2010 was “The Year ‘Global Warming’ Died,” according to Stacy McCain. I hope he’s right, but if he is, I’d say November of of 2009 certainly accelerated the long overdue enviro-euthanasia process.
As Stacy notes:
Even the New York Times is forced to admit that the alarmists are fighting a losing battle:
AdvertisementThe Obama administration, which came into office pledging to limit emissions in the United States, scaled back its ambitions after climate and energy legislation died in the Senate this year.
Challengers have mounted a vigorous assault on the science of climate change. Polls indicate that the public has grown more doubtful about that science.
Science! Science! And if you disagree, you’re anti-Science!
We posted a couple of lengthy items earlier this week exploring how circular the enviro-left’s arguments have become, but Ann Althouse sums them up in a single sentence:
When everything is evidence of the thing you want to believe, it might be time to stop pretending you’re all about science.
And everything really is evidence of what they want to believe.
At the Belmont Club, Richard Fernandez reviews “Ice Age 6″ and gives it two frost-bitten thumbs up:
Unseasonably cold weather in the UK has spurred speculation the earth may be entering a new Ice Age. This flies completely in the face of last decade’s strident warnings about Global Warming. “Piers Corbyn believes that the last three winters could be the harbinger of a mini ice age that could be upon us by 2035, and that it could start to be colder than at any time in the last 200 years. He goes on to speculate that a genuine ice age might then settle in, since an ice age is now cyclically overdue. Is he barmy?”
Piers Corbyn is about as “barmy” as Time Magazine when it predicted in 1974 that another Ice Age was right around the corner.
Telltale signs are everywhere —from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest.Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.
The same tone of impending doom; the same portentous omens; the same catastrophic language was used not long ago — but to warn about a new Ice Age. Today the same tenor is being used to caution against Global Warming. How did the “science” turn 180 degrees around in that time? How could the data have suddenly done an about-face? Who knows?
What is common across the decades was the assertion that weather is generating a political crisis which forces governments to act.
We reviewed a number of those headlines then and now, in our “Hide the Decline” edition of Silicon Graffiti last year. Tune in here if you missed it.
And speaking of movies, as I mentioned back in March, a lot of Hollywood’s recent global warming doomfests are going to be remembered as updated versions of Reefer Madness to the next generation of movie fans. Today’s global warming fear-mongering is tomorrow’s late-night camp TV.
Related: “In 2010, more and more of the supposedly great and good signed up for the misery-fest that is neo-Malthusianism.”
Or as I mentioned last week, if I only have one life to live…
What the NYT did not disclose is that there is bourgeois science, which concerns itself with empirical method and that sort of useless crap, and revolutionary science which has the noble goal of advancing progress. The former is simply archaic and racist and thus fit to be ignored but only stupid people resist the latter.
Perfect
anAL GOREtentive
Buy a hat.
So many of them are so deeply invested in the AWG nonsense, they have no choice but to keep pretending and marching forward. It is rather pathetic, actually.
Seems that we may be a bit early, let us see what Lisa JAckson does at EPA. We already know that JUlius had no problem exceeding his authority at the FCC. WE talk a lot about Alinsky but what we are seeing is Hugo Chavez. Our enemies have used our openess against us, we all need to wake up and flush the toilet.
During the 1950s, when I was about eight years old our family sat down for Thanksgiving dinner. My mother prepared a wonderful banquet, but it included cranberry relish, which was, normally, a favorite of mine. When the cranberry relish was passed to me I declined it while authoritatively stating that the TV news had said that cranberries were tainted by some sort of pesticide that year and had advised against eating them. My wise father told me the cranberry relish was quite edible. More importantly, he told me I should not always blindly believe everything I saw or heard on the TV.
I relished my cranberry relish, and received my first lesson from my father about the madness of crowds and media hysteria.
God save our Republic.
What’s ‘fascinated’ me with the AGW spin is the ‘settled science’ these politicians/grifters/’climate scientists’ AVOID is an open forum with those they disagree with.
If the ‘data’ supports your agenda so well, what’s to fear from differing views, right? Besides, there is nothing more healthy, let alone NEEDED than differing views, ideas to come to an accord.
The ‘only’ problem for the AGW types was the data was ‘smoothed, ‘lost’ at East Anglia, cherry-picked. hidden, they’d ridiculed their very own colleagues (though not vis-a-vis of course.. they’re Liberals!) and the media was MIA or usurping their pie-in-the-sky notions.
Yep, apparently that pee running down the MSM’s back ‘felt’ like rain..
This is an old ploy, and actually, a good tactic. When you cannot stand on the SUBSTANCE of your arguments, simply dismiss your opponents as not worthy of notice. When you dare NOT fight a fair fight, avoid the fight entirely.
This was the reason that Isaac Asimov and Stephen J. Gould together urged Darwinists to stop debating creationists. Seems the creationists kept winning the debates. Oh dear.
You people blather about “science” and you clearly don’t have the first clue what it is. “climate” and “science” in the same sentence are evidently entirely unknown to you. You act like physics and chemistry are something that are a matter of opinion, like whether you like butter on your toast.
I’m not a scientist but I paid attention in Physcial Science when I was in the 8th grade.
The Earth’s atmosphere is 98 percent oxygen and nitrogen. The other gasses, including so-called greenhouse gasses like Co2 account for less than two percent. The atmosphere is a complex, dynamic system we don’t fully understand. The idea is laughable that there is a linear relationship between global temps and Co2 levels, and that we can control global temps by lowering or raising Co2 emissions like turning a spigot on or off.
The global cooling scare in the 1970s should serve as an object lesson because serious scientists of the day were just plain wrong. Only difference between then and now is, there was no 24 hour news cycle, cable TV or the Internet to keep the cooling hype going.
My first introduction to AGW was in the fall of 1988, when my Purdue astronomy professor told us that we’d soon start hearing a bunch of bunk about global warming, but he claimed that Earth’s temperature is closely related to the Sun’s activity. He said we’d see about 10 more years of warming, then a period of cooling, that there were small cycles (iirc 25 year?) and large cycles (12,000 years? sorry it was 22 years ago) of heating and cooling, and that this had been going on for millions of years. But I guess that “noted scientist” Al Gore disagrees, and I’ve seen the charts that go back 12,000 years (the AGW folks are creationists?).
“You act like physics and chemistry are something that are a matter of opinion….”
“You people”, “matter of opinion”? Oh, please, us skeptics are all idiots. Even Phil Jones at East Anglia University stated that there hasn’t been any statistically significant warming in the last 15 years. He was one of the guys that “filtered’ all the climate data and passed it on to the UN IPCC.
http://wizbangblog.com/content/2010/02/14/climate-scientist-phil-jones-no-global-warming-since-1995.php
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html
It’s all about the money – the Feds, UN, scientists with their grants, the greens, 3rd world countries selling carbon credits, etc., etc., etc.
It’s hard to tell what you are saying in the midst of your ranting, but let me offer you a suggestion:
Do a little research into the reflectivity of CO2 in the atmosphere. Pay particular attention to the wavelengths that are of interest (those which are claimed to be significant for global warming), and the level at which CO2 becomes 100% reflective for those wavelengths.
This is standard textbook stuff, easily replicateable in any lab with the requisite equipment, and completely destroys the AWG crowd.
Harphacker:
Ridiculous ad hom. Typical.
To really discuss the AGW hypothesis would to say the least be impractical in this forum. At best we can point out the deeply flawed predictive track record of the warmists! Hurricanes anyone?
Warmist or not, as a practical matter reducing USA carbon emissions will not save the world since India/China will not follow suit. So what is the point?
I remember the global cooling scare during the 1970′s. As the author states, predictions of global cooling were based on the “science of the time.” The science was, however, wrong.
As the saying goes, “Follow the money” and there is plenty money to be had by buying into the global warming hype in the form of government subsidies, tax incentives and funding of grants.
The United States is, by no means, through with global warming. It is a direct threat to our existence, and has come to a head in the past year, since the debacle at Copenhagen. What we have starkly learned is that scientists will lie through their teeth for a buck. Only they will do it with polysyllabic terms that few comprehend. We learned that millions of supposedly educated voters believe in “science”, as opposed to religion, but are abysmally ignorant in both. Basic concepts of science, the study of truth, were trashed, while the rentals of executive jets, limousines, and prostitutes sold out, in a mad rush to take our wealth. We learned that powerful government agencies stand ready to regulate every aspect of our economic life, “for our own good.” Next month, the EPA will begin a process to shut down 70,000 MWe of coal fired power plants, based on an inferred authority granted long before the term, global warming, existed. This is perhaps 20% of our grid. And we relearned that our Congress is essentially useless in solving social problems related to energy.
At some point, the roof will cave in, i.e., the grid will collapse, not for hours, but for years. When and what happens next, is unknown.
It aint over.
“I have had three colleagues killed while conducting research, so I take umbrage when hard-working, relatively under-paid, scientists are accused by the robber-barons and political hacks of hyping climate change for money.” So says Louis Codispoti, a scientist researching chemical processes happening in the ocean at the University of Maryland’s Horn Point Laboratory. At nearly 70, Codispoti is retiring to ease budget pressures at his university, but retains the title of professor and is beginning to pay for his own research.
http://simpleclimate.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/for-the-love-of-science-not-money/
-Who’s in it for the money? No, not David Koch trying to keep Koch Industry’s bottom line strong…….
Ask Professor Codispoti what kind of grades he gave to students who would refuse to disclose their data and refused to show their work? I have a only BS in Chemistry and I can assure you that any student treating data like the AGW supporters have, would have flunked out. Actually, given the intentional hiding of data, they probably would have been thrown out of school.
When you have nothing, a Straw Man Argument will have to do, right?
I’d not want my data to be misrepresented by an industry hack, paid by the Cato Institute to distort the results. But in my class, yes, you’d best show your work.
On the other hand I certainly will not trust any data collected either by NASA or NOAA. Their funding comes from the federal government. And they will massage their data to conform with Federal goals, i.e., impose penalties and taxes on energy producers and users in order to bring in additional revenue, even at the expense of paying off 3rd world counties wealth redistribution. So please spare me your noble scientist bull.
All of this claimed warming was the result of intentional statistical manipulation by the climate data centers at NOAA, NASA, and the Hadley Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Among the ruses employed: From 1989 to 1994, the number of temperature stations used in compiling the data was reduced from 12,000 to less than 6,000. Stations showing a temperature increase were favored, while stations reporting temperature decline were dropped from the record. The data centers employ corrected, not raw, temperature values in their calculations. But corrections were done in such a way as to systematically reduce the recorded temperatures from earlier periods so as to create an appearance of upward temperature in the recent two decades. Statistical filters were employed which masked the urban heat island effect, while claiming to account for it. Sea surface temperature data was also manipulated. Satellite input was removed by NOAA in 2009 after complaints of a cold bias in the Southern Hemisphere. The immediate result was an increase in reported global ocean surface temperatures of 0.24 degrees C, leading to the nonsensical claim that the 2000s was the warmest decade in a millennium.
Jim Hansen at NASA has been alarming since the 80s. And every tome the UN IPCC issues theeir report, catastrophe effects are always lower. According to Hansen back in the 80s, Florida should have been underwater by now.
Dr. Codispoti says in the hyperlink, “I would probably be considered upper middle class financially, and can live off of my retirement savings……. While I would not turn down research funds, I am pretty happy doing what I am doing.” He, and others, just do not get it.
I could show him the graves of engineers who took their lives because their careers in fossil power were destroyed, or show him bulldozer operators, plumbers, real estate salesmen, and cab drivers who lost their engineering career, house, and family because this nation stopped building power plants, both nuclear and fossil.
I know nothing of oceanography, or Codispoti. I have engineered two dozen nukes and four dozen fossil power plants. I am certain that without combustion my nation can not survive. The alternative energy technologies will bankrupt us, in spite of the lies.
I know nothing about Koch industries but am certain that a hot eternity awaits for some who seek its destruction, for personal gain. To energy engineers, green is the color of death.
Very well said, Mr. Hails. But you left out one thing – Whatever is supported by the U.N. will benefit the U.N., and is therefore suspect.
The Beast lives. Envirolunacy as a mode of control & a means of fostering hardship for Normal People will not die anytime soon.
Does anyone this side of an asylum think evidence matters to the left?
There are two parts to this equation:
First the reality: Is the earth’s climate changing? Sure! It has been changing for millions of years, it would be foolish to think that it is somehow going to stop now. Is humanity a part of this? Again, it would be difficult for us to say that human activity doesn’t fit in to this. We don’t know exactly what effect it has yet, nor do we know what measures we could take to keep from accelerating the change to an unhealthy level.
Second, there is the political side: The Earth’s climate is changing, so… –What? Are we supposed to listen to the liberal left and suddenly hand the keys to our society over to them because they somehow have a monopoly on Science? No.
That’s the problem. I have no difficulty with acknowledging that the Earth’s climate is not what it was when my Great Grandparents roamed the planet. However, that’s where things end. I do not think we can conserve our way out of this problem. We need to consider what our options are. We may find that by the time we understand how the climate got to where it is, we can change it through some very simple efforts at terraforming.
I am not in favor of following some wide eyed lunatic who says the sky is falling. That’s what the Left would have us do, and that is where I put my foot down and say No Way!
AGW may be effectively dead with the public at large, but it surely is not dead with the advocates, as the EPA decision to circumvent Congress and limit greenhouse emissions all on their own (like net neutrality at the FCC) proves.
Obama and his Marxist minions have realized and are openly exploiting something that the feckless Republicans never noticed: that over decades, Congress delegated so much power to our “regulators” and have encouraged so much deference to them, that we are nearing a juncture as a country where the Executive Branch can openly defy the courts and the legislature and rule by decree, as Chavez is now doing in Venezuela.
Expect much more of the same before Obama leaves office.
The great thing about global cooling is that to counter it we have to cut down all the trees and drive our cars like mad.
Hahaha, that’s funny. But using the logic of the AGW proponents, you are probably right!
How do I contact Al ? I need to ask him why its hot here in Bangkok on Christmas day and elsewhere everyone is snowed in.
while i dont believe in GW and yes it is being taken down, dont be fooled into thinking its over. Obama and the alarmists are already trying to use the EPA to bypass congress and the people. thats what they do…they play possum. remember when obama backs away wfrom what he is going for, its not because he is giving up. he is backing up to get a running start and ram something through. we saw precisley this duing the hellth care ‘debate’
“You people blather about “science” and you clearly don’t have the first clue what it is.”
– - – - –
Ya done caught us out. For me, that horrible sense of intellectual failing came when I realized that, no matter how many times I read the posts on Real Climate, I just couldn’t get my hands around how we could suddenly enter into a period in which the CO2-warmth interaction began generating its own Positive Feedback ™.
Once I came to terms with how my own desperately pathetic personal egotism was holding back my inner feelings of complete intellectual faith in Peer Reviewed Liberal Spokesmodels – once I could finally accept Gore into my life – only then did the scales fall from my eyes! I’ve never felt freer or more accomplished or more attractive at the cool parties than when I could finally, with no qualms, advocate for the abandonment of that whole Conservation of Energy mantra.
Entropy recedes! Pass it on!
(You stupid sycophantic schmuck. You wouldn’t know “science” if it bit you on the butt.)
Closing comment here and now
global warmingclimate change is a farce! It has always been one and just another way to try to alter behavior of the masses through mass distribution of false or misleading information!Keep living your life as always but keep on guard against those that want to dupe you into following what they say might be quite harmful!
Al Gore is not my father and neither are any of those that promote
global warmingclimate change!I am really pleased to live in France where electricity generation is 85% nuclear.
Future Energy Security, (thoroughly destroyed by the last UK Government and sadly with the destruction perpetuated by the current Coalition), is probably the foremost responsibility of a government to its citizens. It is arguably more important even than Military Security.
In the light of the state of the current Solar Cycle, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation etc., it seems that there is a real prospect of damaging cooling continuing in the near future for several decades as we may inexorably move towards the climate of another Little Ice Age. Piers Corbyn and many others already anticipate that eventuality.
The French long-term energy strategy with its massive commitment to nuclear power is impressive, (85% of electricity generation). And even if one is concerned about CO2, Nuclear Energy pays off, French electricity prices and CO2 emissions / head are the lowest in the developed world.
It is utterly futile to think that mankind can affect climate to any worthwhile extent. The numbers are very simple and are accepted by a renowned UK government advisor, the US Department of Energy and many other reputable scientific minds. Yes CO2 might well affect warming but the important question is HOW MUCH or rather HOW LITTLE ? and therefore are any remedial actions worthwhile at all.
We can get to the nub of the problem with simple NUMBERS NOT ADJECTIVES. There is every chance that these rough and ready numbers are in the right ballpark.
On average world temperature is ~+15 degC. This is sustained by the atmospheric Greenhouse Effect ~33 degC. Without the Greenhouse Effect the planet would be un-inhabitable at ~-18 degC.
So translating the agents causing the Greenhouse Effect into degrees centigrade:
• Water Vapour and Clouds account for as much as 95% of the Greenhouse Effect = ~ 31.35 degC
• Other Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) account for about 5% = ~1.65 degC
• CO2 is 75% of the remaining effect when accounting for the enhanced effects of Methane, Nitrous Oxide and other GHGs = ~1.24 degC
• Most CO2 in the atmosphere is natural, more than ~93%, (some authorities say 97%)
• Man-made CO2 is less than 7% of total atmospheric CO2 = ~0.087 degC being caused by the full emissions of the carbon economies of the whole world
• UK’s contribution to World CO2 emissions is ~1.8% = 1.6 thousandths degC
The maximum efforts made in the UK can only achieve an insignificant and immeasurable part of that. Even partial efforts would damage any Western economy like the UK irrevocably.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy0_SNSM8kg
NASA GISS researcher Gavin Schmidt appears to state in his recent paper (October 2010) that Water Vapour and Clouds account for 75% of the Greenhouse effect. Even at this reduced level of effect that would make very little difference to the FUTILITY argument enumerated above. One is still talking in a few Thousandths of a degree for the whole world Carbon economy.
The probability is that any current global warming is not man-made and in any case such warming could be not be influenced by any remedial action taken by mankind however drastic. And whatever may be said, outside Europe the, rest of the world is not joining in. The non-joiners, (China, India, Japan, Russia, Brazil, South Africa and soon the USA as the Republican majority hopefully dismembers the Catastrophic Man-made Global Warming scam), already amount to 62% of the world CO2 emissions and 48% of the world population.
If the numbers shown above are even close to the right ballpark, the prospect should be greeted with Unmitigated Joy:
• all concern over CO2 as a man-made pollutant can be discounted.
• it is not necessary to damage the western world’s economy to no purpose.
• if warming were happening, it would lead to a more benign and healthy climate for all mankind.
• any extra CO2 is already increasing the fertility and reducing water needs of all plant life and thus enhancing world food production.
• a warmer climate, within natural variation, as has occurred over the last century, would provide a future of greater prosperity for human development and much more food for the growing world population. This has been well proven in the Roman and Medieval pasts and would now especially benefit the third world.