Mount Virtus

In Skeptic magazine, peer-reviewed Ph.D. chemist Patrick Frank comes out with the latest rational debunking of man-made global warming hysteria, complete with well-sourced footnotes. More recommended reading for Gov. Bill Ritter and Boulder U.S. Rep. Mark Udall.

Meanwhile, more scientists sign on to the dissenting report.

As the challenging evidence mounts, we’ll wait in vain for the nightly news report.

It’s the first day of May, and big flakes of snow are falling in my backyard. Yesterday it was 80 degrees and sunny. Call it springtime in Denver. Maybe global warming is taking a holiday.

Democrat Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has conjured up a Scriptural passage from whole cloth to sanction her Left-liberal environmentalist agenda:

In her April 22 Earth Day news release, Pelosi said, “The Bible tells us in the Old Testament, ‘To minister to the needs of God’s creation is an act of worship. To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us.’ On this Earth Day, and every day, let us pledge to our children, and our children’s children, that they will have clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and the opportunity to experience the wonders of nature.”

Cybercast News Service repeatedly queried the speaker’s office for two days to determine where the alleged Bible quote is found. Thus far, no one has responded.

Distinguished biblical scholars, however, cast doubt on the existence of the passage.

Not that biblical scholars necessarily had to be consulted to disprove the obvious, but they all unanimously point out that nothing approximating such a passage exists - and one even called it “fictional.” (Michelle Malkin links to other bloggers commenting on the subject.)
Read the rest of this entry »

Following up on Bill Ritter’s Earth Day “climate change” regulations, I ran across this recent Gallup survey report on Americans’ environmental concerns (H/T Bill Smith).

As I noted before, it seems like an appropriate way to commemorate Earth Day by celebrating the remarkable progress made in cleaning our air and water in the last 35 years.

Public opinion seems to evidence that trend. According to the Gallup poll, Americans’ greatest environmental concern consistently has been water pollution, yet even so the percentage of Americans “worried a great deal” about the problem has declined from 72 percent in 2000 to 53 percent in 2008.

After multi-millions spent to scare people into joining High Priest Algore’s Church of Eco-Theology, only about 37 percent of Americans are very concerned about “The ‘greenhouse effect’ or global warming” - a tick down from 41 percent the year before.

By comparison, acid rain - the “global warming” of the 1980s - still has a following of 23 percent.

Heh.

From today’s Denver Post:

Gov. Bill Ritter celebrated Earth Day beneath an unblemished blue sky this morning by enacting several major pieces of his Climate Action Plan, including a statewide greenhouse gas emissions reduction standard.

I’m curious to know why the phrase “an unblemished blue sky” was included in the lead sentence. It would have been a lot more compelling to read that Ritter was standing beneath “a smog-filled sky,” or that he was “drenched in sweat from the Climate Change-induced heat wave.”

But then again, Steven Hayward at Human Events explains how the radical environmental agenda has been a victim of its own success:

Time magazine this week is running its sixth cover story about global warming, but one of these days the editors of Time and other publications are going to grow bored with yet another “green” issue, just as the media grew bored with the AIDS crisis, civil rights, the NASA space program, and other once front-burner issues. No doubt something else will come along (the threat of asteroids perhaps?), because it is the nature of the media and activist groups to find some new panic to ride. For the time being, ruin an environmentalist’s day by celebrating Earth Day for the enormous progress it represents, not the panic they want you to feel.

Sounds like a great idea to me. I’m going to celebrate the “unblemished blue sky,” while Gov. Ritter seeks to burden the state’s businesses and consumers with new and costly regulations.

At the American Spectator, Paul Chesser writes about some of the highlights of his work he has documented, connecting the dots to compare how different states adopt climate change policies. His conclusion should be upsetting to taxpayers:

Every state amazingly produces the same strategies: increased taxation upon coal-fired energy generation; higher electric bill surcharges; increased tailpipe emissions standards to encompass CO2; subsidized mass transit; “green” standards in school curricula; and more.

Can you feel the pain? CCS and the climate commissions can’t. Seems they promise only positives, as the new taxes and regulations that they always recommend are amazingly said to save state economies money and create jobs. Indeed, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter promises to create an entirely “new energy economy” for his state — quite a feat for government bureaucrats.

Perhaps we should thank these folks for saving us from our freedoms. Undoubtedly they know what is best for the rest of us, as demonstrated by their insistence on stifled debate, limited consideration of actions, exclusion of information, and rosy-outlook economics.

“Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter promises to create an entirely ‘new energy economy’ for his state — quite a feat for government bureaucrats” - That statement makes me chuckle. The irony is effective enough on its face, but only becomes more ridiculous when you realize Ritter’s serious mismanagement of his own campaign funds (and the quandary it puts him in).

This tidbit from Chesser’s article should make my brother laugh, as he can relate from personal experience:

But Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle did not get the rhetoric memo, clumsily calling his appointed group the “Task Force on Global Warming.” No wiggle room there for a state — known for its nasty lake effect–that has experienced its harshest winter in memory. A “climate change” moniker might not have been so easily laughed away.

At least spring has arrived to thaw away the bad memories of cold, wet winters in Wisconsin and Colorado.

News like this has got to be a bit of a bummer for the likes of Ted Turner and the Eco-Elites: They soon may be looking for another excuse to impose their De-population policies on you and your family.

Paul Chesser reports that Colorado chemical engineer Ed Rademacher, Jr., shared a fact-based report with Montana state legislators that questioned the group promoting climate change policies in Montana and many other states. For his work, Mr. Rademacher was showered with shame and insult for daring to cast doubt on the prevailing Eco-Orthodoxy.

This Montana legislator equated an engineer’s skepticism about man-made climate change to a belief that the stork delivers babies

It’s the response of one state Rep. Sue Dickenson that makes this story interesting. Here’s the key excerpt: Read the rest of this entry »

Blogging from Chicago…

The silly publicity stunt known as “Earth Hour” is coming to a close here in the Windy City, while it’s about to start back home in Denver. Instead of participating in this self-absorbed deception, I’m joining Tim Blair in celebrating “The Hour of Power” (H/T Slapstick Politics). Not only are all the lights on here, and the computer running (of course), but so is the television (March Madness) and the room heater. It’s also a good time to recharge the cell phone.

One of my new friends here, Jeff from Louisiana Conservative, also has some advice for liberals who are serious about tonight’s event.

Liberal columnist Jason Salzman writes in the Saturday Rocky Mountain News:

By the time Paul Chesser arrived at the “Environmental Hysteria” cocktail party thrown in his honor Feb. 11 at the “penthouse” of the Independence Institute in Golden, he was feeling pretty good about his day in the Denver media.

In his briefing to Republican lawmakers earlier, Chesser had trashed Gov. Bill Ritter’s plan to fight global warming, and an article with his views would appear in the next day’s Post.

Chesser, of the conservative John Locke Foundation, had yakked in the morning with KOA’s Mike Rosen. The conservative blogosphere had dutifully transcribed Chesser’s anti-environmental message, and he was booked on John Andrews’ KNUS talk radio show.

His interview on Independence Institute President Jon Caldara’s TV program was taped and set to air on public television station KBDI Channel 12 a couple days later.

You wouldn’t call this a media frenzy, but it’s not bad for an obscure visitor from North Carolina.

It certainly made the Independence Institute proud. It booked Chesser’s media appearances and covered his expenses, Chesser told me.

But you have to wonder, could Ritter’s supporters, who favor his efforts to stop global warming, pull off a similar media streak for their expert?

The dailies would give them a fair hearing. And their allies on the Internet would pay attention.

Their odds of catching airtime on commercial talk radio are low, obviously.

But what’s less obvious is that Channel 12 would be a long shot, as well, for an unknown liberal expert on a media tour.

The Independence Institute pays KBDI for the costs of videotaping Caldara’s Channel 12 show, and Caldara uses the program regularly as part of his orchestrated media campaigns, as he did with Chesser.

Left-leaning activists have no equivalent KBDI show.

It’s true, as KBDI President Wick Rowland e-mailed me, that the “left is very well represented, week in and week out, on much of [Channel 12's] traditional and regular programming.”

This includes Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, an icon of the political left.

But there’s no show on Channel 12 that serves as a cog in the political machine of a local left-leaning organization, like Caldara’s show does for his outfit.

[sarcasm]Yes, it’s just plain unfair.[/sarcasm] (Full disclosure: I work for the Independence Institute, which is featured in the column.)

To me, a column like this one is clear evidence of how spoiled Colorado liberals have become. The Left funded and orchestrated a takeover of most of the reins of power in state government, operates a slew of advocacy and media-type organizations, and has more allies in the local mainstream media than their counterparts on the other side. But the only thing holding them back from getting the truth out there is their own local show on Channel 12.

Channel 12. KBDI. Public television.

Does anyone else see the irony here?

Have you ever wondered what would happen if a group of expert scientists came together to analyze climate change, without the vested interest of socialist governments driving the agenda? Well, wonder no more. It was past time to take a closer look at the oft-touted but seldom-scrutinized “findings” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

If you can wade through the figures, graphs, charts, acronyms, and scholarly references embedded in the vast new report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), you’ll get the answer to three basic questions:

The central problems for policymakers in the debate over global warming are (a) is the reported warming trend real and how significant is it? (b) how much of the warming trend is due to natural causes and how much is due to human-generated greenhouse gases? and (c) would the effects of continued warming be harmful or beneficial to plant and wildlife and to human civilization?

In this NIPCC report we have presented evidence that helps provide answers to all three questions. The extent of the modern warming – the subject of the first question – appears to be less than is claimed by the IPCC and in the popular media. We have documented shortcomings of surface data, affected by urban heat islands and by the poor distribution of land-based observing stations. Data from oceans, covering 70 percent of the globe, are also subject to uncertainties. The only truly global observations come from weather satellites, and these have not shown any warming trend since 1998, for the past 10 years.

This report shows conclusively that the human greenhouse gas contribution to current warming is insignificant. Our argument is based on the well-established and generally agreed-to ‘fingerprint’ method. Using data published by the IPCC and further elaborated in the U.S.-sponsored CCSP report, we have shown that observed temperature trend patterns disagree sharply with those calculated from greenhouse models.

It is significant that the IPCC has never made such a comparison, or it would have discovered the same result – namely that the current warming is primarily of natural origin rather than anthropogenic. Instead, the IPCC relied for its conclusion (on AGW) on circumstantial ‘evidence’ that does not hold up under scrutiny….

The third question concerns the effects of modest warming. A major scare associated with a putative future warming is a rapid rise in sea level, but even the IPCC has been scaling its estimates. We show here that there will be little if any acceleration, and therefore no additional increase in the rate of ongoing sea-level rise. This holds true even if there is a decades-long warming, whether natural or manmade.

Other effects of a putative increase in temperature and carbon dioxide are likely to be benign, promoting not only the growth of crops and forests but also benefitting human health…. [emphases added]

Don’t buy into the hype or the hysteria. Get the facts. Educate yourself. Think for yourself. The generation that thought it was “groovy” to “question authority” has stopped doing so, at least when it comes to the Green agenda of the Eco-church and its High Priest Algore. In this case, don’t be like them.

If science is going to dictate radical changes in government policy, it had better be a lot more convincing than the quasi-religious platitudes from the Enviro-socialists.

(H/T Global Climate Scam)

A letter in today’s Raleigh-Durham News & Observer:

In the Feb. 15 N&O, an article’s headline said, “Study’s look at oceans is sobering.” It described research showing negative human influences on nearly every corner of Earth’s oceans and seas.

This is just one of many worrisome phenomena that we read and hear about daily: severe water shortage, global warming, overcrowded schools, power plant pollution, deforestation, endangered species, gang crime and so on. But they all have something in common that never seems to get mentioned: There are too many humans on this planet! Further, I understand that we are increasing by 70 million a year!

We can reduce our littering, change our consumption habits, find better ways to generate electricity, limit the number of new homes, try to protect endangered species and so on, but those solutions only ameliorate the problem until further population expansion and increased human demands overtake them. To add to the problem, having large families is apparently becoming popular again.

Do no political leaders — or, for that matter, news reporters — recognize that the reason behind so many of our more serious problems is simply overpopulation? Do none of them see the urgent need for more and better family planning?

Robert P. Hawkins, Ph.D.
Cary

Letters like this make me thankful for two things: 1) The First Amendment forbids radical ecosocialist neo-pagans from imposing the genocidal implications of their views on the rest of us; and 2) That I opted not to pursue an academic career.

Where else but the modern nihilistic academy could such naive, amoral, and ill-informed views not only emerge but also thrive and flourish? This helped to serve as a reminder today of the great need to work to preserve America’s Founding vision and to keep her from heading down the track of Euro-Socialism. There’s a lot at stake.

From Lorne Gunter at the National Post yesterday:

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its “lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.

But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter’s weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.

And it’s not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona — two prominent climate modellers — the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

“We missed what was right in front of our eyes,” says Prof. Russell. It’s not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind’s effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as “a drop in the bucket.” Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to “stock up on fur coats.”

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

It’s way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it’s way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.

Now there’s another giant splash of ice-cold water in the face of Algore’s Nobel Prize tour.

Remember, you (may have) read it here first. Where is this highly credible and significant news reported in American media outlets?:

NEW evidence has cast doubt on claims that the world’s ice-caps are melting, it emerged last night.

Satellite data shows that concerns over the levels of sea ice may have been premature.

It was feared that the polar caps were vanishing because of the effects of global warming.

But figures from the respected US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that almost all the “lost” ice has come back.

Ice levels which had shrunk from 13million sq km in January 2007 to just four million in October, are almost back to their original levels.

Figures show that there is nearly a third more ice in Antarctica than is usual for the time of year.

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