climate fear mongers

Some Honesty from Climate Scientists….How Refreshing!

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PETER LILLEY & GRAHAM STRINGER VOTE AGAINST CLIMATE COMMITTEE’S IPCC REPORT

  • Date: 28/07/14
  • Peter Lilley MP and Graham Stringer MP

Peter Lilley and Graham Stringer voted against the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee’s report on the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Report because “we believe the role of the Select Committee is to hold public institutions critically to account not to act as their cheer leaders”.

They added: “As scientists by training, we do not dispute the science of the greenhouse effect – nor did any of our witnesses.  However, there remain great uncertainties about how much warming a given increase in greenhouse gases will cause, how much damage any temperature increase will cause and the best balance between adaptation to versus prevention of global warming.

The bulk of the main IPCC technical report recognises these uncertainties and is simply a useful compilation of the research in the field.

However, the Summary for Policy Makers is far less balanced than the report it purports to summarise.

Its headline conclusion was that “evidence for human influence has grown since AR4. It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century”.   It is hard to justify that increase in confidence that CO2 emissions are dominant given that: about one third of all the CO2 omitted by mankind since the industrial revolution has been put into the atmosphere since 1997; yet there has been no statistically significant increase in the mean global temperature since then.    By definition, a period with record emissions but no warming cannot provide evidence that emissions are the dominant cause of warming!

The pause in surface warming does not invalidate the greenhouse effect.   But it does mean that other factors – natural variations – can be of the same magnitude as the greenhouse effect over at least a decade and a half.   Since such variations are presumed to cancel out over the long term variations in the opposite direction may have contributed a significant portion of the surface warming over the previous two and a half decades.

The IPCC’s conclusion flies in the face of the Inter Academy Council Review on the previous IPCC report which criticised its “authors [who] reported high confidence in some statements for which there is little evidence” and recommended that “Quantitative probabilities (as in the likelihood scale) should be used to describe the probability of well-defined outcomes only when there is sufficient evidence. Authors should indicate the basis for assigning a probability to an outcome or event (e.g., based on measurement, expert judgment, and/or model runs)”.   No such basis for assigning this enhanced probability was given even though it is the headline conclusion of this report.

Moreover, the Summary for Policy Makers systematically omits mentioning or plays down key information in the main report which might suggest that the problem of global warming may be less acute or less certain than previously suggested.   Notably it omits to alert Policy Makers to the following facts:

1. The IPCC’s medium term forecast for temperature to 2035 is below that given by the climate models since the experts believe these to be “overheating”.   However, the forecast to the end of the century assumes the temperature will revert to following the projections of the models with no allowance for their tendency to exaggerate warming.

2. New estimates of the impact of aerosols based on satellite observations are both more certain and suggest a smaller cooling effect than previously assumed.   However, there was not time to rerun the models using these latest aerosol figures.  They will, however, inevitably mean that the models are even more out of line with temperature data than previously thought.  This was described by one of our witnesses as ““the most significant thing in AR5because if aerosol cooling is lower and … we know how much warming there has been, then it must follow … a much lower figure [is] attributable to carbon dioxide”.

3. For the first time the IPCC authors cannot agree on a best estimate for climate sensitivity even though they did in previous reports.  There is only a cryptic reference to this in a footnote in the SPM.   It is hard to square this unprecedented disagreement between the experts with the stated increase in their confidence in the scale of global warming.

4. Most recent empirically based studies suggest that the sensitivity of the climate to increases in CO2 is probably lower than assumed in the climate models.

5. The pause in global warming since 1997 may well be the result of natural variations offsetting the warming effect of more CO2 in the atmosphere.   But if that is the case it follows that natural variations may have contributed a sizeable proportion of the warming in the 25 years prior to 1997.

6. Over the last 35 years (not just during the hiatus) the composite of models followed by the IPCC have collectively run 15% too high.

7. Forecasts of global warming generated by climate models have progressively converged on each other but diverged from actual observations of mean global surface temperature.

These issues were raised during the Committee’s inquiry.   It is unfortunate that they were not dealt with in the Committee’s report.   The Committee’s report would have been more balanced if it had drawn a distinction between the largely technical main Report and the much more politicised Summary for Policy Makers.

Graham Stringer MP and Rt Hon Peter Lilley MP

Members of Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change

Climate Alarmists are Terrified that Their Faux-Green Subsidies Will Dry Up!

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Climate alarmists never quit

 

fear dice

July 31, 2014 by , 

In the same way Americans are discovering that the Cold War that was waged from the end of World War Two until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is not over, Americans continue to be subjected to the endless, massive, global campaign to foist the hoax of global warming–now called climate change—on everyone.

The campaign’s purpose to convince everyone that it is humans, not the sun, oceans, and other natural phenomenon, and that requires abandoning fossil fuels in favor of “renewable” wind and solar energy.

It is not surprising that climate alarmists, who desire above all else blind allegiance to their cause, would demand all school teachers toe the ‘official party line’ and quash any dissent on the subject of man-made global warming in their classroom,” says Craig Rucker, the Executive Director of co-founder of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). “What is absurd is that any teacher or free-thinking person for that matter would listen to them.”

These days when I am challenged regarding my views about global warming, climate change or energy I send the individual to www.climatedepot.com  and www.energydepot.com, two constantly updated websites filled with links to information on these topics. Both are maintained by CFACT.

It’s not just our classrooms where Green indoctrination goes on. It is also our news media that continue to distort every weather event to advance the hoax. Guiding and feeding them is a massive complex of organizations led by the United Nations—the International Panel on Climate Change—that maintains the hoax to frighten people worldwide in order to achieve “one world order.”

On September 23, heads of state, including President Obama, will gather in New York City for what the Sierra Club calls “a historic summit on climate change. With our future on the line, we will take a weekend and use it to bend the course of history” to save the world from “the ravages of climate change.” Does the Left truly believe it can tax, redistribute and regulate the world to an ideal temperature?  This is absurd.

One of the leading Leftist organizations, the Center for American Progress, focused on the July 14 Major Economics Forum in Paris, offered four items for its agenda. Claiming that “the Arctic is warming two times faster than any other region on earth”, they wanted policy changes based on this falsehood. They blamed climate change for “global poverty” and wanted further reductions in so-called greenhouse gas emissions from energy use. The enemy, as far as they were concerned was energy use.

Mary Hutzler, a senior research fellow of the Institute for Energy Research, testified before a July 22nd meeting of the Senate Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Development and Foreign Assistance, that due to Europe’s green energy (wind and solar) policies, industrial electricity prices are two-to-five times higher than in the U.S. and that, by 2020, 1.4 million European households will be added to those experiencing energy poverty.

There are lessons to be learned, for example, from Spain’s investment in wind energy that caused the loss of four jobs for the electricity it produced and 13 jobs for every megawatt of solar energy. In Germany, the cost of electricity is three times higher than average U.S. residential prices. Little wonder that European nations are now slashing wind and solar programs.

Billions Wasted to Combat Global Warming

In the U.S., the Obama administration used its “stimulus” to fund Solyndra—$500 million dollars—and fifty other Green energy projects that have failed or are on their way to failure. Undeterred with this appalling record, on July 3 the Energy Department announced $4 billion for “projects that fight global warming.”

But there is no global warming. The Earth has been in a cooling cycle for seventeen years and it shows no indication of ending anytime soon. This is the same administration that has waged a war on coal, forcing the closure of many plants that produced electricity efficiently and affordably, and had throughout the last century.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2014 weather highlights showed that, from January to June, the temperature in the U.S. has risen by a miniscule 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit compared with the average temperature for the 20th century. NOAA also noted that recorded temperatures for the first half of 2014 are the coldest since 1993 when the cooling cycle began. The exception to this has been California.

Brainwashed for decades about global warming, 20% of likely voters, according to a July Rasmussen poll, still believe that global warming is not over, colder weather or not, 17% were not sure, but fully 63% disagreed!

The results of a Pew Research Center poll in June revealed that 35% of Americans say there is not enough solid evidence to suggest mankind is warming the Earth while another 18% says the world has warmed due to “natural patterns”, not human activity. Pew found that liberals remain convinced that humans are to blame, but the bottom line is that 53% disputed the President’s claims.

That means that a growing numbers of Americans are now skeptics.

In the months to come we will see marches and meetings intended to further the global warming hype.  The good news is that fewer Americans are being influenced by such efforts.

– See more at: http://www.cfact.org/2014/07/31/climate-alarmists-never-quit/?utm_source=CFACT+Updates&utm_campaign=b826f6dbb4-Facts_vs_fear8_1_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a28eaedb56-b826f6dbb4-270050433#sthash.o1jqDV6b.dpuf

Climate Alarmists are Looking Very Foolish! Check this out!

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Australia Shoots Down Climate Lobby’s Scare Mongering

July 28, 2014 by  

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Australia shoots down climate lobby’s scare mongering
Marita Noon
cfact.org
21 July 2014

Thursday, July 17 was a big news day. The world was shocked to learn that a Russian-made missile shot down a Malaysian Airlines jet with 298 on board as it flew over Ukraine en route to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam. Though flight 17 eclipsed the news cycle, there was another thing shot down on July 17.

Almost a year ago, Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott won a landslide election with a nearly single-issue campaign: repeal the carbon tax. On July 17, he made good on that promise, as the Australian Senate voted, 39 to 32, to abolish the “world’s biggest carbon tax” – a tax that was reportedto “do nothing to address global warming, apart from imposing high costs on the local economy.”

Australia was one of the first major countries, outside of the European Union, to adopt a carbon price—first suggested in 2007 and passed under Labour Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2011. Gillard’s campaign promised: “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.” While she attempted to brand it a carbon price, not a “tax,” Sinclair Davidson, a professor in the school of Economics, Finance and Marketing at RMIT University, said: “The electorate had a very specific understanding of her words” and perceived it as a broken promise.

Australia’s carbon tax, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), was “recognized by the International Energy Agency as model legislation for developed countries.” The WSJ reports that when Australia’s carbon tax was passed, the Brookings Institution “described Australia as an ‘important laboratory and learning opportunity.’”

So, what do we learn from the “laboratory” the now-failed “model legislation” offered?

First, the WSJ states: “The public hates it.” The (UK) Telegraph calls the tax: “one of the most unsuccessful in history” and points out that it is “unique in that it generated virtually no revenue for the Australian Treasury due to its negative impact on productivity; contributed to the rising costs that have taken the gloss off the country’s resources boom; and essentially helped to bring down Ms. Gillard’s former Government.” The Telegraph, in an article titled: “Australia abandons disastrous green tax on emissions,” adds that the tax failed in “winning over voters who faced higher costs passed on by the companies that had to pay for it.” In Slate, Ariel Bogelclaims the 2011 bill required “about 350 companies to pay a penalty for their greenhouse gas emissions.”

While Australia is, as the WSJ put it: “the world’s first developed nation to repeal carbon laws that put a price on greenhouse-gas emissions,” it is not the only one to back away from such policies. New Zealand has weakened its emissions trading scheme; Japan has retreated from its pledges to cut greenhouse emissions and instead committed to a rise in emissions; Canada withdrew from the Kyoto protocol in 2011; England, where “the bill for green policies is rising,” has “so far resisted calls to expand tax on carbon emissions”; the European Union carbon emissions trading scheme­ – the biggest in the world and the heart of Europe’s climate-change program – is in dire straits; and, just the day after Australia’s news was announced, South Korea – whose planned 2015 emissions trading market launch would make it the world’s second largest – hinted at an additional delay due to projected costs to businesses.

The Telegraph offers this summary: “Carbon trading mechanisms and green taxes have largely been a failure elsewhere and especially so in Europe where they have dragged on investment and threatened long-term energy security.”

These are important lessons in light of the renewed push for a carbon tax in the U.S. Consider the partnership of President George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and liberal billionaire Tom Steyer, who are, together, who are calling for a climate tax.

According to the WSJ, the World Bank called Australia’s repeal “one of the biggest international threats to the rollout of similar programs elsewhere.” The climate lobby is concerned as “Australia’s vote shows that the real obstacle to their dreams of controlling more of the world’s economy is democratic consent.”

In the U.S., similar efforts to reduce CO2 emissions by increasing costs to emitters, and therefore consumers – in our case, cap and trade – failed to achieve “democratic consent” even when Democrats had control. The people didn’t want it. So, the Obama Administration now is trying to go around Congress with onerous rules and regulations on emissions.

As in the U.S., a carbon tax – or cap and trade – is not the only policy increasing energy costs to Australian consumers. In the U.S., we have the Renewable Portfolio Standard; Australia has its Renewable Energy Target (RET). Both require the addition of expensive wind-and-solar energy.

Jennifer Marohasy, Ph.D., who worked for 12 years as a scientist for the Queensland government, told me: “Of course while the carbon tax needed to be repealed, its abolition will go only some way to reducing pressures on Australian businesses and households. The so-called Clean Energy Act 2011 is part of a tsunami of regulation and legislation introduced over recent years that has seen the average electricity price in Australia increase by 70% in real terms. Next in line must be the mandatory RET, a government-legislated requirement on electricity retailers to source a specific proportion of total electricity sales from renewable energy sources including wind and solar, with the extraordinary costs serving as a hidden tax – paid by all electricity users.”

In the Australian Financial Review, Alan Moran, an economist specializing in regulatory matters, in particular covering energy, global warming, housing, transport, and competition issues, and Director of the Institute of Public Affairs’ Deregulation Unit, agrees that the carbon tax is just one of the burdens holding down the Australian economy. He sees a cascade of programs for support of high-cost renewables and penalties for fossil-fuel use and “a bewildering array of subsidies and programs.”

Both see the RET as the bigger issue. Marohasy says: “In short, repeal of the carbon tax is a big symbolic win. But it’s mostly just window-dressing: to appease the masses. In the background, proponents of anthropogenic global warming who dominate our political class still very much control the levers of government and intend to continue to terrorize the population with claims of catastrophic global warming, while consolidating their rent-seeking through the RET.” She explained: “Money collected from the carbon tax went to government, money collected through the RET largely goes to the global warming industry.” Which is why some in the Australian Senate agreed to vote for the repeal – as long as the RET isn’t touched.

However, Abbott has stated: “All of us should want to see lower prices and plainly at the moment the renewable energy target is a very significant impact on higher power prices.” Time will tell how Abbott fares in the RET battle. But for now, he’s given the world a “learning opportunity” on climate change and energy policy.

Meanwhile, the climate lobby resorts to hyperbole to push its scare-mongering tactics. In closing her piece in Slate, Bogle whines: “As someone who has to live in the quickly cooking world Abbott leaves behind…” Perhaps she’s missed the data that the planet’s predicted warming hasn’t happened – despite ever-increasing CO2 emissions. According to satellite records, there has been no warming in almost 18 years.

May America learn from, as the Brookings Institution observed, the “important laboratory” of Australia’s foray into climate schemes.
cfact.org

Marita Noon is the author of the book Energy Freedom and serves as the executive director for Energy Makes America Great Inc. and the companion educational organization, the Citizens’ Alliance for Responsible Energy (CARE).

Marita Noon

What Climate Alarmists Will Do, To Try To Scare You!

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July 21, 2014

Faulty and False Global Temperature Readings

By Jonathan Moseley
 

Temperature measurements that are the basis for claims of global warming are defective and wrong.  That’s the finding of a scientific team led by Anthony Watts.  Watts is a meteorologist, editor of “Watts Up With That,” founder of the “Surface Station Project,” and my personal hero for his style and bravado.

When global warming alarmists claim that the Earth is warming or that this was the hottest (year, month) ever, they are totaling up readings from rather simplistic, low-budget, small, automated weather stations scattered around the nation and the world.  But about 90% of those weather stations violate the officially-published standards required for accurate measurements.

In 2007, meteorologist Anthony Watts stumbled onto an official weather station, where hot air was blowing onto the sensor from an air-conditioner’s exhaust, located on an asphalt parking lot heated by the sun. 

Curious, Watts started the “Surface Station Project” to survey weather stations around the world.  The “crowd sourced” response from trained scientists documented with photographs that about 90% of the weather stations are faulty.  This sparked the “How Not to Measure Temperature” series highlighting individual faulty stations.  Note that when Watts and his team refer to finding “siting issues” with the stations, you should read that as them discovering “royal screw ups.”

Watts was a presenter at the 9th International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-9) organized by the Heartland Institute, held in Las Vegas, Nevada.  Watts explained in a call in to our radio show, Conservative Commandos, from the conference on July 9, 2014, that a weather station (about the size of a modest camera tripod) standing next to a brick building will give inaccurate readings, because the brick building will radiate heat at night absorbed during the day.  This raises the average temperature over 24 hours above what a properly sited station far away from any building or heat source would have registered.  In other cases, air conditioning exhaust, heat from factories, and even jet exhaust at airports blow onto the weather stations measuring temperature.

Furthermore, the errors have changed over time.  Airports were originally located out in the countryside away from cities, to serve small propeller planes.  Today, those airports are surrounded by urban sprawl, with lots of concrete and asphalt creating a local “heat effect” environment that is artificially hotter than the countryside that once was there.  And those airports are now serving large jet-engine aircraft spewing much-hotter exhaust in the direction of badly sited temperature stations.  Therefore, the changing local conditions have increased the temperature readings over time, having nothing to do with global climate. 

Similarly, installations of ever-more-elaborate equipment increase temperature readings over the decades.  More-powerful, modern industrial air conditioning units on the roofs of office buildings blow hot air on to the rooftop weather stations near by.  The growth of cell phone facilities has caused low-budget locations like a rural fire station to bring in extra revenue by hosting both a cell phone transmitter – cooled by air conditioner – and a weather station tripod next to the air conditioner.

So about half of the temperature trend claimed by alarmists is completely artificial (false).  Watts’ team finds that the accurate temperature trends show a rise of about 0.18 degree Centigrade per decade.  NOAA is claiming an increase of 0.32 degrees Centigrade per decade. 

It may not sound that bad that half of the claimed temperature rise is wrong.  However, the scientific debate concerns the sensitivity of the global weather systems to carbon dioxide.  Discovering that half of the alleged temperature increases are fictitious dramatically changes the projections, and our understanding of positive or negative feedback mechanisms in the world’s atmospheric systems and biosphere. 

Anthony Watts and his fellow researchers are about to publish a peer-reviewed study and analysis on the falsehood of temperature readings that global warming alarmists are relying upon.  The news in the near future about climate alarmism should continue to be very interesting.  It is about to get hotter for Al Gore, Tom Steyer, and other climate propagandists.