Tag Archives: Enviornmentalism

News

Coldest December ever recorded in UK and Australia

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UPDATE: We got linked by Gateway Pundit! Gateway Pundit is the best blog for finding news stories. Really recommend bookmarking them if you haven’t already.

From Watts Up With That.

Excerpt:

Breaking news!  December can still be cold and snowy over parts of the Northern Hemisphere.  Don’t look to the American media for much information about European weather;  it’s about as foreign as driving on the wrong side of the road.  But, in Britain, Italy, and the rest of Europe, the past several weeks have seen “the Arctic refrigerator door” swing wide-open.

Here are some example headlines:

Arctic freeze to last another month as AA warns of ‘worst driving conditions imaginable’ for Christmas getaways:  Mail Online:  “With temperatures expected to fall to -15c (5f), the Met Office said this is ‘almost certain’ to become the coldest December since records began in 1910.”

Europe travel mayhem as arctic freeze strikes again:  AFP:  “In Italy, rare snowfall disrupted the tourist destinations of Pisa and Florence, forced both airports to close and severely disrupted traffic and the region’s rail network.”

Meanwhile, here is MORE evidence of global warming on the other side of the planet.

Excerpt:

Parts of the state recorded their coldest December mornings in several decades on Monday as summer snow fell in the Snowy Mountains, wild winds rattled the coast, and more than 500 people were still cut off by the worst flooding in years.

The State Emergency Service (SES) received 74 calls for help from people in the Illawarra, Sydney and the Blue Mountains as gusts of up to 100kmh brought tree branches crashing down and damaged roofs.

Temperatures plummeted to 4C at Parkes Airport in central NSW, 10 degrees below average and the coldest December morning in 54 years, The Weather Channel says.

Coonamble in northern NSW recorded 7C – the coldest December morning in 12 years while Trangie, northwest of Dubbo, had 6C – the coldest December morning in 42 years.

To make matters worse, the Bureau of Meteorology is predicting an unseasonably gloomy Christmas, with rain forecast for just about every part of the state between December 24 and Boxing Day.

And more global warming in Europe.

Excerpt:

In Germany, Frankfurt airport operator Fraport said 560 flights had been canceled by Sunday afternoon and a large snow front coming in could mean more cancellations.

At Germany’s second largest airport in Munich, about 75 flights were canceled on Sunday out of 1,100 in all, mostly due to problems at other airports such as Amsterdam, Paris and Brussels, a spokesman said. Planes destined for London were being diverted to Munich and other German airports.

Many trains were also delayed or canceled and the speed limit for intercity train travel was restricted across Germany.

Snow blanketed northern France and authorities mobilized light armored personnel carriers in some areas to help motorists stranded on roadsides by the white stuff.

Around 700,000 people had been expected to travel through Paris’ two main airports over the weekend. But at the biggest, Roissy Charles de Gaulle, 40 percent of flights were canceled and over 5,000 people were stranded. At Orly, the city’s second airport, 20 percent of flights were canceled.

In Paris, the Eiffel Tower was closed because of the snow and a pop concert by Lady Gaga due to be held on Sunday was canceled because restrictions on heavy trucks in the Paris region prevented the show’s equipment from arriving on time.

I am not so sure that this whole scheme to impose state control on the free market and individual consumption is working. Maybe they should claim that driving cars and running businesses and having babies is causing runaway global cooling, instead.

News

Now that global warming is dead, what was it all about anyway?

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Consider Melanie Phillips writing in the UK Spectator.

Melanie cites this e-mail about the Medieval Warming Period from Phil Jones, the director of the now disgraced Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.The Medieval Warming Period is a period during the Middle Ages when the Earth’s temperature was higher than it is today.

Phil Jones writes:

Bottom line – their is no way the MWP (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the last 20 years. There is also no way a whole decade in the LIA period was more than 1 deg C on a global basis cooler than the 1961-90 mean. This is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and varaibility.

The first graph has no MWP, and the second graph (the real temperatures) has the MWP.

What happened to the Medieval Warming Period?
What happened to the Medieval Warming Period?

(Source: UK Telegraph)

Melanie comments:

In other words, despite the fact that science (or history) tells us that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today, thus destroying the basis of the AGW myth that we are living through an unprecedented warming of the climate caused by carbon dioxide arising from industrialisation, it cannot be true – because the Hadley CRU Director’s ‘gut’ tells him so.

All the manipulation, distortion and suppression revealed by these emails took place because it would seem these scientists knew their belief was not only correct but unchallengeable; and so when faced with evidence that showed it was false, they tried every which way to make the data fit the prior agenda. And those who questioned that agenda themselves had to be airbrushed out of the record, because to question it was simply impossible. Only AGW zealots get to decide, apparently, what science is. Truth is what fits their ideological agenda. Anything else is to be expunged.

Which is the more terrifying and devastating: if people are bent and deliberately try to deceive others, or if they are so much in thrall to an ideology that they genuinely have lost the power to think objectively and rationally?

I think that the terrible history of mankind provides the answer to that question. Nixon was a crook. But what we are dealing with here is the totalitarian personality. One thing is now absolutely clear for all to see about the anthropogenic global warming scam: science this is not.

They had so much blind faith that they just knew that the real temperatures were wrong – so they felt justified in manipulating the data. They had faith that they were right and that the objective world was wrong.

Why they did it

Now consider this article from Pajamas Media. (H/T Muddling Towards Maturity)

Excerpt:

Global warming was a fraud, and it has now been exposed.

That little fraud would have cost the taxpayers of the world trillions of dollars, not to mention wrecking their economies with carbon taxes and penalties.

But that’s not even the worst of it. The most important take home lesson is that global frauding was the clear and conscious work of a political machine aiming to steal your money,  your liberties, and your country. It was a massive, worldwide attempt at a coup d’etat, and the victims were going to include all the free and prosperous peoples of the world. Hitler had his Reichstag fire. Today’s transnational left had its global warming fraud. The political goal was exactly the same: maximum power through maximum fear.

Now that we know for certain that global warming IS false, I think it’s time to ask why the global warming alarmists pushed it so hard. I think the best answer is that the government wanted to control the free market and the production and consumption of individuals. They thought we were using up too many resources doing stupid things like driving. They thought we were having too many babies. They thought that there was no sovereign God in the universe, so they had to step in and take control.

So, they took a bunch of taxpayer money and paid a bunch of arrogant scientists to invent a compelling myth, complete with fabricated data. They paid unionized teachers to teach that myth to vulnerable children in government-run schools. Some of them bought shares in companies that stood to gain from the hysteria they were manufacturing. And they used that myth to deceive people into voting them into power so they could override our fundamental liberties. They thought we were too stupid to run our own lives.

News

Mark Steyn explains what Climategate teaches us about peer-review

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The article is here in the National Review. (H/T Secondhand Smoke via ECM)

First, he argues that Climategate shows that the peer-review process can be corrupted:

Here’s what Phil Jones of the CRU and his colleague Michael Mann of Penn State mean by “peer review.” When Climate Research published a paper dissenting from the Jones-Mann “consensus,” Jones demanded that the journal “rid itself of this troublesome editor,” and Mann advised that “we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers.”

So much for Climate Research. When Geophysical Research Letters also showed signs of wandering off the “consensus” reservation, Dr. Tom Wigley (“one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change”) suggested they get the goods on its editor, Jim Saiers, and go to his bosses at the American Geophysical Union to “get him ousted.” When another pair of troublesome dissenters emerge, Dr. Jones assured Dr. Mann, “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Second, he writes that the mainstream media is far too biased to report the facts:

And gullible types like… Andrew Revkin of the New York Times fell for it hook, line, and tree-ring. The e-mails of “Andy” (as his CRU chums fondly know him) are especially pitiful. Confronted by serious questions from Stephen McIntyre, the dogged Ontario retiree whose Climate Audit website exposed the fraud of Dr. Mann’s global-warming “hockey stick” graph), “Andy” writes to Dr. Mann to say not to worry, he’s going to “cover” the story from a more oblique angle:

I’m going to blog on this as it relates to the value of the peer review process and not on the merits of the mcintyre et al attacks.

peer review, for all its imperfections, is where the herky-jerky process of knowledge building happens, would you agree?

And, amazingly, Dr. Mann does! “Re, your point at the end — you’ve taken the words out of my mouth.”

And that’s what Andrew Revkin did, week in, week out: He took the words out of Michael Mann’s mouth and served them up to impressionable readers of the New York Times and opportunist politicians around the world champing at the bit to inaugurate a vast global regulatory body to confiscate trillions of dollars of your hard-earned wealth in the cause of “saving the planet” from an imaginary crisis concocted by a few dozen thuggish ideologues. If you fall for this after the revelations of the last week, you’re as big a dupe as Begley or Revkin.

I think we need to be skeptical of having science hijacked to prove things that the secular left wants it to prove. They want to “prove” evolution so that they can undermine traditional morality, which they view as an unnecessary restraint on their pursuit of happiness in this life. They want to “prove” global warming so that they can undermine the free market and gain control of the production and consumption of individuals. And they often discriminate against skeptics in the peer-review process (and in hiring/promotion decisions) in order to manufacture a false consensus.