THESE are the seven graphs that should make the Rudd Government feel sick.
These are the seven graphs that should make you ask: What? Has global warming now stopped?
Look for yourself. They show that the world hasn't warmed for a decade, and has even cooled for several years.
Sea ice now isn't melting, but spreading. The seas have not just stopped rising, but started to fall.
Nor is the weather getting wilder. Cyclones, as well as tornadoes and hurricanes, aren't increasing and the rain in Australia hasn't stopped falling.
What's more, the slight warming we saw over the century until 1998 still makes the world no hotter today than it was 1000 years ago.
In fact, it's even a bit cooler. So, dude, where's my global warming?
These graphs should in fact be good news for the Government and all the other warming preachers who warned we were doomed by our gases, which were heating the world to hell.
Now Prime Minister Kevin Rudd can at last stop sweating about the warming terrors he told us were coming - the horrific droughts, the dengue fever, the malaria, the devastation to our land and economy.
And he can announce that, hey, emergency over for now. His emissions trading scheme will go into deep freeze while he checks this good news.
As for his promise this week to make your power bills go up $200 a year to stop global warming? His promise to make even food more expensive? To put gassy companies out of business, and their workers out of a job?
Cancel all that. As you were, soldier. Good news has come from the front.
But now you can see why these graphs terrify Rudd, who has never admitted to a single fact they contain.
You think he dares admit he panicked you for no good reason? Wasted countless millions of dollars?
Yet the facts are stark: The world simply isn't warming as he and his pet scientists said.
Andrew Bolt
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24036602-5000117,00.html
Science is rarely determined or finalised. Science evolves and the huge complexity of climate science will certainly continue to evolve in the light of new facts, new experiences and new understandings.
For example, early in the 1900s, Alfred Wegener proposed that the continents were once joined up; their coastlines seemed to match, there appeared to be great rifts and tears in the continental fabric.
This view was ridiculed; how could the continents move? What possible force could transport the unimaginable mass of Africa or Australia hundreds and thousands of kilometres across the earth? Today, of course, plate tectonics is well understood. We know that continents move and we know the consequences.
Global warming seemed sewn up as well in the year 2000. Michael Mann's hockey-stick graph showed centuries of modest change culminating in an explosive temperature growth in recent decades, leading to terrifying projections of a climate out of control, with the sea rising to drown us all. Al Gore's apocalyptic images of tsunami-like flooding and dying polar bears brought global warming into every home.
Today, the hockey stick has gone. Its basic data was flawed and the statistical processes inadequate; it failed to describe known climate changes from the historically recorded past, so how could it be a reliable predictor? Although Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize, his celebrated documentary has been shown to be riddled with inaccuracies, distortions and misrepresentations; it cannot be shown in British schools without a comprehensive explanation of its mistakes and an acknowledgement that it is advocacy, not science.
There is no doubt that the climate is changing; it always has done. We have become familiar with the regularly repeating glaciations of the past. Human history has mainly occupied an exceptionally warm interglacial peak in a world that, for the last half million years at least, has generally been much cooler, although, in deep time, the world has been much warmer than now.
In the 1970s, climate science was concerned about when the next ice age might commence; we may have to return to that position.
There have been considerably warmer eras in the past couple of thousand years. In both the Roman and medieval warm periods, vineyards flourished as far north as York in England; Greenland was indeed green, at least in parts. By contrast, just 400 years ago, there was a Little Ice Age in America and Europe, at least, that lasted until well into the 1800s. The historic record confirms this.
What we also know, by historical record and by proxy calculation, is that these large swings in temperature closely correlate with the frequency of sunspots, which are a visible indicator of activity in the sun. Sunspots vary in number according to a series of cycles. In periods of high temperature, sunspots proliferated, but during the Little Ice Age, there were few or none for many decades, a phenomenon known as the Maunder Minimum; the last quarter of the 20th century saw a flurry of activity.
The last cycle was at its energetic peak in 1998, our warmest year for some time. The mechanism is unclear, but it seems related to solar magnetic influences and the amount of gamma radiation that reaches the earth. The last 10 years have seen a static or even cooling trend as the sunspot cycle ran down; 2007 saw bitter weather around the world and the mean global temperature dropped by an unprecedented amount. It is not picking up. The Antarctic winter sea ice was at its largest extent since satellite observation began, and it snowed in Baghdad and Buenos Aires for the first time in living memory. China's winter was awful.
http://business.theage.com.au/business/climate-science-is-never-settled-20080721-3ivh.html?page=2
How excited we were, out there on the front railing, our turn to take over the world, you've made such a morbid, terrible mess of it all. That's how we felt. Respect for your elders? No way, Jose, all we could see were old, boring people who had turned the planet into a cesspit, dead music, dead hearts, uniform suburbs with their neat little boxes of despair. And war, of course they had created war. There was only one way out and through all this, and that was to smoke as much dope as possible, which, way back then in the 70s, is exactly what they all did.
Those chaotic houses he had loved so much. Those lasting embraces we would remember for a life time. Those wild outfits and stumbling, drug f'd slurring of the words. Those passionate, hopelessly clumsy, hopelessly stoned embraces. As the music of the era formed its own dramatic backdrop, the Stones ever more profound, David Bowie ever more fascinating. Bisexuality was suddenly in; and while being gay might not have become the de rigueur of inner-city life that it was later, suddenly all sorts of madness and physical embrace was not just possible, but necessary for our great exploration.
Confront limitations, overthrow the rules, wake up each morning and watch the cold sun rise over Paddington, feel the bliss in every tiny speckle of light, as the rooftops became visible and the morning sun crept across the rooftops. Once a working, even poor suburb of workers cottages and inner-city terraces, even back then it was on the turn, becoming fashionable, and in later decades, astonishingly expensive. Those houses Jenny flogged off for $30,000 each when we were short of money would be worth a million dollars today. And the same is true of the whole of Sydney.
Balmain, where we used to get drunk, hopelessly drunk, at The London and play space invaders, which then was the height of innovative electronic gaming. We got plastered and the days passed over us, a feeling of the infinite passing over the suburb. On the harbour, the sun glinting off the warehouses, the boats plying their trades, the ferries marking out their courses, it was as if we really were in a timeless land, that the sense of eternity that draped the inland deserts was here, on the coast, in this modern city, ancient voices, an ancient sense of time.
"If only I'd been sensible and bought a house here, or paid one off, instead of just getting pissed in The London every day," he said each time he went to Balmain, now one of the wealthiest areas of Sydney, with its specialist bookshops and its health and beauty salons, with its smart cafes and fancy, obscure breads. They look so smug, well groomed, their smart cars carefully chosen to match their aspirations, fashionably green, heads full of fashionable left wing rhetoric, not an original idea amongst them.
But oh how they hated the conservatives, pouring contempt at any opportunity on those rampaging murderers trampling through the state's forests, putting greed and money before everything. They were already there, thanks to the booming Sydney property market, which as far as they were concerned any moron could ride. But he hadn't. He had missed the boat entirely, and was still working, skanky, dreary days and aching bones, astonished by the casual wealth of others. He had always resented the rich. Now they were everywhere, his generation, swanning off into their comfortable retirements. Or just as often, living out their days in Housing Commission apartments, lost and despairing and making no impact at all.
He couldn't be free. He couldn't mark out a different realm. He was sentenced to a life, a destiny, that not even he could forecast. And we made passage through the night, sparkling. What you see is not what you get. We are all of us different, in a different space, different place, our heads full of dreams, the glories of a past we thought would never end.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/23/global_warming_yawn/
It looks like Al Gore is going to need every cent of the $300m war chest he's amassed for climate persuasion. Americans polled by Gallup for 'Earth Day' value "traditional", bottom-up environmental issues such as pollution and conservation as being more worrying than Global Warming. Remarkably, the level of concern about greenhouse gas emissions has barely wavered in a generation. Recklessness, or Huck Finn-style American common sense?
A third of Americans think "Global Warming" is a serious concern - a figure that's effectively unchanged since 1990, when the question was first asked. Ominously for the climate doom-mongers, it ranks 10th on a list of 12 environmental issues. OK, so what are Americans worried about?
Water pollution issues are three of the top four areas of concern, with over 80 per cent of people registering serious concern. Waste contamination comes third, and the loss of natural habitat for wildlife fifth, with 77 per cent expressing concern. Then there's rainforests (69 per cent), bio-diversity (68 per cent). Greenhouse emissions come in 10th - above urban sprawl and acid rain.
And when's the last time you ever heard anyone mention acid rain?
(If you add up the "great deal" and "fair amount" worrywarts, then Global Warming comes even lower, 11th out of 12th prompted issues).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/15/bbc_global_notwarming_mailbag/
Andrew's Mailbag It's been a fascinating week for climate reporting and the BBC. On Tuesday, an astonished Jeremy Paxman was heard asking Global Warming advocate Chris Rapley on Newsnight to confirm that the Earth's temperature hasn't risen this century.
(No, Rapley agreed, it hasn't. But clearly, from the amazed look on his face, nobody had ever thought to fill Paxo in on this minor detail - until now).
Last week we described the hurried amendments made to a BBC News Online story about global warming, and this ran round the internet like a contagion, prompting widespread commentary on US TV - and universal ridicule for the corporation.
The Beeb's Roger Harrabin had noted remarks made by the chief of the UN weather quango, concluding that "...this would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory".
Big mistake, Roger.
Harrabin initially stood by his words, but shortly after an eco-warrior made a threat to humiliate him before the Court of The Hive Mind ("I am about to send your comments to others for their contribution, unless you request I do not. They are likely to want to post your comments on forums/fora, so please indicate if you do not want this to happen. You may appear in an unfavourable light") the story was severely edited.
http://money.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=598436
By Mark Westfield*, ninemsn Money
July 16, 2008
The Rudd Government's response to Ross Garnaut's apocalyptic vision on global warming is timed to the political cycle. Its so-called Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is cynical and will raise doubts as to whether it will do anything of substance to achieve its stated aim to reduce carbon emissions, held out as the cause of global warming.
If Kevin Rudd and his ministers are serious about meeting their promises pre- and post-election to tackle climate change, then they should disregard normal political behaviour and get on with it. If the global warming situation is as serious as Rudd and his climate change minister Penny Wong claim, then their response to Garnaut should transcend politics. If the government is certain of its course, then it can demonstrate some leadership and dismiss the muddled Opposition as being out of touch and in league with the emitters.
Yet Rudd and Wong's response is laced with political compromises — petrol excise cuts, a review in three years (ahead of the next election due in 2010), "shields" for some sectors of the economy, assistance packages for coal-fired power stations, assistance for families and so on. There are so many exceptions, the exercise is heavily compromised before it starts.
Rudd's complex, confused and politically-driven response to Professor Garnaut's call for uncompromising action on climate change may be explained by the fact that there are so many uncertainties about the impact of carbon dioxide on the planet and whether in fact it is causing the climate changes that some claim.
The scientific community is divided between those who say the world is heading towards a global warming calamity because of excessive carbon emissions and those who say the melt of the Arctic ice cap is part of a predictable warming during a 100,000-year cycle between ice ages.
The sceptics point to the fact that the surface of Mars and Venus is also warming because of increased activity on the sun's surface and that ice cap melting has been caused as much by a combination of a warmer sun and gradual changes in the angle of the earth's tilt than carbon emissions.
Climate change proponents talk about record high temperatures in 2005 and 1998, when they should be considering periods of hundreds, if not thousands, of years to place the current debate in context.
It is accepted that temperatures in the 1920s and 1930s were warmer than they are today. Sure, the West had coal-fired power stations and the internal combustion engine then, but man-made carbon emissions were a fraction of what they are today. Yet it was warmer.
Cores taken from Greenland's glaciers suggest there was more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere 11,000 years ago, about the time of the melting of the last big ice age, than there is today.
No comments:
Post a Comment