that the President’s bogus “climate change” policy could cost the U.S. economy $50 billion a year and force more than a third of coal-fired plants to close by 2030. The Heritage Foundation says “The plan will drive up energy prices for American families and businesses without making a dent in global temperatures.”

This is a form of regulatory death for the nation and comes straight out of the Oval Office of the White House.

The Promise of an abundance, of “Green Jobs”, was just another “Green Lie!”

May 28, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

1) Germany’s Green Jobs Miracle Collapses
Die Welt, 26 May 2014

Daniel Wetzel

Renewable energy was supposed to create tens of thousands of green jobs. Yet despite three-digit Euro billions of subsidies, the number of jobs is falling rapidly. Seven out of ten jobs will only remain as long as the subsidies keep flowing.

Rund 70 Prozent der Beschäftigung im Bereich erneuerbare Energien ist vom EEG abhängig

The subsidisation of renewable energy has not led to a significant, sustainable increase in jobs. According to recent figures from the German Government, the gross employment in renewable energy decreased by around seven per cent to 363,100 in 2013.

Counting the employees in government agencies and academic institution too, renewable energy creates work for about 370,000 people.

This means, however, that only to about 0.86 percent of the nearly 42 million workers, which are employed in Germany, work in the highly subsidized sector of renewable energy. Much of this employment is limited to the maintenance and operation of existing facilities.

Further job cuts expected

In the core of the industry, the production of renewable energy systems, only 230,800 people were employed last year: a drop of 13 percent within one year, which is primarily due to the collapse of the German solar industry.

There is no improvement in sight, according to the recent report by the Federal Government. It says: “Overall, a further decline of employees will probably be observed in the renewable energies sector this and next year.”

15 years after the start of green energy subsidies through the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG), the vast majority of jobs from in this sector are still dependent on subsidies.

Hardly any self-supporting jobs in Green energy

According to official figures from the Federal Government, 70% of gross employment was due to the EEG last year. Although this is a slight decrease compared to 2012, seven out of ten jobs in the eco-energy sector are still subsidized by the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG).

Around 137,800 employees work in the wind sector which was the only eco-energy sector, besides geothermal, that increased employment. About 56,000 employees in photovoltaic sector depend on EEG payments.

Investments drop by 20 percent

Subsidies for the generation of green electricity have been paid for almost 15 years and have piled up into a three-digit billion sum, which has to be paid over 20 years by electricity consumers through their electricity bills. This year alone, consumers must subsidize the production of green electricity to the tune of around 20 billion Euros. A lasting effect on the labour market is not obvious.

The report, “Gross employment in renewable energy sources in Germany in 2013″, commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Economy and Energy, was jointly written by the institutes DLR, DIW , STW , GWS and Prognos. According to the researchers, the cause of the decrease in employment is the declining investments in green energy systems.

The investments in renewable energy sources in Germany fell by a fifth, to 16.09 billion Euros in the past year. Only about half as many solar panels were installed in Germany as the year before. Investment in biomass plants and solar thermal dropped as well.

“Nothing left from the job miracle“

The researchers do not expect that the production of high quality green energy systems will still lead to a job boom in Germany. For this year and the next they expect a further decline in employment instead. Thereafter, low-tech sectors such as “operation and maintenance” as well as the supply of biomass fuels are expected to „stabilise the employment effect”.

„A few years ago the renewable sector was the job miracle in Germany, now nothing is left of all of that,” said the deputy leader of the Greens in the Bundestag, Oliver Krischer.

The Green politician is sceptical about the attempts by the Federal Government to reduce the subsidy dependence of the green energy sector: „The brakes on the expansion of renewables by the previous conservative-liberal government is now fully hitting the job market,” said Krischer: “Thanks to the current EEG reform by the Union and SPD, the innovative and young renewables industry will lose more jobs.”

The bottom line, no jobs remain

The report by the Federal Government explicitly estimates only the „gross employment“ created primarily by green subsidies. The same subsidies, however, have led to rising costs and job losses in many other areas, such as heavy industry and commerce as well as conventional power plant operators. For a net analysis, the number of jobs that have been prevented or destroyed as a result would have to be deducted from the gross number of green jobs.

Official figures for the net effect of renewables on employment in Germany were originally supposed to be presented in July, according to the Federal Economics Ministry. However, the presentation has now been delayed until the autumn.
Researchers such as the president of the Munich-based IFO institute, Hans-Werner Sinn, believe that the net effect of subsidies for renewable energy on the labour market is equal to zero:

“Whoever claims that net jobs have been created must prove that the capital intensity of production in the new sectors is smaller than in the old ones. There are no indications for that. ”

“There is no positive net effect on employment by the EEG,” said Sinn: “Through subsidies for inefficient technologies not a single new job has been created, but wealth has been destroyed. “

Translation Philip Mueller

2) Reminder: Gordon Hughes: The Myth of Green Jobs
Global Warming Policy Foundation, September 2011

“Claims by politicians and lobbyists that green energy policies will create a few thousand jobs are not supported by the evidence. In terms of the labour market, the gains for a small number of actual or potential employees in businesses specialising in renewable energy has to be weighed against the dismal prospects for a much larger group of workers producing tradable goods in the rest of the manufacturing sector,” said Professor Gordon Hughes.

Full GWPF report: The Myth of Green Jobs

Climate Change Alarmists have Cried wolf…. Once too often!

May 27, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Politics: Sorry, global warmists: The ’97 percent consensus’ is complete fiction

Image Credit: Spinster Cardigan via Flickr

Published by: Dan Calabrese on Tuesday May 27th, 2014

Dan Calabrese

How dare you question them?

You hear it all the time. Why, 97 percent of all climate scientists agree that global warming is dangerous and man is causing it.The debate is over and it’s time to act! (With the very kinds of tax and regulatory policies liberals would advocate anyway.)

Did you ever think to question, though, what the basis of this 97 percent figure might be? Joseph Bast and Roy W. Spencer did. Mr. Bast is president of the Heartland Institute, while Dr. Spencer is a principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Writing today in the Wall Street Journal, the two men examine the most frequently cited sources for this claim and find them wanting. No matter how many times you hear politicians repeat the claim, there is no 97 percent consensus:

Where did Mr. Kerry get the 97% figure? Perhaps from his boss, President Obama, who tweeted on May 16 that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” Or maybe from NASA, which posted (in more measured language) on its website, “Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities.”

Yet the assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research.

One frequently cited source for the consensus is a 2004 opinion essay published in Science magazine by Naomi Oreskes, a science historian now at Harvard. She claimed to have examined abstracts of 928 articles published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and found that 75% supported the view that human activities are responsible for most of the observed warming over the previous 50 years while none directly dissented.

Ms. Oreskes’s definition of consensus covered “man-made” but left out “dangerous”—and scores of articles by prominent scientists such as Richard Lindzen, John Christy, Sherwood Idso and Patrick Michaels, who question the consensus, were excluded. The methodology is also flawed. A study published earlier this year in Nature noted that abstracts of academic papers often contain claims that aren’t substantiated in the papers.

That’s just the beginning. Bast and Spencer examine source after supposed source of this claim and methodically destroy the credibility of every single one. You’re left with the realization that this statistic, constantly cited by left-wing politicians, is completely bogus. And the very people who beat skeptics over the head with these bogus numbers are the ones who say we are “anti-science” for refusing to agree with them.

This explains a lot. It certainly explains the East Anglia e-mails, which sound like they were written by people who are trying to sustain a scam and are nervous about being exposed. It explains the insistence of the so-called “climate science community” to try to silence the work of skeptics and prevent their papers from being published. Science is not the practice of enforcing orthodoxies and siliencing apostates who question things, and yet that’s what these folks do with regularity and their backers in the political realm cheer them on.

And it exposes yet again the pliability of the mainstream media, which continually cites this “97 percent” number without ever questioning where it came from or whether there is any basis for it. It reminds me of activists used to claim back in the 1980s that there were 4 million homeless, and the media would repeat the number as a matter of course without ever questioning its validity or its origin. They just figured that since they heard it all the time from people who ought to know, that was authoritative enough for them. (Besides, it seemed to be an indictment of Reagan policies, so hey, why not?)

There’s all kinds of statistical nonsense floating around out there, and a lot of it that should be questioned never is because the people who ought to be doing the questioning want to believe. It’s like the X-Files.

Once you recognize this, it really shows how insidious is the effort of the political class to marginalize so-called “deniers.” These people are citing completely bogus data themselves – certainly to make the “consensus” claim and almost as certainly to make the claim of man-made global warming as well, not to mention their claims about what it will cause to happen in the future if we don’t “act” (i.e. raise taxes, put government in charge of industry, etc.). Their entire proposition is a lie, and they’re going to shut you up if you say anything about it, because the debate over, damn it!

And why should anyone be surprised about this? The same people who told you “if you like your plan you can keep your plan” now tell us there is no room for questioning them on man-made global warming or its future effects.

Usually people who are dealing in facts and truth don’t have a conniption fit when someone questions them. They are confident about their assertions and they figure they can withstand a healthy challenge. If it’s ever occurred to you that global warmists seem awfully insecure in the way they denounce their critics, now you know a little more about why.

Climate Alarmists Do NOT Want Anyone Exposing the Truth!

May 26, 2014May 26, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Dr. Bengtsson confronts warming bias & bullies

May 24, 2014 by CFACT

Which is more troubling, that Dr. Lennart Bengtsson was bullied and slandered, or that the warming crowd suppressed publication of his conclusion that climate computer models are inaccurate? If temperature observations show climate sensitivity to CO2 to be far less than is programmed into the models, does this not demand scientific publication?

After having his research suppressed and his character attacked, Dr. Lennart Bengtsson, former Director of the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, had this to say:

As a result of chaos theory, weather and climate cannot be predicted, and how future climate will turn out will not be known until future is upon us.

During the last weeks there has been a lot of speculation regarding my views and my scientific standpoint on climate research. I have never really sought publicity and it was with a great deal of reluctance that I began writing articles for public media. A large part of my unwillingness to partake in public debate is connected to my friend Sven Öhman, a linguist who wrote about semantics and not least about the difficulties specialists run into when attempting to communicate with the public. Words and concepts have different meanings and are interpreted differently depending on one’s background and knowledge.

Sometimes such misunderstanding can be disastrous.

This is also true for concepts such as climate and climate forecasts. Climate is nothing but the sum of all weather events during some representative period of time. The length of this period cannot be strictly specified, but ought to encompass at least 100 years.

Nonetheless, for practical purposes meteorologists have used 30 years. For this reason alone it can be hard to determine whether the climate is changing or not, as data series that are both long enough and homogenous are often lacking. An inspection of the weather in Uppsala since 1722 exemplifies this. Because of chaos theory it is practically impossible to make climate forecasts, since weather cannot be predicted more than one or several weeks. For this reason, climate calculations are uncertain even if all model equations would be perfect.

Despite all these issues, climate research has progressed greatly, above all through new revolutionary observations from space, such as the possibility to measure both volume and mass of the oceans. Temperature and water vapor content of the atmosphere are measured by occultation with GPS satellites. Our knowledge of earlier climate has increased substantially.

It is not surprising that the public is impressed by this and that this trust transfers to climate forecasts and the possibility to predict the earth’s future climate. That all this occurs within a context of international cooperation under the supervision of the UN, and with an apparent unity among the scientists involved has created a robust confidence in IPCC’s climate simulations, in Sweden not the least. SMHI’s [Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute] down-scaled climate simulations for 100 years are impressive and show in detail and with splendid graphics how the climate will turn out both in Östergötland [the Swedish province of East Gothland] and in Västerbotten [West Bothnia].

This is invaluable for municipality climate experts and planners who are working feverishly to avoid future floods and forest fires. The public is in good hands in the benevolent society.

Unfortunately, things are not as splendid as they seem. As a result of chaos theory, weather and climate cannot be predicted, and how future climate will turn out will not be known until future is upon us. It would not help even if we knew the exact amount of greenhouse gases. Add to this the uncertainty about the future of the world. This should be clear to anyone, simply by moving back in time and contemplating what has unfolded from that viewpoint. As Daniel Boorstin put it: “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge”.

I’m concerned that this is the problem of the present, and the real reason for me to choose to partake in the climate debate over the last couple of years. I don’t think anyone disputes that I have been highly critical of those who completely reject the effects of greenhouse gases on the earth’s climate. This is however not the problem, but rather how much, how soon and to what extent “climate change” will happen. There is no 97% consensus about this, and even less concerning how weather and climate will turn out in Västerbotten [West Bothnia] in 80 years. This is why it unfortunately is misleading of SMHI to show their beautiful maps, because people may actually believe that this is the way the climate will turn out. The climate scientists of SMHI know this, of course, but for the users this is not clear. My colleague in Hamburg, Guy Brasseur, told me the other day that an insignificant change on about 70 km height in a climate model’s mesosphere, made the weather systems relocate from north Germany to the Alps, consequently with radical regional climate change as a result.

Even more alarming is the tendency of giving people the impression that weather events are becoming more extreme, and that this has actually already occurred. Apart from a possible increase in precipitation and a possible intensification of tropical hurricanes that has not yet been detected, there are no indications of extreme weather in the model simulations, and even less so in current observations.

This has convincingly been demonstrated and also held up by the IPCC. Damages are increasing, as are damages from earth quakes, but this due to the growing economy. It is also important to stress that injuries suffered by humans during extreme weather has decreased substantially due to better weather forecasts.

What is perhaps most worrying is the increased tendency of pseudo-science in climate research. This is revealed through the bias in publication records towards only reporting results that support one climate hypothesis, while refraining from publishing results that deviate. Even extremely cold weather, as this year’s winter in north Eastern USA and Canada, is regarded as a consequence of the greenhouse effect.

Were Karl Popper alive today we would certainly have met with fierce critique of this behavior. It is also demonstrated in journals’ reluctance to address issues contradicting simplified climate assessments, such as the long period during the last 17 years with insignificant or no warming over the oceans, and the increase in sea-ice cover around the Antarctic. My colleagues and I have been met with scant understanding when trying to point out that observations indicate lower climate sensitivity than model calculations indicate. Such behavior may not even be intentional but rather attributed to an effect that my colleague Hans von Storch calls a social construct.

That I have taken a stand trying to put the climate debate onto new tracks has resulted in rather violent protests. I have not only been labeled a sceptic but even a denier, and faced harsh criticism from colleagues. Even contemplating my connections with GWPF was deemed unheard of and scandalous.

I find it difficult to believe that the prominent Jewish scientists in the GWPF council appreciate being labeled deniers. The low-point is probably having been labeled “world criminal” by a representative of the English wind power-industry. I want to stress that I am a sworn enemy of the social construction of natural science that has garnered so much traction in the last years. For example, German scientists have attempted to launch what they call “good” science to ensure that natural science shouldn’t be driven by what they view as anti-social curiosity-research by researching things that might not be “good”.

Einstein’s “anti-social behavior”, when he besides his responsible work as a patent office clerk in Bern also researched on the theory of relativity and the photoelectric effect, was of course reprehensible, and to do this during work-time! Even current labor unions would have strongly condemned this.

____________

http://www.thegwpf.org/lennart-bengtsson-my-view-on-climate-research/

– See more at: http://www.cfact.org/2014/05/24/dr-bengtsson-confronts-warming-bias-bullies/?utm_source=CFACT+Updates&utm_campaign=3419fc677f-Bengtsson_s_smoking_gun5_24_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a28eaedb56-3419fc677f-270050433#sthash.GC2HHswm.dpuf

If Global Warming is the problem….Wind turbines are NOT the Solution!

May 26, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Ken Braun: If the climate is ablaze, why waste time

and money on wind-powered fire trucks?

Palisades Nuclear Power Plant in Covert Township. ((Mark Bugnaski | MLive/Kalamazoo Gazette/FILE))

By Ken Braun

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts we can’t stop the impact of rising seas and flooded cities, and demands radical cuts to carbon emissions or Doomsday will be worse. The loudest climate alarmists demand energy options that produce zero carbon, and show it by supporting the continued river of tax dollars washing toward promises of producing lots of our power from pleasant breezes and rays of sunshine: wind and solar.

It would be easier to take this all more seriously if they’d propose realistic solutions. Skeptics of the Doomsday scenarios are constantly beat about the head regarding the overwhelming “scientific consensus” regarding the implications of climate change.

Yet where is the overwhelming statement of scientific consensus in favor of pouring all these tax subsidies into options that really work, such as low carbon natural gas and zero carbon nuclear?

If the emergency is as dire as advertised, climate scientists should be united in loudly denouncing the wind welfare lobby for wasting so much of the rescue money.

A report from the Brookings Institution demonstrates that wind doesn’t always blow, and often blows most when needed least. Windmills run at just 25 percent capacity (versus 90+ percent for coal, gas and nuclear.) The story is more sad for solar: 15 percent. Factoring this in, wind power is 50 percent more expensive than coal or natural gas.

Tens of billions of dollars (or more) have already flooded down this rathole, and the wind lobby wants more, calling for a continuation of the recently cancelled federal wind power subsidy. This would chew up another $60 billion over ten years.

Low carbon natural gas provides the cheapest and most readily available electricity source there is. But instead of demanding it receive the corporate welfare, climate alarmists instead attack the hydraulic fracking technology that makes natural gas so attractive.

Well, is the world on fire or not?

Brookings supports a carbon tax, but is very critical of the wind subsidies. The report says nuclear energy is a more costly alternative than coal and natural gas, but is vastly cheaper than wind.

Leaving aside low carbon – yet not zero carbon – natural gas, if climate-saving corporate welfare really must be used to produce power without any carbon emissions at all, then nuclear is the place to spend it. Excluding the safety scofflaws of the former Soviet Empire, nuclear power has an excellent safety record: Nobody died from Fukushima, compared to 65 American coal miners killed just since 2001.

A new nuclear plant in Georgia is expected to cost its owner something north of $14 billion (let’s round up crazy to $20 billion.) When operational, just this plant will crank out power equal to ten percent of the total electricity produced by every single wind farm in America last year.

With the objective of cooling the climate, $60 billion from the 2009 federal “Stimulus” Bill went to subsidize green energy, public transit, energy efficiency and the like. Now the wind welfare lobby wants another $60 billion to save its own dubious corporate welfare.

That $120 billion could provide a ten percent subsidy to build 60 nuclear plants like the one in Georgia. Those sixty plants would create six times more electricity than every wind farm currently in operation.

If climate scientists believe the planet is in peril, then they owe it to their cause to denounce climate alarmists who burn our cash on bogus solutions. Otherwise, the advice they’re giving us is this: “The town is ablaze right now, but please waste billions of dollars and hours building wind-powered fire trucks.”

Pardon the skepticism.

The Alarmists changed “Global warming”, to “Climate Change”, so they could blame all “weather” on Humans…LOL!

May 25, 2014May 25, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

David Little: It’s all the fault of climate change

Chico Enterprise-Record

POSTED: 05/24/2014 04:12:15 PM PDT

I have a couple of flaws when it comes to believing anything I’m told.

First, I’m old. Second, I’m a journalist. Both of those unalterable traits make me worse than just a skeptic. I’m a skeptic squared.

I see things like Gov. Jerry Brown’s dog-and-pony show Monday in Sacramento and think more about his motivation than I do about his message. Brown spoke at a conference about climate change, and the media in attendance relayed his concern that global warming threatens our state.

He said California is at the “epicenter” of global climate change. He said the state must prepare for longer fire seasons, for rising oceans and for extended droughts. And he had charts and graphs to prove his points, so it must be true.

If I wasn’t on the downhill side of my journey up and over the hill, I’d be very worried — because while going up the hill, I remember a similar warning. I’m old enough to remember the ’70s, a truly forgettable decade. Growing up back then, there was talk about a “Mini Ice Ace” that was coming. It scared the heck out of me. As an impressionable young lad with a love for swimming in creeks and running around in cutoffs during the hot Northern California summers, I didn’t want to give that up.

I had a love of books and all natural things, so I knew the story of the real Ice Age. I’d never been north of Chico and didn’t want to go anywhere near snow and ice. To think the whole planet could be covered in the stuff truly frightened me.

The talk of the Mini Ice Age was an explanation dreamed up by scientists who couldn’t figure out why the earth was suffering such cruel winters. They figured that’s where we were headed, back to days of woolly mammoths and men wearing furs. Magazines and newspapers fed into the hysteria, with earnest pieces trying to figure out how we would survive a long-term polar event.

We never had to deal with it. Mother Nature let up. I could still swim in the summer.

I read the newspaper when I was young, and the prospect of a Mini Ice Age spooked me. I guess there’s one bright side to fewer kids reading newspapers today — they won’t get frightened by the story talking about raging fire, rising seas and widespread death of many living things.

Here’s the problem I have with the global warming boogeyman: It gets blamed for everything. Only now it’s called climate change, because it needs to encompass more than just hot weather.

Summer heat waves? Climate change. Tornadoes in the Midwest and heretofore mostly untouched places like the north valley? Climate change. Last winter’s polar vortex? Climate change. Our current drought? Climate change? Floods in other parts of the country? Climate change.

And if torrential rains come next winter, courtesy of El Niño? That will be blamed on climate change too.

It’s one heck of a scapegoat, an explanation for anything unpredictable. But that’s the thing — the weather is unpredictable. We don’t need to explain why it might rain hard the year after a drought. It’s weather. Weather happens.

I’ve lived through three pronounced droughts. The first two ended and I’m betting the third one will eventually. I’ve also lived through the third-wettest winter in Eureka history. The next winter was normal again. (At least, that’s what I’m told. I don’t know firsthand. I moved. It rained too much.)

We don’t need to find an explanation for why the weather is unpredictable. Maybe people have a hard time admitting there’s something they can’t predict. Not me. I like mystery.

I like variety, too. I’m thrilled to live in a state where we see it all, from a Eureka winter to a Chico summer, and everything inside or outside that spectrum.

Case in point: The same day the story about the governor’s climate change warning was published in the newspaper, I kept flipping pages until I came to the weather page. I always check the highest and lowest temperatures from the previous day in the lower 48 states.

Amazingly on this day, both were in California. The high was 102 in Death Valley. The low was 24 in Bridgeport. They are just a couple hundred miles apart.

Are those extremes in such proximity a product of climate change, or just climate?

The Media Exacerbates the Climate Confusion and Alarm, because of Their Lack of Scientific Knowledge!

May 22, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Weasel words about the Antarctic

by Dr. Tom Sheahen

May 22, 2014

Q. On TV I saw that the ice in Antarctica is collapsing, and that will raise sea level and inundate cities. Others reports say this will take thousands of years. How serious is the problem?

What you are witnessing here is a result of confusion between the public perception of the ordinary meaning of words, and the very special definitions used in scientific discourse.

Geologists deal with changes in the earth that occur over epochs of millions of years. Anything that happens in less than 10,000 years is “sudden,” and something happening in only 1,000 years is “instantaneous.” To geologists, the word “collapse” is appropriate for a 10,000 year process.

A hot-topic in the media these days has to do with the West Antarctic Ice Shelf (WAIS), a region comprising about 8% of the ice covering Antarctica. Within that region, there are two glaciers that are sliding down to the sea at a steady pace, as glaciers always do. They comprise about 10% of the WAIS, less than 1% of Antarctic ice. This descent has been in progress for several thousand years, and is neither new nor man-caused. It will go on for a few thousand more, after which they’ll be gone. In the parlance of geology, those two glaciers are collapsing.

If that doesn’t sound to you like your usual meaning of the word “collapse,” you’re absolutely right. It’s a specialized geological term.

Unfortunately, the major media overlook the distinction of meanings, and then make the further generalization from two specific glaciers to the entire WAIS, and moreover to Antarctica in general. Scientists who point out the small actual glacier size (and volume of ice) are brushed aside in the rush to get a headline or a flamboyant sound byte that will keep the viewers tuned in. Words like unavoidable collapse carry a sense of foreboding.

This isn’t just a problem from geology. Confusion over the meaning of words used in science crops up frequently. Laws of physics (e.g., conservation of energy) are said to be true in general, meaning “always true.” But if a physicist says “that is generally true,” a non-scientist hears “that is usually true” – meaning “most of the time, but not always.” Neither is aware of the other’s interpretation.

The word “average” is easily misunderstood. For any set of data, about any topic, you can construct an average. But it may be irrelevant – a good example being the “average temperature of the Earth.” Regional and seasonal variations are so great that a single average number is meaningless. And yet people have such familiarity with the word “average” – batting averages, school grade averages, etc. — that it’s commonplace to believe that any statistic called an “average” represents something real.

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