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The Sun – not man – heats the earth

October 17, 2011

It would seem obvious – but it has not been – and it is still heresy for the AGW orthodoxy to entertain the notion that carbon dioxide effects are insignificant in relation to solar effects on climate.

A new paper in Energy & Environment, Vol. 22, No. 6 (Sept. 2011)

Long-Term Instrumental and Reconstructed Temperature Records Contradict Anthropogenic Global Warming

by Horst-Joachim Lüdecke, EIKE, European Institute for Climate and Energy, PO.Box 11011, 07722 Jena, GERMANY

PDF 

There is no evidence that the temperature changes of the second half of the 20th Century are in any way extraordinary. No impact of the rise in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere can be found in the data.

One more nail in the AGW coffin.

Abstract:Monthly instrumental temperature records from 5 stations in the northern hemisphere are analyzed, each of which is local and over 200 years in length, as well as two reconstructed long-range yearly records – from a stalagmite and from tree rings that are about 2000 years long. In the instrumental records, the steepest 100-year temperature fall happened in the 19th century and the steepest rise in the 20th century, both events being of about the same magnitude. Evaluation by the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) yields Hurst exponents that are in good agreement with the literature. DFA, Monte Carlo simulations, and synthetic records reveal that both 100-year events were caused by external trends. In contrast to this, the reconstructed records show stronger 100-year rises and falls as quite common during the last 2000 years. These results contradict the hypothesis of an unusual (anthropogenic) global warming during the 20th century. As a hypothesis, the sun’s magnetic field, which is correlated with sunspot numbers, is put forward as an explanation. The long-term low-frequency fluctuations in sunspot numbers are not detectable by the DFA in the monthly instrumental records, resulting in the common low Hurst exponents. The same does not hold true for the 2000-year-long reconstructed records, which explains both their higher Hurst exponents and the higher probabilities of strong 100-year temperature fluctuations. A long-term synthetic record that embodies the reconstructed sunspot number fluctuations includes the different Hurst exponents of both the instrumental and the reconstructed records and, therefore, corroborates the conjecture.

This paper supports the results published by Prof. Sami Solanki back in 2004 and reported in Science Daily here:

Sami K. Solanki, Natalie A. Krivova Can solar variability explain solar warming since 1970? Journal of Geophysical Research,108, doi 10.1029/2002JA009753 (2003)

The authors  concluded  then that “based on a statistical study of earlier periods of increased solar activity, the researchers predict that the current level of high solar activity will probably continue only for a few more decades”.

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Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Science, Solar science | Comments Off on The Sun – not man – heats the earth

Media touts Camping’s Rapture garbage again — and again it shall not come to pass

October 16, 2011

Harold Camping is at it again. (Or is he? –  it seems to be the media just highlighting a statement on his website and recycling his May 23rd interview rather than any thing more recent). After his predicted May 21st Rapture failed to appear (after his previous failed prediction for a September 6th 1994 Rapture), the 90 year-old is  now predicting the great day will be next week on Friday October 21st.

Christian Post: Harold Camping has predicted that the rapture will take place on Oct. 21, following his May 21 prediction failed to come to pass. He explained this by saying May 21 was just the spiritual rapture, and the physical rapture would soon follow in October. … When describing the rapture prior to May 21, Camping spoke about a great earthquake “such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great.” He then said that those “who survive this terrible earthquake will exist in a world of horror and chaos beyond description. Each day people will die until Oct. 21, 2011, when God will completely destroy this earth and its surviving inhabitants.”

I suppose the Christian Post improves its circulation numbers by publishing this rubbish in addition to their usual nonsense.

But I note that the Family Radio websites themselves are just carrying a few lines which read:

But that universal judgment will not be physically seen until the last day of the five month judgment period, on October 21, 2011. ….. Thus we can be sure that the whole world, with the exception of those who are presently saved (the elect), are under the judgment of God, and will be annihilated together with the whole physical world on October 21, 2011, ….. 

Nevertheless, somebody must be making lots of money from this garbage. Camping is probably senile and apparently he suffered a stroke after the 21st May prediction (which was no debacle considering the amount of interest and money that was raised). But he is surely surrounded by those who are now intent on capitalising on the “Rapture brand” for whatever it is worth even if returns must be diminishing. The money for his Family Radio organisation comes primarily from milking the gullible and the suicidal and the weak-minded.

Newsvine: Amidst all of these predictions, Harold Camping has been profiting quite resoundingly.  The 2009 IRS filings from Family Radio, his radio network, indicated that it had over $104 million in assets.  And those profits aren’t all going toward Christian causes, like helping the needy or setting up missions.  Around $34 million of those assets are tied up in investments.  Harold Camping and Family Radio are profiting from these phony predictions, making money through their efforts to drum up fear.

Apparently in May, Camping and his followers spent a lot of money – though the numbers don’t quite add up:

The Guardian: Camping and his followers spent more than $100m worldwide on billboards and posters, financed by the sale and swap of radio stations. Advertising popped up across America and the globe from Iraq to Lebanon to Israel to Jordan, the Philippines to Vietnam, where thousands of the Hmong ethnic hill tribe gathered together on the Thai border in anticipation of the event. The campaign was backed up by Camping’s radio show. …. There has been a mini-boom in firms and individuals offering to look after the pets of those who believed they were about to be raptured. Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, set up by New Hampshire atheist Bart Centre, has about 250 clients who paid $135 (£83) for insurance policies that guarantee Centre and others will care for their animals when they ascend. Others paid out to sign up with websites that would send out farewell letters to friends and relations left behind.

But it all makes a lot of sense if one removes religion from the equation.

This is all just entertainment and the making of money from a serial radio show which is coming to the end of its natural life. It has been running since 1992 and no matter what one may say – it has had a very good run. The producer’s task is now to milk the “rapture” show until it is deserted by its listeners and has to be taken off the air. And if a few disturbed people give away all their belongings or kill off their animals or even commit suicide; so be it – it only strengthens the “brand”.

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Posted in Alarmism, Business, Media | 1 Comment »

A book is born: Finally a hard light on the IPCC’s advocacy

October 14, 2011

I have just started reading this book but have been following the author’s investigations of the IPCC’s rather “unscientific” advocacy on behalf of environmental lobby groups for some time.

The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World's Top Climate Expert

by Donna Laframboise

The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert

by  Donna Laframboise.

Admirable.

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Posted in Alarmism, Climate, scientific misconduct | Comments Off on A book is born: Finally a hard light on the IPCC’s advocacy

Food production can double and solutions are available for feeding the planet

October 14, 2011

A new study shows that alarmist, Malthusian, doomsday scenarios regarding feeding the world’s population which may reach 9 billion in 2050 are not justified.

A team of researchers from Canada, the U.S., Sweden and Germany has concluded from modelling results that it is feasible to double the world’s food production while reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture. Their findings were recently published in the journal Nature.

Solutions for a cultivated planet, by Jonathan A. Foley, Navin Ramankutty, Kate A. Brauman, Emily S. Cassidy, James S. Gerber, Matt Johnston, Nathaniel D. Mueller, Christine O’Connell, Deepak K. Ray, Paul C. West, Christian Balzer, Elena M. Bennett, Stephen R. Carpenter, Jason Hill, Chad Monfreda, Stephen Polasky, Johan Rockström, John Sheehan, Stefan Siebert, David Tilman, David P. M. Zaks. . Nature, 2011; DOI: 10.1038/nature10452

Science Daily:

By combining information gathered from crop records and satellite images from around the world, they have been able to create new models of agricultural systems and their environmental impacts that are truly global in scope. ….

The researchers recommend:

  1. Halting farmland expansion and land clearing for agricultural purposes, particularly in the tropical rainforest. This can be achieved using incentives such as payment for ecosystem services, certification and ecotourism. This change will yield huge environmental benefits without dramatically cutting into agricultural production or economic well-being.
  2. Improving agricultural yields. Many farming regions in Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe are not living up to their potential for producing crops — something known as “yield gaps.” Improved use of existing crop varieties, better management and improved genetics could increase current food production nearly by 60 per cent.
  3. Supplementing the land more strategically. Current use of water, nutrients and agricultural chemicals suffers from what the research team calls “Goldilocks’ Problem”: too much in some places, too little in others, rarely just right. Strategic reallocation could substantially boost the benefit we get from precious inputs.
  4. Shifting diets. Growing animal feed or biofuels on prime croplands, no matter how efficiently, is a drain on human food supply. Dedicating croplands to direct human food production could boost calories produced per person by nearly 50 per cent. Even shifting nonfood uses such as animal feed or biofuel production away from prime cropland could make a big difference.
  5. Reducing waste. One-third of the food produced by farms ends up discarded, spoiled or eaten by pests. Eliminating waste in the path that food takes from farm to mouth could boost food available for consumption another 50 per cent.

The study also outlines approaches to the problem that would help policy-makers reach informed decisions about the agricultural choices facing them. “For the first time, we have shown that it is possible to both feed a hungry world and protect a threatened planet,” said lead author Jonathan Foley, head of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment. “It will take serious work. But we can do it.”

Related:

Malthusian doomsday postponed – indefinitely 

7 billion people from October 31st by UN decree – but it is an opportunity not a problem

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Posted in Agriculture, Alarmism, Demographics, Development, Food | 1 Comment »

Carbon trading fraudsters lobby hard to keep their playground unregulated

October 10, 2011

Stupidity (in introducing cabon trading in the first place) and greed among the carbon traders and speculators reigns supreme.

No surprise!

Reports calls for tougher regulation on carbon trading scheme

Reports calls for tougher regulation on carbon trading scheme: image clickgreen.org.uk

Clickgreen reports:

Finance sector lobbyists are pushing the European Commission to block tighter regulation of the EU’s carbon market, a new report from Corporate Europe Observatory and Carbon Trade Watch, published today, reveals. 

The Commission is currently reviewing regulation of the market following a number of fraud cases and leaked documents suggest that it will include carbon trading under the revised Market in Financial Instruments Directive.

But according to Letting the market play, lobbyists from the International Emissions Trading Association – the main body representing carbon traders – and BusinessEurope have sought to minimise new regulations, with BusinessEurope claiming “no further regulation” is needed. 

Report author Oscar Reyes said: “Carbon markets are a playground for fraudsters and speculators. Financial regulations are the Commission’s belated attempt to trim the excesses, but the problems lie at the core. Handing over environmental policy to traders has done nothing to address climate change.”  ……..

The report shows that while IETA has blamed a “lack of action from the side of the regulators” for the cases of carbon fraud, its lobby strategy has been driven by a desire to find new opportunities for speculation by whatever means are necessary. 

In January 2011, the European Commission halted trading on a key part of the carbon market after the latest in a series of large fraud cases was uncovered.  According to Carbon Trade Watch, less than a month later and with the suspension still partly in place, the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA, the main carbon traders’ lobby group) was privately insisting to Brussels officials that “there might be no need to regulate this market”.

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Posted in Alarmism, Behaviour, Fraud, Politics | 1 Comment »

Carbon trading greed drives land grab and eviction of 20,000 in Uganda

October 4, 2011

I take man-made carbon dioxide (3 – 4% of an atmospheric concentration of 0.04%) as being quite insignificant and essentially irrelevant for climate change.

But global warming ideology has led to the opportunistic development of the carbon trading  obscenity which funnels vast amounts of tax money into the sticky hands of a few developers and their parasitic politicians and bureaucrats. The UN (Kyoto protocol) and the EU (carbon trading) programs are particularly to blame. The frauds and scams connected with carbon trading do nothing for our climate but they encourage the greed which leads to the most obscene and despicable behaviour. I posted recently about the excesses in Honduras which led to the murder of 23 farmers. But I had missed this story which came out in the New York Times two weeks ago. 20,000 Ugandans have been evicted, houses burned and people killed to allow a UK company to plant forests and earn millions in selling the resulting carbon credits:

In Scramble for Land, Group Says, Company Pushed Ugandans Out 

KICUCULA, Uganda — According to the company’s proposal to join a United Nations clean-air program, the settlers living in this area left in a “peaceful” and “voluntary” manner. People here remember it quite differently. “I heard people being beaten, so I ran outside,” said Emmanuel Cyicyima, 33. “The houses were being burnt down.” Other villagers described gun-toting soldiers and an 8-year-old child burning to death when his home was set ablaze by security officers. “They said if we hesitated they would shoot us,” said William Bakeshisha, adding that he hid in his coffee plantation, watching his house burn down. “Smoke and fire.”

According to a report released by the aid group Oxfam on Wednesday, more than 20,000 people say they were evicted from their homes here in recent years to make way for a tree plantation run by a British forestry company, emblematic of a global scramble for arable land.

“Too many investments have resulted in dispossession, deception, violation of human rights and destruction of livelihoods,” Oxfam said in the report. “This interest in land is not something that will pass.” As population and urbanization soar, it added, “whatever land there is will surely be prized.”

Across Africa, some of the world’s poorest people have been thrown off land to make way for foreign investors, often uprooting local farmers so that food can be grown on a commercial scale and shipped to richer countries overseas.

But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming.

The case twists around an emerging multibillion-dollar market trading carbon-credits under the Kyoto Protocol, which contains mechanisms for outsourcing environmental protection to developing nations. The company involved, New Forests Company, grows forests in African countries with the purpose of selling credits from the carbon-dioxide its trees soak up to polluters abroad. Its investors include the World Bank, through its private investment arm, and the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, HSBC.

Read article 

That the New Forest Company is opportunistic and greedy is inevitable and understandable when the benefits of the carbon trading programs were flouted under their noses. That they were unaware of the methods used is not credible. The results of the carbon trading scams are becoming sick and despicable and the EU politicians and bureaucrats who administer such schemes cannot continue to hide behind their misplaced intentions to “save the globe” and their “rules”.

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Posted in Alarmism, Behaviour, Climate, European Union, Fraud, UN | Comments Off on Carbon trading greed drives land grab and eviction of 20,000 in Uganda

Greed for EU carbon trading credits leads to the murder of 23 Honduran farmers

October 3, 2011

The EU carbon trading fiasco continues and is characterised by greed and fraud. But it has now expanded to embrace the murder of 23 farmers by the developers who in their greed for EU carbon credit money had forcibly – and with the aid of the Honduran authorities and private militias – stolen the farmers’ lands.

Aguán farmers allegedly killed by private militias

Canada Free Press reports:

The deaths were facilitated by the “direct involvement of private security guards from some of the local companies who are complicit with police and military officials”

The reported killing of 23 Honduran farmers in a dispute with the owners of UN-accredited palm oil plantations in Honduras is forcing the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) executive board to reconsider its stakeholder consultation processes. In Brussels, the reported killings have triggered European policymakers into action, with Green MEP Bas Eickhout calling the alleged human rights abuses “a disgrace”

EurActiv carries the full story

… In July, a report by an International Fact Finding Mission was presented to the European Parliament’s Human Rights Sub-committee, alleging that 23 peasants, one journalist and his partner, had all been murdered in the Bajo Aguán region, between January 2010 and March 2011.

The deaths were facilitated by the “direct involvement of private security guards from some of the local companies who are complicit with police and military officials,” the report said.

In some cases it cited “feigned accidents” in which peasants were run over by security guards working for two named palm oil businessmen. In other cases, the farmers were simply shot, or “disappeared”. 

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will be holding a hearing into the report on 24 October, and a delegation of MEPs will be visiting the region between 31 October and 4 November.

But because of a three-year gap between the stakeholder consultation process and the biogas project approvals, the CDM board recently ruled that the project had met the criteria of its mandate.

And the gullible European politicians who have caused this mess are taking refuge behind their “rules”.  The global warming ideology which lies behind all the carbon trading scams has much to answer for.

“We are not investigators of crimes,” a board member told EurActiv. “We had to take judgements within our rules – however regretful that may be – and there was not much scope for us to refuse the project. All the consultation procedures precisely had been obeyed.”

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Posted in Alarmism, European Union, Fraud | 1 Comment »

Wikileaks cable reveals the fraud that is the Kyoto protocol

October 1, 2011

Prof. Dr. Ottmar Edenhofer is the Co-Chair of Working Group III of the IPCC – deputy director and chief economist of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Researck (PIK). PIK is somewhat notorious for being a scientific institution where all their results are governed and constrained by political correctness. Only results which support global warming dogma are ever published by PIK. It is also the institution which is home for the sea level alarmist Stefan Rahmstorf.

But last year even a high priest such as Ottmar Edenhoffer was forced to admit:

“But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.  Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this.  One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.  This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”

It becomes increasingly apparent that climate policy has very little to do with science and everything to do with creating and tapping into vast flows of money. And now courtesy of the Wikileaks cable releases we learn:

(more…)

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Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Fraud, India, Natural Phenomena, Scientific Fraud | 1 Comment »

How many years of global cooling are needed to disprove AGW?

September 26, 2011

I am travelling this week.

I had an interesting – if rather depressing – discussion with a fellow traveler (a patent lawyer) at the airport yesterday. The discussion turned to the manner in which science which happened to be “in fashion” became political movements and  the manner in which science itself took on politically correct dimensions.

Sometimes – as with eugenics – the political movement came first and the science followed to fit the movement.  In fact, his contention was that even where the science had come  first, the development of a political movement would always lead to subsequent science being constrained to support the imperatives of the movement.

I brought up the caase of AGW and how  an uncertain science – in my opinion – had been hijacked by a political movement such that one particular hypothesis – which has still to be proven – had become the only politically correct or allowable science. I suggested that real observations might change what was considered politically correct. Since global temperature – if such a thing can be defined – has been declining for the last decade even though carbon dioxide has been increasing,  I expected that new science would have to take these real observations into account in their mathematical modelling and that the strength of the dogma would eventually decrease.

My companion however disagreed. He suggested that all political movements had to be fundamentally and economically viable to survive. If the movement was lucrative – as AGW had become – then there would be a vested interest in maintaining the science it was based on  even if the facts said otherwise. This would be achieved, he argued, by the “Science” allowing or accounting for some deviations – as for example with explanations made up for why a decade or two of cooling could occur without disturbing the central thesis of the “Science”. He cited medical science and examples of purported treatments which were continued for long periods after they were discredited because of the revenues that they were generating. He suggested that the chemical industry was the prime driver for the banning of some refrigerants (based on now outdated ozone depletion science) just so that they could shift production to newer refrigerants having much higher margins. Similarly he felt that the environmental benefits of switching to low energy lamps was minuscule but the lighting industry much preferred the margins and revenues generated by these to those generated by incandescent light bulbs which were suffering from intense competition.

His conclusion was that since the AGW “industry” was generating large revenues whether through carbon trading schemes or by the extraction of subsidies from taxpayer money for so-called “green” energy or “green” fuels, then the vested interest in showing that any conflicting measurements were a temporary aberration would be very strong. Since the timescales of climate change were in the order of hundreds of years, he felt that a mere 20 or 30 years of inconvenient measurements would do little to dent the momentum of a successful revenue generating “science”!!!

He made some good points. I am afraid that even 3 decades of cooling or the start of a mini-ice age will probably not suffice to dampen the ardour of the global warming enthusiast as long as the revenues from growing bio-fuels or getting subsidies for “green” energy keep rolling in. The AGW religion and its corresponding “science” will stop only if the revenues stop.

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Posted in Alarmism, Business, Climate, Politics, Science | 2 Comments »

New Scientist blog: CEO of “Good” Energy complains that sceptics are resorting to emotion rather than science

September 23, 2011

Juliet Davenport, founder and CEO of something carrying the subjective and emotive name “Good” Energy writes in the New Scientist blog today bemoaning the fact that climate sceptics are winning the argument by the use of emotion rather than science!!

Scientists – she believes – are not doing enough to help her cause. But she might carry a little more credibility if she attempted to use science rather than dogma and consensus. And of course if she did not have a vested interest in extorting subsidies from taxpayers. Clearly Al Gore has failed her in being “charismatic and campaigning”- but then he is no scientist and perhaps he does not count.

A charismatic campaigning voice from the scientific community would make a huge difference in helping to combat the small but vocal minority of sceptics who tend to resort to emotion rather than science to make their arguments. …….. 

…. I can’t help but think it would be better to see all government departments arguing more loudly about the long term benefits of tackling climate change and the transition to a low carbon economy. To do that convincingly, however, they need to have information at their fingertips. Scientists have a huge role to play here, debating and responding to claims made through the media and simplifying messages for the public. They need to make the case that a low-carbon economy is not only necessary for tackling climate change, but also that it is technologically possible.

If we are going to act in time on climate change, it is vital that we keep up the pressure on the government to form a policy framework that we can then deliver.

The coming gas glut and the availability of shale gas – now even in the UK – must be giving her nightmares. Without climate change alarmism and the demonisation of carbon dioxide, the cost of wind and solar power would make them non-starters.

But the tide is turning.

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Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Energy, Renewable Energy | 1 Comment »

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