Tag Archives: Climate Change

News

New study finds that cosmic rays and the sun cause global warming

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Is ManBearPig to blame for global warming?
Is ManBearPig to blame for global warming?

From the Financial Post.

Excerpt:

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

[…]Yet this spectacular success will be largely unrecognized by the general public for years — this column will be the first that most readers have heard of it — because CERN remains too afraid of offending its government masters to admit its success. Weeks ago, CERN formerly decided to muzzle Mr. Kirby and other members of his team to avoid “the highly political arena of the climate change debate,” telling them “to present the results clearly but not interpret them” and to downplay the results by “mak[ing] clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.” The CERN study and press release is written in bureaucratese and the version of Mr. Kirkby’s study that appears in the print edition of Nature censored the most eye-popping graph — only those who know where to look in an online supplement will see the striking potency of cosmic rays in creating the conditions for seeding clouds.

Well, this is no surprise to me. We’ve KNOWN that the planet was warmer in the Middle Ages than it is now. We’ve KNOWN that the surface temperatures on Mars increased when ours was increasing.

Why do secular socialists have to insist on believing what they want to believe against the scientific evidence, and then lie to everyone else, using taxpayer money? If they want to propagate their myths, why do they have to get the government involved? Why can’t they just have a global warming church and go to that, and leave government to serious people who don’t believe in myths and superstitions?

We really need to get leftist ideology out of the business of government. I don’t mind if they want to teach their flat-Earth myths to each other with their own money, but why do I have to pay for it?

If you are curious about this story, James Delingpole has more on it in the UK Telegraph.

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News

Vermont governor blames tropical storms on global warming

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Here’s the interview of the left-wing site Democracy Now.

Excerpt:

AMY GOODMAN: You have a climate cabinet—you’re unusual in this way, Governor Shumlin—in Vermont, dealing with the issue of climate change. Can you talk about something that the networks, as they covered what wasn’t happening in New York and then came very late to what is happening in Vermont, have not talked about through this massive coverage, and that is those two words, “climate change” or “global warming”?

GOV. PETER SHUMLIN: Well, you know, I find it extraordinary that so many political leaders won’t actually talk about the relationship between climate change, fossil fuels, our continuing irrational exuberance about burning fossil fuels, in light of these storm patterns that we’ve been experiencing. Listen, since I’ve been sworn in as governor just seven months ago, I have dealt with—this is the second major disaster as a result of storms. We had storms this spring that flooded our downtowns and put us through many of the same exercises that we’re going through right now. We didn’t used to get weather patterns like this in Vermont. We didn’t get tropical storms. We didn’t get flash flooding. It wasn’t—you know, our storm patterns weren’t like Costa Rica; they were like Vermont.

And the point is, we in the colder states are going to see the results of climate change first. We are. Myself, Premier Charest up in Quebec, Governor Cuomo over in New York, we understand that the flooding and the extraordinary weather patterns that we’re seeing are a result of our burnings of fossil fuel. We’ve got to get off fossil fuels as quickly as we know how, to make this planet livable for our children and our grandchildren. And I do think that there’s a relationship between the storms that we’ve been getting here in Vermont and the example, frankly, of what—they are an example of what lies ahead for us.

Yes, it’s politicians like this that cause oil prices to go through the roof because they refuse to develop domestic sources of energy. And when you raise the price of oil and gas, you raise the prices of food, and anything else that needs to be transported.

But I digress… is the Vermont governor right about tropical storms never happening in Vermont? Let’s see.

Excerpt:

1927 November – A tropical storm spawned torrential rains as it rose over the Green Mountain in Vermont, Nov. 3-4. The record flooding caused $40 million in damage and killed 84 people in Vermont and 1 in Rhode Island. The storm ended as snow in the mountains. Note that this flood was unrelated to the 1927 Mississippi Flood.

1938 September – New England Hurricane of 1938 – Strong Category 3. Wind gusts reached Category 5 strength in eastern Connecticut, Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts west of Buzzards Bay and Cape Cod. The anemometer at the Blue Hill Observatory registered a peak wind gust of 186 m.p.h. before the instrument broke. The hurricane lost strength as it tracked into interior areas of New England, but it is believed to have been at Category 2 intensity as it crossed into Vermont and at minimal Category 1 intensity as it tracked into Quebec. The storm killed over 600 people and is considered to be the worst hurricane to strike New England in modern times.

Ooops!They’ve had hurricanes in Vermont… and those are much worse than tropical storms.

But what about scientists… what do pro-global warming scientists think of the link between hurricane frequency and global warming?

Excerpt:

Ever since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, hurricanes have often been seen as a symbol of global warming’s wrath. Many climate change experts have tied the rise of hurricanes in recent years to global warming and hotter waters that fuel them.

Another group of experts say there is no link. They attribute the recent increase to a natural multi-decade cycle.

What makes this study different is Knutson, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fluid dynamics lab in Princeton, N.J.

He has warned about the harmful effects of climate change and has even complained in the past about being censored by the Bush administration on studies on the dangers of global warming.

He said his new study argues “against the notion that we’ve already seen a really dramatic increase in Atlantic hurricane activity resulting from greenhouse warming.”

The study, published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience, predicts that by the end of the century the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic will fall by 18 percent. The number of hurricanes making landfall in the United States and its neighbors will drop by 30 percent because of wind factors. The biggest storms – those with winds of more than 110 mph – would only decrease in frequency by 8 percent.

So what are we to make over the media freaking out over hurricane tropical storm Irene?

As Dennis Prager argues, meteorologists can’t even predict the intensity of a “hurricane” one day before the event, but they are certain about their predictions for catastrophic global warming. Is that not “irrational exuberance”? I can see why politicians on the left would sign on to this – they are always trying to make everyone equal by limiting individual freedoms and regulating businesses.

News

Drowning polar bears scientist being investigated for misconduct

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Is ManBearPig to blame for global warming?
Is ManBearPig to blame for global warming?

CBS News reports. (H/T Lonely Conservative via Reformed Seth)

Excerpt:

A federal wildlife biologist whose observation in 2004 of presumably drowned polar bears in the Arctic helped to galvanize the global warming movement has been placed on administrative leave and is being investigated for scientific misconduct, possibly over the veracity of that article.

Charles Monnett is an Anchorage-based scientist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.

He has not been informed by the inspector general’s office of any charges or questions related to the scientific integrity of his work, according to Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

Monnett was told July 18 that he was being put on leave, pending results of an investigation into “integrity issues.”

On Thursday, Ruch’s watchdog group plans to file a complaint on Monnett’s behalf.

Lonely Conservative notes that this man’s government-funded “research” was featured by Al Gore in his “documentary”.

And here’s more on this story from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Something about this story is very odd. Surely, under the Obama administration any government official who was discovered to have been “emotionalising the issue” in order to raise public awareness of the terrible dangers of ManBearPig would be given a promotion, and a Congressional Medal of Honor at the very least? Can it really be possible that BOEMRE remains so principled and inviolate that it still insists its employees cleave to the truth?

It’s definitely one to watch, anyway. After all, the “drowning polar bear” story was instrumental in the US Interior Department’s controversial decision in 2008 to have Ursus maritimus declared a “threatened species.” (Despite evidence that polar bear populations have increased roughly five-fold in the last 50 years: not so much a threatened species, you might say; more like a plague or an infestation). It also prompted the silly scene in Al Gore’s fantasy movie An Inconvenient Truth where an animated polar bear is shown drowning because of “global warming.”

At Watts Up With That you’ll find an excellent World Climate Report essay reporting on the background to the “drowning polar bear” story.

But the part of the study that garnered the press attention so much so that it has become ingrained in global warming lore was that Monnett et al. reported the sighting of four polar bear carcasses floating in the sea several kilometers from shore, presumably having drowned. All four dead bears were spotted from the plane a few days after a strong storm had struck the area, with high winds and two meter high waves. Since polar bears are strong swimmers, the authors concluded that it was not just the swimming that caused the bears to drown, but that the swimming in association with high winds and waves, which made the exertion rate much greater, sapping the bears of their energy and leading to their deaths. The authors also suggested that the frequency and intensity of late summer and early fall storms should increase (as would the wave heights) because of global warming and thus the risk to swimming bears will increase along with the number of bears swimming (since there will be less ice) and subsequently more bears will drown. But they didn’t stop there—they suggested that the increased risk will not be borne by all bears equally, but that lone females and females with cubs will be most at risk—putting even more downward pressure of future polar bear populations. And thus a global warming poster child (or cub) is born.

But does all of this follow from the data? Again, we haven’t heard of any reports of polar bear drownings in Alaska in 2005, 2006, or 2007—all years with about the same, or even less late-summer sea ice off the north coast of Alaska than in 2004, the year of the documented drownings.

How is that science?

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