Tag: environmentalism

How environmentalists are losing the climate change war

5:27 pm

How environmentalists are losing the climate change war.

Having made wildly inflated claims, and then been so publicly contradicted by solid science, Hansen and McKibben will find their credibility has taken a big hit. And they can be sure that the next time they make any claim about the oilsands, or anything else, this will be flung at them from every direction. They won a tactical victory. But it cost them a strategic defeat.

And as the writer, who appears to be a believer in human-caused global warming, also notes, “This is an old story in the environmental movement.” The result: no one believes them anymore.

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“Science in the service of politics.”

11:18 pm

Climate scientist Richard Lindzen of MIT spoke before a public meeting of the House of Commons in Great Britain yesterday. You can read his entire speech here [pdf]. Please do. He know his stuff. More important, he begins his presentation by immediately accepting these points:

  • Carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere.
  • There is a greenhouse effect.
  • There has been a doubling of CO2 in the past 150 years.
  • There has probably been a warming of about 0.8 degrees Celsius in the past 150 years.
  • Increasing CO2 alone should cause some warming.

He then notes that while none of these points are controversial among serious climate scientists, none of these facts are a cause for alarm.

The evidence is that the increase in CO2 will lead to very little warming, and that the connection of this minimal warming (or even significant warming) to the purported catastrophes is also minimal. The arguments on which the catastrophic claims are made are extremely weak – and commonly acknowledged as such. They are sometimes overtly dishonest. [emphasis mine]

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Fakegate: Global warmists try to hide their decline

7:04 pm

Fakegate: Global warmists try to hide their decline.

Fakegate shows us, with the precision of a scientific experiment, several key truths about the global warming movement. It shows that most warmists, both the scientists and the journalists, will embrace any claim that seems to bolster their cause, without bothering to check the facts or subject them to rigorous investigation. (Anthony Watts notes how few journalists bothered to contact him before reporting the claims about him that are made in the fake memo.) And it shows us that warmists like Gleick have no compunction about falsifying information to promote their agenda, and that many other warmists are willing to serve as accomplices after the fact, excusing Gleick’s fraud on the grounds that he was acting in a “noble cause.” It shows us that “hide the decline” dishonesty is a deeply ingrained part of the corporate culture of the global warming movement.

Gleick wasn’t just an obscure, rogue operator in the climate debate. Before his exposure, his stock in trade was lecturing on “scientific integrity,” and until a few days ago he was the chairman of the American Geophysical Union’s Task Force on Scientific Ethics. So this scandal goes to the very top of the global warming establishment, and it compels honest observers to ask: if the warmists were willing to deceive us on this, what else have they been deceiving us about?

Between Climategate and Fakegate, the warmist establishment now has zero credibility, and we must call all of their claims into question. [emphasis mine]

And in related news, the EPA has scrubbed its grants database of any mention of the grants it had awarded to Peter Gleick and the institute he heads.

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Germany’s $130B Solar Experiment Delays Global Warming by 23 hours!

5:12 pm

Success! Germany’s $130 billion solar power subsidies has delayed global warming by 23 hours!

It gets worse: Because Germany is part of the European Union Emissions Trading System, the actual effect of extra solar panels in Germany leads to no CO2 reductions, because total emissions are already capped. Instead, the Germans simply allow other parts of the EU to emit more CO2. Germany’s solar panels have only made it cheaper for Portugal or Greece to use coal.

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Peter Gleick’s “truly flabbergasting” lapse of judgement.

10:46 am

Peter Gleick’s “truly flabbergasting” lapse of judgement.

Gleick has done enormous damage to his cause and his own reputation, and it’s no good to say that people shouldn’t be focusing on it. If his judgement is this bad, how is his judgement on matters of science? For that matter, what about the judgement of all the others in the movement who apparently see nothing worth dwelling on in his actions?

When skeptics complain that global warming activists are apparently willing to go to any lengths–including lying–to advance their worldview, I’d say one of the movement’s top priorities should be not proving them right. And if one rogue member of the community does something crazy that provides such proof, I’d say it is crucial that the other members of the community say “Oh, how horrible, this is so far beyond the pale that I cannot imagine how this ever could have happened!” and not, “Well, he’s apologized and I really think it’s pretty crude and opportunistic to make a fuss about something that’s so unimportant in the grand scheme of things.”

After you have convinced people that you fervently believe your cause to be more important than telling the truth, you’ve lost the power to convince them of anything else. [emphasis in original]

As I’ve said repeatedly, until the climate community stops circling the wagons to protect the liars and frauds that pepper their field, no one is going to believe anything they say, even when they are right. Worse, their dishonesty is continuing to do serious harm to the field of science itself.

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A new study in China has found that electric cars are more harmful to public health per kilometer traveled than conventional vehicles.

2:20 pm

Surprise, surprise! A new study in China has found that electric cars are more harmful to public health per kilometer traveled than conventional vehicles.

The problem here isn’t the effort to develop electric cars in the hope they can reduce pollution. The problem is that our government is imposing its preference, prior to anyone finding out if this technology can actually do the job.

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“I feel duped.”

10:33 pm

The man duped is Fritz Vahrenholt, a former global warming advocate and leftwing environmentalist in Germany. The words were spoken in a long and detailed interview in Der Spiegel. Read it all, as it demonstrates without question that Vahrenholt has done his research about the complexities of climate research as well as the flaws and dishonesty contained within the IPCC reports. However, he gets to the nub of the matter when he is asked why he has taken on the role of a climate skeptic with such passion.
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Two more global warming scientists turn skeptics

4:51 pm

Two more global warming scientists, this time in Germany, have become global warming skeptics.

One of the fathers of Germany’s modern green movement, Professor Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt, a social democrat and green activist, decided to author a climate science skeptical book together with geologist/paleontologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning. Vahrenholt’s skepticism started when he was asked to review an IPCC report on renewable energy. He found hundreds of errors. When he pointed them out, IPCC officials simply brushed them aside. Stunned, he asked himself, “Is this the way they approached the climate assessment reports?”

Vahrenholt decided to do some digging. His colleague Dr. Lüning also gave him a copy of Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion. He was horrified by the sloppiness and deception he found. Persuaded by Hoffmann & Campe, he and Lüning decided to write the book. Die kalte Sonne [The Cold Sun] cites 800 sources and has over 80 charts and figures. It examines and summarizes the latest science.

[The c]onclusion: climate catastrophe is called off. The science was hyped.

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Global warming activists seek to purge ‘deniers’ among local weathermen.

9:51 am

The inquisition is alive and well: A campaign by global warming activists is seeking to purge ‘deniers’ among local weathermen.

So far, the campaign has identified 55 “deniers” in the meteorologist community and are looking for more. They define “deniers” as “anyone who expressly refutes the overwhelming scientific consensus about climate change: that it is real, largely caused by humans, and already having profound impacts on our world. … We track the views of meteorologists through their on-air statements, blog posts, social media activity, public appearances, interviews, and interactions with viewers,” the campaign explains.

In other words, they should be fired because of their opinions.

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Persecution for the sake of global warming

11:45 am

Persecution for the sake of global warming.

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

The quote is part of an op-ed signed by sixteen prominent scientists describing why there is no need to panic over global warming.

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Geothermal energy developers plan to pump 24 million gallons of water into a dormant volcano in Oregon this summer to demonstrate a new way to generate electricity.

9:55 am

Geothermal energy developers plan to pump 24 million gallons of water into a dormant volcano in Oregon this summer to demonstrate a new way to generate electricity.

The irony I glean from this article is this: Pumping water underground to produce energy from geothermal sources (a source liked by the environmental movement) is good. However, pumping water underground to produce energy from gas or oil (energy sources hated by the environmental movement) is bad. And yet, what difference really is there between either effort?

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The University of Connecticut has found the chief of its biology lab — an expert on the health benefits of drinking wine — guilty of falsifying and fabricating data on more than two dozen papers and grant applications.

9:35 am

More science fraud: The University of Connecticut has found the chief of its biology lab — an expert on the health benefits of drinking wine — guilty of falsifying and fabricating data on more than two dozen papers and grant applications.

A 60,000-page report issued yesterday (you can read a 49-page summary here) by [University of Connecticut Health Center] (UCHC) found [Dipak] Das guilty of 145 counts of fabrication and falsification of data, involving at least 23 papers and 3 grant applications. … UCHC has frozen externally funded research in Das’ lab, and it turned away $890,000 in federal grants while the investigation was underway. The university has also begun proceedings to fire Das.

Just as in the Stapel case in the Netherlands, we have here another example of the science community responding correctly to scientific fraud. Both examples stand in stark contrast to how the climate science community whitewashed the fraud and malfeasance in its own community.

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“the EPA touches on the lives of every single American every single day.”

3:07 pm

Obama today: “The EPA touches on the lives of every single American every single day.”

Truer words were never spoken, but not in the way the President intended. He was speaking to a gathering of EPA employees in Washington, DC, and was praising them for their work. To the rest of the nation, however, the EPA’s effort is increasingly seen as a terrible burden that is squelching both the economy and the freedom of Americans.

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The Supreme Court looks hard at the EPA and doesn’t like what it sees

10:39 pm

The Supreme Court looks hard at the EPA and doesn’t like what it sees.

This case is about the EPA’s ongoing effort to steal property from private landowners.

The Sacketts wanted to build a home on a 0.63-acre lot near Priest Lake in the Idaho panhandle that they bought for $23,000. But after three days of bringing in fill dirt and preparing for construction in 2007, officials from the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ordered the activity stopped and said they suspected the land contained wetlands.

Months later, the agency sent the Sacketts a “compliance order” that said the land must be restored as a wetlands before the couple could apply for a building permit. The government acknowledged Monday that fines for failure to comply with the orders could be as much as $75,000 a day.

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The new Arctic ozone hole

4:51 pm

An interesting and very informative paper was published by the American Geophysical Union this past Saturday, entitled “Arctic winter 2010/2011 at the brink of an ozone hole.” The first paragraph of the introduction essentially summed up the paper’s key points:

Large losses of Arctic stratospheric ozone have been observed during winter 2010/2011, exceeding observed losses during cold winters over the past decades, characterized as the first Arctic Ozone Hole. Although in general Arctic ozone is expected to recover because of the reductions in ozone depleting substances as a result of the Montreal Protocol and its amendments, the observation that apparently the cold Arctic winters in the stratosphere have been getting colder over the past decades raises some concern that Arctic ozone depletion may worsen over the next decades if the cooling trend continues while concentrations of ozone depleting substances remain sufficiently high. [emphasis mine]

Two important take-aways:
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Global warming is good for you!

12:18 am

Here are two stories that illustrate why we shouldn’t be in a panic over climate change. Though it is important to study the climate and to learn as much as we can about it, it is at this time inappropriate to impose draconian regulations on the world’s populations so that whole economies are destroyed out of fear of climate change. We just don’t know enough about the consequences of climate change. Global warming might even be beneficial!

First, from Nature this story: Global warming wilts malaria. It appears that the assumption that warmer climates would increase malaria epidemics is completely wrong. Instead, warmer temperatures act to hinder the survival of the malaria parasite in mosquitoes.
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The Obama Justice Department is going after climategate whistleblowers

2:25 pm

Thugs: The Obama Justice Department has joined the UK government to go after the climategate whistleblowers.

This action once again shows how completely tone deaf the Obama administration is. Attacking the messenger here will do nothing to convince anyone that global warming is happening. Instead, it will help to convince everyone that the whole thing is a fraud, and should be shut down.

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The IPCC scientist working group has decided that Freedom of Information Act laws do not apply to its work

7:32 pm

The law is such an inconvenient thing: The IPCC scientist working group, meeting in San Francisco, has decided that Freedom of Information Act laws do not apply to its work.

Putting aside the absurdity of a bunch of individuals simply declaring they don’t have to obey the law, it is interesting to me that the lead scientists of the IPCC happen to be meeting in San Francisco the same time the UN climate conference was going on in Durban. This seems to me to be further evidence of how irrelevant science was to that Durban conference.

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Climate theatre of the absurd

5:14 pm

Climate theater of the absurd.

The key thing to understand about the climate talks is that they’re not really about the climate. They’re about power and money. They are about the desire of fast-growing emitters such as Brazil, South Africa, India and China to extract billions in so-called climate reparations from rich countries, especially the United States. These and other so-called developing countries now account for more than half of greenhouse gas emissions. They want the rich countries to start cutting large amounts of carbon right away, while they do nothing. The rich countries are understandably reluctant. Hence the impasse.

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