Al Gore And Artic Ice: Truth Is VERY Inconvenient

The gods in charge of exposing scientific liars and fraud must be working overtime these days.

In addition to the giant treasure trove of deceit known as “Climategate,” we now have Al Gore – last year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize for Science – revealing what a lying demagogue and fraud he is:

December 15, 2009
Inconvenient truth for Al Gore as his North Pole sums don’t add up

There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday.

The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row.

Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.

In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.

The embarrassing error cast another shadow over the conference after the controversy over the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which appeared to suggest that scientists had manipulated data to strengthen their argument that human activities were causing global warming.

Mr Gore is not the only titan of the world stage finding Copenhagen to be a tricky deal.

World leaders — with Gordon Brown arriving tonight in the vanguard — are facing the humiliating prospect of having little of substance to sign on Friday, when they are supposed to be clinching an historic deal.

Meanwhile, five hours of negotiating time were lost yesterday when developing countries walked out in protest over the lack of progress on their demand for legally binding emissions targets from rich nations. The move underlined the distrust between rich and poor countries over the proposed legal framework for the deal.

Last night key elements of the proposed deal were unravelling.  […]

Perhaps Mr Gore had felt the need to gild the lily to buttress resolve. But his speech was roundly criticised by members of the climate science community. “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics,” Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

“You really don’t need to exaggerate the changes in the Arctic.”

Others said that, even if quoted correctly, Dr Maslowski’s six-year projection for near-ice-free conditions is at the extreme end of the scale. Most climate scientists agree that a 20 to 30-year timescale is more likely for the near-disappearance of sea ice.

“Maslowski’s work is very well respected, but he’s a bit out on a limb,” said Professor Peter Wadhams, a specialist in ocean physics at the University of Cambridge. […]

Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusets Institute of Technology who does not believe that global warming is largely caused by man, said: “He’s just extrapolated from 2007, when there was a big retreat, and got zero.”

First of all, the “developing countries” want “progress” toward a deal that would see TEN TRILLION DOLLARS in Western wealth flow to them.

And given the fact that the United States underwrites about a quarter of the U.N.’s budget, and given that most of the world has decided that the United States is mostly responsible for global warming, you can bet that America will be assessed a fair amount more than $2.5 trillion as “our share.”

Then you start to find out that the left really want a tax of $145 trillion to “fight” global warming.  And your head just starts spinning around on your neck.

You’d think we’d really want to have our science iron clad before agreeing to such a massive commitment.  But not so much.

What we have in place of science is “scientism,” science as a religious commitment, science exploited to serve the ideological cause of socialist redistributionism.  And socialism has been disguised as “saving the planet.”

Former prime minister and current global warming alarmist Tony Blair says that we need to destroy our economies so that developing nations might enjoy our wealth “even if the science is not correct.”

And the science that blames man as the cause of global warming is not even close to correct:

Logic and chemistry say all CO2 is the same, whether it blows out of a Porsche tailpipe or is exhaled from Al Gore’s lungs or wafts off my compost pile or the rotting of dead plants in the Atchafalaya swamp.

“Wrong,” say the greenhouse theorists. They maintain that man’s contribution to the greenhouse is different from nature’s, and that only man’s exhaustings count.

Let’s review the greenhouse theory of global warming. Our planet would be one more icy rock hurtling through space at an intolerable temperature were it not for our atmosphere. This thin layer of gases — about 95 percent of the molecules live within the lowest 15 miles — readily allows the sun’s heat in but resists its reradiation into space. Result: The earth is warmed.

The atmosphere is primarily composed of nitrogen (78 percent), oxygen (21 percent), argon (0.93 percent), and CO2 (0.04 percent). Many other gases are present in trace amounts. The lower atmosphere also contains varying amounts of water vapor, up to four percent by volume.

Nitrogen and oxygen are not greenhouse gases and have no warming influence. The greenhouse gases included in the Kyoto Protocol are each rated for warming potency. CO2, the warming gas that has activated Al Gore, has low warming potency, but its relatively high concentration makes it responsible for 72 percent of Kyoto warming. Methane (CH4, a.k.a. natural gas) is 21 times more potent than CO2, but because of its low concentration, it contributes only seven percent of that warming. Nitrous oxide (N2O), mostly of nature’s creation, is 310 times more potent than CO2. Again, low concentration keeps its warming effect down to 19 percent.

Now for an inconvenient truth about CO2 sources — nature generates about 30 times as much of it as does man. Yet the warming worriers are unconcerned about nature’s outpouring. They — and Al Gore — are alarmed only about anthropogenic CO2, that 3.2 percent caused by humans. […]

When water vapor is put in that perspective, then anthropogenic CO2 produces less than 0.1 of one percent of the greenhouse effect.

If everyone knows that water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas, why do Al Gore and so many others focus on CO2? Call it the politics of the possible. Water vapor is almost entirely natural. It’s beyond the reach of man’s screwdriver. But when the delegates of 189 countries met at Kyoto in December 1997 to discuss global climate change, they could hardly vote to do nothing. So instead, they agreed that the developed countries of the world would reduce emissions of six man-made greenhouse gases. At the top of the list is CO2, a trivial influence on global warming compared with water vapor, but unquestionably man’s largest contribution.

Is it really “science” to completely ignore 97% of the CO2, and ignore 99.9% of the greenhouse gasses in general, and even ignore the sun itself as the cause of global warming?  Is it really “science” to ignore thousands of years of geologic history, not to mention the fact that “Greenland” was called Greenland because it used to be green during a previous warming period?  Is it really “science” to allow a scientist who was caught red-handed perpetuating scientific fraud years ago to continue to dominate the climate change debate?

Is it really “science” to simply relabel “global warming” to “climate change” when the actual science started to demonstrate – contrary to the global warming lobby’s shrill claims – that global warming hasn’t happened the last ten years?

And is it really anything even remotely close to “science” to claim that “the science is settled and the debate is over” when that is simply false?  If the science is so settled, then why on earth is it that these global warming alarmist feel the need to so routinely misrepresent the facts?  Why do they deliberately destroy data?  Why do they refuse to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests?  Why do they abuse the peer-review system to undermine fellow scientists?

Al Gore has been playing a hysterical alarmist game with bogus facts and figures for years now.  That alarmist propaganda was actually why he won the Nobel Prize.  In fact, Gore has been screaming that all our ice would melt for years.  Newsbusters’ Noel Sheppard writes a good article demonstrating how disgraceful and despicable Al Gore and many others have been in this regard.

Another good article details that the polar ice caps actually AREN’T melting.  Arctic ice is currently decreasing, but Antarctic ice is actually increasing.  And when you put the two ice caps on a chart, you see that the overall ice level is quite stable, just as it has been for the past 150 years.

The thing that most bothers me is that documented liars and frauds such as Al Gore and Michael Mann have been allowed to continue to be liars and frauds.  The postmodernist left does not even regard truth as a valid or meaningful category anymore, and all that remains is “the will to power.”  By any means necessary.

The inconvenient truth for the left is that “climate change” has been documented by their own scientists to be little more than a gang of thugs manipulating the data to suit their agenda while using their power to punish any would-be modern Galileo who disagrees with them.  The inconvenient truth for the rest of us is that “truth” doesn’t even matter to the left — which is why liars and frauds remain to perpetuate more lies and more fraud.  All that matters to them is raw political power. And nothing but nothing would perpetuate leftist power than imposing massive socialist redistributionism in the name of “saving the earth.”

New Study Published In ‘Nature Geoscience’ Shows Global Warming Models All Wrong

Let’s begin with the study:

Nature Geoscience
Published online: 13 July 2009 | doi:10.1038/ngeo578

Carbon dioxide forcing alone insufficient to explain Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum warming

Richard E. Zeebe¹, James C. Zachos² & Gerald R. Dickens³

Top of pageThe Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (about 55 Myr ago) represents a possible analogue for the future and thus may provide insight into climate system sensitivity and feedbacks^{1, 2}. The key feature of this event is the release of a large mass of ¹³C-depleted carbon into the carbon reservoirs at the Earth’s surface, although the source remains an open issue^{3, 4}. Concurrently, global surface temperatures rose by 5–9 ^°C within a few thousand years^{5, 6, 7, 8, 9}. Here we use published palaeorecords of deep-sea carbonate dissolution^{10, 11, 12, 13, 14} and stable carbon isotope composition^{10, 15, 16, 17} along with a carbon cycle model to constrain the initial carbon pulse to a magnitude of 3,000 Pg C or less, with an isotopic composition lighter than -50. As a result, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increased during the main event by less than about 70% compared with pre-event levels. At accepted values for the climate sensitivity to a doubling of the atmospheric CO₂ concentration¹, this rise in CO₂ can explain only between 1 and 3.5 ^°C of the warming inferred from proxy records. We conclude that in addition to direct CO₂ forcing, other processes and/or feedbacks that are hitherto unknown must have caused a substantial portion of the warming during the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. Once these processes have been identified, their potential effect on future climate change needs to be taken into account.

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1. School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, Department of Oceanography, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1000 Pope Road, MSB 504, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822, USA
2. Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, University of California, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA
3. Department of Earth Sciences, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA

This isn’t just telling us that those stupid dinosaurs didn’t send themselves into extinction by driving too many SUVs and failing to implement global warming legislation to deal with carbon dioxide.  It is saying that carbon dioxide was only a tiny, tiny little fraction of the global warming that the planet experienced 55 million years ago.

This is always one of the most amazing and incomprehensible things to me: we have HAD cycles of global warming and global cooling over and over and over again throughout the entire history of the planet.  And yet that is forgotten over and over again by people who have the educations to know better.  It is a form of willful blindness and deliberate stupidity that is simply shocking (It hearkens to Romans 1, “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools…”).  And it is done in order to advance a political and in fact socialist agenda to redistribute wealth.

A pair of articles you should read:

What the Science REALLY Says About Global Warming

What You Never Hear About Global Warming

A Fox News Special Report story had this to say:

West Virginia, where coal is the heart of the economy.  Coal mining produces both power and revenue.  So Obama’s plan to fight climate change by taxing carbon pollution with a cap and trade system is a serious threat.  And even ardent Obama backers like Gov. Joe Manchin says, “It’s far reaching, and I think it has detrimental effects to our economy – not just West Virginia; I think the United States of America’s economy –  cannot take that shock of artificially increasing the price much higher than what we compete.”  Both senators from W. Virginia Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller oppose the plan.

American Electrical Power CEO Mike Morris says cap and trade will raise everyone’s power cost.  “As an electric consumer and a consumer of any product you’re going to pay more for it.  This is a societal decision to deal with the issue of global warming, and you can’t do it for free.  This is not an inexpensive move.”

Support industries like heavy industries such as Caterpillar would be seriously affected too.  Caterpillar has a $50 million payroll in W.Virginia.  And about 75% of their revenues comes from the coal industry, says Rolger Lilly of Walker Caterpillar.

Burning coal creates nearly half the nation’s electricity.  It is far cheaper than alternative energies (solar $.20 per kilowatt hour; wind $.14 per kilowatt hour; vs. coal at only $.03 per kilowatt hour).

And of course you know Obama has said his plan would cause energy prices to “necessary skyrocket.”

This is a plan that will literally result in Americans starving in the dark and cold unless they stand up for sanity.

Carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring and necessary gas.  Without it life on earth would be impossible.  Liberals like to call it “carbon” to make you think of something black and sooty and icky; but it is odorless and colorless.  It is no bogeyman; liberals are your bogeymen.

The fact of the matter is this: when we consider all global warming gasses, “anthropogenic CO2 produces less than 0.1 of one percent of the greenhouse effect.”

The evidence is abundantly clear, yet we are on the verge of crushing our economic output, and killing jobs in the process, to fight a problem which either doesn’t even exist in the first place or which we can do nothing to stop.

Meanwhile, we’ve got the Obama administration actively working to suppress the science that proves that global warming is bogus.  And we’ve got expert economists saying that the fact that China and India aren’t similarly curtailing THEIR emissions will do result in nothing more than America shooting itself in the foot.

Global Warming alarmists have called people like me “global warming deniers” to impugn me as tantamount to a Holocaust denier.  I respond by calling such people “reality deniers.”

Global Warming: When The Pseudo-Science Fails, Send In The Psychologists

Alternative title: Send in the Psycho-babblers.

The so called “science” of global warming is increasingly being revealed for the straw man it always has been (see my articles: “What the Science REALLY Says About Global Warming“, and “What You Never Hear About Global Warming“, as examples). Yet the more evidence that discredits the theory of anthropogenic global warming, the more hysterical its proponents become.

NASA nutjob James Hansen, (who used to be a leading proponent of “global cooling,” by the way) is a classic example of the WAY over-the-top hysteria:

The global warming debate, a top NASA scientist says, is over. Now, he adds, the issue has turned urgent.

“We have reached a critical point,” NASA scientist James Hansen said Tuesday in an interview. “If we don’t get on a different path within the next several years, then we’re going to pass tipping points in the climate system with large consequences that will be felt especially by our children and grandchildren.”

The head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hansen was in St. Paul with Arctic explorer Will Steger to participate in several forums Monday at the Science Museum of Minnesota. He was one of the first scientists to issue warnings about global warming more than two decades ago.

Already, the Earth’s surface temperature is 1 degree Fahrenheit warmer than it was a century ago. Many climate scientists predict it will rise many more degrees in the next century, melting glaciers, raising sea levels and leading to other ecological changes.

So here we are: an incredibly weak scientific case for what amounts to an enormously costly socialistic redistribution program, and global warming advocates becoming increasingly over-the-top in their rhetoric. What comes next?

Dennis Prager has said that he majored in Soviet studies to learn how the other side thought. And he has said that his studies of Soviet totalitarian communism revealed numerous parallels with the mindset of the American liberal.

So how did the Soviets deal with their dissidents?

They put them in gulags and treated them as mentally ill.

Well, in the global warming debate, enter the white-coated psychobabblers.

A frankly incredible article begins as follows:

Psychologists determine what it means to think ‘green’

By Sharon Jayson, USA TODAY
Those who make human behavior their business aim to make living “green” your business.

Armed with new research into what makes some people environmentally conscious and others less so, the 148,000-member American Psychological Association is stepping up efforts to foster a broader sense of eco-sensitivity that the group believes will translate into more public action to protect the planet.

“We know how to change behavior and attitudes. That is what we do,” says Yale University psychologist Alan Kazdin, association president. “We know what messages will work and what will not.”

During a four-day meeting that begins today in Boston, an expected 16,000 attendees will hear presentations, including studies that explore how people experience the environment, their attitudes about climate change and what social barriers prevent conservation of resources.

Now, you might dismiss these statements, “We know how to change behavior and attitudes. That is what we do.” You might even ridicule them (Remember KAOS villain Siegfried from Get Smart? In one show he said to a pigeon, “Fly UP!” And when the bird sat there he leaned over and said, “So, you will not fly. We have ways of making you fly. Do you have any relatives in the park?“). But when white-coated “professionals” – who literally have the power to have people committed, take such a radical stand about an issue completely outside of their field and come to such conclusions about people who don’t happen to believe in global warming, it should be alarming.

If that isn’t freaky enough, one passage in the middle of the article reads:

• News stories that provided a balanced view of climate change reduced people’s beliefs that humans are at fault and also reduced the number of people who thought climate change would be bad, according to research by Stanford social psychologist Jon Krosnick.

His presentation will detail a decade of American attitudes about climate change. His new experiment, conducted in May, illustrates what he says is a public misperception about global warming. He says there is scientific consensus among experts that climate change is occurring, but the nationwide online poll of 2,600 adults asked whether they believe scientists agree or disagree about it.

By editing CNN and PBS news stories so that some saw a skeptic included in the report, others saw a story in which the skeptic was edited out and another group saw no video, Krosnick found that adding 45 seconds of a skeptic to one news story caused 11% of Americans to shift their opinions about the scientific consensus. Rather than 58% believing a perceived scientific agreement, inclusion of the skeptic caused the perceived amount of agreement to drop to 47%.

American Psychological Association leaders say they want to launch a national initiative specifically targeting behavior changes, including developing media messages that will help people reduce their carbon footprint and pay more attention to ways they can conserve. They want to work with other organizations and enlist congressional support to help fund the effort.

In other words, just a relative few seconds’ worth of skeptical treatment opposing the doctrine of man-caused global warming sufficiently innoculated viewers such that well under half continued to buy the garbage they were being fed.

This is beyond disturbing. The long-politically correct American Psychological Association has essentially determined that only the mentally ill don’t accept man-caused global warming, and that any exposure to alternative views increases the “sickness.”

This is right out of Stalinism. Even worse, it’s right out of 1984 with “Big Brother” controlling the not only the lives but the very thoughts of everyone. The essence of totalitarianism is megalomania: the need to have absolute control over everyone and everything. And anyone who came to think differently from the official doctrine of Big Brother was subjected to “treatment” until he was capable of believing that “two and two made five.”

Lev Trotsky wrote in Literature and Revolution:

“The human species, the sluggish Homo sapiens, will once again enter the stage of radical reconstruction and become in his own hands the object of the most complex methods of artificial selection and psychophysical training … Man will make it his goal…to create a higher sociobiological type, a superman, if you will.”

And in its article on “the new Soviet man,” Wikipedia says:

The three major changes postulated to be indispensable for the building of the communist society were economical and political changes, accompanied with the changes in the human personality.

The Soviet man was to be selfless, learned, healthy and enthusiastic in spreading the socialist Revolution. Adherence to Marxism-Leninism, and individual behaviour consistent with that philosophy’s prescriptions, were among the crucial traits expected of the New Soviet man.

Author and philosopher Bernard Byhovsky, Ph.D. writes: “The new man is endowed, first of all, with a new ethical outlook.”

Among the major traits of a new Soviet man was selfless collectivism.

Thus the parallels between the aims of the American Psychological Association (the concept of the “construction of the new man” angle becomes quite clear in the article) and the aims of the “new Soviet man” become clear. And the logical implications between the potential tactics of global warming alarmists and the historical tacts of the gulags become clear as well.

These people are genuinely scary. All they lack to transform society in a terrifying way is the power to fully implement their ideas.