Global cooling

From Brit Hume's "Grapevine" last night:

Tuesday we told you about several areas around the planet experiencing
record cold and snowpack — in the face of all the predictions of global
warming.

Now there is word that all four major global temperature tracking
outlets have released data showing that temperatures have dropped significantly
over the last year. California meteorologist Anthony Watts says the amount of
cooling ranges from 65-hundredths of a degree Centigrade to 75-hundreds of a
degree.

That is said to be a value large enough to erase nearly all the
global warming recorded over the past 100 years. It is reportedly the single
fastest temperature change ever recorded — up or down.

Some scientists contend the cooling is the result of reduced solar activity — which they say is a larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases.

Volcanoes in Antarctica

We've all seen the TV footage of giant icebergs breaking off of glaciers in Antarctica as evidence of global warming. An article in yesterday's International Herald Tribune suggests that newly discovered volcanoes in Antarctica may have something to do with the glacier thinning.

Global Warming: Worse than you thought!

See the complete list of things caused by global warming (hat tip: John W.).

The global warming scam

John Coleman, lifetime meterologist and founder of the Weather Channel weighs in on global warming on ICECAP:

It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly
offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM. Some dastardly scientists with
environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to
create an allusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same
environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the
“research” to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims.
Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the
movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus.

Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them, then teamed up with movie, media and other liberal, environmentalist journalists to create this wild “scientific” scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda. Now their ridiculous
manipulated science has been accepted as fact and become a cornerstone issue for
CNN, CBS, NBC, the Democratic Political Party, the Governor of California,
school teachers and, in many cases, well informed but very gullible
environmentally conscientious citizens. Only one reporter at ABC has been
allowed to counter the Global Warming frenzy with one 15 minute documentary
segment.

Gore, Gray and Global Warming

As everyone knows by now, Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for his movie on global warming. According to an article in the Washington Post, Bill Gray is not buying the global warming hype. We all know Al Gore, but who is Bill Gray? He’s been called “the World most famous hurricane expert.” He been working in meteorology for over 50 years, and has mentored many of the scientists in the field. He’s pretty confident in himself saying, “I don't think anybody in the world understands how the atmosphere functions better than me."

Dr. Gray’s view on global warming? He says, "I am of the opinion that this is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people."

Bill Gray on Global Warming

As everyone knows by now, Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for his movie on global warming. According to an article in the Washington Post, Bill Gray is not buying the global warming hype. We all know Al Gore, but who is Bill Gray? He’s been called “the World most famous hurricane expert.” He been working in meteorology for over 50 years, and has mentored many of the scientists in the field. He’s pretty confident in himself saying, “I don't think anybody in the world understands how the atmosphere functions better than me."

Dr. Gray’s view on global warming? He says, "I am of the opinion that this is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people."

Global warming and Darfur

"UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that the slaughter in Darfur was triggered by global climate change and that more such conflicts may be on the horizon, in an article published Saturday" (AFP, See LGF).

Yeah right. Global warming caused Muslims to kidnap, torture, rape, enslave and murder Christians by the millions! I sure hope this guy is an absolute idiot because if he knows better, it would be a very, evil person who would knowingly try to justify the mass slaughter of millions of innocent people.

Maybe the Secretary General's time would be better spent figuring out how to keep Muslims from firing rockets into northern Israel before another war breaks out.

The wisdom of Hollywood

According to the Washington Post, singer Sheryl Crow has been traveling around the country on a "Stop Global Warming College Tour." She has a suggestion on how we could save more trees:

I propose a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in
any one sitting. Now, I don't want to rob any law-abiding American of his or her
God-given rights, but I think we are an industrious enough people that we can
make it work with only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on
those pesky occasions where 2 to 3 could be required.

The Supreme Court has not yet ruled on whether we have a God-given right to use more than 1-3 squares of toilet paper, and there is no word on whether Al Gore would establish a federal Department of Restroom Inspection. But look at the bright side: At least Ms. Crow didn't suggest saving the other side for the next restroom user.

Mark Albright fired

Seattle mayor Greg Nickels wrote an op-ed piece in the Seattle Time citing a widely used statistic to the effect that the snow pack in the Cascades has declined by 50% since 1950.

It turns out that this is not true. In fact, the Cascade snow pack has actually been increasing since 1995. When associate state climatologist, Mark Albright, tried to correct the misinformation, he was fired from his "unpaid, but prestigious position" (NCPA).

We certainly can't have something as trivial as science getting in the way of political correctness, can we.

Save the environment

If you wanted to save some money and help the environment would you buy a Hummer or a Toyota Prius hybrid? Before you answer, you may want to read this New York Times article (Hat tip: Kevin).

The religion of environmentalism

Czeck President Vaclav Klaus, speaking in Washington DC, warned that such movements in the west as environmentalism, multiculturalism and social democratism are really movements that will "radically re-organize human society” in a way that establishes more and more state control and undermines freedom. Read the article at CNSNews.

The “science” of global warming

If you can’t convince them with the scientific evidence, try shunning or threats. That appears to be the approach of some global warming advocates:

Scientists who questioned mankind's impact on climate change have received death
threats and claim to have been shunned by the scientific community.

They say the debate on global warming has been "hijacked" by a powerful alliance of
politicians, scientists and environmentalists who have stifled all questioning
about the true environmental impact of carbon dioxide emissions.

Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five deaths threats by email since raising concerns about the
degree to which man was affecting climate change (read the rest at the SundayTelegraph).

Some of the same kind of tactics have been used against those who advocate Intelligent Design (e.g. against Richard Sternberg). Advocates of contemporary scientific theories can be just as religiously dogmatic as medieval priests.

Global warming in Washington

Thousands in Baltimore and Washington DC are without power, the DC airports are closed, and last, but not least, hearings on global warming scheduled on Capitol Hill for today have been cancelled--all because of snow and ice!

All of this says nothing one way or the other about global warming theories, but you've got to love the irony.

Science and political correctness

According to CNSNews, “A dispute erupted this week in Oregon, where Gov. Ted Kulongoski is considering firing the state's climatologist George Taylor, who has said human activity isn't the chief cause of global climate change.”

This kind of pressure is apparently not isolated. See CNSNews for the rest of the story (see also Recliner Commentaries for similar pressure in a different area of science).

Isn’t it a bit concerning when science is manipulated by political correctness?

The leading cause of global warming

According to an article in The Independent, the leading cause of global warming has been discovered: (hat tip: J. Wheaton)

"Meet the world's top destroyer of the environment. It is not the car, or the plane,or even George Bush: it is the cow."

"A United Nations report has identified the world's rapidly growing herds of cattle as the greatest threat to the climate, forests and wildlife. And they are blamed for a host of other environmental crimes, from acid rain to the introduction of alien species, from producing deserts to creating dead zones in the oceans, from poisoning rivers and drinking water to destroying coral reefs."

Please do your part to end global warming--grab a quarter-pounder at McDonalds today!

More on global warming

On November 7 Recliner Commentaries posted excerpts and a link to an article debunking the theory of Global warming. Kevin just sent me a link to another article debunking that article.

Meanwhile, during the conference I atteneded in Washington DC, one presenter argued persuasively that while few scientists deny the phenomena of Global warming, they disagree over the cause. But even if the cause was carbon emissions the cost to curtail it would start at about a trillion dollars per year during the first stage, and increase rapidly during the next 20-30 stages--and all that money would still not make enough difference to prevent the kind of catastrophies about which Al Gore speaks.

Meanwhile, the trillons of dollars spent on preventing global warming could be used to save the lives of hundreds-of-thousands of people who die due to lack of simple necessities like food, clean water or basic medical care.

So the debate goes on.

Global warming and the U.N.

Britain’s Sunday Telegraph published a remarkably eye-opening article on global warming. The thrust of the article is that everyone agrees that the world’s climate is getting warmer, but U.N. scientists are deliberately manipulating the data for political purposes to make it look like the climate change is due to rising CO2 levels. I encourage everyone to read the entire article (which includes a link to detailed scientific calculations) but some of the less technical quotes are included below (hat tip: Kevin):

"Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was the worst 'market failure' ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, 'creating world government."

"This week, I'll show how the UN undervalued the sun's effects on historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase, repealed a fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect."

"Next week, I'll demonstrate the atrocious economic, political and environmental cost of the high-tax, zero-freedom, bureaucratic centralism implicit in Stern's report; I'll compare the global-warming scare with previous sci-fi alarums; and I'll show how the environmentalists' "precautionary principle" (get the state to interfere now, just in case) is killing people."

"So to the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels."

Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period."

"So they did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years."

"Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland: now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none."

"The Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and nearly all its 160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years, reversing a 6,000-year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes worldwide show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than now. And the snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit temperature is rising (it isn't) but because post-colonial deforestation has dried the air. Al Gore please note."

"In some places it was also warmer than now in the Bronze Age and in Roman times. It wasn't CO2 that caused those warm periods. It was the sun. So the UN adjusted the maths and all but extinguished the sun's role in today's warming."

"Sami Solanki, a solar physicist, says that in the past half-century the sun has been warmer, for longer, than at any time in at least the past 11,400 years, contributing a base forcing equivalent to a quarter of the past century's warming. That's before adding climate feedbacks.
The entire 20th-century warming from all sources was below 2 watts. The sun could have caused just about all of it."

"Why haven't air or sea temperatures turned out as the UN's models predicted? Because the science is bad, the "consensus" is wrong…"

Scientists support Gore on global warming?

This afternoon the Associated Press released a news story entitled, “Scientists OK Gore movie for accuracy.” The report states that 100 scientists were contacted by AP for their opinion of the Gore movie. As it turns out the AP headline was based on the 19 scientists who had seen the movie or read the book—none of the other 100 had even seen or read Gore’s work.

Then, a little later, the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works issued a press release strongly disputing the AP article, quoting one scientist who says Gore's "propaganda campaign" is "junk science." I don't know if global warming is junk science or not but it appears to me that the AP article is junk journalism.

Global Warming, Al Gore and junk science

In recent years activists and the media have made a big deal out of global warming-- sometimes suggesting almost apocalyptic, end-of-the-world scenarios. While this may fit well with my theology, I really have no idea whether such scare campaigns are accurate. In my own field of historical Jesus studies, I know for a fact that most of the recent TV specials and documentaries on Jesus, Judas, Mary Magdalene, etc are filled with so much distortion and outright nonsense as to be laughable, so when scientists claim that the global warming scare by Al Gore and the media is all junk science, my ears perk up because I know how much misinformation a few activists and the media can generate.

I really don’t have a position on this debate but since Mr. Gore is getting most of the attention, I thought I’d post some excerpts from the other side: The following are from a recent article “The Inconvenient Truth is indeed inconvenient to alarmists,” by Tom Harris:

"Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: ‘Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention." [Recliner Commentaries note: I have precisely the same gut reaction when I see most TV documentaries about Jesus, etc.]

"…Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. ‘Climate experts’ is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's ‘majority of scientists’ think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field."

"Among experts who actually examine the causes of change on a global scale, many concentrate their research on designing and enhancing computer models of hypothetical futures. ‘These models have been consistently wrong in all their scenarios,’ asserts Ball."

"Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, 'There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years.'

"Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, 'The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."

Worldwide devastation and destruction

Last night I was watching a program by National Geographic in which scientists hypothesize about the catastrophic, civilization-ending consequences of a super-volcano at Yellowstone National Park. Also last night, PBS Frontline showed a documentary on the world-ravishing effects of AIDS—8,000 people dying per day! The Weather Channel has a series called “It Could Happen Tomorrow” which “takes a close look at unbelievable acts of nature that, if they occur, could spell disaster in cities across America.”

Other programs have discussed the possibility of an asteroid striking the earth, forever changing, or even destroying, life on this planet. Such programs often say it is not a matter of whether an asteroid will hit, but when. Still other programs sometimes say the same things about mega-earthquakes and nuclear terrorism. Of course there have also been numerous movies and docudramas on the worldwide spread of horrendous diseases through biological terrorism.

And then there’s Al Gore. One reviewer of Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, writes, “Extreme poverty, intractable wars, virulent disease, hatred of all stripes–these are a few of the scourges we live with today. And yet global climate change trumps them all; for if it's not addressed, all life on the planet will be devastated…”

If I didn’t know better I’d think this was all some kind of a vast right-wing Christian conspiracy to convince people that the prophecies in the biblical Book of Revelation could be true :-)