Tag: News

By ScienceDaily

PHOTO: Loblolly trees growing under elevated carbon dioxide levels emitted from towers at Duke Forest’s FACE site. (Credit: Chris Hildreth)

Pine trees grown for 12 years in air one-and-a-half times richer in carbon dioxide than today’s levels produced twice as many seeds of at least as good a quality as those growing under normal conditions, a Duke University-led research team reported Aug. 3 at a national ecology conference.Carbon dioxide readings that high are expected everywhere by mid-century. The findings suggest some woody tree species could, in the future, out-compete grasses and other herbaceous plants that scientists had previously found can also produce more seeds under high-CO2, but of inferior quality. “Even if both groups were producing twice as many seeds, if the trees are producing high-quality seeds and the herbaceous species aren’t, then competitively you can get a shift,” said Danielle Way, a Duke post-doctoral researcher. Way is scheduled to present the results at a poster session on Aug. 3 during the Ecological Society of America’s 2009 annual meeting in Albuquerque, N.M. She is also first author of a report on the study scheduled for publication in the research journal Global Change Biology. Way and her co-researchers collected, counted and analyzed seeds produced at the Duke Free Air CO2 Enrichment (FACE) site in Duke Forest, near the university’s campus. There, growing parcels of loblolly pine trees have been receiving elevated amounts of CO2 around the clock since 1997 in a Department of Energy-funded project designed to simulate natural growing conditions. Their analysis found the high-CO2 loblolly seeds were similar in nutrient content, germination and growth potential to seeds from trees growing under present-day CO2 concentrations. “If anything, they actually seem to be slightly better seeds rather than more seeds of poorer quality,” Way said. “The notion here is that if the trees are producing more high-quality seeds at high CO2 compared to grasses and herbs, then the trees may be at an advantage,” added study participant Robert Jackson. Jackson is Way’s advisor at Duke, where he is a biology professor, as well as professor of global environmental change at the university’s Nicholas School of the Environment. The ultimate competitive outcome will depend on how other trees comparatively respond to high-CO2, said James Clark, another Duke biology professor and Nicholas School professor of the environment who also participated in the study. “We don’t know that yet, because we only have estimates for loblolly pines,” Clark said. Other study participants included Shannon LaDeau, now at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies at Millbrook, N.Y.; Heather McCarthy, now at the University of California at Irvine; Ram Oren, a Nicholas School ecology professor who directs the FACE experiments; and Adrien Finzi, an associate biology professor at Boston University.Source

By Fiona Kobusingye
Life in Africa is often nasty, impoverished and short. AIDS kills 2.2 million Africans every year according to WHO (World Health Organization) reports. Lung infections cause 1.4 million deaths, malaria 1 million more, intestinal diseases 700,000. Diseases that could be prevented with simple vaccines kill an additional 600,000 annually, while war, malnutrition and life in filthy slums send countless more parents and children to early graves. And yet, day after day, Africans are told the biggest threat we face is – global warming. Conferences, news stories, television programs, class lectures and one-sided “dialogues” repeat the claim endlessly. We’re told using oil and petrol, even burning wood and charcoal, will dangerously overheat our planet, melt ice caps, flood coastal cities, and cause storms, droughts, disease and extinctions.
Over 700 climate scientists and 31,000 other scientists say humans and carbon dioxide have minimal effects on Earth’s temperature and climate, and there is no global warming crisis. But their views and studies are never invited or even tolerated in these “climate crisis” forums, especially at “ministerial dialogues” staged with United Nations money. Al Gore refuses to debate any of these experts, or even permit questions that he hasn’t approved ahead of time. Instead, Africans are told climate change “threatens humanity more than HIV/AIDS.” More than 2.2 million dead Africans every year? We are warned that it would be “nearly impossible to adapt to the loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet,” which would raise sea levels by “5 to 15 meters.” That certainly would impact our coastal communities. But how likely is it? The average annual temperature in Antarctica is minus 50 degrees F! Summer in its Western Peninsula barely lasts two months and gets maybe 10 degrees above freezing for just a few hours a day. Not even Mr. Gore or UN computer models talk about raising Antarctic temperatures by 85 degrees F year-round. So how is that ice supposed to melt? Let’s not forget that sea levels have risen 120 meters since the last Ice Age ended. Do the global warming alarmists think cave men fires caused that? Obviously, powerful natural forces caused those ancient glaciers to come and go – and caused the droughts, floods and climate changes that have affected Africa, the Earth and its animals and people for millions of years. Just consider northern Africa, where green river valleys, hippopotami and happy villages suddenly got turned into the Sahara Desert 4,000 years ago. Scientists don’t know why, but it probably wasn’t Egyptian pharaohs building pyramids and driving chariots. However, the real problem isn’t questionable or fake science, hysterical claims and worthless computer models that predict global warming disasters. It’s that they’re being used to justify telling Africans that we shouldn’t build coal or natural gas electrical power plants. It’s the almost total absence of electricity keeping us from creating jobs and becoming modern societies. It’s that these policies KILL. The average African life span is lower than it was in the United States and Europe 100 years ago. But Africans are being told we shouldn’t develop, or have electricity or cars because, now that those countries are rich beyond anything Africans can imagine, they’re worried about global warming. Al Gore and UN climate boss Yvo de Boer tell us the world needs to go on an energy diet. Well, I have news for them. Africans are already on an energy diet. We’re starving! Al Gore uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year. And those anti-electricity policies are keeping us impoverished. Not having electricity means millions of Africans don’t have refrigerators to preserve food and medicine. Outside of wealthy parts of our big cities, people don’t have lights, computers, modern hospitals and schools, air conditioning – or offices, factories and shops to make things and create good jobs. Not having electricity also means disease and death. It means millions die from lung infections, because they have to cook and heat with open fires; from intestinal diseases caused by spoiled food and unsafe drinking water; from malaria, TB, cholera, measles and other diseases that we could prevent or treat if we had proper medical facilities. Hypothetical global warming a hundred years from now is worse than this? Telling Africans they can’t have electricity and economic development – except what can be produced with some wind turbines or little solar panels – is immoral. It is a crime against humanity. Meanwhile, China and India are building new coal-fired power plants every week, so that they can lift their people out of poverty. So even if Africa remains impoverished – and the US and Europe switched to windmills and nuclear power – global carbon dioxide levels would continue increasing for decades. Even worse, the global warming crusaders don’t stop at telling us we can’t have electricity. They also campaign against biotechnology. As American, Brazilian and South African farmers will tell you, biotech seeds increase crop yields, reduce pesticide use, feed more people and help farmers earn more money. New varieties are being developed that can resist droughts – the kind Africa has always experienced, and the ones some claim will increase due to global warming. Environmental radicals even oppose insecticides and the powerful spatial insect repellant DDT, which Uganda’s Health Ministry is using along with bed nets and modern ACT drugs to eliminate malaria. They claim global warming will make malaria worse. That’s ridiculous, because the disease was once found all over Europe, the United States and even Siberia. Uganda and Africa need to stop worrying about what the West, the UN and Al Gore say. We need to focus on our own needs, resources and opportunities. We don’t need more aid – especially the kind that goes mostly to corrupt officials who put the money in private bank accounts, hold global warming propaganda conferences and keep their own people poor. We don’t need rich countries promising climate change assistance (maybe, sometime, ten years from now), if we promise not to develop. We need to stop acting like ignorant savages, who thought solar eclipses meant the gods were angry with them, and asked witch doctors to bring the sun back. We need to stop listening to global warming witch doctors, who get rich telling us to keep living “indigenous,” impoverished lives. We need trade, manufacturing, electricity and transportation fuels to power modern industrial economies. We need to do what China and India are doing – develop – and trade more with them. That is how we will get the jobs, prosperity, health and environmental quality we deserve.
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IBD Editorial

Climate Change: A new scientific paper says that man has had little or nothing to do with global temperature variations. Maybe the only place it’s really getting hotter is in Al Gore’s head.
Because he must be getting flustered now, what with his efforts to save the benighted world from global warming continually being exposed as a fraud. The true believers will not be moved by the peer-reviewed findings of Chris de Freitas, John McLean and Bob Carter, scientists at universities in Australia and New Zealand. Warming advocates have too much invested in perpetuating the myth. (And are probably having too much fun calling those who don’t agree with them “deniers” and likening skeptics to fascists.) But these scientists have made an important contribution to the debate that Gore says doesn’t exist. Their research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, indicates that nature, not man, has been the dominant force in climate change in the late 20th century. “The surge in global temperatures since 1977 can be attributed to a 1976 climate shift in the Pacific Ocean that made warming El Nino conditions more likely than they were over the previous 30 years and cooling La Nina conditions less likely” says co-author de Freitas. “We have shown that internal global climate-system variability accounts for at least 80% of the observed global climate variation over the past half-century. It may even be more if the period of influence of major volcanoes can be more clearly identified and the corresponding data excluded from the analysis.” These findings are largely being ignored by the mainstream media. They simply don’t fit the worn narrative that man is dangerously warming the Earth through his carbon dioxide emissions and a radical alteration of Western lifestyles mandated by government policy is desperately needed. They will be ignored, as well, by the Democratic machine that is trying to ram an economy-smothering carbon cap-and-trade regime through Congress. Despite efforts to keep the global warming scare alive, the growing evidence that humans aren’t heating the planet is piercing the public consciousness and alarmists are becoming marginalized. Sharp Americans are starting to understand H.L. Mencken’s observation that “The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it.” That pretty much sums up the modern environmentalist movement.Source

By Debra J. Saunders, Statesman Journal

No wonder skeptics consider the left’s belief in man-made global warming as akin to a fad religion — last week in Italy, G8 leaders pledged to not allow the Earth’s temperature to rise more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

For its next act, the G8 can part the Red Sea. The worst part is: These are the brainy swells who think of themselves as — all bow — Men of Science.The funny part is: G8 leaders can’t even decide the year from which emissions must be reduced. 1990? 2005? “This question is a mystery for everyone,” an aide to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said.And although President Obama led the charge for the G8 nations to agree to an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in industrial nations by 2050, the same Russian aide dissed the standard as “likely unattainable.”No worries, the language was nonbinding. Global-warming believers say that they are all about science, but their emphasis is not on results so much as declarations of belief.Faith. Mystery. Promises to engage in pious acts. Global warming is a religion. While Obama was in Italy preaching big cuts in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, he was losing some of his flock in Washington. The House may have passed the 1,200-page cap-and-trade bill largely unread, but Senate Democrats are combing the fine print and not liking what they see.Republicans who oppose the legislation are positively gleeful. For some issues, it can be more fun being part of the opposition, as Democrats are discovering.When the GOP was in the White House, Democrats got to play scientific martyrs. James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, would go running to the New York Times or Washington Post with the lament that the Bushies were trying to muzzle his pro-global-warming science. No matter how many times he appeared on TV, the stories kept reporting on allegations that Bush was censoring science.Now GOP senators have their own Hansen: Alan Carlin of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Be it noted, Carlin is not a scientist. He’s an MIT-trained economist, albeit with a degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology, who has worked as an analyst at the EPA since 1974. In March, he co-wrote a 98-page paper that began, “We have become increasingly concerned that EPA and many other agencies and countries have paid too little attention to the science of global warming.” He fears politics are steering what should be scientific research.

The analysis noted that global temperatures have declined in the past 11 years while carbon emissions have increased. It cited a 2009 paper that found “solar variability” may have had more to do with any warming during the past few decades than rising greenhouse gas levels. Carlin also wondered why the EPA bought into global-warming doom scenarios, when, despite increased greenhouse gas levels, U.S. crop yields are up, air quality is improved and Americans are living longer.

Did the EPA welcome a dissenting voice? Au contraire. According to e-mails released last month by Sam Kazman, general counsel for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank, Carlin’s supervisor told him not to “have any direct communication” with anyone in-house or elsewhere on the issue. And: “I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change.”Now, you can argue that the Obama administration simply wanted to present a clear message on a policy on which it already had settled. But why is it muzzling science when Bush did it, but not worthy of a New York Times story when Obama does it?Don’t say that Obama has science on his side. As the Carlin paper noted, “We do not believe that science is writing a description of the world or the opinions of world authorities on a particular subject … The question in our view is not what someone believes, but how what he or she believes corresponds with real world data.”The global-warming community’s reaction to real-world data — and the lack of warming in this century — has been to remain true believers. Except now they call it “climate change.”Debra J. Saunders is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, 901 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94103. Send e-mail to dsaunders@sfchronicle.com.

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HAMweather (July 20, 2009). Once again, cold records are far more frequent than warm records these days. In fact, record low temperatures are occuring 300% to 400% more often than record warm temperatures. This holds true to the fact that our planet has been cooling for over a full decade now.

Record Events for Mon Jul 13, 2009 through Sun Jul 19, 2009

Total Records: 2481

Rainfall: 441

High Temperatures: 204

Low Temperatures: 651

Lowest Max Temperatures: 868

Highest Min Temperatures: 317

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By Bob Ellis, Dakota Voice
The Global Warming Swindle is a devastating rebuttal of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” propaganda. It was produced in 2007 by WAG TV, one of Great Britain’s top production companies, and provides testimony from many respected scientists which reveals the lack of foundation for global warming hysteria. As Part 1 points out, the religion of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) has become the “new morality” of a politically correct age. No dissent will be tolerated, and is even viewed as dangerous by its acolytes. This video pulls no punches when it says that despite the fact that “experts” like Al Gore tell us AGW is “settled science,”

You are being told lies.

In this video, you’ll hear from Professor Tim Ball of the Department of Climatology at the University of Winnipeg, Professor Nir Shaviv of the Institute of Physics at the University of Jerusalem, Lord Nigel Lawson of Blaby, Professor Ian Clark of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Ottawa, climate forecaster Dr Piers Corbyn, Professor John Christy of the IPCC, Professor Philip Stott of the Department of Biogeography at the University of London, Professor Paul Reiter of the IPCC and the Pasteur Institute in France, Professor Richard Lindzen from the IPCC and MIT, Professor Patrick Michaels of the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, economist and author James Shikwati, former New Scientist editor Nigel Calder, NASA Weather Satellite Team Leader Dr. Roy Spencer and even Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore. The video points out how we have been force-fed a diet of AGW pap for years, and it’s a wonder that a solid majority of the public doesn’t believe this farce. As one scene from the BBC shows, we see the area in London near Parliament flooded from the Thames River, along with Trafalgar Square, and as someone who once lived in England and walked these areas a number of times, I can testify that it can be a little disconcerting to see places you know appearing to be flooded, even though you know it’s just special effects. As you see in this video, even members of the IPCC point out that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (a UN group) is a political organization, that the number of people in the group is inflated, and that a number of members do not agree with the hysterical findings published by the leaders of the group. Professor Shaviv points out that evidence indicates the earth once had three times as much or more CO2 in the atmosphere as we see today, yet these could not be blamed on human activity. Indeed, as the film points out, the earth has been considerably warmer in the last 1,000 years or so, and has been coming out of a “Little Ice Age” a few hundred years ago–all of this prior to SUVs, power plants or any industrial human activity. Why does NASA perpetuate this bunk, especially when a great deal of their own data points to natural causes of climate change? As Dr. Spencer points out, “Climate scientists need there to be a problem in order to get funding.” True believers in AGW like to claim that those of us who realize the theory doesn’t pass the smell test are simply minions of a powerful profit-driven oil industry. But the inconvenient truth they ignore is that there is even more money–free, easy, taxpayer money–flowing to the green movement based on the perpetuation of this fantasy. Their motives aren’t nearly so squeaky-clean as they would have you think. As the narrator summarizes so well of the film, “This is a story of how a theory about climate turned into a political ideology.” Over the next several days, I will post a new part of this important film at Dakota Voice. I hope you will come back for all the parts, if you have the courage to face the truth about this massive swindle.

Read about parts 2 through 8 here.

• Location: Lafayette Park, Washington DC
• Date: Saturday, September 26, 2009
• Time: 1:00 – 5:00 PM

T.A.G. (TruthAboutGreen.org) will be hosting the nation’s first Green Tea Party!
T.A.G. was formed in 2009 to respond to the constant barrage of misinformation currently available regarding climate change. Our hope is to bring commonly ignored, scientific facts into the mainstream dialogue about environmental change.The Green Tea Party planning committee has attracted Author, Steven Milloy, who wrote Green Hell, and has been featured on the Glenn Beck Program. Mr. Milloy is also the founder and publisher of www.junkscience.com, a website devoted to defending the truth of science.Also included in our program at the Green Tea Party are:~International documentarians, Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer who recently completed Not Evil Just Wrong, a rebuttal film aimed at uncovering the falsehoods presented in Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth.~Andrew Langer, creator of the Institute for Liberty, www.instituteforliberty.org an organization whose initiatives include Truth in Voting, which promotes the reading of legislation prior to it’s passage into law; and Liberty Belles, an organization designed to empower and inform concervative women on political issues.~Charles Lollar, Chairman of New Day Maryland, a group of Republicans, Democrates and Independents who are working together to achieve the goals of less government involvement and fewer taxes in the lives of Marylanders. ~~~~~~The Green Tea Party is still adding to our list of guests and is awaiting news from potential headlining speakers and musical entertainers who have expressed an interest in our cause. Please plan to attend this event and spread the word so that we may have a large turnout.We also seek financial donors, please strongly consider how you can assist or support this effort. If you able to contribute financially or offer a contact or other assistance, please contact Nancy Sabater, Chair, at nancy@truthaboutgreen.org, (301) 751-0006. Thank You & We Hope To See You There!

By Christopher Booker, Telegraph.co.uk

To meet our peak demand of 56 gigawatts of electricity would require 112,000 turbines covering 11,000 square miles, or an eighth of Britain’s entire land area, says Christopher Booker.
It would be hard to beat the sad gullibility with which the media last week reported the plans of Lord Mandelson and our Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband to cover our countryside and sea with 10,000 more huge wind turbines. According to one newspaper, it would need “an area of only 70 square miles to generate Britain’s total power requirements”. Well, no, actually. To meet our peak demand of 56 gigawatts of electricity would require 112,000 turbines covering 11,000 square miles, or an eighth of Britain’s entire land area.
Another newspaper solemnly reported that a new study shows that “a well-placed turbine could make enough energy to power 825,000 homes”. Well, no, actually. The figure for a single 2 megawatt turbine would be just 825 homes, meaning that the newspaper was only 100,000 per cent wrong. Even more alarming than the media’s credulity is that of the ministers themselves, in seriously trying to pretend that their £100 billion dream of building three giant turbines every day between now and 2020 has the faintest practical hope of being realised, let alone that it would serve any useful purpose to do so. Most alarming of all, however, in the desperation to reach EU “renewables” target, is the setting up of a new Infrastructure Planning Commission to force through thousands of these absurd objects over the wishes of local people and councils, who are now to be robbed of any right of appeal. Last week a Government inspector threw out a highly unpopular scheme for seven turbines in Shropshire which would have generated £43 million in subsidies alone for its owners over the next 25 years. The surrounding community was delighted. From next March, however, thanks to Lord Mandelson’s all-powerful new Commission, such inquiries will be a thing of the past, thrown onto the scrapheap of history along with much of the rest of our democracy, We will no longer have any right to oppose this tsunami of lunacy, until our countryside is ruined to no rational purpose whatever.
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