Someone please help me out here. Everyone is yelling about fixing the "climate crisis", but I still can't find it - the crisis, that is.
There appears to be no significant change in either the frequency or intensity of hurricanes and in fact the last two seasons have been pretty quiet. Katrina hit land as a pretty standard CAT 3 and hurricane intensity isn't measured by the measure of property damage at any rate.
Global "temperatures" appear to be dropping ( if that term has any meaning at any rate ) and the solar scientists are complaining about a quiet sun which is starting to show many of the same characteristics as the Maunder Minimum, which led to the "little ice age". Well, that's a crisis, I suppose, but not the same color as the present one.
Sea levels continue to rise a minuscule amount each year as they have since the last ice age when sea level was perhaps 400 feet lower than it is today. I just can't see New York under water anytime in the 21st century at the present observed rates which don't seem to be changing.
Even the oceans seems to be cooling a bit based on data from the new diving buoy system, but perhaps NOAA is cooking the data and we can't trust them any more than we can trust NASA anymore.
The Antarctic Ice Pack continues to grow and is now larger than ever in the 30+ years we've been able to take highly accurate radar altimeter measurements. The Arctic Ice continues to expand and shrink annually as it seems inclined to do, and we note some pretty good sized volcanoes have recently been discovered on the Arctic Ocean floor which might be helping the shrinking part a bit.
Polar bear populations are at near record levels and seem healthy, and even I have seen them playing around on floating ice chunks in the Arctic summer. They are a terrestrial animal, after all, as anyone can see who visits the Churchill area in the summer and takes a polar bear cruise on one of their giant bear-proof buses.
Droughts and floods seem to be more strongly correlated with changes in ENSO and his friends than with a one degree temperature rise over the span of a hundred years, but maybe I'm missing something.
When I wrote the WE Campaign suggesting they take a closer look at things before falling off the turnip truck I immediately started receiving email bulletins from them referring to me as a "fellow campaigner", so I guess I now know how they grew to be a "million strong".
So, while hordes of folks continually call for Weapons of Mass Taxation to be hauled out to fight the "climate crisis", I still can't seem to find the crisis anywhere and note that the likely beneficiaries of carbon taxes and such will be the folks tolling the alarm.
As I said at the beginning: I'm having trouble locating the crisis, so I'm hoping some of the many experts here on this forum can give me a little guidance.
Jim Peden
Middlebury,
Vermont, USA
This comment posted by Jim Peden in this thread at popular blog realclimate.org was disallowed. I tend to think it is the alarmist scientists that are really in denial?
Jim Peden is Webmaster of Middlebury Networks and Editor of the Middlebury Community Network, spent some of his earlier years as an Atmospheric Physicist at the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh and Extranuclear Laboratories in Blawnox, Pennsylvania, studying ion-molecule reactions in the upper atmosphere. As a student, he was elected to both the National Physics Honor Society and the National Mathematics Honor Fraternity, and was President of the Student Section of the American Institute of Physics. He was a founding member of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, and a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. His thesis on charge transfer reactions in the upper atmosphere was co-published in part in the prestigious Journal of Chemical Physics. The results obtained by himself and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh remain today as the gold standard in the AstroChemistry Database. He was a co-developer of the Modulated Beam Quadrupole Mass Spectrometer, declared one of the "100 Most Significant Technical Developments of the Year" and displayed at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.
Hi Mark,
Like the link
What's scary is when we have kids (who've been brainwashed with this AGW claptrap) associating very cold weather with Global Warming- madness!!
The Goracle and his followers are now using the phrase 'climate change' - neat, now means anything that the weather does is our fault.
I'm an aethiest buy might well decide to believe in a God if one can deliver us from these deluded AGW believers!
Here's the reality:
http://www.bclocalnews.com/vancouver_island_north/northislandmidweek/opinion/25999209.html
Jim Peden...about the climate crisis. I've thought about your question for some time and I know there is no climate crisis per se, at this time. I'm not worried about the Arctic because the ice there is not an ice cap, it's comprised of ice floes that float on the Arctic Ocean. That means the ocean levels throughout the world are already displaced by that mass of ice and even if it all melts the ocean levels wont increase.
The only crisis I see is the meddling of humans, and that's real, and here right now. If they start cutting back on CO2 and go beyond the natural level of CO2, which is about 97% of the current CO2 density, we could impact the planet in a dangerous manner.
Mother Nature has established the CO2 levels as they are with humans adding a mere 3%. Even at that, we don't know what amount of man-made CO2 has already been reabsorbed and which part of the 3% is natural. It would be really stupid to meddle with that balance in the way many politicians are talking about. I don't want Al Gore and Arnold Schwarzeneggar fixing my climate.
We also have the problem with world economy. Carbon taxes, cap and trade systems and Kyoto have the potential to mess world economy to the point of devastation. Furthermore, if the Greens are allowed to follow up on their hysterical agenda, well be struggling with basics like transportation and home heating due to the lack of oil and other fuels.
The climate crisis right now is in the human mind and that's where the danger lies. Religious belief systems are a peculiarity of certain human minds in that the people suffering from the malady are unable to see beyond the belief, or to see it is simply a thought. I am not talking about a person having a personal relationship with his or her God, I am talking about organized systems of belief that are conditioned into people. People who accept global warming dogma blindly, especially those who emotionally defend it, are under the spell of that religious-type belief system, but they can't see it. In Zen, that is called the 'cosmic joke'.
Rhetoric is the use of emotion in an argument to sway the outcome. It is practiced by politicians and others who don't have facts to back their arguments and lean on another peculiarity of the human mind through which it can be influenced by emotion alone. We all have the ability to see past the emotion but many people seem incapable of doing so. The current climate crisis, which is an illusion, has been indoctrinated into the minds of the believers entirely by rhetoric.
There is not one shred of evidence that CO2 is warming the atmosphere. Certain scientists have jumped to that conclusion because it is all they can understand. There is some evidence that the atmosphere is warming, however, albeit very slightly, but there is evidence that such warming may be natural.
In reality, no one could claim a crisis based on half a degree of warming over a century. That half degree is not enough to cause droughts, serious glacial melting, severe storms or any of the other climate irregularities blamed on it, yet that's what the believers are seeing. No one can predict the future of climate and the IPCC made that clear in their 2001 assessment (TAR). The were very clear that future climate states could only be hypothesized based on the best probability from different computer models.
The fact that a crisis is seen by many to be real is a testament to the power of rhetoric and the ability of the human mind to live in illusion. To those who see the crisis, it is real, even if it is imaginary.
Sorry I couldn't be of any help.
To the AGW propogandists: I’m sorry but you’ve only yourselves to blame for not allowing un- biased/evenly funded research science to run its course!
The Greens are Going Crazy
By Alan Caruba (07/27/08)
It’s hard to ignore the fact that the Greens are going crazy, not just in the United States, but around the world. They are increasingly frantic over the opposition being voiced against global warming, one of the greatest hoaxes in modern history.
The Greens have bet everything on global warming as the reason for giving up the use of long established sources of energy such as oil, coal and natural gas. The object has been to slow everything the modern world calls progress.
In India, a spokesman for that nation of one billion people has flatly refused to accept the global warming hoax. China shows no sign of yielding to the global warming lies. The greatest agricultural and mercantile economy to have ever existed, the United States of America continues to thwart its own growth by yielding to the lies.
Recently the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, said that “coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. It’s global warming. It’s ruining our country. It’s ruining our world.”
No, what makes us sick is listening to such preposterous lies. A Rasmussen telephone survey taken after Sen. Reid’s absurd statement found that 52% of voters surveyed rejected his views about coal and oil, double the amount of those who agreed.
What is troublesome, however, is that the same survey found the voters evenly divided on whether global warming exists or poses a threat. Fully 47% of those surveyed believe that human activity affects the climate. Both candidates for President are publicly committed to the global warming hoax by varying degrees.
Despite an intense, decades-long propaganda campaign, coupled with indoctrination in our nation’s schools, the truth is beginning to emerge.
In March, an international conference on climate change organized by The Heartland Institute brought together over 500 of the world’s leading climatologists, meteorologists, economists and others for three days of seminars and presentations that completely refuted the pronouncements of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and disputed the lies of Al Gore’s famed “documentary.”
As recently as July 8, the Space and Science Research Center held a news conference in which it stated that the warming that has occurred since the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850 was completely natural, i.e., had nothing to do with human or industrial activity.
More significantly, the Center went on record saying that, “After an exhaustive review of a substantial body of climate research, and in conjunction with the obvious and compelling new evidence that exists, it is time that the world community acknowledges that the Earth has begun the next climate change.” The current warming period is not only at an end, but a distinct cooling cycle has begun and will bring “predominantly colder global temperatures for many years into the future.”
Just how crazed has the environmental movement become? On July 7 it was announced that Argentine scientists have been strapping plastic tanks to the backs of cows to collect and measure how much methane gas they produce.
Methane, like carbon dioxide, is a minor component of the Earth’s atmosphere. Methane is also released from swamps, landfills and other sources. If it and CO2 played a significant role in determining the world’s climate, it would be a cause for concern, but it is the Sun that primarily drives the Earth’s climate cycles. Solar activity has gone quiet in recent years as fewer and fewer sunspots, magnetic storms, have been seen.
To maintain the global warming hoax, thousands of events and natural phenomena have been blamed on it. A recent example is the floods in America’s mid-West. The National Wildlife Federation released a statement on July 1 blaming global warming.
Climate experts at The Heartland Institute were quick to respond. Dr. Joseph D’Aleo, Executive Director of the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, said, “Alarmists have adopted the can’t-lose position that all extremes of weather—cold, warm, wet, or dry—are all due to global warming”, adding that, “The record snows, severe weather, and heavy rainfall have been the result of rapid cooling in the northern tier of the United States and Canada, not global warming.”
Early in July, Bret Stephens, writing in The Wall Street Journal, called global warming “a mass hysteria phenomenon”, noting that “NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world’s oceans show there has been slight cooling in the past five years…”
The global warming hoax has never been about the climate. It is about competing economic theories. “Socialism may have failed as an economic theory,” wrote Stephens, “but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism.”
The United States Senate refused to consider the UN Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change that requires massive reductions in carbon dioxide emissions based solely on the global warming hoax, but other nations did sign on. None have ever met their obligation to limit CO2 emissions, nor need they have bothered.
At the recent G8 conference an international agreement to cut CO2 emissions was given serious consideration despite the fact that the Earth is now a decade into a cooling cycle likely to last several decades or longer. The impact of this proposal on the lives of ordinary citizens will prove needlessly costly. Proposals in some nations for various taxes based on global warming are a form of fraud.
The sensible refusal by leaders in emerging economies such as China and India would make it impossible for any limitations on carbon emissions by Western nations to have any impact, even if such reductions had anything to do with the realities of the Earth’s climate.
The only thing that can be predicted with certainty is that the Greens will become increasingly unhinged and crazed by the failure of the global warming hoax.