"Global warming alarmists had a field day in 2004 when a supposedly 'secret report' commissioned by the US Defence Department warned of widespread famine and droughts caused by global warming. A London tabloid launched the hysteria:
'A recent report, suppressed by the US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a Siberian climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-drought, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world... Deaths from war and famine run into the millions, until the planet's population is reduced by such an extent the Earth can cope. Access to water becomes a major battleground... Rich areas like the US and Europe would become 'virtual fortresses' to prevent millions of migrants from entering after being forced from landdrowned by sea-level rise or no longer able to grow crops.'
Much less widely reported was the explanation given by the report's coauthor, that the commissioned study, written by 'futurists' and not by scientists, was only an attempt to speculate about a possible worst-case scenario. 'It's an unlikely event, and the Pentagon often thinks the unthinkable, and that's all it is.
But millions of people read the original headlines and still believe global warming will cause famines, droughts and even worse. Once again, the popular perception is false."
Avery and Singer, Unstoppable Global Warming.
The government ads are running now, warning of doom and gloom if we don't act now and introduce an emissions trading scheme. Already the propaganda has changed; like a fleet of fish, they're now all calling it a "carbon reduction scheme" not an ETS. It's criminal garbage and they should all hang their heads in shame, but they won't. The flakey idiots running the Labor party will continue to peddle alarmist propaganda for their own purposes, socialising capitalism. They search desperately for that moment of applause, the same euphoric high when they signed the Kyoto Protocol, when the whole world, or at least the whole tax payer funded universe of global warming hypers, applauded.
It's hard to relive those past, utterly addictive, peak moments. John Howard, Australia's last Prime Minister, tried desperately, thrashing in vain in his stale undies, for that moment when he was loved by all, given rock star treatment wherever he went. Nothing could bring it back. Much of the Labor government so far has been indiscernible from the campaign itself, when they got to where they wanted to go on a wave of public disgust with the treacheries and blusterings of the incumbent.
Now we're in a different realm, where good administration would actually be a plus. Journalism is a left leaning profession, and there's hardly a soul in the entire newspaper world who would call themselves a conservative - a few crusty old pundits, that's about it. The fresh faced enthusiasms of the young are universally pro-Labor, universally proud to be part of the pack mentality of the left. I know your generation believes all this rubbish, you just need to live a bit longer, he felt like saying. Just use your common sense. Just make hay out of darkness. Just look up to the light.
Instead common sense was marginalised and the lunatics took over the asylum. No one cares about the truth, as the government promotes ever more outlandish garbage. It's the ads that give it away. If global warming really was such a genuine threat, they wouldn't feel the need to spend millions of dollars of our money on dubious advertisements they claim provide public information, but do nothing of the kind. Like so many of their predecessors, the campaign is built on sleights of hand and blatant lies.
The Australia Says No campaign promoted the thoroughly discredited idea that all men are bashers and are all women are victims, all for the simple purpose of building up their massive bureaucracies. If their outlandish rubbish was really true, would they need to inflict us with these ridiculous campaigns. It is government by scare campaign, it's irresponsible, shallow, callow and dishonest. But will anybody notice? Will anybody stand up and say enough is enough, stop already. "I don't think so," as the pop song goes.
One of climate change's first victims is leader of the Opposition Brendan Nelson, who has vacilitated hopelessly for the past fortnight between common sense and kow towing to his party. The latest mode is kow towing, with his own party, well aware of the role global warming hysteria paid in their loss at the last election, well aware of how they were made to look like Neanderthals for not signing Kyoto, have rolled him. So he's out there peddling lines that he himself does not believe. The thought police are out there, and anyone who doesn't express alarm over global warming and admiration for those who are supposedly doing something about it, are ridiculed.
Ridiculed by people swanning around in limousines. Ridiculed, as in the US, by Al Gore types who's daily consumption of carbon is hundreds of times that of any normal person. Ridiculed by the pack. Where have we seen all this before? Where are we going? Will reason return? Unlikely in the short term, that's for sure.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://ambit-gambit.nationalforum.com.au/archives/002137.html
Auditors qualify global warming account
Who would have thought that the climate models used as the basis of IPCC greenhouse forecasts would violate 72 of 89 principles of forecasting. That's the claim from forecastingprinciples.com a site run by J. Scott Armstrong,
Professor of Marketing at the Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania. He and Kesten C Green from Monash University have published an audit of the forecasts from the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. (You can access the report from http://www.forecastingprinciples.com/Public_Policy/global_warming_audit.html). The auditors come to the view that while the scientists might know something about physics, they understand little about the science of forecasting.
This quote gives a flavour of the review:
9.3 Do not use fit to develop the model.
It is not clear to what extent the models produced by the IPCC are either based on, or have been tested against, sound empirical data. However, some statements were made about the ability of the models described in Chapter 8 to fit historical data, after tweaking of their parameters. Extensive research has shown that the ability of models to fit historical data has little relationship to forecast accuracy (See “Evaluating Methods” in Armstrong 2001.) It is well known that fit can be improved by making the model more complex. The consequence of increasing complexity to improve fit, however, is to decrease the accuracy of forecasts. The 12 authors of Chapter 8 appeared to be unaware of this principle.
In other words, by trying to make the models more accurate the scientists are doing the opposite.
It's an entertaining read and reveals amongst other things that the opinions of experts are no better than the opinions of anyone else when it comes to forecasting. Worse, that the wrong opinions of experts can reinforce each other - an example of the law of group polarisation, and a fact which potentially undermines the validity of the refereed publishing process.
This report opens a new and important front in the CO2 wars. The lead author also runs an interesting site for those of us who are skeptical of all sorts of fortune telling.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/the_coolness_of_global_warming/
Andrew Bolt
Wednesday, January 31, 2007 at 05:53am
It’s still cool to believe that global warming is an entirely man-made apocalyse, of course:
A NEW worldwide movement backed by celebrities, musicians, politicians and business leaders is aiming to reverse the effects of global warming over the next decade.
Global Cool launched in London and LA today and is calling on one billion people to reduce their carbon emissions by just one tonne a year, for the next 10 years…
Big names including Leonardo Di Caprio, Orlando Bloom, KT Tunstall, Pink, The Killers, Razorlight and Josh Hartnett have thrown their weight behind the worldwide effort to beat climate change.
The coolness of the cause - and its religious packaging - has made questioning the wilder warming claims amost impossible. It’s been a crime against fashion, and a heresy, to doubt.
But that may slowly be changing, when it’s becoming best-selling news not to scare, but to reassure:
Two powerful new books say today’s global warming is due not to human activity but primarily to a long, moderate solar-linked cycle. Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years, by physicist Fred Singer and economist Dennis Avery was released just before Christmas. The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change, by Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark and former BBC science writer Nigel Calder (Icon Books), is due out in March.
Singer and Avery note that most of the earth’s recent warming occurred before 1940, and thus before much human-emitted CO2. Moreover, physical evidence shows 600 moderate warmings in the earth’s last million years. The evidence ranges from ancient Nile flood records, Chinese court documents and Roman wine grapes to modern spectral analysis of polar ice cores, deep seabed sediments, and layered cave stalagmites.
Unstoppable Global Warming shows the earth’s temperatures following variations in solar intensity through centuries of sunspot records, and finds cycles of sun-linked isotopes in ice and tree rings. The book cites the work of Svensmark, who says cosmic rays vary the earth’s temperatures by creating more or fewer of the low, wet clouds that cool the earth. It notes that global climate models can’t accurately register cloud effects.
The Chilling Stars relates how Svensmark’s team mimicked the chemistry of earth’s atmosphere, by putting realistic mixtures of atmospheric gases into a large reaction chamber, with ultraviolet light as a stand-in for the sun. When they turned on the UV, microscopic droplets—cloud seeds—started floating through the chamber.
I’m not saying these scientists are wrong and the IPCC’s scientists are wrong. I’m just saying the incentives - up until now entirely on the side of hyping global warming - are now slowly changing.
http://209.85.141.104/search?q=cache:B5abXFPvwSgJ:epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm%3FFuseAction%3DFiles.View%26FileStore_id%3D56dd129d-e40a-4bad-abd9-68c808e8809e+Global+warming+alarmists+had+a+field+day+in+2004&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=au
ALARMISM HAS LED TO SKEPTICISM
It is an inconvenient truth that so far, 2006 has been a year in which major segments of the media have
given up on any quest for journalistic balance, fairness and objectivity when it comes to climate change.
The global warming alarmists and their friends in the media have attempted to smear scientists who dare
question the premise of man-made catastrophic global warming, and as a result some scientists have
seen their reputations and research funding dry up.
The media has so relentlessly promoted global warming fears that a British group called the Institute
for Public Policy Research – and this from a left leaning group – issued a report in 2006 accusing media
Page 17
outlets of engaging in what they termed “climate porn” in order to attract the public’s attention.
Bob Carter, a Paleoclimate geologist from James Cook University in Australia has described how the
media promotes climate fear:
“Each such alarmist article is larded with words such as ‘if’, ‘might’, ‘could’, ‘probably’, ‘perhaps’,
‘expected’, ‘projected’or ‘modeled’- and many involve such deep dreaming, or ignorance of scientific
facts and principles, that they are akin to nonsense,” professor Carter concluded in an op-ed in April
of this year. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/04/09/do0907.
xml&sSheet=/news/2006/04/09/ixworld.html
Another example of this relentless hype is the reporting on the seemingly endless number of global
warming impact studies which do not even address whether global warming is going to happen. They
merely project the impact of potential temperature increases.
The media endlessly hypes studies that purportedly show that global warming could increase mosquito
populations, malaria, West Nile Virus, heat waves and hurricanes, threaten the oceans, damage coral
reefs, boost poison ivy growth, damage vineyards, and global food crops, to name just a few of the
global warming linked calamities. Oddly, according to the media reports, warmer temperatures almost
never seem to have any positive effects on plant or animal life or food production.
Fortunately, the media’s addiction to so-called ‘climate porn’has failed to seduce many Americans.
According to a July Pew Research Center Poll, the American public is split about evenly between those
who say global warming is due to human activity versus those who believe it’s from natural factors or
not happening at all.
In addition, an August Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll found that most Americans do not attribute
the cause of recent severe weather events to global warming, and the portion of Americans who believe
global warming is naturally occurring is on the rise.
Yes -- it appears that alarmism has led to skepticism.
The American people know when their intelligence is being insulted. They know when they are being
used and when they are being duped by the hysterical left.
The American people deserve better -- much better -- from our fourth estate. We have a right to expect
accuracy and objectivity on climate change coverage. We have a right to expect balance in sourcing and
fair analysis from reporters who cover the issue.
Above all, the media must roll back this mantra that there is scientific “consensus” of impending
climatic doom as an excuse to ignore recent science. After all, there was a so-called scientific
“consensus” that there were nine planets in our solar system until Pluto was recently demoted.
Breaking the cycles of media hysteria will not be easy since hysteria sells -- it’s very profitable. But
I want to challenge the news media to reverse course and report on the objective science of climate
change, to stop ignoring legitimate voices this scientific debate and to stop acting as a vehicle for
unsubstantiated hype.
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