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CLIMATE CHANGE

An Open Letter to my Cousins in the West and Readers in General:

I think you are probably taking the overwhelming amount of anti-climate change material on the windbag site as what I believe.

I believe when you tell me, that you and Barrie see differences in the fish species. I believe that we are in a general warming trend although not as great as thousands of years ago.

My site is an attempt to bring out the other side of the issues which do not except for the National Post, get a fair hearing. For example, to call someone a "climate change denier" is like calling someone Ernst Zundel [the Canadian who denies the holocaust]. What I see is OVER-emphasis on man's ability to change the temperatures. I don't deny what the temperatures are, just the cause.

We may have a small part to play, but when you look at how nature changes temperatures so quickly and easily with volcanoes and islands being born in the sea and so on, I question how puny man can even compete.

And the only reason I do question man's influence is because noted and well-known climatologists etc. have questioned man's influence and given convincing reasons as to their opinion. Unfortunately we are on such a temperature-rising bandwagon, they are dismissed or overlooked, not listened to in the crowd of yelling panic-mongers.

So I am simply attempting in my small way, to air the other side.
I have heard examples like how many glasses of water would you have to pour into the Pacific Ocean to raise the level 1 mm? That is what the many experts point out about temperature.

It never hurts to do everything we can for our environment. Back in 1970 when I took Biology, I read Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring", a classic on how pesticides etc. were soon going to kill off all birds and there would be silent springs from then on.

I read The Population Bomb (1968), a book written by Paul R. Ehrlich about overpopulation which claimed by the year 2000 [which was about 30 years away at the time], the earth would have so many people that there would be massive famines the likes of which we have never seen and people dying in masses due to too many people living in a crowded world.

Well the alarmists such as the two above, made us think, and we stopped a lot of pollution going into our lakes and rivers so that the Lake Ontario salmon once again is present in ever-increasing numbers. Lake Erie has seen a return of trout and bass.

So the alarmists serve a purpose, just like the alarmists regarding the year 2000. They make us take notice and change things and examine program code and re-write it. Some good things happen. Then we look and say it was all a big sham, "Look nothing happened! 2000 came and went!" True but it was partly because the alarmists made people take a closer look which prevented the problems.

However if you look at the predictions of the alarmists they are invariably wrong. We still have birds and no silent springs. We have even more population than the population-warners estimated and actually food is more evenly distributed and the poor are getting richer around the world. Oh it is never fast enough. But the dire warnings of calamity have come and gone like a horror movie.

So it is always good to listen and work at making things better, right?
But to shake up our society with drastic measures and carbon taxes and create even greater burdens on the poor and middle class is NOT an idea I agree with.

Have I made myself clearer?

Anyway Lorrie, as your father-in-law rightly observed, "everyone is entitled to their own ridiculous opinion" is a good policy.

So I wish you well with your "spring" and "mud" investments. Is someone who really gets into the white mud stuff called a "mudder"? [as opposed to a fadder?] Sorry Lorrie, just couldn't resist that one.

I really enjoy keeping in contact from time to time. It is sad to me on my side of the Wallingford's that they are all so scattered and living lives with no relationship with their own family tree. And of course the next generation won't even know the family tree at all. That is sad. However as the TV show, a few years back "Life Goes On".

And now an attempt at an early morning Irish Ontario prayer for the fishermen of the west.

May the ocean rise up to meet you
But not too high,

May the fish jump into your boat
before the hooks and nets are ready

May the sun always be at your back
but only when sailing north
at mid day

And may God bless you
with his greatest blessings.

Always.

Charles

Financial Post Story

POLAR BEARS NEED A BIRTH-CONTROL PILL NOT PROTECTION!!!
Population increases from 25000 to 40000!
Where are the over-population frenetics & fanatics when you need them???

Friday, May 16, 2008

The polar bears are doing fine

Peter Foster, Financial Post
Published: Friday, May 16, 2008

Today is Endangered Species Day in the United States. And what better way to celebrate it than the decision this week by the Department of the Interior to put the polar bear on the "threatened" list. No doubt this will provide another necessary jolt for eight-year-olds who have already become obsessed with climatic Armageddon after being forced to watch An Inconvenient Truth. But then who could forget Al Gore's little animated polar bear, paddling around desperately looking for a bit of ice on which to alight. Who could forget the following 2006 exchange between Mr. Gore and Oprah Winfrey, after showing the clip of the doomed creature:

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Presented by

Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

National Post Story

Global swarming? Like bees full of honey. Like a sunny day when the new queen takes her brood and flies off en masse to establish a new hive, a new colony, so are the days of our Global Swarming lives!

3/10/2008 12:00:00 AM

The media snowjob on global warming

Lorne Gunter, National Post
Published: 3/10/2008 12:00:00 AM

Just how pervasive the bias at most news outlets is in favour of climate alarmism -- and how little interest most outlets have in reporting any research that diverges from the alarmist orthodoxy -- can be seen in a Washington Post story on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), announced last week in New York.

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Related links

Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age

Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

U.K. Judge rules Gore film 'exaggerated'

U.K. judge rules Gore film 'exaggerated'

Parent challenged the showing of documentary in classrooms

On Saturday, October 13, 2007, Allison Hanes writes in the National Post

"A British High Court judge this week exposed nine inaccuracies in former U.S. vicepresident Al Gore's award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, labelling it "a political film" and calling many of its claims about climate change "alarmist" and "exaggerated."

Justice Michael Burton had been asked to rule on whether the showing of the Oscar-winning film in British classrooms amounted to education or indoctrination.

The ruling, just two days before Mr. Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday for his environmental activism, did not undermine the overall premise of the work and stopped short of preventing screenings. But it has dramatically altered the uncritical way in which it was being presented to British high school students as debate simmers in Canada and elsewhere over whether what some consider propaganda is being passed off as incontrovertible fact.

The British judgment resulted from a court challenge brought by Stuart Dimmock, the truck driver parent of two teenage sons, who argued that the British government's decision to distribute An Inconvenient Truth to all public high schools violated a provision of the education act forbidding "the promotion of partisan political views in the teaching of any subject in the school."

After viewing it himself, Judge Burton lauded Mr. Gore's film as "powerful, dramatically presented and highly professionally produced."

But he found the film blurs the line between science, politics and environmental advocacy.

"It is built round the charismatic presence of the ex-vicepresident, Al Gore, whose crusade it now is to persuade the world of the dangers of climate change cause by global warming," Judge Burton wrote. "Is is now common ground that this is not simply a science film -- although it is clear that it is based substantially on scientific research and opinion -- but that it is a political film.

"Its theme is ... that urgent, and if necessary, expensive and inconvenient steps must be taken to counter it."

Kalee Kreider, a spokesperson for Mr. Gore, said: "Of the thousands of facts, the judge seemingly only took issue with a handful."

Since the documentary began winning awards, it has become a popular educational tool worldwide.

In Canada, charitable foundations have funded the purchase and distribution of thousands of copies for schools.

But some have questioned whether its contents have been served up not as fodder for discussion and debate, but as scientific fact.

In Surrey, B.C., the school board passed a motion requiring that a documentary espousing a contrary viewpoint -- such as the British film The Great Global Warming Swindle -- be screened for students alongside Mr. Gore's.

Heather Stilwell said proposing the motion earned her the scorn of detractors.

"As soon as you dared to question, then it was in to attack mode. I was called a [George W.] Bush-lover -- I just asked if it was good science," she said. "Who can vote against being balanced in the classroom?"

She applauded the British court decision as common sense.

Victoria Serda, Ontario's deputy Green party leader, has been trained to deliver the slide show presentation on climate change that Mr. Gore gives in the documentary and has done so 67 times in Ontario, before 17,000 people, including school children.

She dismissed the court decision as "minor."

"How can a judge in England make a determination on whether something is scientific fact when he has no background in it?" Ms. Serda said. "This is a judge that doesn't even know what he's talking about, he doesn't work in the field, he's not a climate scientist, he's not a peer-reviewed scientific journalist. He has no basis in order to even go forward with this decision he's making. It's just kind of silly."

The court case brought by Mr. Dimmock resulted in the production of guidelines for teachers on how to bring a more critical viewpoint to classroom discussions of the film.

A first draft by the Education Ministry was produced during the court case, but Judge Burton found it didn't go far enough in addressing nine factual inaccuracies he uncovered in the film by comparing Mr. Gore's claims with a report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

New guidelines were produced that draw "specific attention to where Mr. Gore may be in error and/or in any event where he deviates from the consensus view as set out in the IPCC report, and by, where appropriate, raising specific questions for discussions."

Hundreds of copies of An Inconvenient Truth have been donated to Ontario schools by the Tides Canada Foundation.

Ontario Education Minister Kathleen Wynne said last summer it is not required viewing and that the government is not endorsing Mr. Gore's position.

Frank Bruseker, president of the Alberta Teachers Association, said he hasn't heard of the film being widely disseminated in his province.

As a former science teacher who has seen the film, Mr. Bruseker said if he showed it in his classroom, he would provide a disclaimer.

"You have to present the whole picture. Part of our job in educating students in my opinion is not to indoctrinate them with our views, but to educate them so they can make their own decisions."

---

NINE CONVENIENT UNTRUTHS

Untruth 1

Gore says: A sea-level rise of up to seven metres will be caused by melting of either West Antarctic or Greenland ice cap in the near future. Cities such as Beijing, Calcutta and Manhattan would be devastated.

Judge says: "This is distinctly alarmist, and part of Mr. Gore's 'wake-up call.' It is common ground that if indeed Greenland melted, it would release this amount of water, but only after, and over, millennia, so that the Armageddon scenario he predicts, insofar as it suggests that sea-level rises of seven metres might occur in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus."

Untruth 2

Gore says: Low lying inhabited Pacific atolls are being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming. "That's why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand."

Judge says: "There is no evidence of any such evacuation having yet happened."

Untruth 3

Gore says: The shutting down of the "Ocean Conveyor" would lead to another ice age.

Judge says: "According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it is very unlikely that the Ocean Conveyor (an ocean current known technically as the Meridional Overturning Circulation or thermohaline circulation) will shut down in the future, though it is considered likely that thermohaline circulation may slow down."

Untruth 4

Gore says: Two graphs relating to a period of 650,000 years, one showing rise in CO2 and one showing rise in temperature, show an exact fit.

Judge says: "Although there is general scientific agreement that there is a connection, the two graphs do not establish what Mr. Gore asserts."

Untruth 5

Gore says: The disappearance of snow on Mt. Kilimanjaro is expressly attributable to global warming.

Judge says: "The scientific consensus is that it cannot be established that the recession of snows on Mt. Kilimanjaro is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change."

Untruth 6

Gore says: The drying up of Lake Chad is a prime example of a catastrophic result of global warming.

Judge says: "It is generally accepted that the evidence remains insufficient to establish such an attribution."

Untruth 7

Gore says: Hurricane Katrina and the consequent devastation in New Orleans is due to global warming.

Judge says: "It is common ground that there is insufficient evidence to show that."

Untruth 8

Gore says: Polar bears have drowned swimming long distances to find ice.

Judge says: "The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm."

Untruth 9

Gore says: Coral reefs are bleaching because of global warming.

Judge says: "The actual scientific view, as recorded in the IPCC report, is that, if the temperature were to rise by 1-3 degrees centigrade, there would be increased coral bleaching and widespread coral mortality, unless corals could adapt or acclimatize."

Write to Allison Hanes at her public email address below.

ahanes@nationalpost.com

Terence Corcoran in the National Post Writes Gore's Prize "A Coup For Junk Science"

The Nobel prize used to be awarded to outstanding people. But when it was awarded to the likes of Yassir Arafat, I knew that it was suffering dementia ..... - Editor

Terence Corcoran wrote in the National Post ....

"A Coup For Junk Science"

"Gore's 'truth' Nets Nobel Prize

Global warming theory has been in political and scientific trouble for some time, but who knew it had sunk so low it needed a boost from the Nobel Peace Prize committee?

Rescuing and rewarding the obscure and the absurd has been a Nobel sideline for some years. The award has gone to half a dozen fringe movements and futile causes (the Gameen bank, Mother Teresa, nuclear disarmament, land mine activists, peace negotiators), ineffectual United Nations agencies and personalities (including KofiAnnan and the UN itself ), occasional warmongers (Yasser Arafat), plus an international assortment of minor and woolly-headed players on the world stage (Wangari Masthai, Jimmy Carter).

Onto this heap of forgotten causes and marginalia the Nobel has just tossed Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN's official climate science group. What a blow the award must be to the IPCC, self-proclaimed home of scientific rigour, to now be lumped in with Reverend Al and his Travelling Snake Oil Road Show and Climate Terror Machine.

If history is any guide here, the IPCC is now doomed to slide into obscurity, joining the list of similarly feted UN agencies that beaver away in relative obscurity and ineffectiveness, their Nobels rotting on shelves: The International Atomic Energy Agency (2005), United Nations peacekeeping forces (1988), the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (1981), the International Labour Organization (1969) and the UN Children's Fund (1965).

The first task of the IPCC now, one would think, is to craft a statement disavowing any link with Gore, whose film and book, both titled An Inconvenient Truth, deserved a Nobel for science fiction rather than peace. Not that the IPCC is squeaky clean on the science of climate accuracy. Even the Nobel committee's statement on the IPCC captured the agency's primary role as political shaper of opinion and builder of consensus. IPCC scientific reports have "created an ever-broader informed consensus" about man-made global warming. The Nobel committee said it wanted to "contribute to a sharper focus" on climate change around the world.

Due to the timing of the award, that sharper focus may end up highlighting the gross scientific inaccuracies in Gore's work, thereby making millions of people wonder about the validity of climate science -- and the Nobel -- rather than rush to join its crusading proponents.

Just hours before the Nobel announcement, Gore was busy spinning his way out of a devastating United Kingdom court case that found nine substantial science errors in the film version of An Inconvenient Truth.

The nine errors, listed on Page A19 of this newspaper, are truly major. But Gore's office, in true political form, tried to turn the science disaster into victory, claiming he was "gratified" that the U.K. court had not totally banned distribution of his film in British schools. Instead, it would have to circulate like a package of cigarettes, with a warning label: Children watch this movie at peril of being politically manipulated by Al Gore into thinking what they are watching is true.

This is fine with Gore, apparently, because the mistakes were only a "handful" amid "thousands of other facts in the film."

First of all, there are not thousands of facts in the film, except in the metaphysical sense. It is a fact that the world is presented as a globe floating in space, and a fact that Al Gore's wife looks pretty good in a sweater in the book version. But these are not the facts in dispute. The nine errors are core buttresses that support the whole hysterical narrative in the film and the book.

I don't have the film here to review, but the book is at hand, and it would have to be ripped to pieces to remove the science mistakes found by the court, whole sections removed and key narratives and innuendos thrown out as invalid. There would be nothing left.

The first theme of An Inconvenient Truth is that climate change is already devastating and that "very dramatic changes are taking place." On that page in the book, and the next three, are pictures purporting to show that the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro are disappearing. Not true, said the court.

Twenty pages later, a foldout graphic claimed to show 650,000 years of proof that carbon levels in the atmosphere cause temperatures to rise. Not true, said the court. The chart actually shows temperatures increased first, then carbon levels rose. In the film, this sequence alone consumes maybe five minutes, a clever turning point in which Gore mounts a ladder to demonstrate soaring carbon levels and make other false claims.

Pages of photos are built around Katrina and other hurricanes, which the court said cannot scientifically be pinned on global warming.

And so it goes through the book, each of the nine errors a pillar supporting hundreds of subsidiary claims that are now suspect, if not downright wrong. The untrue claim that Chad Lake, in Africa, had disappeared is used to mount an argument that global warming is leading to civil war and genocide in Africa.

The wildly exaggerated sea-level rise in the film and the book is not a small error of fact. It's the basis for a 10-page spread on how "THE MAPS OF THE WORLD WILL HAVE TO BE REDRAWN," showing Florida, Manhattan and San Francisco under water. Pages are devoted to species losses that are not happening.

The question on everybody's mind yesterday was whether the Nobel will spring Gore into the U.S. presidential race. Not a chance, I'd say. The young Al Gore pictured on draftgore.com in reality looks more like the John Travolta character from Hairspray. He is no JFK, as the Gore backers like to think. For more than a year he has refused to engage in any public debate over climate issues, or any issue for that matter. He's hardly ready for public exposure and scrutiny, and would get eaten alive by real opposition and challenge.

Given his science gaffes, and his political liabilities, the Nobel may be more of a liability, not just to Gore but to the entire global warming community. The prize has elevated junk science, gross exaggeration and outright misrepresentation to high international stature, the most prestigious award in the world, discrediting all who work honestly to find the facts and do the right thing."

Gore vs. Corcoran: Climate Change or GORE-bal Swarming?

Gore vs. Corcoran: Climate Change or GORE-bal Swarming?

Saturday, July 28, 2007 - from National Post
Is Gore Right [That's a laugh:he's Left!] or Corcoran?

IS CLIMATE CHANGE A LOOMING CATASTROPHE? OR A LEFT-WING FRAUD?

Terence Corcoran writes in the National Post "Don't believe Al Gore: Global Warming is a Crock!

He says, "Before we get to the climate change chapter of Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason, we need to know a bit more about the whole book. It helps put the climate stuff in perspective.

When the climate chapter refers to the "massive and well-organized" campaign of "lavishly funded" disinformation on climate change, backed by "wealthy right-wing ideologues," Gore is merely imposing the big theme of his book on the climate issue.

It's not a new theme. It's the same old leftist paranoia Noam Chomsky has been dispensing for decades: the idea that the media are tools of corporate-capitalist control used by power-hungry groups to undermineand destroy American democracy.

The Assault on Reason, now a bestseller, is a tour de force irrational rampage through the U.S. political system, a pseudo-intellectual pastiche of distorted history, context-dropping quotations, bizarre economic theory, and misrepresentations. Climate change is just a side issue to the book's major objective, which is to portray the United States as a country under the heel of power-hungry cabals of corporate and political interests. Gore calls it a "coalition of right-wing religious extremists and exceptionally greedy economic special interests."

The big theme is that Iraq, U.S. energy policy, climate issues, the Bush presidency and all that is wrong with the world can be pinned on the media. The Internet may eventually save us, but until that happens all citizens are at the mercy of electronic corporate power.

It all began, says Gore, with radio. Stalin, Mussolini, Adolf Hitler -- what do these totalitarian dictators have in common? "Each one mobilized support for his malignant, totalitarian ideology by using the powerful new medium for mass communication: radio."

In the United States, however, government "legal constraints" prevented abuse of radio through most of the last century. But "these constraints were removed during the Reagan administration in the name of 'free speech', and the results have been horrendous." Aha! So Ronald Reagan, that old totalitarian, is the culprit. And now radio, along with television, are controlled by the evil coalition. "One of the most obvious and dangerous consolidations of power has formed in the media, where powerful conglomerates have used their wealth to gain more power and consequently more wealth." Whew.

Now the climate chapter falls into place. These same wealthy right-wing ideologues loom over the climate issue. To prove this, Gore rehashes the trivial nonsense stories about ExxonMobil that are now part of the lore and mythical fabric of climate policy debate.

First we have the allegation that "one of the front groups" funded by Exxon had offered US$10,000 to each scientist who would produce a "pseudostudy" disputing climate science. This phony allegation surfaced in the left wing Guardian newspaper last year. It was based on a plan by the American Enterprise Institute to pay a group of scientists and contributors -- as it often does --an honorarium of US$10,000 to examine key climate issues.

Exxon's role? AEI's total revenues over the last seven years exceeded US$160-million, of which Exxon contributed less than 1% as part of its routine funding of foundations and think tanks. Gore's version of the Exxon science payoff is just a lazy rehash of climate activist dirty tricks. (For a full review of the AEI-Exxon story, search Google under "Scenes from the Climate Inquisition.")

Another dirty trick is the Royal Society's alleged role in rapping Exxon. Gore makes it sound like the full force of the society was brought down on the company. In fact, the society itself never really said anything about Exxon.

What happened was this. Bob Ward, then chief flak with the Society, was leaving the organization to take a new job elsewhere. A few weeks before his departure, he personally sent a letter to his corporate affairs counterpart at Esso UK Limited, a man named Nick Thomas. In the letter, flak to flak, Mr. Ward unloaded a lot of his personal concerns and first-person observations on what he viewed as Exxon's climate science failings. Mr. Ward, a clever manipulator if ever there was one, then leaked his own letter, again to the Guardian, the day before he resigned from the Royal Society. This created a sensation and established the now mythic Royal Society put-down of Exxon--even though it amounted to nothing more than a personal screed from a Royal Society employee who was about to jump ship.

Gore also repeats the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) charge that Exxon "funneled" nearly US$16-million over seven years to 43 advocacy organizations. That would include the US$1.6-million to AEI mentioned above. All other organizations would have received an average of US$330,000. Even the UCS described this as a "modest" funding effort -- and a far cry from the "massive" and "well organized" and "lavishly funded" crusade described by Gore. It's also peanuts compared with the billions and billions funnelled by governments to climate change promotion.

The Frank Luntz anecdote is another bit of recycled material from the trivia-laden war chest of climate activists. No doubt Luntz, a political strategist of the highest cynical caliber, actually did urge politicians to emphasize scientific uncertainty. So what? A larger number of strategists likely urged the opposite. Luntz is just another guy with advice on playing public opinion.

Gore's climate chapter -- including its brief notes on hurricanes, polar ice caps and other climate phenomena -- is a sloppy collage of false material and loose summaries of reports and stories.

In a later section of the climate chapter, not reproduced here, climate gets the full Gore treatment. He ties all his themes together in a typical total irrational meltdown. After a review of Hurricane Katrina as a climate event, Gore connects the dots between the unconnectable. "We were warned of an imminent attack by al-Qaeda; we didn't respond. We were warned the levees would break in New Orleans; we didn't respond. Now, the scientific community is warning us of the worst catastrophe in the history of human civilization."

When you think about assaults on reason, it doesn't get any worse than that."

If you wish to write to Terence, use his publicly published email address tcorcoran@nationalpost.com

Cold or Hot, it's Always Our Fault

Lorne Gunter writes in the National Post on Monday, July 23,

"If you haven't been following Lawrence Solomon's brilliant, reader-friendly Financial Post series on the scientists who are skeptical of the coming global warming crisis, you really must check it out. It's called Climate change: The Deniers, and there is a link to the 29 profiles he as written so far on the National Post's homepage. (Go to www.nationalpost.com, and scroll down to the "Current Features" section.)

In one instalment -- Forget warming -beware the new ice age -- published in June, Lawrence reminds readers that as recently as the 1970s, the scientific consensus was that earth was entering a new ice age.

If geological history is any guide, we're long overdue for one. And in the 1970s, the world was in the throws of a 30-year phase of especially cold weather. So naturally, scientists put two and six together and came up with impending disaster.

Politicians appointed high-level international commissions to determine when and how bad the coming peril would be. Extensive reports were funded citing this or that disaster as proof of an approaching deep freeze. The popular press was quick to run alarming stories about the disaster that awaited mankind.

In 1975, Newsweek ran a feature story entitled The Cooling World, the first sentence of which insisted: "There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production -- with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth."

Extreme weather would increase. Drought would grip huge regions of the planet. Crops would fail and tens of millions would starve. Wars would be fought over diminishing resources.

And the evidence for all this? Well, according to Newsweek it had "begun to accumulate so massively" there was no denying it. The scientific world had spoken. Don't bother to voice alternative theories.

Sound familiar?

Reading Lawrence's piece, though, I was struck by another similarity between the alarmism then and now: The proof for each was/is almost entirely circumstantial.

In theory, both global cooling and warming are possible. But all we can see are potential effects. We then look backwards to determine if we can discern a cause.

The scientists and activists who believe the globe is currently warming dangerously don't have any direct proof that carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases are the cause. They merely have a stack of potential consequences that they have convinced themselves amount to incontrovertible proof.

Today, effects such as big hurricanes, spring heat waves, rising levels of atmospheric CO2 and melting polar ice are pointed to as proof that a single cause (man-made carbon emissions trapping solar energy in the atmosphere) exists. As Lawrence reminds, in the 1970s the effects that were used to "prove" the cause included a killing winter freeze in 1972-73, followed by a severe summer heat wave in the United States, "anomalously low precipitation in the U.S. Pacific Northwest during the winter of 1972-73," the failure of the Soviet wheat crop in 1972, the failure of the Peruvian anchovy harvest the same year, even changes in Pacific ocean currents that scientists had never before seen.

So why, in the absence of direct proof, is the UN, along with thousands of scientists and environmentalists worldwide, currently so adamant that our activities -- humans' --are causing a climate meltdown?

British filmmaker Martin Durkin, whose documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle has already aired in the U.K. and Australia (and will soon be available here on DVD), thinks it is because "global warming is first and foremost a political theory." [Editor:as we told you here on Windbag-Energy, this is further evidence of what we call "GLOBAL SWARMING" like bees leaving a hive gathering together in a giant swarmball!]

Those who buy into it -- including most scientists who back it -- have a particular worldview that Durkin believes can be "summed up in the oft-repeated phrase 'we consume too much.' " He calls this "backward-looking bigotry," and claims it has "found perfect expression in the idea of man-made climate disaster. It has cohered a bunch of disparate reactionary prejudices (anti-car, anti-supermarkets, anti-globalization) into a single unquestionable truth and cause."

In other words (mine, not Durkin's), global warming has become the new locus for those who believe government is the solution to all ills, and central planning the preferred tool. [Editor: Does this sound familiar? Isn't that what socialism or communism is all about? The idea that inefficient government can decide what is best for you and I?]

When they look back through the stack of global warming consequences, they don't want to see any natural explanations. The sun, cosmic rays, cloud development and so on, cannot be controlled by Ottawa or the UN.

So they have grasped (and cling tenaciously to) a theory that might explain the science and favours their bias toward big-government solutions."


If you wish to communicate with Lorne, used his public email address: lgunter@shaw.ca

[Editor:Ominous stormclouds portending that the old communism and the new socialism are not yet dead! Why do we have so much trouble believing that individuals should make choices about their lives, instead of government? Doesn't this sound strikingly hypocritical considering the mantra "a woman should have the say about her own body" but we cannot choose how to live?

Which do we believe? Individual choice or what is supposedly good for humanity? Can government appeal to our positive sides to work toward being more environmentally-friendly or do they have to FORCE us by legislation to do so? Perhaps we don't have a good side and are too stupid to see "impending disaster"? Isn't it time we expose political hypocrisy? We cannot have it both ways:heavy-handed government intervention in everything or 'encouragement legislation' to reward steps toward being greener. It's time to decide! I can just see it now. The next disaster theory will be that 1/2 of the world is going to be too hot and the other half will be veering toward an ice age. There you have it global swarmists:start finding circumstantial evidence without cause for this GLOBAL CRISIS!]


Please feel free to comment unless you have nothing to say.
Photo by Charles Pedley

Al Gore:my favourite Martian by Peter Foster

Windbag-Energy Award NUMBER TWO goes to AL GORE!

Peter Foster in the Financial Post wrote an interesting piece on "Al Gore: my favourite Martian"

It was subtitled, "(AL) GORE: extra-terrestrial in disguise?"

Apparently Al Gore has been using Venus as an example of climate change comparing Venus's 867 degree temp to Mercury which is much closer to the sun and has temperatures one-third that of Venus. The cause? Venus is a cloud-covered planet which Mr. Gore uses an example of greenhouse effect.

Only thing he forgot to mention is how THE VENETIANS GOT THEIR SUV'S AND FACTORIES BELCHING FORTH SMOKE IN AN AVERAGE TEMPERATURE OF OVER 840 degrees! So if Venus has that high a temperature from volcano eruption, then how is getting rid of your SUV and shutting down all our industries going to stop temperatures like that on Earth?

Here is what he says,

"Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids In fact it's cold as hell?" --Elton John, Rocket Man [Hey Elton, WHERE YOU GET YO FACTS MAN?]

Elton John won't be performing at next Saturday's Live Earth series of concerts, reportedly the biggest "charitable" music event ever. However, like his Rocket Man, the concerts' main promoter, Al Gore, has invoked life -- or rather its absence -- on another planet as relevant to our situation on earth.

In a piece in last Sunday's New York Times, Mr. Gore suggested that Venus is a valid reference point for the dangers of the enhanced greenhouse effect. Earth's average temperature is a balmy 59 degrees (Fahrenheit), that of Venus a metal-melting 867 degrees. Is that difference due to being closer to the sun? No, says Mr. Gore. Venus is three times hotter on average than Mercury, which is practically sitting on the sun! The culprit? "It's the carbon dioxide."

We might note, however, that there have been no reports that X-ray surveys of Venus's cloud-enshrouded surface have uncovered the remnants of coal-fired power plants or SUV factories. Venus's carbon dioxide is thought to come entirely from its volcanoes, indicating the awesome power of natural forces. That presumably isn't the conclusion Mr. Gore wants us to draw.

The Venus reference is important for reasons beyond its typical attempt to use scientific factoids to stoke hysteria. I have long maintained that Al Gore is in fact an extra-terrestrial in disguise, and I would suggest that there were too many other-planetary references in his Times piece for this to be any longer in doubt.

One of Mr. Gore's more earthling rhetorical techniques is to marshal the voices of the noble dead to his cause. In last Sunday's column, he elicited the unlikely support of Ronald Reagan, who once said, "I occasionally think how quickly our differences would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world."

Given that Mr. Gore is a prime example of psychological "projection" (He accuses George Bush of being obsessed with power and world domination!), should we perhaps call in the Men in Black? I have little trouble envisioning a scenario in which Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones confront Mr. Gore, whereupon he transforms into something with an exoskeleton.

Live Earth certainly represents a gathering of space cadets. It might be called An Inconvenient Truth: The Musical. Apart from Mr. Gore, its main organizer is Kevin Wall, an L.A.-based distributor of digital concerts. Mr. Wall, a veteran organizer of awareness-raising shindigs such as Live Aid and Live 8, claims that he was inspired to join Live Earth by seeing Mr. Gore's documentary. He subsequently changed his life by trading in his Mercedes for a Lexus Hybrid. Despite his admiration for Mr. Gore, Mr. Wall refers to him as "Mr. Rhythm," and acknowledges that he is "a little stiff." But then what do you expect when your inner alien is straining to escape?

Another straw in the solar wind: Mr. Gore reportedly wanted to turn out the lights all over Britain for a brief period at the time of the concert. Was this really an attempt to signal to his home planet? As it turned out, the plot was foiled when the operators of the National Grid pointed out that the power surge when the lights were switched back on might disrupt the entire system, possibly flat-lining hospital patients on life-support.

Live Earth's hypocrisy seems a little out of this world, too. Its stars are among the largest consumers of energy on Earth. They are, however, reportedly being given "green counselling."

Those of a Jacobin temperament have an extraordinary urge to consume their own, and sure enough Greater Moralists have rounded on Live Earth's fellow pop poseurs. Saint Bob Geldof raised a discordant note when he suggested the concert was pointless because "We are all f--king conscious of global warming." Roger "Talking 'Bout My Co-Generation" Daltrey, lead singer of The Who, noted that the concert would represent a waste of fuel. Matt Bellamy, front man for a band called Muse, described it as "private jets for climate change." Case in point, Madonna, who will headline the show in London, reportedly used 440 tonnes of CO2 on her Confessions tour last year.

Live Earth has inevitably spawned a welter of "carbon offsets" to compensate for its very existence. Still perhaps all the artists can get together to record inspirational titles such as "Do they know it's the apocalypse?" or "Hybrids are not enough."

While Live Aid and Live 8 perpetuated the notion that the underdeveloped world's problems are rooted in a failure to redistribute wealth generated in the West, we might still believe that its promoters' and participants' hearts were in the right place. Live Earth has much more dubious political underpinnings. One of the less-publicized is its role in boosting another run by Mr. Gore for the White House. Go to AlGore.org and you will find the "2008 Grassroots Draft Campaign," motto: "The People, Not the Powerful '08."

I hope that Will and Tommy Lee are keeping their weapons charged."

GORE'S GURU DISAGREES!

Lawrence Soloman reported that GORE'S GURU DISAGREES!

The Deniers, Part XX: Gore's guru disagreed by Lawrence Solomon

In the history of the global-warming movement, no scientist is more revered than Roger Revelle of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Harvard University and University of California San Diego. He was the co-author of the seminal 1957 paper that demonstrated that fossil fuels had increased carbon-dioxide levels in the air. Under his leadership, the President's Science Advisory Committee Panel on Environmental Pollution in 1965 published the first authoritative U.S. government report in which carbon dioxide from fossil fuels was officially recognized as a potential global problem. He was the author of the influential 1982 Scientific American article that elevated global warming on to the public agenda. For being "the grandfather of the greenhouse effect," as he put it, he was awarded the National Medal of Science by the first President Bush.

Roger Revelle's most consequential act, however, may have come in his role as a teacher, during the 1960s at Harvard. Dr. Revelle inspired a young student named Al Gore.

Dr. Revelle would change Gore's life, particularly since the climate-change field had become cutting edge, with Dr. Revelle adding to the excitement by giving his students advance notice of the fruits of his research.

"It felt like such a privilege to be able to hear about the readouts from some of those measurements in a group of no more than a dozen undergraduates," Gore later explained. "Here was this teacher presenting something not years old but fresh out of the lab, with profound implications for our future!"

Calling him "a wonderful, visionary professor" who was "one of the first people in the academic community to sound the alarm on global warming," Gore thought of Dr. Revelle as his mentor and referred to him frequently, relaying his experiences as a student in his book Earth in the Balance, published in 1992. Gore's warmth for Dr. Revelle cooled, however, when it became clear that he had misunderstood his former professor: Although Dr. Revelle recognized potential harm from global warming, he also saw potential benefits and was by no means alarmed, as seen in this 1984 interview in Omni magazine:

Omni: A problem that has occupied your attention for many years is the increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, which could cause the earth's climate to become warmer. Is this actually happening?

Revelle: I estimate that the total increase [in CO2] over the past hundred years has been about 21%. But whether the increase will lead to a significant rise in global temperature, we can't absolutely say.

Omni: What will the warming of the earth mean to us?

Revelle: There may be lots of effects. Increased CO2 in the air acts like a fertilizer for plants . . . you get more plant growth. Increasing CO2 levels also affect water transpiration, causing plants to close their pores and sweat less. That means plants will be able to grow in drier climates.

Omni: Does the increase in CO2 have anything to do with people saying the weather is getting worse?

Revelle: People are always saying the weather's getting worse. Actually, the CO2 increase is predicted to temper weather extremes . . . .

While Gore in the late 1980s was becoming a prominent politician, loudly warning of global warming dangers, Dr. Revelle was quietly warning against taking any drastic action.

In a July 14, 1988, in a letter to Congressman Jim Bates, he wrote that:

"Most scientists familiar with the subject are not yet willing to bet that the climate this year is the result of 'greenhouse warming.' As you very well know, climate is highly variable from year to year, and the causes of these variations are not at all well understood. My own personal belief is that we should wait another 10 or 20 years to really be convinced that the greenhouse is going to be important for human beings, in both positive and negative ways." A few days later, he sent a similar letter to Senator Tim Wirth, cautioning ". . . we should be careful not to arouse too much alarm until the rate and amount of warming becomes clearer."

Then in 1991, Dr. Revelle wrote an article for Cosmos, a scientific journal, with two illustrious colleagues, Chauncey Starr, founding director of the Electric Power Research Institute and Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite. Entitled "What to do about greenhouse warming: Look before you leap," the article argued that decades of research could be required for the consequences of increased carbon dioxide to be understood, and laid out the harm that could come of acting recklessly:

"Drastic, precipitous and, especially, unilateral steps to delay the putative greenhouse impacts can cost jobs and prosperity and increase the human costs of global poverty, without being effective. Stringent controls enacted now would be economically devastating, particularly for developing countries for whom reduced energy consumption would mean slower rates of economic growth without being able to delay greatly the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Yale economist William Nordhaus, one of the few who have been trying to deal quantitatively with the economics of the greenhouse effect, has pointed out that '... those who argue for strong measures to slow greenhouse warming have reached their conclusion without any discernible analysis of the costs and benefits . . . .' It would be prudent to complete the ongoing and recently expanded research so that we will know what we are doing before we act. 'Look before you leap' may still be good advice."

Three months after the Cosmos article appeared, Dr. Revelle died of a heart attack. One year later, with Al Gore running for vice-president in the 1992 presidential election, the inconsistency between Gore's pronouncements � he claimed that the "science was settled" then, too � and those of his mentor became national news. Gore responded with a withering attack, leading to claims that Dr. Revelle had become senile before his death, that Dr. Singer had duped Dr. Revelle into co-authoring the article, and that Dr. Singer had listed Dr. Revelle as a co-author over his objections. The sordid accusations ended in a defamation suit and an abject public apology in 1994 from Gore's academic hit man, a prominent Harvard scientist, who revealed his unsavory role and that of Gore in the fabrications against Dr. Singer and Dr. Revelle.

That was then. Would Dr. Revelle, if he were still alive, believe that global warming now demands urgent action? We can never know. We do know, however, that Dr. Revelle had no time for the alarmist views of Al Gore in the 1980s. We also know that those whose views Dr. Revelle respected continue to caution us against precipitous action: Dr. Revelle's colleague and friend, Fred Singer, is among the most prominent of Al Gore's critics, and economist William Nordhaus, generally considered the leading expert in the field, continue to warn of the economic danger of climate alarmism.

We also know that the science is still not settled, and that in the years since Dr. Revelle's death, new research from many of the world's most respected scientists bears out the cautions that Dr. Revelle bequeathed us.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.

WOW! ALMOST 1/2 A DEGREE IN 107 YEARS!!!

"According to research cited by the IPCC in 2007, the Earth's average surface temperature has gone up about 0.6 C since the start of the 20th century. That may not sound like much, and many climatologists will agree that it isn't. But some say it's a sign of things to come." from CBC

This article is very interesting. Points on both sides but the above statement was very interesting to me.

You know how when they do polls, they say "accurate to within 3 - 4 points"? So how accurate is the 1/2 degree?

If you figure it out, that means that the earth's surface has been warming at the astounding rate of almost 0.0056074 degrees EVERY YEAR!! ARE YOU ALARMED NOW? WHAT KIND OF THERMOMETERS MEASURE WEATHER THAT ACCURATELY?

I THINK I WILL GO HOME AND HAVE A PANIC ATTACK!!!

DOOMSDAY CALLED OFF PART 1

DOOMSDAY CALLED OFF Part 5

Global Warming Swindle

Candidate Number One: John Moore

Tuesday, April 24 - John Moore's "CounterPoint" in the National Post receives the Windbag Award #1!

1. Question: What qualifies John Moore to even make any comments on global warming? Surely he has not fallen victim to the Hollywood-syndrome that is evidenced by those celebrities who think because they ARE celebrities they know everything about everything? What research has he done? Surely he doesn't think that his verbal journalism achievements are scientific?
   
2. His whole article appears to be a frontman attempt to thrust himself in the limelight to become Canada's next Liberal leader after Dion.
3. He comments that "Doing nothing is always cheap" and I would agree and add that "Saying nothing is cheaper". No matter how many words you use to say it, if you have no qualifications on a topic, omit truth from one's rhetoric, and proceed to deny the attempts of the Conservative government to get a responsible energy bill passed, then you are a truth-denier! And saying nothing in many words can be a cause of global warming! All that hot air should be harnessed to run our "Windbag Generator" which would make a positive attempt to provide Canada with a clean NEW energy source!
4. It would be interesting to hear how John explains the highest temperature recorded in North America was in Death Valley, California in 1913. How many cars and factories contributed to the 134-degree temperature then John? [Reference:National Climatic Data Center: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalextremes.html#hightemp. Just curious!]
5. And of course, we must all realize that the boats trapped in ice of the coast of Newfoundland is a result of massive ice melting in the North Atlantic!
   
6. Added July 2007 - Just HAD TO add this comment that I heard during the last election from John on his CFRB show. Of course it is not a quote but the IDEA IS THE SAME. He asked the question of his radio audience, "Should the Pope be allowed to make comments on political topics?" [My response: HEY JOHN, DO YOU KNOW THE DEFINITION OF DEMOCRACY? I thought you believed in FREEDOMS? Why should the Pope SHUT UP, YOU DON'T! Perhaps the question should be re-phrased, "Should John Moore be allowed to make comments about religion when he is a self-declared atheist? Isn't part of being an atheist admitTing that you know nothing about a God?" If that is true, then should you be allowed to make comments on things you know nothing about? [Oh! Oh! Sorry Hollywood! You can say anything you want, especially if it is in your area of expertise, FANTASY!"]