Another nail in the coffin of AGW

No rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide fraction in past 160 years, new research finds

ScienceDaily (2009-12-31) -- Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. However, some studies have suggested that the ability of oceans and plants to absorb carbon dioxide recently may have begun to decline and that the airborne fraction of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is therefore beginning to increase. In contradiction to those studies, new research finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades. ... > read full article
 
Some good news for the new year. Maybe there will be a turn towards sanity in the Earth Sciences. We can always hope.

I"M BAAACK!!
A repost from a few years ago, December 2006 actually, to get things started.

Ebenezer Scrooge – proto-Green?


I read Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” annually to remind myself why I will someday invent a time machine, travel back to 1843, and have the man kneecapped. This year, though, it yielded unforeseen riches in the form of a sudden shock, a unexpected vision of an all too familiar character that I never realized existed in 19th century London. What was this revelation, this epiphany, this eye-opener? It turns out that the unreconstructed Scrooge was WAY ahead of his time and was actually the first recorded modern environmentalist.

The first rather broad hint of this comes as Scrooge is in his office trying to get rid of two gentlemen who are soliciting charitable donations. When one of them says that many of the poor would rather die than go to the workhouses, Scrooge replies, “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” A reply that would do Paul Ehrlich and the rest of his Neo-Malthusian misanthropes proud! Of course, they want the poor to die in order to 'save the environment', just like all those who condemned millions of Africans to illness and death by banning DDT. Feeling good about the environment is much more important than saving human lives. But wait, there’s more!

“Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk’s fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn’t replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room, and as surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary to part.”

Scrooge is obviously being conservation minded here, and he is sincerely trying to reduce his carbon footprint on the earth by limiting his use of fossil fuels. And as all Greens desperately desire, he has the power to force another to behave likewise whether that person wants to or not. It’s for Bob Cratchit's own good after all.


When Scrooge’s nephew comes in to wish him a merry Christmas, Scrooge snarls, “What right have you to be merry?” What is this but the constant cry of the Al Gores of the world decrying any human comfort or enjoyment as destructive to the planet? Nobody has a right to be merry unless Al and his fellow elites approve.

Before his conversion to Dickensian righteousness, Scrooge walks everywhere – no SUV for him! He eats cheap food and not much of it. He lives in rooms in an old building that has been converted to offices – no planet-killing house or yard. He owns very little furniture or clothing. He has no wife or children or pets- no contributor to overpopulation and increased emissions he! He hates humanity in general and especially people who are enjoying themselves ("If I could work my will every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart."). He is the very model of the modern Green, the master mold of the perfect environmentalist. Who cares about his actual reasons for living such a life, it’s good for the planet, isn’t it? We should all be like Scrooge!

Well, we should be like the old Scrooge. After Dickens' sentimental ghosts get through with him, his consumption of the earth’s resources goes way up – “Make up the fires and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!” He also “knew how to keep Christmas well”, and we all know what THAT means. Redemption, indeed! Bah, humbug! We all know a good life is really all about minimizing your carbon footprint, not saving your soul.

So in this season of hope and joy, remember that the only way to save the planet is for all of us to be hopeless and joyless like old Ebenezer Scrooge, version one.



Merry Christmas! [and a Happy and Prosperous New Year!]

More idiocy from the Greens

From The Star

Greens' climate plan sees 12-cent tax at the pump
Carbon toll is to avert climate "catastrophe", says May

OTTAWA–The Green party wants Canadian drivers to pay an extra 12 cents a litre at the gas pumps as the price of averting environmental "catastrophe."

Leader Elizabeth May is boasting that her party is the only one politically brave enough to call for carbon taxes that would discourage automobile use and finance other tax cuts that would allow consumers to make smarter environmental choices.

"Right now, the Green Party of Canada is the only Canadian political party prepared to state this obvious reality," May said yesterday. "We will use those carbon taxes to reduce taxes elsewhere."

May rolled out her party's environmental plan yesterday in part to coincide with the G-8 meeting starting today in Germany, where Canada's action on this issue – or lack of it – is a major story.

The Green leader had harsh words for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his announced intentions to be a "bridge" between countries that have signed on to the Kyoto air quality accord and the United States, which hasn't.

"If we stop being with the rest of the world and start siding with George Bush, we are global saboteurs and that's what Mr. Harper is doing right now in Germany," May said.

The environmental challenge is similar to the space race about 50 years ago in which then-president John F. Kennedy said the United States would put a man on the moon, May said.

"He couldn't prove it when he said it. He could mobilize the resources, fix the political will, and engage the public's spirit and imagination in a bold, collective venture," she said. "Surely we can do the same thing for purposes of survival."

I’ve seen this silly comparison so many times before. It’s really getting old.

“If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we……cure cancer?”

..find a cure for AIDS?”

...stop hurricanes?”

...keep earthquakes from happening?”

...eliminate world hunger?”

...eliminate poverty and ignorance?”

and now

...stop global warming?”

So all we need to do is throw a bunch of money and engineers at any problem and it will magically be solved. Well, that actually can work if you already know the solution to the problem. We had all the science needed to put a man on the moon by the 19^th century. The equations were all known and solved. The “space race” in the 1960s was just a matter of developing the technology needed to implement the solutions. The Apollo 13 astronauts themselves, when asked by Mission Control who was driving replied, “Isaac Newton is in the driver’s seat.” However, none of these other systems are well understood. We don’t know all the science involved in climate, let alone how to “fix” it or if it even needs to be fixed. And I might remind Ms. May that one country’s climate “catastrophe” is usually another’s windfall. Why should only Westerners get to decide what the entire earth's climate should be?

After reading this article, I began to wonder about the sanity of the world in general and the U.S. in particular. Maybe we should force everybody in government and the media to just answer this one simple question:

Which of these things should we really be worried about?

This is not at all likely:




This is:



These things won't kill you:



These will:




This will take care of itself with no effort on your part:



This won't:



Well?

But will it rain in Dubuque tomorrow?

Sweeping changes to global climate seen by 2100: study

Note: all of the links in the following article were put in by Breitbart.com, not me

Many of the world's climate zones will vanish entirely by 2100, or be replaced by new, previously unseen ones, if global warming continues as expected, a study released Monday said.

And what kind of study is this? Wait for it.............

Rising temperatures will force existing climate zones toward higher latitudes and higher elevations, squeezing out climates at the colder extremes, and leaving room for unfamiliar climes around the equator, the study predicted.

The sweeping climatic changes will likely affect huge swaths of land from the Indonesian rainforest to the Peruvian Andes, including many known hotspots of diversity, disrupting local ecological systems and populations.

"Our findings are a logical outcome of global warming scenarios that are driven by continued emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases," said Jack Williams, a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and author of the paper.

"The warmest areas get warmer and move outside our current range of experience and the colder areas also get warmer and so those climates disappear."

Williams and colleagues from the University of Wyoming based their predictions on computer models that translate carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions into climate change. The emissions' estimates were taken from a report issued by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in February.

Bingo!!!!

The models suggest that the climate zones covering as much as 48 percent of the earth's landmass could disappear by 2100.

Classic weasel wording.

By that point, close to 40 percent of the world's land surface area would also have a "novel" or new climate, according to the climate models.

New (or "novel") in terms of what? The climate of the central US has been shallow inland sea, semi-tropical swamp, glacier, temperate forest, and semi-arid grassland depending on what part of the past 70 million years you look at. Which of these is novel, again?

Even if emission rates slowed due to mitigation strategies, the changes would still affect up to 20 percent of the earth's landmass in each scenario, the authors said.

As a geographic phenomenon, the disappearing climates would likely affect tropical highlands and regions near the poles including the Colombian and Peruvian Andes, Central America, African Rift Mountains, the Zambian and Angolan Highlands.

???????????????? What does this even mean? Climate changes all the time, but it never disappears.

The trend poses the greatest threat to areas of rich, but threatened, animal and plant life, in regions such as the Himalayas, the Philippines and African and South American mountain ranges. The changes could threaten some species with extinction and also displace or fragment local human populations.

All areas, I might add, that are extremely active tectonically, and thus subject to rapid changes due to earthquakes and volcanic activity.

As for new or novel climate zones, the phenomenon will largely affect the tropics or sub-tropics, such as the Amazonian and Indonesian rainforests, where even subtle temperature variations can have far-reaching effects, Williams said.

Such as ?? Come on, you can scare us more than that!

The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Who should be thouroughly ashamed of themselves.

The previous link to the movie The Great Global Warming Swindle no longer works. Go here to see it. And this is what will probably happen to all the scientists who participated: (via Cox and Forkum)



The intimidation seems to have already begun.

They're getting desperate in cloud-cuckooland
the following is probably a reaction to this (the Great Global Warming Swindle program on Britain's channel 4)
See the video here

from AP news

Warming Report to warn of coming drought

By Seth Borenstein

WASHINGTON (AP) - The harmful effects of global warming on daily life are already showing up, and within a couple of decades hundreds of millions of people won't have enough water, top scientists will say next month at a meeting in Belgium.

At the same time, tens of millions of others will be flooded out of their homes each year as the Earth reels from rising temperatures and sea levels, according to portions of a draft of an international scientific report obtained by The Associated Press.

Tropical diseases like malaria will spread. By 2050, polar bears will mostly be found in zoos, their habitats gone. Pests like fire ants will thrive.

How do they know these things with such certainty when meteorologists admit that they don’t know how much precipitation falls around the world now, what form it’s in, or even where it falls? And when I say “don’t know”, I mean precisely that. Their estimates are not even in the ballpark. Since this, unlike anthropogenic CO₂,is actually important in determining the climate, you would think they would be a little less dogmatic in theor pronouncements.

But as long as we’re indulging in doom and gloom, let’s not forget the other horrible effects of “global warming: the increased shortage of prostitutes in Bulgaria and all the things on this list.

For a time, food will be plentiful because of the longer growing season in northern regions. But by 2080, hundreds of millions of people could face starvation, according to the report, which is still being revised.

The draft document by the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change focuses on global warming's effects and is the second in a series of four being issued this year. Written and reviewed by more than 1,000 scientists from dozens of countries, it still must be edited by government officials.

Not scarey enough yet, I guess.

"Things are happening and happening faster than we expected," said Patricia Romero Lankao of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., one of the many co-authors of the new report.

The draft document says scientists are highly confident that many current problems - change in species' habits and habitats, more acidified oceans, loss of wetlands, bleaching of coral reefs, and increases in allergy-inducing pollen - can be blamed on global warming.

Not quite the same thing as their earlier certainty. Don’t worry, they’re back to that in the next paragraph.

For example, the report says North America "has already experienced substantial ecosystem, social and cultural disruption from recent climate extremes," such as hurricanes and wildfires.

Like the devastating 2006 Atlantic hurricane season. I have a feeling these particular examples may disappear from the final draft if anyone with two brain cells sees them. Hurricane frequencies and wildfires are two things which have been shown to have absolutely no relation to warming. Wildfires are an entirely natural phenomenon and the only reasons they have become more destructive in recent years are poor forest management practices and increased building density in the Southwestern US. Hurricane frequency follows a Poisson Distribution, the implications of which are here. They’re not related to surface temperatures, either.

But the present is nothing compared to the future.

[snip] I have left out the list of computer-induced hallucinations which constitute climate prediction these days. Go read them if you want. I'll wait.

This report - considered by some scientists the "emotional heart" of climate change research - focuses on how global warming alters the planet and life here, as opposed to the more science-focused report by the same group last month.

Excuse me. I just spilled coffee all over my computer. “Science focused”???????? I missed the science in the Summary for Policymakers last month. It’s supposed to be in the full report, which hasn’t been released yet. “Emotional heart”?????????????? I don’t dispute that scientists have emotions or that they should express them, but they should confine that sort of thing to their friends and families. I don’t CARE how they feel about global warming. This is science. Stick to the facts. Oh, I forget, they don’t have any.

"This is the story. This is the whole play. This is how it's going to affect people. The science is one thing (and obviously not a thing we agree with – ed.) This is how it affects me, you and the person next door," said University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver.

YAY! Somebody has it right! It is just a story, a work of fiction. As far as horror stories go, it’s not nearly up to the standards of Poe or LeFanu, but I would rate it as middling science fiction, maybe on the level of Asimov.

Many - not all - of those effects can be prevented, the report says, if within a generation the world slows down its emissions of carbon dioxide and if the level of greenhouse gases sticking around in the atmosphere stabilizes. (News flash – methane already has been stable for several years- ed.) If that's the case, the report says "most major impacts on human welfare would be avoided; but some major impacts on ecosystems are likely to occur."

The United Nations-organized network of 2,000 scientists was established in 1988 to give regular assessments of the Earth's environment. The document issued last month in Paris concluded that scientists are 90 percent certain that people are the cause of global warming and that warming will continue for centuries.

So we’re supposed to torpedo the world’s economies, including those that are just getting developed in Africa, because these guys and their computer generated fantasies are 90% certain about catastrophic AGW. Would you risk bungee jumping if the operator was just 90% certain that the rope is short enough for you? Or buy a car that the dealer was 90% certain would not explode on your way home? That means that there’s a one in ten chance that it will. There’s a reason why statisticians use the 95% confidence level as the standard by which you can say that some outcome is likely. But I seriously doubt any statisticians were consulted for this particular boondoggle. I don’t think a reputable statistician would have let this pass.

Again, for the sake of humanity, someone PLEASE take the computers away from these people.