From Democracy Now (oh dear!):
Organizers of the U.N. climate talks in Warsaw, Poland, are facing criticism for accepting corporate sponsorships from major car manufacturers, oil companies, steel manufacturers and coal firms. Meanwhile, the Polish Ministry of Economy has teamed up with the World Coal Association to put on a parallel “International Coal & Climate Summit,” also in Warsaw.
Actions speak louder than words.
As with climate change itself, I am perfectly content to wait and see whether 32 years-young Eric actually goes through with his twin commitments, before drawing any conclusions about his sincerity.
From Investor’s Business Daily:
Hysteria: A weeping meteorologist says he’ll forgo jet travel and having children because he’s upset by last week’s climate change report. He will likely be the object of much mockery. But might he also be a victim?
Eric Holthaus appears to be a publicity hound crying out for attention. His tweet explaining how he broke down in tears to his wife upon hearing that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say it’s 95% certain man is warming Earth is surely self-serving.
So, too, is his claim that on Friday he was boarding “the last flight I ever take” because flying is “not worth the climate.”
The former Wall Street Journal weather writer also pledged to have “no children” and was “thinking of a vasectomy” to help him keep his promise.
It’s OK to laugh at Holthaus. Grown men reacting like schoolgirls should be hooted at with great pleasure.
But maybe it’s not all his fault.
The global warming alarmists have created a climate of madness. Their incessant warnings of worldwide disaster and unspeakable human suffering due to man-made warming have sent some people into a frenzy.
Almost five years ago we wrote on these pages about climate change delusion. The first case diagnosed was in a 17-year-old Australian who refused to drink water because he thought it would cause millions to die from the drought-effects of global warming. He was eventually hospitalized in a psychiatric unit, having been depressed for months before being committed.
At that time, we also mentioned that the psychiatrist in charge of that unit told the Boston Globe that he “has now seen several more patients with psychosis or anxiety disorders focused on climate change.”
There were also stories of children “having nightmares about global-warming-related natural disasters” booking appointments with doctors.
We reported, as well, about the American Psychological Association’s effort to condition the public to believe that humans are causing an environmental crisis, an objective it was confident it could achieve because it knows “how to change behavior and attitudes.”
Is Holthaus a victim of an attempt to whip up hysteria over global warming? Or is he part of the campaign?
Whatever the truth, we now live in a world where it’s fine for a grown man to cry over a modern fable like a child frightened by tales of witches and ghosts.
UPDATE:
Some think he’s not really committed …
Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman is famous for many things. Among them being this statement:
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
The following video shows the typically engaging Feynman giving a simple lecture on the scientific method.
Believers in the claim that “the science is settled” regarding alleged “dangerous”, man-made global warming, would do well to listen … very carefully:
Professor Ross McKitrick, famous for having debunked the now infamous Michael Mann / Al Gore global warming “Hockey Stick” graph, has very neatly summarised the latest UN IPCC Summary for Policy Makers (SPM):
“SPM in a nutshell: Since we started in 1990 we were right about the Arctic, wrong about the Antarctic, wrong about the tropical troposphere, wrong about the surface, wrong about hurricanes, wrong about the Himalayas, wrong about sensitivity, clueless on clouds and useless on regional trends. And on that basis we’re 95% confident we’re right.”
I loved Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. This version of ‘Danke Schön’ is much better:
The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report is due to be released on September 30th.
Alas, once they start laughing at you, you’re through.
From the Environment Editor at The Australian:
THE Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest assessment reportedly admits its computer drastically overestimated rising temperatures, and over the past 60 years the world has in fact been warming at half the rate claimed in the previous IPCC report in 2007.
More importantly, according to reports in British and US media, the draft report appears to suggest global temperatures were less sensitive to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide than was previously thought.
The 2007 assessment report said the planet was warming at a rate of 0.2C every decade, but according to Britain’s The Daily Mail the draft update report says the true figure since 1951 has been 0.12C.
Last week, the IPCC was forced to deny it was locked in crisis talks as reports intensified that scientists were preparing to revise down the speed at which climate change is happening and its likely impact.
Professor Judith Curry, head of climate science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, told The Daily Mail the leaked summary showed “the science is clearly not settled, and is in a state of flux”.
The Wall Street Journal said the updated report, due out on September 27, would show “the temperature rise we can expect as a result of manmade emissions of carbon dioxide is lower than the IPCC thought in 2007”.
The WSJ report said the change was small but “it is significant because it points to the very real possibility that, over the next several generations, the overall effect of climate change will be positive for humankind and the planet”.
After several leaks and reports on how climate scientists would deal with a slowdown in the rate of average global surface temperatures over the past decade, the IPCC was last week forced to deny it had called for crisis talks.
“Contrary to the articles the IPCC is not holding any crisis meeting,” it said in a statement.
The IPCC said more than 1800 comments had been received on the final draft of the “summary for policymakers” to be considered at a meeting in Stockholm before the release of the final report. It did not comment on the latest report, which said scientists accepted their forecast computers may have exaggerated the effect of increased carbon emissions on world temperatures and not taken enough notice of natural variability.
According to The Daily Mail, the draft report recognised the global warming “pause”, with average temperatures not showing any statistically significant increase since 1997.
Scientists admitted large parts of the world had been as warm as they were now for decades at a time between 950 and 1250, centuries before the Industrial Revolution.
And, The Daily Mail said, a forecast in the 2007 report that hurricanes would become more intense had been dropped.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley said the draft report had revised downwards the “equilibrium climate sensitivity”, a measure of eventual warming induced by a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It had also revised down the Transient Climate Response, the actual climate change expected from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide about 70 years from now.
Ridley said most experts believed that warming of less than 2C from pre-industrial levels would result in no net economic and ecological damage. “Therefore, the new report is effectively saying (based on the middle of the range of the IPCC’s emissions scenarios) that there is a better than 50-50 chance that by 2083 the benefits of climate change will still outweigh the harm,” he said.
Nice timing.
Just as Australia gets a new government. One that has made a “blood pledge” to “scrap the carbon tax”, and the $10 billion “green bank”.
From the UK’s The Mail on Sunday:
A chilly Arctic summer has left nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 60 per cent.
The rebound from 2012’s record low comes six years after the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013.
Instead, days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.
Click to enlarge
The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year. More than 20 yachts that had planned to sail it have been left ice-bound and a cruise ship attempting the route was forced to turn back.
Some eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century – a process that would expose computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming as dangerously misleading.
The disclosure comes 11 months after The Mail on Sunday triggered intense political and scientific debate by revealing that global warming has ‘paused’ since the beginning of 1997 – an event that the computer models used by climate experts failed to predict.
In March, this newspaper further revealed that temperatures are about to drop below the level that the models forecast with ‘90 per cent certainty’.
The pause – which has now been accepted as real by every major climate research centre – is important, because the models’ predictions of ever-increasing global temperatures have made many of the world’s economies divert billions of pounds into ‘green’ measures to counter climate change.
Those predictions now appear gravely flawed.
The continuing furore caused by The Mail on Sunday’s revelations – which will now be amplified by the return of the Arctic ice sheet – has forced the UN’s climate change body to hold a crisis meeting.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was due in October to start publishing its Fifth Assessment Report – a huge three-volume study issued every six or seven years. It will now hold a pre-summit in Stockholm later this month.
Leaked documents show that governments which support and finance the IPCC are demanding more than 1,500 changes to the report’s ‘summary for policymakers’. They say its current draft does not properly explain the pause.
At the heart of the row lie two questions: the extent to which temperatures will rise with carbon dioxide levels, as well as how much of the warming over the past 150 years – so far, just 0.8C – is down to human greenhouse gas emissions and how much is due to natural variability.
In its draft report, the IPCC says it is ‘95 per cent confident’ that global warming has been caused by humans – up from 90 per cent in 2007.
This claim is already hotly disputed. US climate expert Professor Judith Curry said last night: ‘In fact, the uncertainty is getting bigger. It’s now clear the models are way too sensitive to carbon dioxide. I cannot see any basis for the IPCC increasing its confidence level.’
She pointed to long-term cycles in ocean temperature, which have a huge influence on climate and suggest the world may be approaching a period similar to that from 1965 to 1975, when there was a clear cooling trend. This led some scientists at the time to forecast an imminent ice age.
Professor Anastasios Tsonis, of the University of Wisconsin, was one of the first to investigate the ocean cycles. He said: ‘We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped.
Click to enlarge
‘The IPCC claims its models show a pause of 15 years can be expected. But that means that after only a very few years more, they will have to admit they are wrong.’
Others are more cautious. Dr Ed Hawkins, of Reading University, drew the graph published by The Mail on Sunday in March showing how far world temperatures have diverged from computer predictions. He admitted the cycles may have caused some of the recorded warming, but insisted that natural variability alone could not explain all of the temperature rise over the past 150 years.
Nonetheless, the belief that summer Arctic ice is about to disappear remains an IPCC tenet, frequently flung in the face of critics who point to the pause.
Yet there is mounting evidence that Arctic ice levels are cyclical. Data uncovered by climate historians show that there was a massive melt in the 1920s and 1930s, followed by intense re-freezes that ended only in 1979 – the year the IPCC says that shrinking began.
Professor Curry said the ice’s behaviour over the next five years would be crucial, both for understanding the climate and for future policy. ‘Arctic sea ice is the indicator to watch,’ she said.
Climate Change Commissioner Tim Flannery – he of the $180,000 per annum taxpayer-funded salary for 3 days a week “work” – in 2007:
“Even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and river systems”
From AAP, Feb 29, 2012:
Record rain floods parts of NSW
EVACUATIONS are underway in one town and emergency crews are standing by in three others as large parts of New South Wales continue to be deluged with the heaviest rains in more than 80 years.
Evacuation warnings are current for Cooma in the Snowy Mountains, with up to 300 people at risk, and parts of the southern tablelands township of Goulburn, where the Wollondilly Creek is threatening to burst its banks.
Orders are also in place at Captains Flat south of Queanbeyan, while crews are keeping an eye on the swollen Murrumbidgee River at Cootamundra in the Riverina, an SES spokesman says.
Sydney’s Warragamba Dam is also on the verge of overflowing for the first time in more than a decade.
And from Their ABC (via Yahoo!7 News):
Big wet bears down on NSW
One of the biggest weather events in New South Wales for decades is starting to make its presence felt, with a massive rain system bearing down on southern and central parts of the state.
The region has already seen torrential downpours, evacuation alerts and warnings of flash flooding…
“We’ve got a very serious situation developing in New South Wales, about 75 per cent of the state is flood-affected or in flood watch,” SES spokesman Dieter Geske said.
It is long past time that Flannery was sacked, his Australian of The Year award rescinded, his earnings-to-date confiscated and returned to Consolidated Revenue … and his miserable, lying, gold digging, profit-of-doom soggy-bottomed arse kicked out of town.
Make that, out of the country.
Won’t happen, of course.
So this blogger will live in hope that the waterfront-dwelling Flannery – now lying low in shame, it seems – will suffer exactly the same ultimate fate as that other Man Of Constant Sorrow in O Brother, Where Art Thou.
A great read from the Wall Street Journal. Click the link to read the whole thing:
How do religions die? Generally they don’t, which probably explains why there’s so little literature on the subject. Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can’t kill what wasn’t there to begin with.
Still, Zeus and Apollo are no longer with us, and neither are Odin and Thor. Among the secular gods, Marx is mostly dead and Freud is totally so. Something did away with them, and it’s worth asking what.
Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.
As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term “climate change” when thermometers don’t oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other “deniers.” And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.
This week, the conclave of global warming’s cardinals are meeting in Durban, South Africa, for their 17th conference in as many years. The idea is to come up with a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire next year, and to require rich countries to pony up $100 billion a year to help poor countries cope with the alleged effects of climate change. This is said to be essential because in 2017 global warming becomes “catastrophic and irreversible,” according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency.
Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the climate apocalypse. Namely, the financial apocalypse.
The U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won’t be signing on to a new Kyoto. The Chinese and Indians won’t make a move unless the West does. The notion that rich (or formerly rich) countries are going to ship $100 billion every year to the Micronesias of the world is risible, especially after they’ve spent it all on Greece.
Cap and trade is a dead letter in the U.S. Even Europe is having second thoughts about carbon-reduction targets that are decimating the continent’s heavy industries and cost an estimated $67 billion a year. “Green” technologies have all proved expensive, environmentally hazardous and wildly unpopular duds….
And the desperate attempts to cover up the truth about the Great Global Warming Swindle continue.
Popular writer and sceptic John O’Sullivan has just been fired by his publisher for revealing the latest bombshell:
Industrialized nations emit far less carbon dioxide than the Third World, according to latest evidence from Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
Global warming alarmism is turned on its head and the supposed role of carbon dioxide in climate change may be wrong, if the latest evidence from Japan’s scientists is to be believed.
Japanese national broadcaster, NHK World broke the astonishing story on their main Sunday evening news bulletin (October 30, 2011). Television viewers learned that the country’s groundbreaking IBUKU satellite, launched in June 2009, appears to have scorched an indelible hole in conventional global warming theory.
Here is John’s letter explaining the attempt to bury his story, as published in Climate Realists:
Friends,
I write to announce my employment with my publishers, Suite101 was terminated today without prior notice or explanation and all my articles published over a two-year period with them are now removed from the Internet. I believe this is in retaliation for my latest article ‘New Satellite Data Contradicts Carbon Dioxide Climate Theory’ revealing the shocking fact that the Japanese ‘IBUKI’ satellite measuring surface carbon dioxide emissions shows that Third World regions are emitting considerably more CO2 than western, industrial nations. [1.]
The consequences of this story are that, as such, all international policies aimed at compelling western countries to reduce their carbon emissions are premised on a scientific con trick. See more here: New Satellite Data Contradicts Carbon Dioxide Climate Theory
One respected online skeptic analyst, E.M. Smith (‘Chiefio’) has reviewed the article favorably and had this to say:
How right he was! It appears a self-serving and influential clique of zealots, fearful that the story may go viral, is desperate to kill it. This morning my Suite101 article had already gotten over 400,000 crosslinks a mere two days after publication. This evening a Google search shows that number cut to 297,000; so much for free speech and easy access to information on the Internet.
But what these ecoloons fail to understand is that they may shoot down one or two bloggers, but there are legions more waiting to step up to the plate. By such egregious censorship they merely draw more attention to their eco fascist attack on our freedoms.
Along with my skeptic colleagues, I will continue with our work to expose the climate fraud and to defend our freedoms. We will tirelessly fight to expose those global warming gatekeepers who cynically try to control the worldwide web as perniciously as they have the mainstream media.
The struggle for truth continues!
John
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