Der Spiegel reports today that scientists have identified soot (black carbon) as one of the major global warmers out there.
According to Science Journal here, a team of 24 experts led by NASA scientist Drew Shindell looked at 400 emission control measures and identified 14 measures targeting methane and black carbon (BC) emissions that would reduce projected global mean warming.
Recently scientists and activists have been frustrated by the slow progress and dogged reluctance by countries to cap CO2 emissions, which are thought to be causing global warming. So Shindell looked for alternative ways to avert warming. Suddenly, lo and behold, soot (BC) and methane have emerged as major global warming factors. The amount they admit soot and methane contribute to warming is in my view astonishing. The abstract states (emphasis added):
We considered ~400 emission control measures to reduce these pollutants by using current technology and experience. We identified 14 measures targeting methane and BC emissions that reduce projected global mean warming ~0.5°C by 2050.”
This equals the total amount of warming we’ve seen in the last 40 years!
Every now and then I read a blog post that melts my heart. I truly feel the pain, anguish and anger of the writer. I may not always agree with the writer’s point of view, but I empathize with the writer’s pain nonetheless.
Reading Peter Gleick’s January 5 blog post here at Forbes.com, I experienced that empathy in full force. Gleick’s global warming beliefs are misguided and unsupported by sound science, but I nevertheless empathize with his pain and frustration that few people seem to agree with him. A person of thinner skin than me might be offended by Gleick’s frustration-induced rant, but I believe the best remedy is truth and understanding. Accordingly, I understand Gleick’s pain and I will present some truths that might ease Gleick’s anguish if he listens to them with an open heart and mind.
Gleick sets the tone for his blog post in the very first sentence, where he begins his column by stating, “The Earth’s climate continued to change during 2011….” Here, in the first eight words of his column, Gleick unwittingly reveals one of the primary reasons why he is so wrong in his dire warnings of a human-induced global warming crisis. Gleick and his fellow global warming alarmists are the ultimate climate change deniers.
A careful look at the history of environmental activism shows how the movement has been unravelling. Now itseems to be dead in the water.
In 2012, three years into President Barack Obama’s first term, green activists are asking, “What went wrong?” Where are all the new laws and regulations regulating energy use and the natural resource production? Where are the public-private partnerships signalling a new era of enironmentalist problem-solving? Where’s Al Gore? Shouldn’t he be lurking over President Obama’s shoulder, smiling, as the President signs yet another green jobs bill into law?
The question is a good one but one not easily answered. In the decades since the birth of the environmental movement, something’s clearly gone wrong. Other movements pushing for political and social change have altered the national discussion and elected candidates at every level of government.
Look at the Tea Party. Born only in 2009, it’s pushed back against the agenda of Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, forcing Congress to heel and almost sending the federal government into default.
But the environmental movement seems dead in the water.
This is a book about the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an outfit few know much about if indeed they have heard of it at all. That’s unfortunate because the IPCC is having a huge impact on all our lives. The IPCC has fashioned the so-called “scientific consensus” that man-made global warming threatens the future of the planet. Its periodic weighty Reports (literally, they are in the range of 800 pages and up) are the basis for the efforts by the governments of developed countries to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions and in the process make the energy our economy depends on to function, and we depend on to drive our cars, heat our homes and power our appliances, vastly more expensive.
Journalist Donna Laframboise has exposed the full range of deceptive techniques, at times descending into outright fakery, practiced by the IPCC. While her sprightly title may suggest a flippant take on the issues, Laframboise has performed an astonishing feat of investigative journalism. It is all the more impressive given that she had retired from her journalistic career and was working as a solitary blogger, with none of the resources of the literally thousands of journalists worldwide who have covered the IPCC reports with mindless, slavish adoration.
This video is a critique of catastrophic man-made global warming theory, based on presentation slides used in a series of public presentations and debates in late 2009 and early 2010. The author is Warren Meyer, author of the web site climate-skeptic.com.
While the world has almost certainly warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age in the early 19th century, and while it is fairly clear that CO2 and other greenhouse gasses may be responsible for some of this warming, climate alarmists are grossly overestimating the sensitivity of climate to CO2, and thus overestimating future man-made warming.
While the theory of greenhouse gas warming is fairly well understood, most of the warming, and all of the catastrophe, in future forecasts actually comes from a second theory that the Earth’s climate system is dominated by strong positive feedbacks. This second theory is not at all settled and is at the heart of why climate models are greatly over-estimating future warming.
Note: Charts last updated Jan 2010. The earlier live version of this video has 8000 views on Vimeo.
Climate change because of man is causing more death and drought – especially in Africa, so claim the “experts”.
But what we have to remember is that many of these “experts are not reliable spend their time sitting in air conditioned offices in Zurich, London, or Manhattan and never really have gone out in the field and taken real scientific measurements. Many in fact just spew crap in the form of alarmist press releases to the gullible media. Hat-tip: International Business Times.
Der Spiegel above brings a report on the Sahel Region of Africa, interviewing Dutch geographer Chris Reij of the University of Amsterdam. Reij says the opposite is occurring: the Sahara is shrinking. It is not expanding.
Reij has been visiting and documenting “the greening of the Sahel Zone” for decades. According to Reij at the the 0:28 mark:
The Sahara is not expanding. Sure there are still some areas of drought. But it is a popular myth that is gladly spread by the media that the Sahara is creeping southwards more and more every year. Also serious organizations claim this agaian and again. But it’s not true.”
As Der Spiegel shows at 0:58, trees are growing where 20 years ago there was only sand. And people are learning to manage the land and to reforest the area. “Here there’s more success than what people believe,” says Reij.
Der Spiegel concludes:
The Sahel zone is called the ground zero of climate change by UN officials. But now it’s getting green because of people on site have learned to help themselves.”
Thanks, Der Spiegel, for this bit of reality from Africa.
Hard on the heels of Donna Laframboise’s expose last month of the ramshackle workings of the IPCC, comes a study by Professor Ross McKitrick on how the IPCC should be fixed.
Ross McKitrick’s essay, What Is Wrong with the IPCC?, is only 37 pages but his status ensures it will be influential. The fact that Australia’s ex-Prime Minister John Howard wrote a four-para forward, gives it some extra gravitas.
McKitrick’s final recommendation is that if the IPCC’s 195 member states don’t embark on essential reforms to IPCC procedures, governments that do want good advice on climate issues should withdraw from the IPCC. They should then create their own advisory body to get the job done properly.
McKitrick is Professor of Economics at Guelph University, Ontario. With Canadian mathematician Steven McIntyre and weather guru Anthony Watts, he is one of a trio of leading skeptics against warmism.
Through the blogs climateaudit.org and wattsupwiththat.com, the trio provide fora where scientists and the public have followed the debate.
In the course of auditing such flawed efforts as Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick (it ‘disappeared’ the mediaeval warming period), they also uncovered a culture of debased scientific practices in which IPCC authors fudged and hid their source data and conspired to defeat normal processes of peer review.
Laframboise, in her 90-page ever-so-readable tract The Delinquent Teenager, documented in excruciating detail the IPCC’s lack of internal integrity.
The Anthropogenic Global Warming movement is faced with the ugly specter of expanding deserts, dry, arid places with no… funding.
“The availability of finance to help developing countries tackle climate change is drying up, imperiling the international climate talks, the head of the World Bank’s sustainable development network has warned,” according to a recent post on the Environmental Finance Web site. Evidently, Rachel Kyte told an audience in London that there could be a spreading “desert” between funds already allocated in fast-start climate finance, according to the post, “such as to the Clean Technology Fund, and the beginning of operations of the planned Green Climate Fund.”
Kyte said managers of the Clean Technology Fund, a climate “investment” fund set up by the UN and managed by five development banks, have $4.5 billion in commitments and the use of an additional $37 billion, around one third of which is private sector money.
Of course the goal, the idea is for the West to be shoveling about $100 billion a year by 2020 to developing countries on the pretext of helping them deal with climate change.
“$100 Billion A Year? Um, We’ll… Think About It. We’ll Call You.”
There are only a few minor details that might get in the way of such largesse — the fact that, as Bret Stephens writes in The Wall Street Journal, the U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won’t be signing on, the Chinese and Indians won’t make a move unless the West does, and Europe’s already spent all their money bailing out Greece and the Germans really aren’t in the mood anymore.
By Judy Kurtz – 12/05/11
If you plan on throwing a dinner party full of VIPs, whatever you do, don’t seat Bob Woodward next to Al Gore.
In a speech at the Organization for International Investment’s annual dinner at D.C.’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Thursday, the famed Washington Post journalist, who helped uncover the Watergate scandal, disclosed that he doesn’t enjoy the former vice president as a tablemate.
Describing an event where he was paired up next to the monotone-talking ex-vice president, Woodward said, “Now, sitting next to Gore is taxing.”
After some laughs from the crowd, Woodward continued, “In fact, it’s unpleasant.”
Woodward offered up another tidbit from the conversation with his dinner companion. The investigative reporter asked the politician, more than five years after leaving office, how much the public knows about what went on during the Clinton administration. Gore replied, “One percent.”
Woodward admitted that revelation made him feel a bit icky, saying, “I kind of died inside and have to confess to having an unclean thought.”
He then dug a little deeper, asking Gore, if the former VP were to write a memoir, how much Americans would know then. Gore retorted, “Two percent.”
source: NoTricksZone
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