Dec 052012
 

To Stop Climate Change, Students Aim at College Portfolios

Rather good to have them wasting their time on such pointless activity  – but it doesn’t say much for the intellectual standards at Swarthmore or among Warmist generally.  If a college sells its shares, it can only do so if someone else buys them!

A group of Swarthmore College students is asking the school administration to take a seemingly simple step to combat pollution and climate change: sell off the endowment’s holdings in large fossil fuel companies. For months, they have been getting a simple answer: no.

As they consider how to ratchet up their campaign, the students suddenly find themselves at the vanguard of a national movement.

In recent weeks, college students on dozens of campuses have demanded that university endowment funds rid themselves of coal, oil and gas stocks. The students see it as a tactic that could force climate change, barely discussed in the presidential campaign, back onto the national political agenda.

“We’ve reached this point of intense urgency that we need to act on climate change now, but the situation is bleaker than it’s ever been from a political perspective,” said William Lawrence, a Swarthmore senior from East Lansing, Mich.

Students who have signed on see it as a conscious imitation of the successful effort in the 1980s to pressure colleges and other institutions to divest themselves of the stocks of companies doing business in South Africa under apartheid.

A small institution in Maine, Unity College, has already voted to get out of fossil fuels. Another, Hampshire College in Massachusetts, has adopted a broad investment policy that is ridding its portfolio of fossil fuel stocks.

“In the near future, the political tide will turn and the public will demand action on climate change,” Stephen Mulkey, the Unity College president, wrote in a letter to other college administrators. “Our students are already demanding action, and we must not ignore them.”

But at colleges with large endowments, many administrators are viewing the demand skeptically, saying it would undermine their goal of maximum returns in support of education. Fossil fuel companies represent a significant portion of the stock market, comprising nearly 10 percent of the value of the Russell 3000, a broad index of 3,000 American companies.

No school with an endowment exceeding $1 billion has agreed to divest itself of fossil fuel stocks. At Harvard, which holds the largest endowment in the country at $31 billion, the student body recently voted to ask the school to do so. With roughly half the undergraduates voting, 72 percent of them supported the demand.

“We always appreciate hearing from students about their viewpoints, but Harvard is not considering divesting from companies related to fossil fuels,” Kevin Galvin, a university spokesman, said by e-mail.

Several organizations have been working on some version of a divestment campaign, initially focusing on coal, for more than a year. But the recent escalation has largely been the handiwork of a grass-roots organization, 350.org, that focuses on climate change, and its leader, Bill McKibben, a writer turned advocate. The group’s name is a reference to what some scientists see as a maximum safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 350 parts per million. The level is now about 390, an increase of 41 percent since before the Industrial Revolution.

Mr. McKibben is touring the country by bus, speaking at sold-out halls and urging students to begin local divestment initiatives focusing on 200 energy companies. Many of the students attending said they were inspired to do so by an article he wrote over the summer in Rolling Stone magazine, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.”

SOURCE

Dec 052012
 

“Let’s All Spread Hate Against The Skeptics” – Alarmists’ Panic Confirms Stark Fear Of The Skeptic Invasion

Today I present to you the latest wonderful example of tolerance and open-mindedness from fundamentalist warmist site klimabedwetter.de here in green nutsy Germany.

Nowadays it’s hard to tell what the alarmists are more petrified of: the global climate catastrophe or the skeptic invasion in Europe. They are angry and panicked that the skeptics have succeeded in getting the public in Europe to question the dubious climate science.

It helps to recall that the klimaretter website is run by devout climate catastrophe alarmists who absolutely can’t live without the imminent threat of the end of the world. Don’t take my word for it, all you have to do is read their site. Of course, you may ask how anyone could possibly get so psychologically obsessed with and insistent about the end of the world? I’m afraid you’ll have to ask a psychiatrist that question.

You can be pretty sure that when December 21 passes many of the disappointed Mayan calender kooks are going to be hitching their wagons to the next best thing: the coming global climate catastrophe. But don’t try to tell them that it’s just another hoax. Good news on climate is like holy water to the devil.

I witnessed this first hand at a press conference when a klimabedwetter went into emotional seizures when Fritz Vahrenholt and Sebastian Lüning introduced their book Die kalte Sonne telling us that there wasn’t going to be a climate catastrophe after all. “Sorry – now go home and do something worthwhile for a living.” That good news was simply too much for the warmists in the audience to take.

So without further ado, here’s the latest spread-the-hate piece by klimabedwetter.de. It’s about the drive-by journalism hit on skeptics by weekly Die Zeit:

The unscrupulous schemes used by certain circles of business and politics to manipulate public opinion on climate change and renewable energies are revealed by a report by Die Zeit: “The Climate Warriors”. It exposes the crusade of these ideologically blinded deniers in horrifying detail. It is really shocking how professional PR strategists, with the help of lots of money and self-anointed climate experts, are hounding renowned scientists. It is of great worry that these well-paid ‘experts’ have in the meantime gotten gotten attention in Europen. Their crude claims have not only been picked up by the major dailies and talk shows, but also by the German parliament.

It is essential for us all to take a stand against these demagogues and to publicly denounce their unscrupulous schemes.

Die Zeit performed an exemplary service here. I really would like to see more of such detailed researched articles.”

What does this tell us about the warmists in Germany? Gandhi says it the best in a nutshell: First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.

The skeptics in Europe have made it to step 3 in almost record time. I suspect step 4 will the accomplished even more quickly.

SOURCE

Jun 082012
 

Quick! Where is that global warming? Subcontinental glaciers are not melting

Global cooling set to starve Pakistan

Climate change is already beginning to affect the Pakistani economy it seems: Punjab’s agricultural areas face a water shortage due to the late melting of the Himalayan glaciers that form the source of the region’s rivers, delaying the sowing of three of the four most important crops in the country – cotton, sugarcane and rice.

“The water flow in the rivers is approximately 35% below what it should be for this time of the year,” said Arshad Khan, an officer at the Punjab irrigation department. “That shortage may rise to as high as 45% in the coming months just as the sowing season starts.”

Continue reading »

Jun 082012
 

Note: There is not one detail offered about the “review” or even about who conducted it

A review has cleared the scientist Peter Gleick of forging any documents in his expose of the rightwing Heartland Institute’s strategy and finances, the Guardian has learned.

Gleick’s sting on Heartland brought unwelcome scrutiny to the organisation’s efforts to block action on climate change, and prompted a walk-out of corporate donors that has created uncertainty about its financial future.

Gleick, founder of the Pacific Institute and a well-regarded water expert, admitted and apologised for using deception to obtain internal Heartland documents last February.

Continue reading »

Jun 082012
 

Ben Pile is a throughly admirable climate skeptic but he usually writes in such an intellectual way that he gives even me a bit of a headache — and with 200+ published academic journal articles and an interest in non-English poetry I have some claims as an intellectual myself. The following excerpt from one of his articles is pretty clear however — with a bit of judicious re-paragraphing.

I myself always answer advocates of the precautionary principle by agreeing with it — and pointing out how near we are to the end of a warm interglacial — which leads to the imperative that we should be preparing urgently for global cooling.

Continue reading »

Jun 082012
 

An environmentalist lobbying group claims corporations pay vast sums to misrepresent climate science.

The fact that at least one member of the UCS is a dog does however lend a lighter touch to their pontifications

Ronald Bailey

Last week the environmental lobbying group the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a new report entitled “A Climate of Corporate Control: How Corporations Have Influenced the U.S. Dialogue on Climate Science and Policy” [PDF]. Among other things, the report claims to trace corporate donations in 2008 and 2009 to think tanks and politicians as a way to uncover the true corporate attitudes and intentions toward climate change science and policy. According to the UCS, its analysis reveals that some corporations are climate-change science hypocrites, claiming to support the climate-change “consensus” in some venues but not in others. This climate hypocrisy allegedly produces confusion among both the public and policymakers, resulting in the defeat or delay of urgent policies needed to address climate change.

Continue reading »

Feb 232012
 

Martin Hertzberg, Ph.D, wrote the following in response to an article by an alleged physicist who was taken in by “ad hominem” arguments :

The following commentary is submitted for your consideration in response to today’s guest commentary in the SDN by Dave Yost.

It is tragic that what should have been a respectful and objective evaluation of the available data on weather and climate by qualified, independent scientists, has instead degenerated into a partisan diatribe among journalists, environmentalists, historians and politicians: none of whom is qualified in either meteorology or climatology. Weather and climate are controlled by natural laws on a scale that is enormous compared to the scale of human activity. Those natural laws engender forces and motions in the Earth’s atmosphere, its oceans, and its surface that are beyond human control. Weather and climate existed long before humans appeared on Earth, and they will continue to exist in the same way long after we are gone, either individually or collectively as the human race.

Those forces and motions are driven by the following phenomena. First, there is the motion of the Earth relative to the Sun: the periodic changes in its elliptical orbit, the rotation of the Earth about its axis, the periodic changes in the tilt of that axis, and the periodic precession of that axis. Second, there is the variation in solar activity, which causes changes in the amount of radiant energy that reaches the Earth and also causes variations in the cosmic ray input into its atmosphere, which affects the Earth’s cloudiness. Third, there is the distribution of land and water on the Earth’s surface, which controls the temperature distribution of the atmosphere, the availability of moisture, monsoon effects and the paths and intensities of hurricanes, typhoons and other storms. Fourth, there is the topography of the Earth’s land mass, which causes copious precipitation on the windward side of mountains and aridity on the leeward side. Fifth, there are the motions within the Earth’s oceans that determine moisture availability and its surface temperature distribution (El Nino and La Nina cycles).

The determinant of weather is mainly water in all of its forms: as vapor in the atmosphere; in its heat transport by evaporation and condensation, as the enormous circulating mass of liquid ocean whose heat capacity and mass/energy transport dominate the motions of our atmosphere and the precipitation from it, and finally as cloud, snow, and ice cover which influence the radiative balance between the Sun, the Earth, and free space. In comparison, the human emission of CO2 is totally insignificant for the Earth’s weather and climate and there is not one iota of reliable evidence that proves otherwise.

Most of this was learned by me when I served as a research and forecasting meteorologist while on active duty in the U. S. Navy. That was long before the ersatz field now called “Climate Science” was fabricated out of thin air for the main purpose of promoting the theory that human emission of CO2 was causing “global warming/climate change/extreme weather phenomena.” Note that since it stopped warming about a decade ago, “global warming” morphed into “climate change,” but since climate has always changed, it morphed into “extreme weather phenomena.” Although the theory has become a moving target over the last decade, it is still relatively easy to track it and to shoot it down on the basis of the real data that is available.

Dave Yost’s column claims that “it is now warmer than it has ever been.” That claim is false. Climatologists have long known that the Medieval Warm Period and dozens of other periods in the Earth’s history were much warmer than today because of the factors enumerated above and long before any significant human emission of CO2. The data (see www.climate4you.com) show significant cooling in the Earth’s average temperature over the last decade, no significant change in Arctic ice area coverage, and a significant decline in sea level over the last two years.

While I disagree strongly with most of the political positions of the Heartland Institute, they deserve considerable credit for sponsoring a series of conferences of the world’s leading meteorologists and climatologists whose papers show clearly that the theory that human emission is causing “global warming/climate change/extreme weather phenomena” is without merit. The attempt in Orestes and Conway’s “Merchants of Doubt” to defame and to cast doubt on the integrity of those distinguished scientists, is a disservice to both science and history. For the record, I have not received one cent of financial support from either the CATO or the Heartland Institutes, and I think they are wrong in most of their other political positions.

SOURCE

Feb 232012
 

Dutch scientist and chemical engineer Dr. Arthur Rörsch has distributed a working paper to Dutch officials in his country to request a comprehensive review of the results and recommendations of the IPCC, especially its upcoming 5th assessment report.

In his paper Rörsch, former vice-president of the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Research, writes that the IPCC has “deviated from the traditional scientific principles”. On man-made warming from CO2, he writes “that no indisputable scientific proof, or even strong empirical evidence, has been provided for such an effect, which therefore remains a matter of speculation.”

He adds: “These reviews would best be undertaken by senior and established scientists whose reputation rests in the traditional enabling disciplines that underpin climate science, specifically physics, chemistry, geology and meteorology.”

The draft volume for WG1 AR5 is a summary and compilation of papers published in scientific journals up to 2011. Rörsch makes two observations:

- The prevailing hypothesis of the assessment report is that Dangerous Anthropogenic Global Warming (DAGW) is occurring; this hypothesis has been under challenge for many years by numerous independent scientists. These scientists were not invited to participate in the preparation of the AR5 report.

- The scientific literature cited in the draft AR5 is selective towards papers that support the DAGW hypothesis, and even the papers that are included are then selectively analysed towards the same ends. These two underlying biases set the tone of the message that the authors of the AR5 report want to transmit.

Rörsch particularly criticizes the following points:

1. The IPCC assumes that atmospheric CO2 is a dominant forcing agent for global temperature without providing evidence.

2. The report authors are instructed to express their conclusions in terms of a qualitative (i.e. opinion-based) probability scale.

3. The IPCC’s use of “self-appointed experts”.

4. There’s arrogance and intolerance for alternative views displayed by the self-appointed climate experts. These experts should be treated with extreme suspicion.

5. The style of the draft AR5 report marks it as a political rather than a scientific document, for it has been fashioned within the framework of a particular cultural paradigm.

Here’s what Dr. Rörsch concludes: “The IPCC’s draft AR5 report shows insufficient objectivity, and lacks the ‘traditional’ scientific balance necessary for it to be used as the basis for policy making. Regrettably, the report exemplifies some of the worst features of the ‘post-modern’ approach to science…”

SOURCE

Feb 232012
 

Facts don’t bother Warmists

The Himalayan glaciers aren’t melting, at least for the moment, says a recently study published in Nature. Between 2003 and 2010 the effective change in the size of glaciers in the high mountains of Asia was “not significantly different from zero,” said a British scientist not involved with the study, who added, “I believe this data is the most reliable estimate of global glacier mass balance that has been produced to date.” Low-lying glaciers were indeed melting, but ice added at higher altitudes made up the difference.

Astoundingly, the scientists don’t seem to have realized the significance of their own findings. “People should be just as worried about the melting of the world’s ice as they were before,” said one of the researchers. In other words, we should be just as worried as we were when the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was scaring us with the news that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 (or was it 2350?). It turns out, too, that the polar bear population in the Arctic is much more stable than previous estimates suggested.

The science is never settled.

SOURCE

Feb 232012
 

by John O’Sullivan

Astrophysicists will tell you that the vast emptiness of outer space has no temperature. Space is empty, thus it is temperature-less. But ask a climatologist and you’ll be told space is ‘cold.’ Such fallacy spawned the fatal error in the junk science known as ‘greenhouse gas theory,’ also called the ‘greenhouse effect’ (GHE).

Alberto Miatello has now published his own stunning debunk of Dr. Roy Spencer’s‘Yes, Virginia, Cooler Objects Can Make Warmer Objects Even Warmer Still’ (July 23, 2010) dissecting how the fallacy of ‘cold’ outer space allowed climatologists to believe Earths’ atmosphere acted like a ‘blanket’ to help keep our planet ‘warmer than it otherwise would be.’

Miatello’s paper adroitly affirms a prior compelling evisceration of Spencer’s errors by Dr. Pierre R. Latour in Latour’s masterful, ‘No, Virginia, Cooler Objects Cannot Make Warmer Objects Even Warmer Still.’

The Miatello and Latour papers utterly vindicate the groundbreaking analysis of the ‘Slaying the Sky Dragon’ book – the world’s first full-volume refutation of the greenhouse gas hypothesis – a publication that some critics have tried and failed to discredit. Miatello’s exposure of the ‘cold’ space fallacy is further compelling affirmation that fudged numbers were fed into the bogus ‘greenhouse gas theory’ equations.

Miatello’s new paper, ‘Roy Spencer and the Vacuum Bottle Flask’ (February, 2012), not only refutes Spencer’s errors but also once again affirms the damning analysis of savvy climatologist, Dr. Tim Ball who points out, “Climatology is a generalist discipline in a world of specialization.”

Generalists, we find, often need specialist help. We can forgive principled experts such as doctors Roy Spencer and Richard Lindzen because they are not specialists. As Miatello points out,

“The vacuum space is neither cold nor hot, being void of all molecules/atoms (or almost void) and as such has no temperature. Then, you can clearly see the aftermath of Spencer’s wrong idea of ‘cold’ vacuum outer space.”

What did the ‘Cold Space’ Fallacy do for Greenhouse Gas Believers?

Anyone who reads Roy Spencer’s ‘Yes, Virginia…’ can adduce that Spencer truly believes that vacuum space is cold, because unlike Pierre Latour’s ‘No, Virginia…’ debunk, Spencer did not feel the need to add quotation marks on the word ‘cold.’

Miatello observes, “I saw that Pierre understood that the cosmic vacuum is not cold, and so did not devote much attention to the point. However, I saw that it was important to identify Spencer’s error that vacuum space is NOT cold.”

But how significant is this?

“IF the vacuum of space were cold – then it would be true what Spencer (and many GHE supporters) maintain, namely: the colder body reduces the rate of the heat loss by the hotter body, etc.”

But because we know that vacuum space is neither cold nor hot (being almost void of matter and thus having no temperature) we can clearly see the aftermath of Spencer’s wrong idea of a ‘cold’ vacuum of outer space.

No ‘Heat Loss Blanket Effect’ because Vacuum Space is ‘Neutral’ not ‘Cold’

This then has a fatal knock on effect for GHE calculations. We can better understand the root of the big mistake by GHE promoters because they actually believe that our ‘colder’ atmosphere is reducing the rate of heat loss, as a blanket with our body, just because (in my opinion) they believe that vacuum space is ‘cold.’

Of course, they would be right if the vacuum of outer space were truly ‘cold.’

But unfortunately for them, vacuum space is neutral (neither cold nor hot), and so the rate of heat loss by our ‘hotter body’ (earth’s surface at +15° C), surrounded by a colder body (atmosphere at – 18°C) is much larger than what they believe!

There is no greenhouse effect, our atmosphere is not surrounded by a ‘colder’ vacuum space and thus our atmosphere is not a blanket reducing the rate of heat loss. On the contrary, our gaseous and ‘wet’ atmosphere is acting to cool our planet’s surface by convection and conduction while constrained within the energy neutral zone of the ‘thermos flask’ of vacuum space.

Such reasoning is faultless and demands the immediate cessation of all further reliance on spurious GHE numbers. It’s now all exposed as pure GIGO: ‘garbage in – garbage out.’

Paging James Hansen: NASA’s Errant Evangelist of Climate Fraud

The crass notion of ‘cold’ outer space is but one of several gross misunderstandings built into the calculations of the increasingly discredited ‘theory’ that is the cornerstone of the $100 billion man-made global warming industry.

Although we can justly forgive Spencer for his errors, we cannot forgive the ultimate instigator of the GHE fraud: NASA’s Dr. James Hansen. Hansen has stubbornly refused to listen to fellow NASA veterans like Dr. Pierre Latour and others – experts who actually put Neil Armstrong on the moon.

And Hansen is not alone within NASA for sustaining this fraud. Since the glory days of the Apollo Mission, the once great U.S. space agency has lost its way. It abandoned its place at the cutting-edge of space science to descend into political advocacy; recently being caught out faking sea level rises and surface temperature records.

In 1969 when Armstrong took his ‘giant leap’ to walk on the moon no one at Mission Control was confused about whether space was ‘cold’ or not. Everyone understood that in the airless void outside Earth there was neither ‘hot’ nor ‘cold’ – just emptiness. The reason: Back then, NASA applied the traditional scientific method rather than post-normal science.

One of the greatest dangers to the astronauts was not freezing in their suits but getting the excess body heat away from their skin. This is because in a vacuum, with the absence of any molecules, the free exchange of temperature is virtually impossible.

NASA Literature Contradictory and Confused on “Cold” Outer Space

After pulling out of the ‘space race’ a politicized NASA applied a self-contradictory double-speak to maintain the illusion that space is ‘cold’ when describing the need for huge radiators on the International Space Station (ISS). NASA spin doctors now crassly state: “MLI insulation does a double-duty job: keeping solar radiation out, and keeping the bitter cold of space from penetrating the Station’s metal skin.”

NASA then admits, in its ‘Staying Cool in Space’ web page that the “ISS needs huge radiators to get rid of its excess heat.” So much for the ‘cold’ of space!

So deadly is the risk of astronauts being cooked alive in the ‘cold’ tin can of the ISS that the vehicle requires 14 honeycombed aluminum panels each measuring 6 by 10 feet (1.8 by 3 meters), for a total of 1680 square feet (156 square meters) of ammonia-tubing-filled heat exchange area just to stay cool.

Our Planet: the Air Conditioning Chiller

Firmly shoulder-to-shoulder with the ‘Slayers’ is yet another compelling voice in a growing cacophony of specialist voices demonstrating that the time has come for a full re-examination, then abandonment of the false GHE paradigm.

For too long highly educated scientists have imagined our atmosphere as a ‘blanket,’ instead of a ‘refrigerator,’ or at least an ‘air conditioning chiller’ surrounding our planet, as it is in reality.

With the myth that space is ‘cold’ now firmly debunked Miatello calls on Spencer and other principled climatologists to work with us to promote a new ‘Copernican revolution’ throughout the blogosphere.

Once climate scientists understand that the concept of a ‘blanket’ trapping effect is false then they will grasp the fact that the very foundation of the greenhouse gas effect itself is also proven to be false. As such, the necessary scientific proof is now in hand to bring a swift end to the needless and grossly expensive restriction on human emissions of the benign trace gas, carbon dioxide.

SOURCE

Feb 232012
 

Greener Than Thou

By Alan Caruba

The most obnoxious and hypocritical people are those who are always preaching a “greener” way of life, insisting that anything that constitutes our modern lifestyles are destroying the Earth and depleting its natural resources. Never mind that we depend upon oil, natural gas, coal, and a host of minerals and chemicals for that lifestyle, the absence of which caused people in earlier eras to live shorter, far more unpleasant lives.

Oil, other than ust an energy source is also a component in countless products, starting with plastic, and is so vital to modern life that its value goes far beyond just being able to drive our cars to visit grandma.

Greener than thou has replaced holier than thou ever since Rachel Carson penned her pernicious and seriously flawed attack on DDT and other chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides in 1962. The result has been the needless deaths of millions from malaria in Africa and subtropical nations after the U.S. banned DDT and other nations followed suit. If there was a comparable pesticide available today, the U.S. would not be suffering a biblical plague of bed bugs.

A bone fide environmentalist, David Owen, has written a book that quite literally filets environmentalism, “The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse.” ($14.00, Riverhead Press, softcover).

Owen, who has authored 14 previous books, examines the way environmentalism frequently makes no sense at all. This is not to be confused with conservation, the earlier movement that led to the preservation of some of the nation’s natural wonders.

To live an environmentally acceptable way of life is the same as striving to be a saint, avoiding “sin” in order to secure a place in heaven. It is not only virtually impossible, but to be human is to consume what Nature provides. If you think about, all of Earth’s creatures are consumers, depending on where they are on the food chain.

For example, when environmentalists convinced Congress to reduce the amount of water in toilet tanks, the only thing they accomplished was to require that the newer, smaller tanks had be flushed twice to rid he toilet of feces and urine, i.e., more use of water, not less. The EPA has just issued a ruling they claim is necessary to reduce mercury emissions despite the fact that your average volcanic eruption puts more into the atmosphere than any human imposed restrictions could ever achieve. Congress, however, passed a law banning 100-watt incandescent light bulbs, thus requiring people to purchase mercury-filled ones that, if broken, require a hazmat team to clean up after.

Environmentalism is essentially irrational.

It believes that humans actually have anything to do with “saving the Earth” when the natural forces of the Earth are so far beyond any “control” that it routinely reminds us of this fact. We have zero impact on the climate and, as for carbon dioxide, the villain of all “global warming” claims, humans exhale about six pounds of it every day. And there are seven billion of us. Even so, it constitutes barely 0.033 percent of the atmosphere.

Owen begins by posing the question, “How do we truly begin to think about less—less fossil fuel, less carbon, less water, less waste, less habitat destruction, less population stress—when our sense of economic, cultural, and personal well-being is based on more?”

The real question at the heart of all environmentalism is what do we do when there are seven billion humans using the resources of the Earth and the real answer for environmentalists is how do we reduce the Earth’s population and how do they grow rich in the process? That is what lies at the heart of all the “solutions” put forth by the United Nations environmental program; an enemy of the human race if there ever was one.

What environmentalists want is “a vast, unprecedented transformation of human behavior in our relationship with energy and consumption.” The next time you hear anyone call for a “transformation” know also that they are a charlatan seeking control over your life.

The environmental assumption is that the Earth is running out of the sources of energy and that consumption is bad. Both are equally wrong because the Earth is not running out of the sources of energy and consumption is what humans and all other species on Earth do every day.

Owen believes that humans are “the world’s main emitter of manmade greenhouse gases” and this is utterly false. The so-called greenhouse gases are the ones in the atmosphere that not only keep the Sun from turning the Earth into a desiccated version of Mars or the Moon, but in the case of carbon dioxide, it is responsible for every single element of vegetation upon which all life depends.

Owen and many environmentalists would prefer that all of humanity live packed side-by-side in crowded cities, using mass transit or bicycling to work to save the Earth, but anyone who gives two thoughts to the amount of energy consumed to maintain a city knows this too is yet another idiotic environmental conceit.

Indeed, Owen notes that “There are many downsides to density, including the fact that squeezing people and their destinations close together makes diseases, wars, and natural disasters more efficient, too.”

That, says Owen, is a conundrum. Indeed, his book is filled with environmental conundrums that he tries to resolve while overtly and inadvertently exposing the idiocy of environmentalism.

Simply put, farmers are the world’s natural environmentalists, relying on the weather—which they cannot control—and the stewardship of their land to feed themselves and others. They must, however, have a means to move their crops to places where other humans can acquire them and that requires a massive system of transportation which, in turn, requires the affordable use of energy.

Environmentalism’s goals, clean air and water, are laudable, but a massive governmental bureaucracy to require that people use less energy and consume less is not.

Time and time again we see examples of environmentalism that only manage to kill people, whether it is the banning of beneficial chemicals or the use of the least efficient forms of electrical power, wind and solar energy.

The least reported story out of Europe these days is the extreme cold that is literally killing people because it puts the lie to all the environmental “solutions” advanced since the 1960s. Environmentalism has been decried as a religion and, for those who want to deny a greater power, Nature or God, it remains their holy grail.

SOURCE

Feb 232012
 

The truth will out even in the “Ostmark des Deutschen Reichs”

Fritz Vahrenholt gives a comprehensive interview with leading Austrian daily KURIER here.

The interview covers a number of areas. But a few points I found particularly interesting. On the lack of warming since 2000, the KURIER asks if it’s too short of a time period: “Of course it is. But we still need an explanation on why CO2 emissions, which the IPCC says is responsible for global warming, and which rose continuously since 2000, has not caused any warming. There has to be natural causes: the sun and the 60-year ocean cycles – they were the reasons why we wrote the book.”

Vahrenholt also has words on Germany’s current attempt to move to renewable energy: “We’ve gone into a hectic rush and today in Germany we are converting wheat into bioethanol, and installing 50% of all the world’s photovoltaic systems in a country that gets as much sunshine as Alaska – namely Germany. This uncoordinated mad rush is rooted in fear: It’s our fault, we could trigger a climate catastrophe.”

On the IPCC filtering out the sun and other factors: “It is indeed interesting that of the 34 members of the IPCC editorial team that wrote the summary report, one third are connected to the WWF and Greenpeace. That is legitimate, but that has to be made transparent. Imagine just the opposite and the editorial team were one third Exxon supporters. Wouldn’t people say: ’Hello! Is that really necessary?’”

Vahrenholt on why the climate debate has inquisitorial undercurrents: “Because it has long since not been about a purely scientific issue, rather it is about how to run society. Some are saying that we are entering an uncontrollable situation, and so claim any means against it is justified.”

Like throwing democracy overboard, as some are advocating. Here Vahrenholt specifically singles out Schellnhuber’s WBGU and his Great Transformation of society masterplan, which calls for: “…changes in consumption behavior, changed trade behavior and that non-sustainable living styles be stigmatized by society.”

On the success of the book? “It’s no. 14 on the Spiegel bestseller list. Of course I hope the book will be read. The worst thing that could happen would be a spiral of silence, a discussion that never gets held. In five or ten years, we’ll know who is right.”

Overall, a solid and convincing interview by the KURIER. This will push book sales in Austria, Switzerland and Bavaria. Readers can visit the “http://kaltesonne.de/” site, which has an English translation button.

SOURCE