Author: admin

By Raphael Alexander

The only thing more ironic than environmentalist hipsters wanting everybody on the planet to turn off their lights for an hour on March 28, is probably the billions of people who wish they could turn them on. This kind of pop culture fad is exactly the stuff that reminds one of how very insignificant the problems of western civilization must seem to the rest of the world. Much like the 24 hour famine in which the same hipsters stop eating their tofu vegan burgers for a single day to symbolize their solidarity with people who don’t have a grain of rice, the act is nothing more than idealistic masturbation, an empty and hollow and ultimately meaningless exercise in faux-humanism.

The main objection I have to Earth Hour is that it quite literally accomplishes nothing. Whether one decides to wallow in the dark for an hour out of the calender year is about as meaningless as deciding to run a mile once a year to get in shape. If one were to buy the environmental cultist mentality that the planet is doomed from our reliance on inefficient energy sources by way of global warming, an hour is still delaying the inevitable, even by their own green religion’s notions. That isn’t the point, they will argue. It is “symbolism” in order to get us to find ways to rely less on non-renewable energy sources, and create an awareness for the importance of “fighting” against global warming. The poster pin-up model for combating global warming, then, is clearly the third world starving child. Their eco-footprint is certainly minimal, and because of their high infant mortality rate, they will spare the planet needless exhalations of deadly carbon dioxide gases. That mankind has evolved to a point in civilization where we live in such relative comfort and ease that we find ways to criticize our existence, must surely be a disturbed warning of the dangers of too much pacifism.

The fundamentalist warming religion must realize the irony of the ideals they emulate for an hour, but refuse to live by. If they really wanted to make a difference, they could go and live in the third world where they wouldn’t take up so much wasted space and electricity, thus combating global warming. But no. That wouldn’t be as exciting as twittering about Earth Hour and preparing all sorts of wonderful social media networks and meetings for people to feel extra magnanimous to mother Earth.

Our planet exists on a globalized scale of vast commercialized trade. Billions of people work in a global economy that trades resources, products and services, and as a result we are able to mass produce the daily needs of first world hipsters who can blog about Earth Hour on their Apple Quadcore Macs to their hearts content. Without this productivity by people in the third world who work at highly disproportionate wages in order to provide our products, our economy would contract, people would be out of work, homelessness would rise, and demand for electricity would ultimately fall as poverty skyrocketed. In fact this would probably be far preferable to whatever utopian “Kyoto 2″ plan is in the works in Copenhagen. Perhaps a few global conflicts and disasters, involving famine and disaster, perhaps a genocide or two, would decrease the surplus population enough to slow catastrophic global warming.

After all, at the heart of the green religion is an essentially an anti-civilization ideology. The best thing for the planet, in all seriousness, would be to get Russia and the United States to launch all ICBM warheads simultaneously at the earliest opportunity. That may sound contradictory since the greens say they want our civilization to survive despite this Armageddon hanging over our heads, but it simply doesn’t make sense. Our mass produced, mass consumed, mass expansionist species simply isn’t going to solve the mythical solution to global warming by enacting placebo carbon taxes and CO2 targets. In the end analysis, the fight against global warming, if the planet chooses to undertake the task, will be the greatest expenditure ever attempted upon a crisis that will remain infinitely unprovable.

This is little more than a modern pop culture movement that makes people feel good about themselves in spite of the glaring evidence that mankind cannot be both creatures simultaneously: a creature that is consumptive to the point of excess without any natural predators and an aggressively upward population trend with no end in sight; and also a caretaker of the Earth with designs to preserve and maintain and protect and save. It’s a fallacy. In truth we are in the golden age of a human civilization that will likely see a decline when the global population becomes strained to the point of critical mass, and resource wars begin a natural “culling effect” that takes the place of our lack of any natural predators.

I’m not being cynical, but if we’re going to engage in science fiction about “saving” the Earth against the invisible forces of global warming by turning off our lights for an hour, I should be able to write rhetorical hyperbole as well.

But for now, relax. Life is good. Keep your lights on during “Earth Hour”. Drink a beer from your fridge. Watch a show on television. Twitter to your friends. The apocalypse is not yet nigh. Not yet. If the Vancouver Canucks win the Stanley Cup, then you can begin worrying about the end.

By Andrew Kenny

Man-made global warming, the notion that mankind is changing the world’s climate in a dangerous way, never had much grounding in science. It has now departed from proper science altogether and become a millennial religion of rich people in rich countries.

We can expect the well-funded Jeremiahs of climate change to produce apocalyptic warnings of disaster (sea levels rising by metres, disappearing ice caps and other such nonsense) before the Copenhagen climate negotiations in December, where the faithful hope to persuade governments to damage their economies with foolish efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions.

There is overwhelming scientific evidence that the slight warming of the 20th century was perfectly natural – no different from previous natural warming periods. It had little, if anything, to do with rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2).

During the medieval warm period, which was worldwide, from about 900 to 1200 AD, temperatures were rather higher than now, while CO2 levels were lower.

This is confirmed by hundreds of scientific studies and by historical record. During this period the Vikings had a colony in Greenland, growing crops where it is now too cold for them.

CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas (by far the most vital is water vapour), whose only significant absorption band is already saturated. CO2 has never been seen to affect global temperatures, although of course temperatures can affect it, because cooling oceans dissolve more of it, removing it from the air, and vice versa with warming oceans. In the past 500 million years, CO2 levels have averaged above 2 000 parts per million (ppm).

They are now below 400ppm, extraordinarily low, way below the optimum level for most green plants, upon which we depend.

The main cause of climate change seems to be solar variation, especially as it affects cloud formation. Clouds are all-important in determining our climate. Cosmic rays from beyond our solar system penetrate our atmosphere and produce low clouds by giving them nucleation sites.

The low clouds cause cooling by reflecting away incoming sunlight. (You look down upon them when you are flying.) The more cosmic rays, the more low clouds, and the colder it gets.

When the sun is active, the solar wind deflects the cosmic rays, there are fewer low clouds – and the warmer it gets.

The coldest climate of the last 10 000 years happened in the 17th century during the “Maunder minimum”, when the sun was unusually inactive. By contrast, the sun was active in the 20th century, which may explain the warming then.

Since 2007, CO2 levels have risen, the sun has become very quiet and global temperatures have plunged, bringing record cold and snow at locations around the world. This, perhaps the biggest environment story of the past two years, has been almost entirely ignored by the big media.

We do not know if the cooling will continue, but let’s hope not, because cooling is far more dangerous than warming.

The head of the Church of Global Warming is the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It contains good scientists, bad scientists, political activists and functionaries. Its managers select, distort and ignore evidence to promote one view only: that mankind is damaging the climate. It is essentially a politically funded advocacy group. It is rich and powerful.

The defining moment for the IPCC came in 2001 in its third assessment report, when it published the infamous Mann curve, or “hockey stick curve” showing temperatures in the northern hemisphere dropping slightly from the year 1000 to 1850, then suddenly rising to unprecedented highs in 2000.

The embarrassing medieval warm period had been removed from history!

The Mann curve was instantly hailed by the faithful as the revealed truth. In fact, it was a piece of scientific quackery and has since been utterly discredited. Ross McKitrick, a statistical expert, has written a detailed and devastating account of this perversion of science, What is the Hockey Stick Debate About? (The perpetrators of the hockey stick now run an overheated website called www.realclimate.org.)

Climate alarm seems to fit some deep-rooted human need for a religious moral: we have sinned (by our industrial society), we face disaster (by the planet warming dangerously) and we must repent and change our ways (by forsaking fossil fuels).

It is a lucrative religion, providing jobs, funding, travel and conferences for a huge international congregation of academics, journalists, activists and bureaucrats.

I am struck by the fact that so many of those promoting the scare have no training in the physical sciences or even a basic grasp of thermodynamics and heat transfer, upon which understanding of the climate depends. They have nothing but faith and simply recite the litany of the IPCC and former US vice-president Al Gore’s atrocious film.

By far the best technology to reduce greenhouse emissions is nuclear power – clean, safe, economic, sustainable and emitting among the least greenhouse gases over the full energy cycle.

The worst technology is the one favoured by most of the faithful, wind turbines – hopelessly expensive, unreliable, and a proven failure wherever they have been used. You need massive machines to give even small amounts of electricity. “Gigantic is Beautiful!” might well be the slogan of the wind lobby.

To provide the same amount of electricity as a standard Eskom coal station, you would require more than 5 500 wind turbines, each more than 90m high – higher than the Statue of Liberty (assuming 25 000 gigawatt hours a year for the coal station, two-megawatt capacity for each wind turbine and a generous 25 percent load factor for wind power). These would come at enormous cost, massive disruption to the environment – and on a still day they would give you not one kilowatt-hour of electricity.

Man-made global warming is an expensive and wasteful distraction from the real environmental problems of our planet: disappearing wildlife, polluted water, land degradation and the ravages of mass poverty.

Fortunately, hundreds of the world’s leading scientists, growing in number, are publicly explaining and speaking out against the superstition of climate change, the greatest folly of our age.

Andrew Kenny is a consulting engineer with degrees in physics and mechanical engineering. His career, which has lately focused on thermodynamics, has spanned working in Eskom power stations, research at the University of Cape Town and the nuclear power industry

By Justin C, ILCD

With thanks to the inspiration from our good friends over at Australian Climate Madness and to fully participate in Human Achievement Hour, we here at ILCD headquarters have also taken many hours out of our busy day to prepare for Earth Hour this weekend. And yes, we made sure to use only real incandescent bulbs for the entire display. So during Earth Hour when all the hippies are looking for their candles, you’ll know where to find us.

By Richard Courtney

AGW supporters could not argue facts, had to insult instead — as usual

I write to report on a debate that defeated the motion “This House Believes Global Warming is a Global Crisis” during a meeting of the St Andrews University Debating Society. It is difficult to arrange a debate of anthropogenic (that is, man-made) global warming (AGW) because few proponents of AGW are willing to face such debate. They know from past experience that they always lose such debates because there is no evidence that AGW exists and much evidence that it does not.

However, on Wednesday 4 March 2009, the St Andrews University Debating Society held their debate of the motion, “This House Believes Global Warming is a Global Crisis” in the Old Parliament Building, St Andrews. The debate was organized and presided over with exemplary efficiency and professionalism by the Speaker of the Society, Ms Jessica Siegel. It was conducted with all the pomp and ceremony that could be expected of an ancient society of so ancient and prestigious a university.

And the debate was lively, informative and entertaining. It got emotional at times. Some of the contributions from the floor were of exceptionally high quality. But, it was somewhat spoiled by the weakness of the proponents of the motion. (I have good reason to suspect this weakness is because stronger speakers could not be obtained to propose the motion. If so, then it is yet another example of leading proponents of AGW fearing to face their critics in open debate).

The proponents of the motion were Ross Finnie MSP, former Scottish Government Minister for Environment and Rural Development; Mike Robinson, Chief Executive of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and Chair of Stop Climate Chaos Scotland; Gregory Norminton, Novelist `Serious Things’, Environmental Activist, Founder of `Alliance against Urban 4x4s’

The motion was opposed by myself, and Nils-Axel Morner, Leader of the Maldives International Sea-Level Project who was awarded the `Golden Contrite of Merits’ by Algarve University, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, Former advisor to then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and now an Investigator of Scientific Frauds.

Each speaker was given a strict maximum of 7 minutes to speak. The speakers would alternate between proponents and opponents of the motion until all 6 had spoken. No speaker was allowed to speak more than once except to raise a point of information, order, or etc.

The proponents had clearly not prepared. They were not co-ordinated in their presentations, they each lacked any significant knowledge of the science of AGW, and they each assumed that AGW is a fact. None of them made a substantial presentation of arguments supporting the motion, and they all (including the politician!) lacked adequate skills at public speaking. The opponents of the motion were a sharp contrast to that. They each have significant expertise in their subject, and they had agreed the case they were to put and how they were to put it. Also, they are all very competent public speakers and their very different styles made their presentation much better than the sum of its parts.

Finnie spoke first. He argued that AGW is a fact because the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has published its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) that says the IPCC is “90% certain” that AGW exists. From this he claimed there is a “crisis” because governments are failing to give the matter sufficient importance. It is necessary for governments to decide a treaty that would follow-on from the Kyoto Ptotocol that intends to constrain emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) but ends in 2012. The decision needs to be made at a meeting later this year.

I replied by outlining the case for the opposition. My speech is copied here. It asserts that governments do need to have policies on climate change but empirical evidence denies the existence of AGW and so there is no need to constrain fossil fuel emissions. Indeed, the harm caused by the emission constraints would be greater than any harm that AGW could induce if it were to exist.

Robinson’s response was very angry. He seemed to think attacking the opposition speakers would provide a victory for the motion. Almost his entire speech was attempted defamation of the opposition speakers. Within seconds of starting to speak he had accused them of being “like supporters of the Nazis in 1930s Germany” (my family lost everything in the blitz so I did not take kindly to that). The speakers on the opposition side “could not get anything published in peer-reviewed journals” (Morner and I each shouted out that we have and we do). And much of the same. He said people and governments must act to stop global warming (but he did not say how they should act) because – according to him – if a person had an elevated temperature of 2 degrees then he would die so we cannot let the Earth get 2 degrees hotter in case that kills the Earth.

Morner then gave a witty, entertaining and informative lecture on sea level change. The major potential threat from AGW is severe sea-level change. He interacted with the audience and selected one individual to jape with (his skill at this selection was later demonstrated when that individual stood and gave a speech that won the prize – of a Society neck-tie – for best speech from the floor). Morner presented data that showed sea level is not rising as a result of AGW at a detectable rate anywhere.

Norminton then spoke to conclude the case for the proponents of the motion. Like Finnie he seemed to be extremely nervous: both were shaking during their presentations. Norminton’s hand was shaking so much he put it into his pocket. (I know others interpret this to be nervousness, but I think it was extreme anger: Norminton had not expected any opposition to the motion, and the assertion of clear evidence that AGW does not exist was – to him – an outrage too hard to accept.) Also, like Finnie, he did not address the motion. He said he was not a scientist so he had to accept the word of scientists about global warming and scientists agree that global warming is real and man-made. He said, the speakers on the opposition side were “not scientists”. Lord Monckton interjected that “Courtney and Morner are”. And Norminton replied, “So was Mengele.” Monckton raised a Point of Order demanding withdrawal of the remark. Norminton lacked the wit to withdraw and move on, so he refused to withdraw. Monckton persisted pressing the Point of Order and Norminton continued to refuse to withdraw. Only moments before Morner had made himself the lecturer the students would most like to have, and support for Norminton drained away as he insisted that Morner was akin to a murderer operating in a Nazi concentration camp. Norminton continued by saying the threat of global warming was real, and it was killing polar bears, but it is not clear that anybody was listening to him.

Monckton then summated the case for the opposition. He had not prepared a speech but took notes of the proponents’ speeches with a view to refuting arguments of the proponents that Morner and myself had not covered, and by defending the opposition case against rebuttals of its arguments. This was a deliberate use by our side of Monckton’s debating skills. But he had a problem because the proponents of the motion had not made a case and they had not addressed any of our arguments. Instead, they had made personal attacks on the opposition speakers, and they had asserted – with no evidence or argument – that the IPCC is right. So, Monckton’s summarizing speech consisted of evidence that the proponents of the motion had merely provided errors of logic and fact but they had not a case. He pointed out that polar bears had quadrupled their number in recent decades and this was not a sign that their species is threatened. And he cited and named each of the logical fallacies utilized by the proponents of the motion.

The debate then opened to the floor. Four persons each spoke well. One gave a balanced presentation and the other three spoke in favour of the motion. But by then the debate had been settled. Prior to the debate the opponents of the motion had expected to lose the vote because the students have been exposed to a lifetime (i.e. their short lifetime) of pro-AGW propaganda. We consoled ourselves with the certainty that we would win the arguments because opponents of AGW have all the facts on our side. But in the event we won both. The motion was defeated when put to the vote.

By Kate Galbraith, NY Times Green Inc.

Michele Bachmann, a Republican Congresswoman from east-central Minnesota, has some fighting words for President Obama’s energy plans.

According to the Smart Politics blog at the University of Minnesota’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, Ms. Bachmann, when asked about President Obama’s cap-and-trade plans on a local radio station last Saturday, responded:

“I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us, “Having a revolution every now and then is a good thing,” and the people – we the people – are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country. And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States.”

Ms. Bachmann also expressed some skepticism on global warming, saying, “The science is on our side on this one, and the science indicates that human activity is not the cause of all this global warming. And that in fact, nature is the cause, with solar flares, etc.”

It’s not the first time that Ms. Bachmann has expressed skepticism about climate change, and her latest comments are reminiscent of Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, who has accused Mr. Obama of perpetrating “environmental thuggery.”

Her views were also echoed earlier this month by Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, who asserted in a radio appearance: “We are cooling. We are not warming.”

However, Ms. Bachmann seems supportive of the energy revolution taking place on Minnesota’s own soil. “We must look beyond our traditional sources of energy to diversify our supply and find innovative solutions to help protect the environment,” her Web site says.

Indeed, Minnesota has aggressively pushed for the development of clean energy. The state currently requires diesel fuel to be blended with 2 percent biodiesel, and is soon to raise the “blend ratio” to 5 percent. Minnesota also will require 25 percent of its electricity to come from renewable sources by 2025.

(ILoveCarbonDioxide.com Note: Info on the evils of biofuels can be found here)

By Alan Caruba, Warning Signs

Warning! Avoid the April edition of U.S. News & World Report because it is devoted to the question, “Can America Prosper in the New Green Economy?”

What is wrong with this? For one thing, we are not in a “new Green economy” and, if the folks at U.S. News had taken time to notice, we are closing in on having no economy thanks to the stupidity of several Congresses and the deliberate effort to repeat all the errors of the successive Franklin D. Roosevelt administrations that prolonged the Great Depression for ten long years.

There is no great plethora of new Green jobs unless, perhaps, you are referring to the minimum wage jobs that involve picking up dead birds slaughtered by the wind turbines in the States that were foolish enough to think they might actually generate electricity on a scale that one good nuclear or coal-fired plant could. They can’t. They never will. They exist only because of government subsidies and the increased energy bills for consumers.

What offends me most (aside from the fact that I actually subscribed to this pathetic, knee-jerk, liberal excuse for “news”) is the way this news magazine and all of the mainstream media repeatedly fail to get the message about all things Green. It’s a SCAM.

After decades of claims that have been repeatedly debunked, these alleged news magazines are still propagating the same old Green lies. Newsweek and Time have tried to outdo one another with the scariest covers about a global warming catastrophe that never happened and never will. So, why should we expect U.S. News to step up to the plate with anything other than the same tired Green message?

The editor, Brian Kelly, revealed the real bias of the issue. “What’s changed, in a word, is Obama. The president and the tide of voters who swept him into office want a change in the way we manage energy and the environment—and to put them at the top of the country’s agenda. It looks like that will happen.”

Earth to Brian! Humans do not manage the environment! We are not in charge of the Sun, the oceans, the clouds, the volcanoes, the blizzards, the tornadoes, et cetera.

Moreover, Obama did not get elected with a huge mandate or tide of voters. The vote was separated by five percentage points, a relatively small margin. The only mandate Obama has is the one in his fevered, socialist mind.

More to the point, how can a so-called news magazine devote itself to yet another sorry Green message in the midst of the worst financial crisis this nation has experienced since the Great Depression of the 1930s? Perhaps they were too busy congratulating themselves for printing “the entire magazine on what’s called ‘manufactured carbon-neutral paper.’”

Carbon-neutral paper? Considering that paper is created from trees and those trees formerly absorbed a lot of carbon dioxide, how did the paper magically transform itself into something “neutral”? And didn’t all the emissions involved in physically transporting the trees to the paper mill, processing the pulp, then transmitting the paper to the printing plant, and applying the ink, and then transporting the magazines to be mailed or sold at newsstands not involve CO2?

This is the kind of gibberish that magazines like U.S. News & World Report and the endless daily and weekly newspapers have been shoveling for decades. In case it has missed your notice, U.S. News & World Report is no longer a weekly magazine. It’s a monthly now.

The bottom line is this: Just about everything the Greens advocate, when they are not trying to stop the drilling or mining or building of anything that might provide energy, will cost you more. It will also degrade life in the U.S. because they are against building new roads, against the building of any new homes and apartment structures for our increasing population, against the use of pesticides to protect people from the diseases spread by insects and rodents, against the use of automobiles and trucks; against letting you enjoy our national parks and reserves except on their terms, against the use of plastic, against, against, against!

I am against stupid magazines offering stupid “solutions” to non-problems like global warming or what has conveniently been dubbed climate change as if the Earth’s climate hasn’t always been in a state of change for billions of years.

By Marc Sheppard, American Thinker

California’s KQED has a story about elementary school children being taught that manmade “Mr. Carbon” is giving the Earth a global warming “fever” and killing “lovable” polar bears. Of course, the San Francisco-based PBS station thinks that’s just swell. It’s not – it’s outrageous.

Cool The Earth, the group behind this blatant indoctrination program, is the brainchild of two Marin County parents who say they were inspired by watching Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. That’s probably all you need to know, but bear with me – it gets better.

According to their website, “Cool The Earth is a ready-to-run program that educates K-8 students and their families about global warming and inspires them to take simple actions to reduce their carbon emissions.” Here’s how they describe the program’s kick-off assembly:

The Cool the Earth program launches with an all-school assembly in which an original, age-appropriate play is performed by teachers, parents and students. Characters such as Koda the polar bear, Earth and Mother Nature act out scenarios about how human activities are contributing to raising levels of carbon dioxide and giving the earth a global warming “fever.” By the end of the play, all the kids are excited to get rid of the villain, Mr. Carbon, and save the lovable Koda. The tone of the play is positive and helps kids feel empowered to take action.

I can just imagine the boos and hisses when the evil caped Mr. Carbon creeps onto the stage and the applause and cheers when the cuddly and lovable Koda is saved from his villainous intent.

And speaking of dubious intentions, program co-founder Carleen Cullen makes no attempt to conceal hers:

“Cool the Earth plants the seeds of environmental change into the minds of the people who can have the biggest impact on the planet: children. If anyone can inspire their parents to make changes, it’s their children.”

Planting seeds into children’s minds? In other words — brain washing.

And the site’s Climate 101 page, which incorrectly identifies carbon dioxide as “the most prevalent greenhouse gas,” reveals the fallacious weed they want those seeds to sprout:

“An overwhelming body of scientific evidence paints a clear picture: climate change is happening; it is caused in large part by human activity and it will have many serious and potentially damaging effects in the decades ahead. Scientists have confirmed that the greenhouse gas emissions from cars, power plants and other manmade sources—rather than natural variations in climate—are a primary cause”

It’s broken record time again, folks. As global temperatures continue to cool, alarmists are picking up both the tempo and intensity of their disinformation campaign. And public schools are a high value target. Please monitor the “science” being fed to your kids in school. And be prepared to remove any green mush that finds itself between their ears. Sit your kids down to watch and discuss the fabulous video AT’s Gregory Young features today.

And should your 7-year-old return home from school one day upset that your “carbon footprint” is killing poor Koda the polar bear, explain to the little tyke that polar bear populations have more than doubled since 1960. That warming is over, that it wasn’t caused by anything people did and never threatened polar bears. And that what he or she saw in class wasn’t real, but only make-believe.

Just like manmade global warming itself.