http://www.newsmax.com/US/climate-change-global-warming-noaa-ncdc/2015/03/10/id/629191/
]]>“CBS News: Congress may probe leaked global warming e-mails”.
That’ll sure inspire confidence.
]]>Does anyone here actually think that a little thing like fraud will stop the statists from putting decimating regulations into effect against western industrialized countries while letting India and China run free?
After all, according the the EPA, the science is settled and CO2 is a clear and present danger to all of us. The Amish may take over the economy.
]]>Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges
Copenhagen is preparing for the climate change summit that will produce as much carbon dioxide as a town the size of Middlesbrough.On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen’s biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the “summit to save the world”, which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.
“We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention,” she says. “But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report.”
Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. “We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand,” she says. “We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.”
And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? “Five,” says Ms Jorgensen. “The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don’t have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it’s very Danish.”
The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.
Read more here.
]]>]]>The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.
The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.
]]>With 20,000 delegates, advocates and journalists jetting to Copenhagen for planet Earth’s last chance, the carbon footprint of the global warming summit will be the only impressive consequence of the climate-change meeting. Its organizers had hoped that it would produce binding caps on emissions, global taxation to redistribute trillions of dollars, and micromanagement of everyone’s choices.
China, nimble at the politics of pretending that is characteristic of climate-change theater, promises only to reduce its “carbon intensity” — carbon emissions per unit of production. So China’s emissions will rise.
Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate-change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83 percent below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million Americans in 2050, so Obama’s promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen.
Disclosure of e-mails and documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Britain — a collaborator with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — reveals some scientists’ willingness to suppress or massage data and rig the peer-review process and the publication of scholarly work. The CRU materials also reveal paranoia on the part of scientists who believe that in trying to engineer “consensus” and alarm about warming, they are a brave and embattled minority. Actually, never in peacetime history has the government-media-academic complex been in such sustained propagandistic lockstep about any subject.
Cynthia, your reply is very gracious, God bless you …and California! 🙂 I used to live in Eureka, Ca., it still has not dropped into the sea; but we did have earthquakes – and it doesn’t survive in the movie 2012. But then…. what does? (Please forgive my light-hearted comment!) John in London
]]>Of course, I’m not holding my breath waiting for mea culpas from, say, the Evangelical Environmental Network and National Religious Partnership for the Environment. But there are some hopeful signs among individual Christians who think about these issues. For instance, on November 20, “Blackadder,” at the (generally conservative) American Catholic wrote a post, “Are the GOP and/or Conservatives Anti-Science?” Among his examples: conservative skepticism about “evolution,” vaccines, and—you guessed it—global warming:
I do find it startling that so many conservatives still reject the idea that human activity is a major cause of global warming. Not only that, but in discussions about the subject people often will use arguments or bring up points calling into question the validity of scientific knowledge in general, or in areas completely separated from the subject (one person recently told me during a discussion about global warming that there wasn’t any evidence in favor of heliocentrism).
So in one short paragraph, Blackadder links skepticism about AGW (anthropogenic global warming) with heliocentrism, while using the bugaboo “anti-science,” which is an adjective often used by proponents of conventional wisdom to dismiss anyone who doubts said wisdom. Blackadder isn’t taking seriously the skeptical critiques of climate change orthodoxy, or even following the climate debate carefully. He’s just following conventional wisdom.
Notice that the post appeared on November 20, the same day the news broke of the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Then, on November 29, Blackadder posted “Conservatives and Science: A Partial Retraction.” Here’s what he says:
Last Friday I wrote a post, Are the GOP and/or Conservatives Anti-Science, in which I described what I felt was a growing anti-scientific sentiment among certain segments of the conservative movement and the Republican party. One of my examples was continued conservative denial of the reality of anthropogenic global warming. In a case of what you might describe as Really Bad Timing, my post happened to coincide with the release of a lot of climate science’s dirty laundry.
I’ve now taken a little time to digest the materials from CRU, and I have to say some of the stuff their strikes me as being pretty damaging. If I had to bet, I’d still say that human activity was a major cause of recent warming, and I still maintain that some of the arguments advanced by conservatives on this subject display a mix of scientific ignorance and/or anti-scientific bias (in fact, in some cases conservatives I’ve argued with have admitted as much). Nevertheless, based on the CRU material, I have to say that it was wrong to lump all climate skeptics into the “anti-science” camp.
Mea culpa.
Blackadder and others at American Catholic still need to study the substance of the issue, since they’re still appealing to the fake “consensus” on climate change; but this is progress. I’m hoping millions of religious Americans are also considering retractions, if only in the way they think about this issue.
]]>The article cited appears to be based on a number of popularly-held myths. You might want to check out “Galileo Goes to Jail – And Other Myths about Science and Religion,” a book that was
“rigorously researched and well footnoted, and written by 25 of the leading historians in the English-speaking world.”
To quote a couple of relevant excerpts from The Weekly Standard review (Oct. 19, 2009):
“. . . readers discover that Galileo never really was imprisoned (nor was he tortured). . . “
Likewise,
While Christianity wasn’t the only factor that gave rise to modern science, it was certainly no hindrance. As one scholar put it, “The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and probably all other, institutions.”
More to the point, George Michalopulos (the very same who often comments on these pages) wrote a terrific review of the new book by David B. Hart which demolishes this fiction. (If you wish to read it, it is on a sister-site: OrthodoxyToday.
As for Galileo, Hart plumbs the historical record and proves that he was a prickly character who needlessly and with malice often provoked his many academic enemies. More to the point, his own astrophysical theories were not in themselves correct as his inquest pointed out. Indeed, the Church had no problems with his theories as they were essentially the same as Copernicus’, who some eighty years earlier, had received the imprimatur of the Church. And almost always left out of the modern secularist critique of the Church was the fact that he was a devout Christian, indeed more so than his great friend, Pope Urban VIII, who lavished upon him great accolades, pensions, and awards (thus further inflaming Galileo’s many enemies). More damningly, Galileo himself was not intellectually honest. He castigated competing astronomers such as Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, more out of spite than conviction. Indeed, it is Kepler’s system of celestial mechanics which we use today.
While I am not surprised by the growing Climategate scandal (way, way too much money and power on the line), it is dishonest for the author of the linked article to take a (heavy handed) swipe at “faith-based science,” especially since – as the books described above both note – it was (at least in part) the faith of the Church in the the reason and care of God that provided the foundation needed to study the cosmos (literally “well-ordered” creation – the very opposite of chaos). Unfortunately, anti-Catholic myths have been a useful and socially-acceptable staple since the Reformation. Not that there aren’t genuine points of disagreement, but honesty is always essential.
Unfortunately, a Chesterton noted, those who stop believing in God don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. Most of the time, this disbelief seems to have a strong moral motivation behind it: God gets in the way of what one wants to do, so it’s easier to deny God than one’s self. A truly “faith-based” approach would (or should) have a deep respect for fact; by contrast, once one has rendered “truth” and “fact” as merely relative, one can feel free to “use” facts in the service of one’s agenda. (This appears to be a key assumption behind the agenda-driven journalism that has dominated our J-schools for at least 25 years and may be the element most responsible for the fragile credibility of the MSM.) So, perhaps it is not surprising that a handful of scientists with the chance to grab an awful lot of prestige and influence decided that Climate policy was their ticket.
]]>http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/03/global-warming-fraud-harms-science/
]]>Physicist David Wright “…never did I see groups of people plotting to hijack the peer review process in order to shut out those who disagreed with them, or discussing how to hide data that did not look good for their side of the debate.”
….
Few academics outside those directly snared in the e-mail exchanges are defending or downplaying what happened. Asking a scientist to “delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re [the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report]” is really asking someone to destroy evidence. The “trick of adding in the real temps to each series … to hide the decline [in temperature]” means just that: hiding data that disproves one’s position. Even most scientists can understand that is wrong.