Critics slam MEP's climate theory claims

mkpdavies · 15-11-2006, 08:56 AM

Quote:

[SOME]CLIMATE experts and green campaigners have criticised one of the region's Euro MPs for describing global warming as a “highly debatable theory”.

Jeffrey Titford, one of the leading figures in the UK Independence Party, has written that ministers were in danger of getting climate change “out of all proportion” and that the “endless repetition of doom-laden predictions” would give the European Parliament the chance to impose “needless restrictions” on the British way of life.

In his regular Letter from Europe column in yesterday's East Anglian Daily Times, he argued: “The proponents of the highly-debatable theory that the world is getting hotter because of man's emissions of greenhouse gases seem to be relying on endless repetition of doom-laden predictions to induce hysteria leading to Government action.”

“It is creating opportunities for the British Government and the real government in Brussels to push through an agenda (which) may end up costing us huge amounts of extra taxation and needless restrictions on our way of life.

“Statistically, the facts are that the rise in temperature over the past century, 0.6C (plus or minus 0.2C) is far from exceptional, and that clouds and water vapour are far more significant presences in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.”

However, Dr Tim Osborn of the internationally renowned climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia, said although a 0.6C rise in one part of the world might not be significant, universally across the globe it was leading to weather changes and rising sea levels which would not happen without the increase in greenhouse gasses.

“The world is warming up,” said Dr Osborn. “There is basic evidence - greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere are leading to global warming. There can be no uncertainty.”(err yes there is)

James Abbott of The Green Party said atmospheric physicists and climate researchers, with no political axe to grind, were warning of impending catastrophe unless action was taken. “Climate change and carbon dioxide emissions are very serious indeed.”

Liberal Democrat Euro MP Andrew Duff, whose party is calling for green taxes to ensure the polluter pays, called Mr Titford's intervention “extraordinary” which would put him at odds with the overwhelming majority of MEPs(good) and the public throughout Europe.

“Europe's policy on climate change and its campaigning on the issue strike a chord with ordinary people. It is very popular and has marginalised the UK Independence Party(have your say says differentely,” said Mr Duff.

The Government is expected to outline proposals for a carbon emissions Bill in tomorrow's Queen's speech.

Man I haven't seen witch burning like this for sometime. Slammed for saying the issue is debatable. Notice all the same EU leaches coming out of the woodwork as usual.

I have higlighted some of the hillarious biased statements above. Once again no attempt to accept that there are MANY scientists, experts, laymen etc that don't swallow it. Nothing about history, nothing about other factors that effect climate, nothing on the tiny amount of human effect on the planets production of co2.

If the alarm bells aren't ringing by now for people, they never will and you will be served up with mint sauce one day.

SponPlague · 15-11-2006, 09:30 AM

I suggest you all read Michael Crichton (ER, Jurassic Park)'s latest thriller, State of Fear: heavily researched, here's a review from Amazon:

Quote:

Michael Crichton did a Q&A on C-Span regarding State of Fear. His recommendation to the scientific community was, for one thing, much-needed oversight, namely of the bullying by those who fund it. He urged the seperation of research funding into three groups of researchers: one, the group funded by pro-global-warming; the second, a watchdog group, looking to refute any politicizing of the firsts results; and a third, neutral group. He also suggested public debate between these groups. The new hollywood/limousine liberal bourgeoise does not pour billions of dollars into scientific research to prove global warming, only to be told "Antarctica is getting colder", "The earth has been warming up for the last 6,000 years, and has only recently started cooling", "Glaciers are expanding". Make no misatake about it, they bought the cart before the horse when they made all their passionate speeches about the decadent west and global warming, and they'll be damned if they're not gonna get some use out of it! Comparing "Global warming deniers" to Holocaust-deniers is meant to excite emotion and close the doors on debate on an issue that absolutely begs debate.
I think Michael Crichton has done a great job in this book of giving his characters dimension, without gutting them, and making them into sounding boards for his views on global warming. Just ask yourself this, you'll swallow all of Al Gore's tripe in An Inconvenient Truth- Al Gore, that great scientist- but you don't trust Michael Crichton's science at all? I think the man's earned our respect as an impartial man of science. Read this book: it's eye-opening.

Tony Bennett · 15-11-2006, 09:32 AM

This article, a bit technical in places, published in the Sunday Telegraph earlier this month, repays a careful read. The problem for 'climate change deniers' like me is that the world *is* currently getting warmer (though the extent of this may well be exaggerated).

The *only* question is - *why* is it getting warmer?

================================================== =======================

Climate chaos? Don't believe it

By Christopher Monckton, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:14am GMT 05/11/2006

QUOTE

The Stern report last week predicted dire economic and social effects of unchecked global warming. In what many will see as a highly controversial polemic, Christopher Monckton disputes the 'facts' of this impending apocalypse and accuses the UN and its scientists of distorting the truth.

[Biblical droughts, floods, plagues and extinctions?]

Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was the worst "market failure" ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government". This week and next, I'll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science.

Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the economics of climate change, which was published last week, says that the debate is over. It isn't. There are more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world should warm a bit, but that's as far as the "consensus" goes. After the recent hysteria, you may not find the truth easy to believe. So you can find all my references and detailed calculations here.

The Royal Society says there's a worldwide scientific consensus. It brands Apocalypse-deniers as paid lackeys of coal and oil corporations. I declare my interest: I once took the taxpayer's shilling and advised Margaret Thatcher, FRS, on scientific scams and scares. Alas, not a red cent from Exxon.

In 1988, James Hansen, a climatologist, told the US Congress that temperature would rise 0.3C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1C), and that sea level would rise several feet (no, one inch). The UN set up a transnational bureaucracy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The UK taxpayer unwittingly meets the entire cost of its scientific team, which, in 2001, produced the Third Assessment Report, a Bible-length document presenting apocalyptic conclusions well beyond previous reports.

This week, I'll show how the UN undervalued the sun's effects on historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase, repealed a fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect.

Next week, I'll demonstrate the atrocious economic, political and environmental cost of the high-tax, zero-freedom, bureaucratic centralism implicit in Stern's report; I'll compare the global-warming scare with previous sci-fi alarums; and I'll show how the environmentalists' "precautionary principle" (get the state to interfere now, just in case) is killing people.

So to the scare.

First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.

Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "

So they did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years. The graph looked like an ice hockey-stick. The wrongly flat AD1000-AD1900 temperature line was the shaft: the uptick from 1900 to 2000 was the blade. Here's how they did it:

• They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature 390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so).

• The technique they overweighted was one which the UN's 1996 report had said was unsafe: measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines. Tree-rings are wider in warmer years, but pine-rings are also wider when there's more carbon dioxide in the air: it's plant food. This carbon dioxide fertilisation distorts the calculations.

• They said they had included 24 data sets going back to 1400. Without saying so, they left out the set showing the medieval warm period, tucking it into a folder marked "Censored Data".

• They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".

The large, full-colour "hockey-stick" was the key graph in the UN's 2001 report, and the only one to appear six times. The Canadian Government copied it to every household. Four years passed before a leading scientific journal would publish the truth about the graph. Did the UN or the Canadian government apologise? Of course not. The UN still uses the graph in its publications.

Even after the "hockey stick" graph was exposed, scientific papers apparently confirming its abolition of the medieval warm period appeared. The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found that the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of the scientists who had compiled it had written many of the papers supporting its conclusion.

The UN, echoed by Stern, says the graph isn't important. It is. Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland: now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none.

The Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and nearly all its 160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years, reversing a 6,000-year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes worldwide show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than now. And the snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit temperature is rising (it isn't) but because post-colonial deforestation has dried the air. Al Gore please note.

In some places it was also warmer than now in the Bronze Age and in Roman times. It wasn't CO2 that caused those warm periods. It was the sun. So the UN adjusted the maths and all but extinguished the sun's role in today's warming. Here's how:

• The UN dated its list of "forcings" (influences on temperature) from 1750, when the sun, and consequently air temperature, was almost as warm as now. But its start-date for the increase in world temperature was 1900, when the sun, and temperature, were much cooler.

• Every "forcing" produces "climate feedbacks" making temperature rise faster. For instance, as temperature rises in response to a forcing, the air carries more water vapour, the most important greenhouse gas; and polar ice melts, increasing heat absorption. Up goes the temperature again. The UN more than doubled the base forcings from greenhouse gases to allow for climate feedbacks. It didn't do the same for the base solar forcing.

Two centuries ago, the astronomer William Herschel was reading Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations when he noticed that quoted grain prices fell when the number of sunspots rose. Gales of laughter ensued, but he was right. At solar maxima, when the sun was at its hottest and sunspots showed, temperature was warmer, grain grew faster and prices fell. Such observations show that even small solar changes affect climate detectably. But recent solar changes have been big.

Sami Solanki, a solar physicist, says that in the past half-century the sun has been warmer, for longer, than at any time in at least the past 11,400 years, contributing a base forcing equivalent to a quarter of the past century's warming. That's before adding climate feedbacks.

The UN expresses its heat-energy forcings in watts per square metre per second. It estimates that the sun caused just 0.3 watts of forcing since 1750. Begin in 1900 to match the temperature start-date, and the base solar forcing more than doubles to 0.7 watts. Multiply by 2.7, which the Royal Society suggests is the UN's current factor for climate feedbacks, and you get 1.9 watts – more than six times the UN's figure.

The entire 20th-century warming from all sources was below 2 watts. The sun could have caused just about all of it.

Next, the UN slashed the natural greenhouse effect by 40 per cent from 33C in the climate-physics textbooks to 20C, making the man-made additions appear bigger.

Then the UN chose the biggest 20th-century temperature increase it could find. Stern says: "As anticipated by scientists, global mean surface temperatures have risen over the past century." As anticipated? Only 30 years ago, scientists were anticipating a new Ice Age and writing books called The Cooling.

In the US, where weather records have been more reliable than elsewhere, 20th-century temperature went up by only 0.3C. AccuWeather, a worldwide meteorological service, reckons world temperature rose by 0.45C. The US National Climate Data Centre says 0.5C. Any advance on 0.5? The UN went for 0.6C, probably distorted by urban growth near many of the world's fast-disappearing temperature stations.

The number of temperature stations round the world peaked at 6,000 in 1970. It's fallen by two-thirds to 2,000 now: a real "hockey-stick" curve, and an instance of the UN's growing reliance on computer guesswork rather than facts.

Even a 0.6C temperature rise wasn't enough. So the UN repealed a fundamental physical law. Buried in a sub-chapter in its 2001 report is a short but revealing section discussing "lambda": the crucial factor converting forcings to temperature. The UN said its climate models had found lambda near-invariant at 0.5C per watt of forcing.

You don't need computer models to "find" lambda. Its value is given by a century-old law, derived experimentally by a Slovenian professor and proved by his Austrian student (who later committed suicide when his scientific compatriots refused to believe in atoms). The Stefan-Boltzmann law, not mentioned once in the UN's 2001 report, is as central to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein's later equation is to astrophysics. Like Einstein's, it relates energy to the square of the speed of light, but by reference to temperature rather than mass.

The bigger the value of lambda, the bigger the temperature increase the UN could predict. Using poor Ludwig Boltzmann's law, lambda's true value is just 0.22-0.3C per watt. In 2001, the UN effectively repealed the law, doubling lambda to 0.5C per watt. A recent paper by James Hansen says lambda should be 0.67, 0.75 or 1C: take your pick. Sir John Houghton, who chaired the UN's scientific assessment working group until recently, tells me it now puts lambda at 0.8C: that's 3C for a 3.7-watt doubling of airborne CO2. Most of the UN's computer models have used 1C. Stern implies 1.9C.

On the UN's figures, the entire greenhouse-gas forcing in the 20th century was 2 watts. Multiplying by the correct value of lambda gives a temperature increase of 0.44 to 0.6C, in line with observation. But using Stern's 1.9C per watt gives 3.8C. Where did 85 per cent of his imagined 20th-century warming go? As Professor Dick Lindzen of MIT pointed out in The Sunday Telegraph last week, the UK's Hadley Centre had the same problem, and solved it by dividing its modelled output by three to "predict" 20th-century temperature correctly.

A spate of recent scientific papers, gearing up for the UN's fourth report next year, gives a different reason for the failure of reality to keep up with prediction. The oceans, we're now told, are acting as a giant heat-sink. In these papers the well-known, central flaw (not mentioned by Stern) is that the computer models' "predictions" of past ocean temperature changes only approach reality if they are averaged over a depth of at least a mile and a quarter.

Deep-ocean temperature hasn't changed at all, it's barely above freezing. The models tend to over-predict the warming of the climate-relevant surface layer up to threefold. A recent paper by John Lyman, of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, reports that the oceans have cooled sharply in the past two years. The computers didn't predict this. Sea level is scarcely rising faster today than a century ago: an inch every 15 years. Hansen now says that the oceanic "flywheel effect" gives us extra time to act, so Stern's alarmism is misplaced.

Finally, the UN's predictions are founded not only on an exaggerated forcing-to-temperature conversion factor justified neither by observation nor by physical law, but also on an excessive rate of increase in airborne carbon dioxide. The true rate is 0.38 per cent year on year since records began in 1958. The models assume 1 per cent per annum, more than two and a half times too high. In 2001, the UN used these and other adjustments to predict a 21st-century temperature increase of 1.5 to 6C. Stern suggests up to 10C.

Dick Lindzen emailed me last week to say that constant repetition of wrong numbers doesn't make them right. Removing the UN's solecisms, and using reasonable data and assumptions, a simple global model shows that temperature will rise by just 0.1 to 1.4C in the coming century, with a best estimate of 0.6C, well within the medieval temperature range and only a fifth of the UN's new, central projection.

Why haven't air or sea temperatures turned out as the UN's models predicted? Because the science is bad, the "consensus" is wrong, and Herr Professor Ludwig Boltzmann, FRS, was as right about energy-to-temperature as he was about atoms.

UNQUOTE

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

mkpdavies · 15-11-2006, 09:46 AM

This is the whole issue. I don't deny climate change, why would I? It has been happening for millions of years. I don't see why it should stop now we have arrived.

The issues I have are.

1) Is man really having that much effect?
2) Even so, is it significant compared to what nature will throw at us?
3) Who says what we are doing is bad? It might end up good!
4) Are we even addressing the biggest players in climate change?
5) Could we use money more effectively in other ways to help us and the planet.

For having those questions I am accused of being equal to Islamic terrorists, Holocaust deniers. I am told my view shouldn't be heard, that I am dangerous, that I must have interests in the oil companies.

Burn the witch, burn him. He beleaves the earth is not flat, he must be evil, shut him up. End him. He doesn't want his home to be nice, he just wants to be rich. Finish him, make him go away.

Thank God there is still one set of people with a limited amount of political power standing up for rational debate and free speech.

It may have it's faults in terms of organisation, image etc but UKIP is a shining light in the darkness of fascism that passes off as democracy and politics at the moment.

SponPlague · 15-11-2006, 09:46 AM

this was posted on an Auntie discussion forum recently - Newsnight's "Ethical Man" had flown to the bahamas to make a point, and people were Bovvered...

Quote:

85. At 12:57 PM on 19 Oct 2006, John Finn wrote:
It’s no good – enough is enough. I can’t listen to any more drivel on ‘climate change’ from programmes like Newsnight. It was bad enough when they were simply urging the government or somebody or other to act, like some latter day King Canute, to “stop”, “tackle” or “combat” Climate Change. More recently though, we’ve been fed regular slots featuring some imbecile called “ethical man” and his crackpot wife, but Tuesday night really plumbed the depths. I am referring to the ‘debate’ between some token presence from the aviation industry and what appeared - from the level of his argument- to be a particularly bolshie 10 year old. It was chaired by Jeremy Paxman who’s clearly getting madder by the day. None of the three participants had the faintest idea what they were talking about. At some point. Paxman asked what must be the stupidest question ever which went something like “Why should millions of Africans die just because ‘we’ want to travel abroad on holiday?” What!!. Where on earth does this come from? I can only assume from some study with the usual plethora of ‘could bes’, ‘may bes’ and ‘up tos’. There is actually good reason to believe that Africa would, for reasons I’ll go into later, be one of the least affected regions in the world in the event of CO2-enhanced global warming. But first, for the benefit of the 10 year old, here is a brief background to the “Science”.

The earth warms due to the incoming solar radiation it receives from the Sun. It cools by convection, evaporation and by emitting Infra-Red (outgoing Long Wave) radiation from the earth’s surface. If the earth receives more radiation than it gets rid of – it warms up. If it gets rid of more than it receives - it cools down. Over the long term the Incoming is broadly equal to the Outgoing, implying that the earth’s mean temperature is more or less stable though there are millions of factors which, over hugely different time-scales, can disturb this state.

THE “GREENHOUSE EFFECT “

Without the so-called greenhouse effect the earth would absorb and emit energy at a mean temperature of –18 degrees C. This is 33 degrees C lower than the current mean global temperature of around 15 degrees C. To put this in perspective, global temperatures during the last Ice Age were around 5 or 6 degrees lower than they are to-day. In other words. the greenhouse effect is absolutely essential for the continuation of human life. So how does it work?

The earth’s atmosphere includes a number of gases – i.e. the ‘greenhouse’ gases – which warm the atmosphere by absorbing some (around 73%) of the IR radiation which is emitted from the earth’s surface. The most abundant and dominant greenhouse gas is water vapour though, because it’s individual molecules are short-lived in the atmosphere, many scientists refer to water vapour as a feedback. Other greenhouse gases include Carbon Dioxide (CO2), Methane plus smaller quantities of N2O, Ozone ..etc. It might seem reasonable, therefore, to think that any increase in CO2 concentrations could cause the earth to warm. But there are a couple of key questions here, i.e. does it and more importantly by how much. It might be useful here to use an analogy (not mine thanks Richard C.) to illustrate a crucial point. Imagine you are shining a torch. Now cover the torch beam with a sheet of paper. The paper will absorb some of the light and reduce the brightness of the beam. Keep covering the beam with sheets of paper until the light can no longer be seen. At this point covering the torch will have no further effect. All the light will have been absorbed (to the naked eye, at least). Now back to the CO2 increase. As we have previously implied CO2, as a greenhouse gas, can absorb IR radiation – but not all IR radiation. CO2 only absorbs in a narrow band about a peak absorption wavelength of 15 microns (wavenumber : 667 per cm). If we look at plots of the earth’s radiance emission and GHG absorption, it’s quite clear that the CO2 absorption band is already at (or very close to) ‘saturation’ point. That is, all the IR radiation which can be absorbed by CO2 is already being absorbed by the existing GH gases in the atmosphere or to refer back to our analogy we’ve already covered the torch with enough sheets of paper to prevent any light shining through.

When atmospheric CO2 concentrations were at pre-industrial levels (around 280 ppm), in the first 100m of the atmosphere (See Dr Jack Barrett’s paper at http://www.warwickhughes.com/papers/barrett_ee05.pdf), the earth’s emitted radiance was apportioned as follows;

72.9% was absorbed by GH gases; 22.5% escaped through the IR window (i.e. that region which is outside the GH gas absorption bands); leaving a remaining 4.6% for absorption in the next layer.

Doubling CO2 concentrations (to 560 ppm) alters the ratio as follows:

73.4% absorbed by GH gases; 22.5% escapes through the IR window (i.e. that region which is outside the GH gas absorption bands); leaving a remaining 4.1% for absorption in the next layer.

This is an increase of 0.5% absorption of total radiance (in the lower 100m). Bearing in mind that 73% absorption equates to a temperature increase of 33 deg C it’s hard to see how doubling CO2 can possibly result in an increase of any more than a few tenths of a degree.

I can well imagine some of the better informed readers will be pointing out that the reported rise of 0.6 degrees in the past century is already more than a “few tenths of a degree”. Others might want to draw attention to the much larger increases being forecast by IPCC modellers. If I have tine and can be bothered I’ll deal with both these issues (failing that I’ll respond if I’m specifically asked), but I did promise a comment on Africa, so here goes

The atmosphere in the tropics, including Africa, consists of high concentrations of water vapour – the dominant greenhouse gas. The absorption bands of water vapour overlap those of carbon dioxide. Hence the addition of CO2 will not have the same impact as it might in other parts of the world. Also – radiation energy and therefore wavelength varies as a function of the temperature of the emitting body. Basically the higher the temperature – the shorter the wavelength of the emitted radiation. Peak CO2 absorption wavelengths occur at colder temperatures, i.e. in the extreme latitudes towards the poles. In a nutshell CO2 should, theoretically, be most effective in the cold dry regions of the Arctic and the Antarctic. Ah - I hear you cry – isn’t this exactly what’s happening. Well - Yes and No. The Arctic has certainly warmed in the past 30 years, but it has only just reached the temperatures it reached in the 1940s. Check GISS station data for confirmation. The Antarctic, on the other hand, has actually cooled over the past 3 decades. Forget what you hear about Antarctic warming. This only refers to the Antarctic Peninsula – a small finger of land which juts out into the Southern Ocean. The climate of the Antarctic Peninsula is extremely vulnerable to fluctuations in ocean circulation. The large mass of the Antarctic interior shows a definite steady cooling trend.

Right that’s all for now. But for any interested ‘layperson’ it ’s worth reading the following

Two papers by Richard Lindzen (Professor of Atmospheric Physics at MIT)

‘Global Warming: The nature and Origin of the Alleged Scientific Consensus’ and the more recent ‘Understanding Common Climate Claims’ .

Also this highly readable and hugely significant paper by Ross McKitrick

‘What is the Hockey Stick debate about’

You’ll find all 3 on the web.

Biscuitman · 15-11-2006, 10:44 AM

My view is that Global Warming is more related to sun spot activity than mankind's doings. However, I do want a cleaner less poluted planet to live on.

Our planet is around 12,000 miles in diametre, (?), and mankind, by and large, occupies 20 or 30 feet of the surface. We are very insignificant by comparison.

Has anybody checked who is behind the funding for the GW faction? I wouldn't be surprised if the David Rockerfeller, who seems to be funding almost all the one world government type groups, was shelling out.

jp · 15-11-2006, 11:08 AM

I think this is relevant:

http://www.democracyforum.co.uk/about15573.html

One Londoner · 15-11-2006, 11:40 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Biscuitman

Has anybody checked who is behind the funding for the GW faction?

Surely the poor bloody taxpayer is funding it?

mkpdavies · 15-11-2006, 11:47 AM

I think he meant voluntary funding.

Unionist · 15-11-2006, 12:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Biscuitman

Has anybody checked who is behind the funding for the GW faction? I wouldn't be surprised if the David Rockerfeller, who seems to be funding almost all the one world government type groups, was shelling out.

George Soros is certainly one of them.

15-11-2006, 09:32 AM	#3 (permalink)
Tony Bennett Senior Member Join Date: Aug 2006 Posts: 879	Mockton on 'Global Warming' and 'Climate Change' This article, a bit technical in places, published in the Sunday Telegraph earlier this month, repays a careful read. The problem for 'climate change deniers' like me is that the world is currently getting warmer (though the extent of this may well be exaggerated). The only question is - why is it getting warmer? ================================================== ======================= Climate chaos? Don't believe it By Christopher Monckton, Sunday Telegraph Last Updated: 12:14am GMT 05/11/2006 QUOTE The Stern report last week predicted dire economic and social effects of unchecked global warming. In what many will see as a highly controversial polemic, Christopher Monckton disputes the 'facts' of this impending apocalypse and accuses the UN and its scientists of distorting the truth. [Biblical droughts, floods, plagues and extinctions?] Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was the worst "market failure" ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government". This week and next, I'll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science. Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the economics of climate change, which was published last week, says that the debate is over. It isn't. There are more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world should warm a bit, but that's as far as the "consensus" goes. After the recent hysteria, you may not find the truth easy to believe. So you can find all my references and detailed calculations here. The Royal Society says there's a worldwide scientific consensus. It brands Apocalypse-deniers as paid lackeys of coal and oil corporations. I declare my interest: I once took the taxpayer's shilling and advised Margaret Thatcher, FRS, on scientific scams and scares. Alas, not a red cent from Exxon. In 1988, James Hansen, a climatologist, told the US Congress that temperature would rise 0.3C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1C), and that sea level would rise several feet (no, one inch). The UN set up a transnational bureaucracy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The UK taxpayer unwittingly meets the entire cost of its scientific team, which, in 2001, produced the Third Assessment Report, a Bible-length document presenting apocalyptic conclusions well beyond previous reports. This week, I'll show how the UN undervalued the sun's effects on historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase, repealed a fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect. Next week, I'll demonstrate the atrocious economic, political and environmental cost of the high-tax, zero-freedom, bureaucratic centralism implicit in Stern's report; I'll compare the global-warming scare with previous sci-fi alarums; and I'll show how the environmentalists' "precautionary principle" (get the state to interfere now, just in case) is killing people. So to the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels. Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' " So they did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years. The graph looked like an ice hockey-stick. The wrongly flat AD1000-AD1900 temperature line was the shaft: the uptick from 1900 to 2000 was the blade. Here's how they did it: • They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature 390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so). • The technique they overweighted was one which the UN's 1996 report had said was unsafe: measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines. Tree-rings are wider in warmer years, but pine-rings are also wider when there's more carbon dioxide in the air: it's plant food. This carbon dioxide fertilisation distorts the calculations. • They said they had included 24 data sets going back to 1400. Without saying so, they left out the set showing the medieval warm period, tucking it into a folder marked "Censored Data". • They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise". The large, full-colour "hockey-stick" was the key graph in the UN's 2001 report, and the only one to appear six times. The Canadian Government copied it to every household. Four years passed before a leading scientific journal would publish the truth about the graph. Did the UN or the Canadian government apologise? Of course not. The UN still uses the graph in its publications. Even after the "hockey stick" graph was exposed, scientific papers apparently confirming its abolition of the medieval warm period appeared. The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found that the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of the scientists who had compiled it had written many of the papers supporting its conclusion. The UN, echoed by Stern, says the graph isn't important. It is. Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland: now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none. The Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and nearly all its 160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years, reversing a 6,000-year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes worldwide show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than now. And the snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit temperature is rising (it isn't) but because post-colonial deforestation has dried the air. Al Gore please note. In some places it was also warmer than now in the Bronze Age and in Roman times. It wasn't CO2 that caused those warm periods. It was the sun. So the UN adjusted the maths and all but extinguished the sun's role in today's warming. Here's how: • The UN dated its list of "forcings" (influences on temperature) from 1750, when the sun, and consequently air temperature, was almost as warm as now. But its start-date for the increase in world temperature was 1900, when the sun, and temperature, were much cooler. • Every "forcing" produces "climate feedbacks" making temperature rise faster. For instance, as temperature rises in response to a forcing, the air carries more water vapour, the most important greenhouse gas; and polar ice melts, increasing heat absorption. Up goes the temperature again. The UN more than doubled the base forcings from greenhouse gases to allow for climate feedbacks. It didn't do the same for the base solar forcing. Two centuries ago, the astronomer William Herschel was reading Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations when he noticed that quoted grain prices fell when the number of sunspots rose. Gales of laughter ensued, but he was right. At solar maxima, when the sun was at its hottest and sunspots showed, temperature was warmer, grain grew faster and prices fell. Such observations show that even small solar changes affect climate detectably. But recent solar changes have been big. Sami Solanki, a solar physicist, says that in the past half-century the sun has been warmer, for longer, than at any time in at least the past 11,400 years, contributing a base forcing equivalent to a quarter of the past century's warming. That's before adding climate feedbacks. The UN expresses its heat-energy forcings in watts per square metre per second. It estimates that the sun caused just 0.3 watts of forcing since 1750. Begin in 1900 to match the temperature start-date, and the base solar forcing more than doubles to 0.7 watts. Multiply by 2.7, which the Royal Society suggests is the UN's current factor for climate feedbacks, and you get 1.9 watts – more than six times the UN's figure. The entire 20th-century warming from all sources was below 2 watts. The sun could have caused just about all of it. Next, the UN slashed the natural greenhouse effect by 40 per cent from 33C in the climate-physics textbooks to 20C, making the man-made additions appear bigger. Then the UN chose the biggest 20th-century temperature increase it could find. Stern says: "As anticipated by scientists, global mean surface temperatures have risen over the past century." As anticipated? Only 30 years ago, scientists were anticipating a new Ice Age and writing books called The Cooling. In the US, where weather records have been more reliable than elsewhere, 20th-century temperature went up by only 0.3C. AccuWeather, a worldwide meteorological service, reckons world temperature rose by 0.45C. The US National Climate Data Centre says 0.5C. Any advance on 0.5? The UN went for 0.6C, probably distorted by urban growth near many of the world's fast-disappearing temperature stations. The number of temperature stations round the world peaked at 6,000 in 1970. It's fallen by two-thirds to 2,000 now: a real "hockey-stick" curve, and an instance of the UN's growing reliance on computer guesswork rather than facts. Even a 0.6C temperature rise wasn't enough. So the UN repealed a fundamental physical law. Buried in a sub-chapter in its 2001 report is a short but revealing section discussing "lambda": the crucial factor converting forcings to temperature. The UN said its climate models had found lambda near-invariant at 0.5C per watt of forcing. You don't need computer models to "find" lambda. Its value is given by a century-old law, derived experimentally by a Slovenian professor and proved by his Austrian student (who later committed suicide when his scientific compatriots refused to believe in atoms). The Stefan-Boltzmann law, not mentioned once in the UN's 2001 report, is as central to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein's later equation is to astrophysics. Like Einstein's, it relates energy to the square of the speed of light, but by reference to temperature rather than mass. The bigger the value of lambda, the bigger the temperature increase the UN could predict. Using poor Ludwig Boltzmann's law, lambda's true value is just 0.22-0.3C per watt. In 2001, the UN effectively repealed the law, doubling lambda to 0.5C per watt. A recent paper by James Hansen says lambda should be 0.67, 0.75 or 1C: take your pick. Sir John Houghton, who chaired the UN's scientific assessment working group until recently, tells me it now puts lambda at 0.8C: that's 3C for a 3.7-watt doubling of airborne CO2. Most of the UN's computer models have used 1C. Stern implies 1.9C. On the UN's figures, the entire greenhouse-gas forcing in the 20th century was 2 watts. Multiplying by the correct value of lambda gives a temperature increase of 0.44 to 0.6C, in line with observation. But using Stern's 1.9C per watt gives 3.8C. Where did 85 per cent of his imagined 20th-century warming go? As Professor Dick Lindzen of MIT pointed out in The Sunday Telegraph last week, the UK's Hadley Centre had the same problem, and solved it by dividing its modelled output by three to "predict" 20th-century temperature correctly. A spate of recent scientific papers, gearing up for the UN's fourth report next year, gives a different reason for the failure of reality to keep up with prediction. The oceans, we're now told, are acting as a giant heat-sink. In these papers the well-known, central flaw (not mentioned by Stern) is that the computer models' "predictions" of past ocean temperature changes only approach reality if they are averaged over a depth of at least a mile and a quarter. Deep-ocean temperature hasn't changed at all, it's barely above freezing. The models tend to over-predict the warming of the climate-relevant surface layer up to threefold. A recent paper by John Lyman, of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, reports that the oceans have cooled sharply in the past two years. The computers didn't predict this. Sea level is scarcely rising faster today than a century ago: an inch every 15 years. Hansen now says that the oceanic "flywheel effect" gives us extra time to act, so Stern's alarmism is misplaced. Finally, the UN's predictions are founded not only on an exaggerated forcing-to-temperature conversion factor justified neither by observation nor by physical law, but also on an excessive rate of increase in airborne carbon dioxide. The true rate is 0.38 per cent year on year since records began in 1958. The models assume 1 per cent per annum, more than two and a half times too high. In 2001, the UN used these and other adjustments to predict a 21st-century temperature increase of 1.5 to 6C. Stern suggests up to 10C. Dick Lindzen emailed me last week to say that constant repetition of wrong numbers doesn't make them right. Removing the UN's solecisms, and using reasonable data and assumptions, a simple global model shows that temperature will rise by just 0.1 to 1.4C in the coming century, with a best estimate of 0.6C, well within the medieval temperature range and only a fifth of the UN's new, central projection. Why haven't air or sea temperatures turned out as the UN's models predicted? Because the science is bad, the "consensus" is wrong, and Herr Professor Ludwig Boltzmann, FRS, was as right about energy-to-temperature as he was about atoms. UNQUOTE --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

15-11-2006, 09:46 AM	#4 (permalink)
mkpdavies Uber Member Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Woking Posts: 30,604	This is the whole issue. I don't deny climate change, why would I? It has been happening for millions of years. I don't see why it should stop now we have arrived. The issues I have are. 1) Is man really having that much effect? 2) Even so, is it significant compared to what nature will throw at us? 3) Who says what we are doing is bad? It might end up good! 4) Are we even addressing the biggest players in climate change? 5) Could we use money more effectively in other ways to help us and the planet. For having those questions I am accused of being equal to Islamic terrorists, Holocaust deniers. I am told my view shouldn't be heard, that I am dangerous, that I must have interests in the oil companies. Burn the witch, burn him. He beleaves the earth is not flat, he must be evil, shut him up. End him. He doesn't want his home to be nice, he just wants to be rich. Finish him, make him go away. Thank God there is still one set of people with a limited amount of political power standing up for rational debate and free speech. It may have it's faults in terms of organisation, image etc but UKIP is a shining light in the darkness of fascism that passes off as democracy and politics at the moment. __________________ http://brits4ronpaul.blogspot.com/ http://wokinglibertarians.blogspot.com/ http://lpuk.org My ignore list Labour, Blue Labour, Lib Dems

15-11-2006, 10:44 AM	#6 (permalink)
Biscuitman Uber Member Join Date: Oct 2004 Location: Reading Posts: 3,486	My view is that Global Warming is more related to sun spot activity than mankind's doings. However, I do want a cleaner less poluted planet to live on. Our planet is around 12,000 miles in diametre, (?), and mankind, by and large, occupies 20 or 30 feet of the surface. We are very insignificant by comparison. Has anybody checked who is behind the funding for the GW faction? I wouldn't be surprised if the David Rockerfeller, who seems to be funding almost all the one world government type groups, was shelling out. __________________ IF THE EU WAS THE ANSWER, IT MUST HAVE BEEN A STUPID QUESTION!

15-11-2006, 11:47 AM	#9 (permalink)
mkpdavies Uber Member Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Woking Posts: 30,604	I think he meant voluntary funding. __________________ http://brits4ronpaul.blogspot.com/ http://wokinglibertarians.blogspot.com/ http://lpuk.org My ignore list Labour, Blue Labour, Lib Dems

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15-11-2006, 11:08 AM	#7 (permalink)
jp Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 1,000	I think this is relevant: http://www.democracyforum.co.uk/about15573.html