Thursday, January 13, 2011

Long-time Green/Leftist Mike Roddy dehumanizes leading skeptic and compares him to Hitler

I guess that it is really pointless to argue with exploding rage but I will nonetheless do Roddy the courtesy of looking at his "argument" as if it were rational:

First note: His article on Morano that he refers back to is headed "Marc Morano, Professional Douchebag" and Roddy retains that level of profundity in what follows thereafter.

Second: A third of Americans don't matter? That is a fair summary of far-Leftist thinking as embodied in Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and all that merry gang.

Third: Comparing Morano to Hitler is to compare a conservative journalist to a successful socialist political campaigner and powerful politician. It's hard to see any relevance in such a comparison.

Fourth: The second sentence of the second paragraph below has now been deleted from the site. Even Warmists can suffer shame, it appears


It still amazes me that people can quote Mark Morano with a straight face, and that he shows up as a guest on TV shows. One would think that even Fox would draw the line at stone cold lunatics. I wrote something about him and others a year ago for Buffalo Beast that ended up being pretty popular.

The scary thing is the size of his audience, even if it only reflects the views of about a third of Americans. Unfortunately, that popularity rating turned out to be enough for Hitler. After all, these kinds of people have lots of guns.

Relentless and funny ridicule of people like Morano and Watts may be the best weapon. They are, after all, more like badly wired toys than actual humans. It worked when McCarthy was exposed as an idiot on TV in 1954. And if Charlie Chaplin’s Hitler parody had been shown throughout Germany in the 1930’s, he would have been laughed out of office.

Peter Sinclair does a great job with the deniers in his Climate Crock videos. If they were expanded and shown nationally, Morano, Monckton, and the rest of them would be laughed out of the country, ending up, like McCarthy, as hopeless and forgotten alcoholics.

SOURCE






Another Nazi comparison

The writer clearly knows that the comparison is faulty but cannot resist using it anyway

To use an admittedly extreme example, when you're doing a story about the Holocaust, you don't need to balance it by quoting a neo-Nazi. Nor is it "showing balance" to quote a climate-change denier in every story about global warming --not when scientists who study these issues have concluded with rare, near-universal fervor that climate change is not only real but presents an existential threat to civilization as we know it, if not to our species.

More HERE

Amusingly, the writer above started out his article with this: "In the new landscape, we can't be passive anymore. We must be skeptical but open-minded, questioning everything". Again, he knows what he should do but just can't do it. It's just amazing how corrosive to the mind Warmism can be. The wish to see yourself as a Messiah overwhelms everything else in some people.






2010 tied for Earth's warmest year on record?

See below. It is an excellent example of the old saying that there are lies, damned lies and statistics. A conclusion from statistics that varies greatly from most people's experience suggests error and is likely to persuade only those who want to be persuaded

Last year tied with 2005 as the world's warmest on record, according to data released Wednesday by the National Climatic Data Center. Records began in 1880.

It was also the wettest year on record globally as measured by average precipitation, according to the center. Heavy rain in Asia due to the monsoon (which led to disastrous floods in Pakistan) and tropical storms in Central America contributed to the extreme precipitation amounts.

The Earth's average temperature in 2010, as in 2005, was 58.12 degrees, which is 1.12 degrees above the 20th-century average of 57 degrees.

It was the 34th consecutive year that the global temperature was above average, according to the data center. The last below-average year was 1976.

"This warmth reinforces the notion that we're seeing climate change," says David Easterling, chief of scientific services at the data center in Asheville, N.C.

Not so fast, says Pat Michaels, a climatologist with the Cato Institute in Washington. "If you draw a trend line from the data, it's pretty flat from the 1990s. We don't see much of a warming trend over the past 12 years."

He says the gloom-and-doom projections on global warming are likely to be too hot. "The projections will have to come down," Michaels says.

The climate center reports that the global land surface temperatures for 2010 were the warmest on record, at 1.80 degrees above the 20th-century average. The global ocean surface temperature for 2010 tied with 2005 as the third-warmest on record, at 0.88 degrees above the 20th-century average.

Several exceptional heat waves occurred during 2010, the center reported, bringing record high temperatures and affecting tens of millions of people. Russia endured an unprecedented two-month heat wave last summer: On July 29, the Moscow Observatory recorded its highest-ever temperature of 100.8 degrees.

In a separate global temperature report released last week, 2010 finished in a tie with 1998 for the warmest year in the 32-year satellite temperature record, according to John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH).

Unlike the climate center's surface-based temperatures, UAH's data are based on instruments aboard satellites from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that measure the temperature of the atmosphere from the surface up to an altitude of about 5 miles above sea level.

The satellite data show that the globe continues to warm unevenly. Warming increases as you go north: The Arctic Ocean has warmed an average of almost 3 degrees in the past 32 years. [So there's lots more CO2 clustering over the poles?? Very strange in the light of what we know about gaseous diffusion]

Another global surface temperature report released Wednesday — from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York — said 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest year.

SOURCE

Marc Morano Comments:

It is amazing people believe this tripe. These are political statements! The margin of error easily surpasses the difference in years. We are talking fractions of a degree between years, not to mention heat urban island effects, etc.

What's funny is Romm and others said 2010 would be hottest ever, what happened, it only tied?!

The other point is, if 2010 was a 'record' hot year, the Arctic, Antarctic, sea level, N. and S. hemispheres did not seem to notice. How important is it really to have fraction of degree declarations? It is only important for political purposes.

See here for great analysis:

German Climate Professor Slams 'Climate Religion': Refutes claims of 'hottest decade' as 'a joke' -- 'Determining a global avg. is a tricky business and in the end is only a theoretical value'

Of course, warming does not equal man-made warming anyway.





Scientists Challenged to Become Better Global Warming Propagandists

Can scientists become "Deadly Ninjas of Science Communication"? That was proposed by Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War Against Science," and a member of the board of directors of the American Geophysical Union. Mooney advocated this idea in a presentation at the Union's December 13-17 fall meeting in San Francisco.

Mooney is concerned that global warming skeptics are getting the upper hand in the ongoing debate. Mooney has an unquestioning belief that disaster will overtake the world if we don't mend our CO2-emitting ways. Many other speakers at the meeting, like Mooney, suggested that if scientists improved their communications skills, the skeptics could be defeated.

At the same fall meeting four years ago, Al Gore spoke to ten thousand assembled scientists. The scientists treated him like a rock star. Why would the scientists love Al Gore? His movie, An Inconvenient Truth, was full of scientific errors. But this is about not biting the hand that feeds you. When Al Gore spreads global warming hysteria, financial and political support for climate science increases. Scientists become guests on TV shows instead of lab drones.

But a dark cloud is gathering over climate science. Public fear of global warming is declining. Most of the activist scientists gathered in San Francisco were blind to the possibility that there is any defect in their scary product. It must be that forces of darkness (perhaps Republicans or coal companies) are financing skeptics. Apparently the skeptics, cleverly disguised as grassroots activists, have an uncanny knack for propaganda.

A few years ago, Exxon, a world-class provider of CO2 emissions, would have been top dog among the forces of darkness. But now Exxon is the sole "titanium" sponsor of the meeting, ranked above the platinum, gold, silver, and bronze sponsors. Apparently Exxon gave the Union so much money that they had to create a new category, and the logic of the nobility of the metals in the periodic table be damned. Exxon purchased an indulgence from the church of global warming, probably at a price that is Exxon chump change.

Susan Hassol, a professional climate change communicator, gave the scientists in San Francisco a long list of words that scientists should never use when communicating with the public. For example, to climate scientists, a positive feedback to global warming is bad, because a positive feedback would increase global warming. But to the man in the street, a positive feedback is good, as when your boss gives you positive feedback.

One of the most famous propagandists of global warming, professor Michael Mann, gave a bitter presentation. Mann is famous for creating the hockey stick curve, a graph that purported to show that the climate was stable for a thousand years until CO2 emissions in the 20th century made the temperature shoot up like the blade of a hockey stick. The hockey stick graph went viral and was published everywhere as absolutely positive scientific proof of man-caused global warming.

A retired expert on mining, Steve McIntyre, working out of his modest Toronto house, thought the graph was suspicious and decided to investigate. Amateur scientist McIntyre demolished the hockey stick, along with Mann's reputation. Mann's presentation in San Francisco depicted him as a victim of dark forces. Some of his slides included a picture of Sarah Palin in the upper-left corner, probably to galvanize the left-leaning audience.

Steve Easterbrook, a professor and software expert, reported on his investigation of computer climate models. The entire edifice of global warming alarmism rests on a foundation of computer climate models used to make predictions about the future climate. Easterbrook visited four different laboratories where models are created. He basically said that these huge computer programs that have a million lines of computer code are kludges that would have to be completely rewritten to be up to modern software standards. It would take fifty programmers working for twenty years at a cost of $350 million to rewrite one of these software dinosaurs.

However, there is little reason to suppose that if the models were rewritten, they would be much better. As the brilliant and perhaps overly candid government scientist Kevin Trenberth said, "none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate. In particular, the state of the oceans, sea ice, and soil moisture has no relationship to the observed state at any recent time[.]" It is an embarrassing fact that the major models disagree with each other by more than two-to-one about the magnitude of future global warming.

It was apparent that scientists have little experience with propaganda. Rather than trying to do it themselves, they need to take a lesson from Al Gore and bring in the big guns from Hollywood and Madison Avenue. Or maybe they should stick to science and stop trying to convince us that doom is around the corner unless we reconfigure the world economy to their specifications.

SOURCE






It's the scientists who are killing the penguins, not global warming

Some scientists studying penguins may be inadvertently harming them with the metal bands they use to keep track of the tuxedo-clad seabirds, a new study says.

The survival rate of King penguins with metal bands on their flippers was 44 percent lower than those without bands and banded birds produced far fewer chicks, according to new research published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The theory is that the metal bands -- either aluminum or stainless steel -- increase drag on the penguins when they swim, making them work harder, the study's authors said.

Author Yvon Le Maho of the University of Strasbourg in France, said the banded penguins looked haggard, appearing older than their actual age.

Consequently, studies that use banded penguins -- including ones about the effects of global warming on the seabirds -- may be inaccurate, mixing up other changes in penguin life with the effects from banding, said Le Maho and colleague Claire Saraux.

More HERE






Recovery Act spent over 600 million dollars on climate change research; billions on GHG mitigation

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), better known as the stimulus act or stimulus package, was passed with the stated goal of helping our economy. It was meant to create jobs and boost consumer spending. Opponents of the nearly $1 trillion act pointed out that many of the provisions had nothing to do with helping the economy.

Looking back at a few different documents, I've found that the stimulus act spent over $600 million dollars on climate change research among three Federal agencies. In addition, there was $25 billion spent on researching different greenhouse gas emissions mitigation options.

In March 2009 the Pew Center on Global Climate Change issued a document summarizing the key provisions in the ARRA. It is available here. On the bottom of the first page, they show the spending on climate change research.

NOAA gets $170 million, and NASA gets $400 million for a total of $570 million. However, this total is incorrect. Another agency got money for climate research from the ARRA. The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility, which is a part of the Department of Energy (DOE) received $60 million. This press release from Dec. 2009 makes mention of the funding:

The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science provided $60 million in ARRA funding for climate research to the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility, a DOE national user facility that has been operating climate observing sites around the world for nearly two decades.

This is also corroborated by a 2010 slide show given by the ARM facility.

More HERE (See the original for links and graphics)

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