That wonderfully nuanced judgment appears on a site devoted to "Observation, Analysis, Reflection, New Questions" yet makes no new observations, analyses or reflections and asks no new questions!
Typically, he relies on opinion polls rather than scientific facts. He also relies on the discredited Ross Gelbspan, who got hold of a policy proposal that was never accepted by anyone involved but which Gelbspan has been eating out on ever since. But that's Warmist "science" for you
One of the world’s most widely known and respected senior scientists tells ABC News that current denial about the basic daunting realities of manmade global warming is “just foolishness.”
He also reports that the rest of the world has now “pretty well given up” on its hope for U.S. leadership in dealing with global climate change.
His assessment reinforces our findings at the recent global climate summit in Durban, South Africa, that the vigorous anti-climate science movement in the United States has significantly damaged American prestige among European leaders who are struggling to deal with the daunting impacts of global warming.
Peter Raven, co-inventor in 1964, along with biologist Paul R. Ehrlich, of the bedrock concept of co-evolution (see footnote below), has long been a trusted adviser of American presidents, many other heads of state and government, religious leaders including popes, and countless congressional, academic and scientific leaders in the United States and around the world.
A frequent world traveler for his work, Raven reconfirmed in an email from the international Planet Under Pressure conference in London what he first told Natures’ Edge in 2010 in St. Louis.
When we asked, in the course of an interview on the occasion of his retirement after four decades as head of the Missouri Botanical Gardens, what he thought about the increasing claims of some parties in the United States that the science and alarm about manmade global warming was “a hoax” or greatly overblown, he responded patiently, “Oh, it’s just foolishness.”
“It’s not a matter of conjecture anymore,” he said. “Climate change is the most serious challenge probably that the human race has ever confronted.”
Raven quickly summarized the virtually unanimous understanding of the world’s climate scientists and other responsible experts about the great upheavals manmade global warming is now producing.
He talked to us outdoors, in the now world-famous, immense and exquisite gardens that, as the brief introduction to this video excerpt of his remarks shows, he had turned into an expansive vision of what a peaceful and balanced world could look like — a sort of international botanical metaphor.
“There is virtually unanimous consensus among the world’s scientists who work in the area that human beings are the major reason that this is so (the world’s average temperature rising),” writes Raven from London. “Because, just as first noted by the Swedish chemist Arrhenius in 1895, when you add more carbon dioxide or other co-called greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, you make it warmer.”
Academic and scientific surveys have repeatedly confirmed this view among the world’s climate scientists.
One detailed study, “Expert Credibility in Climate Change,” published in PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, July 6, 2010, focused on “an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers.”
It found that “97-98 percent of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field … supported the basic tenets of ACC (manmade global warming) established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”
It also determined that the minute number of detractors had significantly less standing in the field of climate science among their scientist peers.
It reported that “the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of (those tenets of climate change) are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.”
“Two years ago,” Raven added in his email, “the world was hoping for U.S. leadership on this question, global climate change, and now it has pretty well given up, with us as the only hold-out nation on the science.”
An extensive “disinformation campaign” in the United States about the scientific solidity and gravity of manmade global warming has been described in detail by a number of academic analyses and extensive professional journalistic enquiry.
For example, “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming,” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, details how ideological, political and fossil fuel industry interests have been able to confuse and intimidate many leaders in legislature and media.
Author and journalist Ross Gelbspan, who directed a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation at the Boston Globe, was one of the first professional journalists to describe fossil fuel industry efforts to delay government regulation on greenhouse gas emissions as long as possible.
“They don’t expect or need to win any debate,” he says, “they just want to keep the appearance of a debate going.”
More HERE
You are Invited to Occupy the Job-Killing, Wealth-Robbing EPA Mafia
Regular readers have been able to follow along as I chronicle the 17,384-employee wrecking crew that is the EPA. This week the racket put the coal industry out of business, helped raise electricty prices for everyone, and did it all for the low, low price of $9,000,000,000 per year.
Underpinning the confidence game is deceptive science that manufactures evidence of climate change/global warming by pointing out people's natural curosity about natural weather events.
A New York Times story that ran in the Environment section on March 28, 2012 is a textbook example of all that is wrong with the supposed “scientific” method liberals are employing to bolster climate change arguments.
It’s not so much that they argue for bad science, but that they argue for no science by postulating only theories that fall within their preconceived notions that every weather event can be tied to global climate change. And if it can’t, by God, it will be when we get through!
Lurching from one weather extreme to another seems to have become routine across the Northern Hemisphere, writes the Times. Parts of the United States may be shivering now, but Scotland is setting heat records. Across Europe, people died by the hundreds during a severe cold wave in the first half of February, but a week later revelers in Paris were strolling down the Champs-Élysées in their shirt-sleeves.
Does science have a clue what is going on? The short answer appears to be: not quite.
Ah, but “not quite” isn’t going to stop them from getting to the inevitable answer that they always come to when climate is involved:
The longer answer is that researchers are developing theories that, should they withstand critical scrutiny, may tie at least some of the erratic weather to global warming. Specifically, suspicion is focused these days on the drastic decline of sea ice in the Arctic, which is believed to be a direct consequence of the human release of greenhouse gases.
So they are developing theories that if they get people to buy into- which of course the “people” already want to do- they can then pin the whole caper of man-killing freezing temperatures on…cue the music… global warming!
Can’t we agree now that no matter what the data says that liberal scientists most certainly will advocate that the cause of everything is man-made global warming?
If they could tie it to man-made global warming, they would manipulate the data to prove the moon is made of Swiss cheese. Of course the moon didn’t start out that way, they’d say, it’s just that the Swiss over utilized certain resources on the moon, throwing the moon out of balance and the result is Swiss cheese.
All you have to do to show this is fail to carry the 2, multiply that integer by 12.285764 to increase the effects of water vapor, and voila, man-made, man-warmed, creamy Swiss cheese.
Occupy the EPA
Well, Americans for Prosperity is fighting back against false science with an Occupy the EPA rally on April 4th in Colorado:
“In order to symbolize the constraints EPA overregulation places on the economy, and on average working Americans,” says AFP on the internet broadside for the event, “the rally will feature representatives of various impacted industries bound in red tape. Some participants will also be wearing red tape handcuffs in order to drive the point home.”
AFP says that global warming professionals have doctored and manipulated the data to exaggerate or wholly falsify climate science.
More from AFP:
Recent rules targeting coal-fired power plants are the latest in a long list of EPA regulatory excesses, according to AFP-CO, which will cost Coloradans jobs and contribute to already-skyrocketing energy costs. The agency relies on biased, agenda-driven “science” and “scientists” to bolster its actions, the group says, pointing to the shoddy work the agency did investigating alleged water well contamination in Pavillion, Wyoming — as well as the agency’s decision to provide a prime speaking spot at the April 4 conference to Boulder-based Stratus Consulting, a hired gun for extreme environmental groups that has been implicated in a scheme to use shady science to rig a favorable ruling in a lawsuit in South America.
Stratus is being sued, under federal anti-organized crime laws, after one of its principals, Ann Maest, was caught on video appearing to agree to doctor data in a way that would exaggerate environmental damage and increase the payout for plaintiffs and their lawyers in the long-running legal case. Maest originally was on the April 4 speaking schedule, but abruptly vanished from the program – probably when EPA caught wind of the fact that her appearance might prove controversial or prompt objections.
Make sure you register for this at Eventbright. Here’s your invitation:
Occupy the EPA
Give Red Tape a Rest
12 PM
Renaissance Denver Hotel
3801 Quebec Street
Denver, Colorado 80207
The Environment Protection Agency will hold a major mining conference in Denver and we want to be there to rally against the agency’s job-killing activities and agenda, as well as focus on some of the questionable and biased science underpinning many regulations.
Come turn the tables on the “1 percent” of career politicians and regulators imposing an economy-killing regulatory regime on the “99 percent” of Americans who want jobs and economic opportunity.
SOURCE
Idso 1998 – eight different ways to show CO2 will have little effect
Here’s a forgotten paper that deserves more attention: Idso 1998.
Rather than using an enormously complex global circulation model (or 22) to come up with a figure for climate sensitivity, Sherwood Idso does calculations from eight completely different natural experiments which all arrive at similar figures. In short, he reviewed 20 years of work to arrive at a prediction that if CO2 is doubled we will get 0.4°C of warming at most, and even he admitted, it might be an overestimate. Basically by the time CO2 levels double, he says we ought expect 0 – 0.4°C of warming, after feedbacks are taken into account. Idso started off assuming that the feedbacks were largely positive, but repeatedly found that they were negative.
Idso’s approach was novel. Instead of climate sensitivity to CO2, he estimates the sensitivity of the Earth to any factor. He calls it the “surface air temperature sensitivity factor“. Once something known heats or cools the Earth, how much do the net feedbacks amplify or dampen that initial change? Rather than trying to measure and capture every single feedback and process, and then calculate the end results, Idso finds situations where he can isolate a factor and calculate the effect after all the known and unknown feedbacks have occurred.
There are eight natural experiments Idso looked at. Even he was skeptical initially, knowing his initial experiments were based on one city and shorter time frames, but the independent experiments turned up such similar numbers that he grew confident that the results were meaningful.
Much more HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
Resistance to warmism must be 'treated'
The Stalinist ratbag herself above
Warmists have jumped the shark -- or maybe make that jumped the Stalin. The old Soviet trick of defining political opposition as a mental illness is back, this time at the Unioversity of Oregon. Their media relations folks are bursting with pride that one of their faculty is faithfully recycling, in this case from Uncle Joe:
"Resistance at individual and societal levels must be recognized and treated before real action can be taken to effectively address threats facing the planet from human-caused contributions to climate change.
That's the message to this week's Planet Under Pressure Conference by a group of speakers led by Kari Marie Norgaard, professor of sociology and environmental studies at the University of Oregon. In a news briefing today, Norgaard discussed her paper and issues her group will address in a session Wednesday, March 28.."
Warmism has become a religion, and Oregon is its spiritual capital, so this would-be priestess of the cult calling for unbelievers to be brainwashed fits a pattern seen before in history. The pride of the Department of Sociology continues:
"Climate change poses a massive threat to our present social, economic and political order. From a sociological perspective, resistance to change is to be expected," she said. "People are individually and collectively habituated to the ways we act and think. This habituation must be recognized and simultaneously addressed at the individual, cultural and societal level - how we think the world works and how we think it should work."
We have to address the way people think, the ways they are habituated to act. Collectively, naturally. The great Australian columnist Andrew Bolt:
"I've said, again in a post today, that the global warming faith licences the closet totalitarian. Imagine what such people as this sociologist feel licenced to do to us - for our own good, of course, as the Inquisition, Nazis and Bolsheviks insisted, too. Already some, like Professor Clive Hamilton, ponder the need for a "suspension of the democratic processes".
As the nature of the fraud becomes more apparent with each succeeding scandal, warmists are becoming frenzied. I really hope Kari Norgaad carries her crusade as far as possible. The bookers at Fox News should get contact media relations at The University of Oregon.
SOURCE
Time to end the war on coal
Forty-five percent of America’s energy needs are met by a single industry — coal. And it is this industry that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Energy and President Obama himself continues to burden with heavy regulations, rules and guidelines.
Though 90 percent of coal consumed in the U.S. is used for electricity, the power is also used for making steel, paper and cement.
As this administration continues to lay burdensome rules on this industry, attempting to push coal out of the energy sector completely, where is America expected to make up for losing almost 50 percent of its electric energy source? Not to mention the other affected industries that are also dependent on coal?
Those questions are likely to remain unanswered as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) continues writing even more rules and regulations that negatively affect the coal industry.
The latest set of rules stem from concerns reached in 2009. It was then the EPA decided greenhouse gas pollution poses a huge risk to human health and well being. Interestingly, these rules to cap carbon emissions on power plants, affect all future power plants — those being built 12 months from now and beyond.
But while the EPA worries about regulating the air of future America, coal power plants will have a big problem complying with these rules.
The EPA proposes that new fossil‐fuel‐fired power plants meet an output‐based standard of 1,000 pounds of CO2 per megawatt‐hour (lb CO2/MWh gross). Most natural gas power plants built since 2005 already meet this new standard. And lending a “helpful” hand to coal power plants, the EPA suggests new technology such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) to rein in their emissions.
The Wall Street Journal reports that adding this new technology isn’t as easy as it might seem:
“Most gas-fired power plants built since 2005 meet that standard, but coal plants can’t unless they are fitted with special equipment to capture the carbon emissions and store them underground. Although that technology is commercially available, it is prohibitively expensive, utilities and energy analysts say.”
Institute for Energy Research (IER) President Tom Pyle echoes those concerns, saying, “President Obama promised to bankrupt coal-powered electricity in the United States, and this latest rule… makes good on that promise,” he said in a press release. “The United States has the largest coal reserves of any country in the world with 486 billion short tons of technically recoverable resources… If the EPA’s new rules are finalized, entire industries across the United States will be pushed out of business — and jobs with them.”
Sadly, these are not the only rules that negatively impact the coal industry.
It was only in December of 2011 that the EPA released its new Clean Air Act “National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants,” which controls emission levels of mercury (Hg) and other air toxics from U.S. coal- and oil-fired power plants. This rule will have a huge impact on energy-intensive industries that rely on low-cost electricity to survive and will also likely negatively impact small businesses.
The benefits? EPA computer models claim mercury emission cuts will reduce average per person “avoided IQ loss” by “0.00209 IQ points,” with estimated “total nationwide benefits” of $500,000 to $6.1 million by 2016.
Taking into account the great loss of Americans jobs as well as the source of nearly 50 percent of the country’s electric energy, the costs of cutting coal production would far outweigh the benefits.
But that hasn’t stopped the EPA. Another guideline for the mountaintop mining of coal, under the Clean Water Act, requires streams to be kept cleaner and to a higher standard than that of tap water.
Even EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said of the new guidelines, “the goal is a standard so strict that few, if any, permits would be issued for valley fills.”
It seems this administration has some sort of personal vendetta against the coal industry.
“All these EPA guidelines, rules and regulations are nothing more than an attempt to end coal production in the U.S.,” says Bill Wilson, president of Americans for Limited Government (ALG).
Bill Bissett, president of the Kentucky Coal Association, told ALG in a prior interview, “At a time when the U.S. economy is still hurting, now is not the time to end coal production. By harming coal you will damage the economy of the entire nation. Bissett estimates that the U.S. will increase electricity demands by 40 percent by 2025. “We will need every form of energy to meet that demand,” he says. “Coal should remain.”
With 45 percent of the U.S. dependent on electric energy from coal perhaps the Obama administration should listen to his speeches where he declares support for an all-of-the-above energy strategy rather than continuing to pursue its war on coal.
SOURCE
Australian conservative leader threatens a double dissolution to get rid of the carbon tax
In a double dissolution all seats in both the lower house and the Senate are up for grabs. A lot of existing Senators would be likely to shrink from that
FEDERAL Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says getting rid of the carbon tax won't be hard to do if he's elected prime minister.
Mr Abbott today refuted Prime Minister Julia Gillard's claims that his "chest-beating" over plans to unwind the carbon tax would "prove to be incredibly hollow".
"It's not hard to do. You simply repeal the legislation," he told Radio 2SM today. "I accept that there are various things that the carbon tax is funding that we will have to deal with and that presents some fiscal issues and some political issues.
"But we will deal with that and everyone will know exactly what is going to happen to tax and pensions in good time before the next election."
When asked how his push to repeal the carbon tax was different to Labor's campaign to roll back the GST, Mr Abbott replied: ``It differs because it is different." "I will get rid of the carbon tax. It'll be gone, lock, stock and barrel," Mr Abbott said. "It's an act of economic self-harm."
He also confirmed the coalition would pursue a double dissolution to secure the end of the carbon tax if Labor decided to "commit suicide twice" by persisting in its support for it.
"If they did, and we couldn't get a repeal through the Senate, yes, we would go to a double dissolution," he said.
"Good governments shouldn't be scared of an election."
SOURCE
Australia's climate honcho is like the weather: unreliable
He is a likeable and popular personality but why an expert on kangaroo fossils feels qualified to make climate prophecies is not at all clear. I guess it gives him attention that he would otherwise lack
A QUARTER of Australians say Tim Flannery is an unreliable source of information about climate change, a new survey reveals.
A Galaxy poll for the Institute of Public Affairs found 18 per cent of people regard the country's official climate change spokesman as "somewhat unreliable", while 7 per cent consider him "very unreliable". Less than a third, 31 per cent, found him somewhat or very reliable.
NSW residents are among the most dubious in the nation, with 28 per cent of those polled saying the Climate Commissioner was an unreliable source of information.
"By regularly making predictions that have turned out to be false, Tim Flannery is doing the carbon tax and the Gillard government more harm than good," the Institute's James Paterson said.
Last night, Prof Flannery said [unreliably]: "This issue isn't about opinion. It is about facts. We know climate is changing and if we don't act there is likely to be serious consequences."
SOURCE
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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