Location: its wet, windy and chilly....take a guess Gender:
Posted:
Feb 3, 2010 - 4:48pm
black321 wrote:
Economic growth 'cannot continue'
Continuing global economic growth "is not possible" if nations are to tackle climate change, a report by an environmental think-tank has warned.
The New Economics Foundation (Nef) said "unprecedented and probably impossible" carbon reductions would be needed to hold temperature rises below 2C (3.6F).
Nowhere in that article does it mention the increase in growth provided by a broadening green energy market. Power (Energy*time) is money. The low-carbon and carbon neutral ways of producing storing and using energy will provide a new growth area, as well as streamlining businesses into low carbon-cost or low-energy methods. This was rather telling though:
"Magic bullets - such as carbon capture and storage, nuclear or even geo-engineering - are potentially dangerous distractions from more human-scale solutions," said co-author Victoria Johnson, Nef's lead researcher for the climate change and energy programme.
She added that there was growing support for community-scale projects, such as decentralised energy systems, but support from governments was needed.
"At the moment, magic bullets... are getting much of the funding and political attention, but are missing the targets," Dr Johnson said.
VERY INTERESTING AND WELL WORTH VIEWING. It's presented by a weather expert, John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel. Believable—-and no politicians involved. http://www.kusi.com/home/78477082.html?video=pop&t=a
"The increasingly public "skepticism" of aging weatherman John Coleman raises an interesting question: Do you have to be corrupt to be wrong about climate change?
The answer, of course, is no. Notwithstanding the money that Coleman makes as a guest speaker for oily conferences organized by long-compromised groups like the Heartland Institute, he may be sincere, even well-intentioned about his personal campaign to dismiss climate change as "the greatest scam in history."
But that doesn't absolve him of responsibility, especially as he is leveraging a high profile to interfere in a debate about which he is clearly ill-informed."
Coleman may be sincere. He may be well-intentioned. He may be a charming dupe. But he should be ashamed of himself for not taking more care in what he reads and who he befriends.
And the rest of us should ignore him more enthusiastically than the good people of San Diego ignore his weather forecasts."
VERY INTERESTING AND WELL WORTH VIEWING. It's presented by a weather expert, John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel. Believable—-and no politicians involved. http://www.kusi.com/home/78477082.html?video=pop&t=a
John Coleman apparently receives funding from polluting industries through the likes of the Heartland Institute, a lobbying firm for the tobacco industry and various big carbon producers. I think I'll get my understanding of the climate change issue from the vast majority of scientists who have said that global warming is probably human-caused, not from a TV weatherman who is the paid shill of polluters.
VERY INTERESTING AND WELL WORTH VIEWING. It's presented by a weather expert, John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel. Believable—-and no politicians involved. http://www.kusi.com/home/78477082.html?video=pop&t=a
Your State of the Union speech last week laudably referenced clean tech and renewable energy several times. We ask that you follow your words with action, by leading the transition to a post-carbon economy and a healthier world.
You also spoke of our need to face hard truths.
Hard truth: Our continued, willful reliance on fossil fuels is making our planet uninhabitable. We are evicting ourselves from the only paradise we’ve ever known.
Hard truth: No combination of current and anticipated renewable sources can maintain our profligate energy usage as the global supply of fossil fuels heads for terminal decline.
For the recently released Searching for a Miracle, Post Carbon Institute Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg conducted a “net energy” analysis of 18 different energy sources (including nuclear and “clean coal”). He concluded that the amount of energy available after accounting for the energy used in extraction and production of those sources is—at our current and anticipated rates of consumption—insufficient to get us “over the hump” to a post-carbon world.
Our 29 Post Carbon Institute Fellows—experts in the leading economic, energy, and environmental issues of the day—all agree that this "net energy" deficit is just one of many interrelated crises shaping the 21st century. Each crisis alone creates formidable challenges; in combination, their complexity admits no simple solution. But given their direness, inaction risks tragedy.
Mr. President, we respect you and your advisors and appreciate the enormity of the dilemmas you and all of us confront. When a great leader frames a great challenge, a resilient will people rise to meet the opportunity. And so we ask, Mr. President, that you tell the American people that we must:
1. Face reality. In a carbon-constrained world, true prosperity comes not from heedless growth, but from shared security, community, and liberty.
2. Prepare for the future. Conservation, with an emphasis on building a green economy and revitalizing struggling communities, offers cost-effective “found” energy, and the most immediate and long-term return on investment.
3. Lead the way. A substantial investment in renewable energy, with an emphasis on distributed solar and wind, offers the best hope for moving to a sustainable economy and environment.
Mr. President, lead us in creating a future worth inheriting. Post Carbon Institute and our Fellows will support you and your team in whatever capacity we can. We believe that the American people, and the world’s people, will support you as well.
If I was a 3rd world country... how would I defend myself from being overrun by the excesses of the Western World? How do poor peoples protect themselves from having their very identity destroyed by the tidal wave of consumerism and westernness?
I'm not pro terrorism. I'm certainly not pro Al Quida But the bully cultures need to look what position they put other cultures in. When an huge elephant corners a snake, the snake will strike out and bite the elephant to protect itself. It may not be able to win, but it can hurt the elephant. And if the elephant is a conscious being, should it destroy the snake, just because it bites?
Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden reportedly issued a new audiotape Friday, calling for an international boycott of American goods and the U.S. dollar as a way to combat climate change. In the new tape, a voice said to be bin Laden's rambles about the dangers of global warming before predictably segueing into his broader argument - that the only way to stop worldwide catastrophe is to bring "the wheels of the American economy" to a standstill. (Maybe no one has told bin Laden that China is actually now the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions?) The tape's authenticity has yet to be confirmed, but it wouldn't be the first time bin Laden has mentioned climate change, just his first tape that's dedicated entirely to the subject. The tape blames Western nations for floods, desertification and other environmental ills around the world, and demands "drastic action" rather than "solutions that partially reduce the effect." Bin Laden also released another tape last week in which he took credit for a Nigerian student's failed Christmas Day airplane bombing attempt, and many terrorism experts say these tapes seem to be desperate attempts by bin Laden to regain his relevance on the world stage. (Sources: Associated Press, BBC News)
I consider this gentleman a respected friend. I have and do trust (to an extent) the material he puts out. I think to the best of his knowledge he produces videos that are educational and informative. In light of new material, I'm looking forward to his updates. (His "Made Easy" series are a hit, especially on evolution.) He also touches on the hacked emails, and it has caused me to rethink some of the "cherry picked" (his words, not mine) quotes we see. I had posted this some time back when there were only four videos, now there are seven. He defends anthropogenic warming to a degree (some pun intended). Considering the lag time between discovery and production, his work is one of the best arguments I've seen.
I consider this gentleman a respected friend. I have and do trust (to an extent) the material he puts out. I think to the best of his knowledge he produces videos that are educational and informative. In light of new material, I'm looking forward to his updates. (His "Made Easy" series are a hit, especially on evolution.) He also touches on the hacked emails, and it has caused me to rethink some of the "cherry picked" (his words, not mine) quotes we see. I had posted this some time back when there were only four videos, now there are seven. He defends anthropogenic warming to a degree (some pun intended). Considering the lag time between discovery and production, his work is one of the best arguments I've seen.
Continuing global economic growth "is not possible" if nations are to tackle climate change, a report by an environmental think-tank has warned.
The New Economics Foundation (Nef) said "unprecedented and probably impossible" carbon reductions would be needed to hold temperature rises below 2C (3.6F).
No, it's more about "turning our children into Orwellian eco-spies"...
Tuesday 15 December 2009
Frank Furedi
Turning children into Orwellian eco-spies Frank Furedi recalls being educated through fear in Stalinist Hungary, and is disturbed that the same tactics are now used by environmentalists.
There is a long and sordid tradition of trying to socialise children by scaring them. The aim of such socialisation-through-fear is twofold: firstly, to get children to conform to the scaremongers' values; secondly, to use children to influence, or at least to contain, their parents' behaviour.
When I was a schoolchild in Stalinist Hungary, we were frequently warned about the numerous threats facing our glorious regime. I also recall that we were encouraged to lecture our errant parents about the new wonderful values being promoted by our brave, wise leaders. The Big Brothers of the 1940s saw children as tools of moral blackmail and social control. Today, in the twenty-first century, scaremongers see children in much the same way, exploiting their natural concern with the wonders of life to promote a message of shrill climate alarmism.
If you want to know how it works, watch the official opening video of the Copenhagen summit on climate change (see below). Titled ‘Please Help The World', the four-minute film opens with happy children laughing and playing on swings. A sudden outburst of rain forces them all to rush for cover. The message is clear: the climate threatens our way of life. It then cuts to a young girl who is anxiously watching one TV news broadcaster after another reporting on impending environmental catastrophes. Then we see the young girl tucked into bed, sweetly asleep as she embraces her toy polar bear... but suddenly we're drawn into her nightmare. She's on a parched and eerie landscape; she looks frightened and desolate; suddenly the dry earth cracks and she runs in terror towards the shelter of a distant solitary tree. She drops her toy polar bear in a newly formed chasm and yells and screams as she holds on to the tree for dear life. The video ends with groups of children pleading with us: ‘Please help the world.' You get the picture.
Two months after "climategate" cast doubt on some of the science behind global warming, new questions are being raised about the reliability of a key temperature database, used by the United Nations and climate change scientists as proof of recent planetary warming.
Two American researchers allege that U.S. government scientists have skewed global temperature trends by ignoring readings from thousands of local weather stations around the world, particularly those in colder altitudes and more northerly latitudes, such as Canada.
In the 1970s, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed surface temperature readings into a global database assembled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Today, NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada.
Worse, only one station — at Eureka on Ellesmere Island — is now used by NOAA as a temperature gauge for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle.
The Canadian government, meanwhile, operates 1,400 surface weather stations across the country, and more than 100 above the Arctic Circle, according to Environment Canada.
Yet as American researchers Joseph D'Aleo, a meteorologist, and E. Michael Smith, a computer programmer, point out in a study published on the website of the Science and Public Policy Institute, NOAA uses "just one thermometer everything north of latitude 65 degrees."
Both the authors, and the institute, are well-known in climate-change circles for their skepticism about the threat of global warming.
Mr. D'Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and another U.S. agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have "cherry picked" the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea — which has a warming effect on winter weather.
Over the past two decades, they say, "the percentage of stations in the lower elevations tripled and those at higher elevations, above 300 feet, were reduced in half."
Using the agency's own figures, Smith shows that in 1991, almost a quarter of NOAA's Canadian temperature data came from stations in the high Arctic. The same region contributes only 3% of the Canadian data today.
Mr. D'Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and GISS also ignore data from numerous weather stations in other parts of the world, including Russia, the U.S. and China.
They say NOAA collects no temperature data at all from Bolivia — a high-altitude, landlocked country — but instead "interpolates" or assigns temperature values for that country based on data from "nearby" temperature stations located at lower elevations in Peru, or in the Amazon basin.
The result, they say, is a warmer-than-truthful global temperature record.
"NOAA . . . systematically eliminated 75% of the world's stations with a clear bias towards removing higher latitude, high altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler," the authors say. "The thermometers in a sense, marched towards the tropics, the sea, and to airport tarmacs."
The NOAA database forms the basis of the influential climate modelling work, and the dire, periodic warnings on climate change, issued by James Hanson, the director of the GISS in New York.
Neither agency responded to a request for comment Wednesday from Canwest News Service. However Hanson did issue a public statement on the matter earlier this week.
"NASA has not been involved in any manipulation of climate data used in the annual GISS global temperature analysis," he said. "The agency is confident of the quality of this data and stands by previous scientifically-based conclusions regarding global temperatures."
In addition to the allegations against NOAA and GISS, climate scientists are also dealing with the embarrassment this week of the false glacier-melt warning contained in the 2007 report of the UN Panel on Climate Change. That report said Himalayan glaciers are likely to disappear within three decades if current rates of melting continue.
This week, however, the panel admitted there is no scientific evidence to support such a claim.
The revelations come only two months after the "climategate" scandal, in which the leak or theft of thousands of e-mails — private discussions between scientists in the U.S. and Britain — showed that a group of influential climatologists tried for years to manipulate global warming data, rig the scientific peer-review process and keep their methods secret from other, contrary-minded researchers.
And this was in the comments section. I wonder if someone who has the time and knowledge double check this gentleman's statement. snowmaneasy
January 22, 2010 - 9:33 AM Flag this as Inappropriate
"There may be something in this story...as I have been checking the temp data for Smithers, Central BC..I have plotted all the data back to 1949...you can check it yourself on the Environment Canada website...just go to the archives for BC and then for Smithers and download the data into excel....as for all of these issues you have to check it yourself.
Well, I plotted it all in excel and lo and behold no warming can be seen after 1998. In fact from 1998 to the end of 2009 there is in fact a decline (cooling)"
If we are going to judge the truth of claims on the behaviour of those making them, it seems only fair to look at the behaviour of a few of those questioning the scientific consensus. There are many similar examples we did not include. We leave readers to draw their own conclusions about who to trust.
"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."
And this?
"Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low....
The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."
I'd like for all of the data that the IPCC has access to, to be made public, for the past and from this day forward.
That goes for NASA and NOAA too. (The IPCC glacier gaff/manipulation, that they would be gone in a few years was actually up on the NASA site until a couple of days ago. How in the hell could NASA make such an un-researched error? I'm stunned at their incompetence and/or agenda.)
We fund these groups, we should see the results.
Did anyone watch the D'Aleo video?
He makes some very valid points and raises excellent questions.
I do agree with Richard, in a nutshell, you either have very good reasons to believe what you do, or you don't.
Unfortunately, people rarely follow up on the rebuttals. The smear sticks (and confirmed what they already believed/wanted to be true, i.e. wide scaled fraud and conspiracy).
The comparison with another branch of science, the theory of evolution, is uncanny. It doesn't do too well in the same of court of the unwashed and unread masses, even after being established more than 150 years ago.
excellent. Stolen & posted on FB.
