May 2008 Archives

By Karlis Salna, news.com.au

A screen shot from the “calculator.” Click Here to view enlargement.

An ABC website has been accused of portraying farmers and forestry workers as evil and telling kids how much carbon they can produce before they die.

The Planet Slayer website, which can be accessed via the science section on the ABC home page, also demonises people who eat meat and those involved in the nuclear industry, a Senate estimates committee heard.

The site has several features including a cartoon series, Adventures of Greena, and a tool called Prof Schpinkee’s Greenhouse Calculator to help kids work out their carbon footprint.

The calculator lets users compare their own carbon output to the “average Aussie greenhouse pig” and estimates at what age a person should die so they don’t use more than their fair share of the Earth’s resources.

Too much carbon production causes a cartoon pig to explode, leaving behind a pool of blood.

Leader Telegram

The 2008 winter was the coldest in 40 years for the upper Midwest, Plains states and most of Canada. Minnesota newspapers report that this year's opening of the locks to Mississippi barge traffic, delayed by three weeks, was the latest since the modern waterway opened in 1940.

Eau Claire, where "old-fashioned winters" have been a thing of the past, recorded 43 days of below-zero temperatures, while folks down in Madison shoveled away at a 117-year record snowfall throughout the season, as did many in New England and Canada.

Rare snowfalls struck Buenos Aires, Capetown, and Sidney during their mid-year winter, while China continually battled blizzards. Even Baghdad experienced measurable snowfall.

Antarctic pack-ice far exceeded what Captain Cook saw on his 18th century voyage into the Southern Ocean. On the continent itself the miles-thick ice continues to accumulate despite peripheral melting along the Antarctic Peninsula and occasional calving of an ice block. At the opposite pole, flow-ice once again spans the entire Arctic Ocean, and by April it had extended into the Bering Strait, making up for the much heralded melt-back last summer.

Jonah Goldberg: LA Times

A kind of irrational nature worship separates environmentalism from the more fair-minded approach of conservationism.

Iadmit it: I'm no environmentalist. But I like to think I'm something of a conservationist.

No doubt for millions of Americans this is a distinction without a difference, as the two words are usually used interchangeably. But they're different things, and the country would be better off if we sharpened the distinctions between both word and concept.

At its core, environmentalism is a kind of nature worship. It's a holistic ideology, shot through with religious sentiment. "If you look carefully," author Michael Crichton famously observed, "you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths."

By John Stossel, Townhall.com

"Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming, ... we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters, and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring. We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great. The most relevant question now is whether our own government is equal to the challenge". Read entire speech.

With that, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain threw his support -- again -- to a complex government program to reduce carbon emissions. He claims he can do this, without causing economic hardship, by using the power of the free market.

As The Wall Street Journal commented, "His plan is 'market based' insofar as it requires an expensive, invasive government bureaucracy to interfere with the market".

By PAUL WALSH, Star Tribune

Longtime WCCO-TV meteorologist Mike Fairbourne says that the environmental movement is practicing "squishy science" when it ties human activity to global warming.

Fairbourne's assessment Monday came on the same day that the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine appeared before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and announced that it has the signatures of more than 31,000 scientists -- including Fairbourne's -- who agree that the human impact on global warming is overblown.

By Lawrence Solomon, National Post

That’s the number of scientists who are outraged by the Kyoto Protocol’s corruption of science.

Question: How many scientists does it take to establish that a consensus does not exist on global warming? The quest to establish that the science is not settled on climate change began before most people had even heard of global warming.

The year was 1992 and the United Nations was about to hold its Earth Summit in Rio. It was billed as — and was — the greatest environmental and political assemblage in human history. Delegations came from 178 nations — virtually every nation in the world — including 118 heads of state or government and 7,000 diplomatic bureaucrats. The world’s environmental groups came too — they sent some 30,000 representatives from every corner of the world to Rio. To report all this, 7,000 journalists converged on Rio to cover the event, and relay to the publics of the world that global warming and other environmental insults were threatening the planet with catastrophe.

By Matthew Moore and agencies, Telegraph

Global warming is not to blame for the recent jump in hurricanes, according to a top scientist who previously warned about the meteorological impact of climate change.

Rising temperatures may actually reduce the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic, Tom Knutson claims in a new study.

Dr Knutson’s change of heart has reignited the debate in the US about how closely hurricanes can be tied to global warming.

Since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, environmentalists and some scientists have seized on hurricanes as symbols of the damaging consequences of climate change.

By Jeff Poor, Business & Media Institute

Inhofe, Sessions blast massive costs of global warming legislation.

Worried about gas prices hitting $4 a gallon and beyond? Imagine if they were $6, $7 or even $8 a gallon. Those levels are a certain possibility should Congress pass cap-and-trade legislation, which could face a vote in early June.

Oil is trading at record levels, in excess of $120 a barrel. Leading Republican Sens. James Inhofe (Okla.) and Jeff Sessions (Ala.) both told the Business & Media Institute (BMI) energy prices would drastically increase if the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (S. 2191) is signed into law.

By TOM KIZZIA, Anchorage Daily News

Polar Bears relax after being listed as endangered.

Alaska industry and political leaders reacted with disappointment, even vehemence, to the decision Wednesday to protect the polar bear as "threatened," despite assurances from the Bush administration that the listing would mean no new regulation in Alaska.

Industry officials worried that the listing decision would give environmentalists a new tool for opposing development in the Arctic, especially new offshore oil exploration and development. Politicians attacked the science behind the decision as speculative.

Chelsea Schilling, WorldNetDaily

May we live long and die out" is the unofficial motto of a movement that seeks to improve the Earth's ecosystem by ensuring that the human species does not survive.

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, or VHEMT, consists of volunteers who have made active life decisions to remain childless for the benefit of the Earth, thereby preventing the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals.

While no one person takes credit for being the founder, Les U. Knight created its name and is the spokesperson for the movement.

"We've already exceeded Earth's carrying capacity for humans by quite a bit," Knight told WND. "We are using up our resources. The best way to stop it is by not breeding. It's really the best way because the people we don't create don't exist, and so there's no impact on them."

Patrick Frank, Skeptic.com

The claim that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for the current warming of Earth climate is scientifically insupportable because climate models are unreliable

Excerpt: So the bottom line is this: When it comes to future climate, no one knows what they’re talking about. No one. Not the IPCC nor its scientists, not the US National Academy of Sciences, not the NRDC or National Geographic, not the US Congressional House leadership, not me, not you, and certainly not Mr. Albert Gore. […] But there is no falsifiable scientific basis whatever to assert this warming is caused by human-produced greenhouse gasses because current physical theory is too grossly inadequate to establish any cause at all. Nevertheless, those who advocate extreme policies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions inevitably base their case on GCM projections, which somehow become real predictions in publicity releases. […] General Circulation Models are so terribly unreliable that there is no objectively falsifiable reason to suppose any of the current warming trend is due to human-produced CO2, or that this CO2 will detectably warm the climate at all. Therefore, even if extreme events do develop because of a warming climate, there is no scientifically valid reason to attribute the cause to human-produced CO2. In the chaos of Earth’s climate, there may be no discernible cause for warming. Many excellent scientists have explained all this in powerful works written to defuse the CO2 panic, but the choir sings seductively and few righteous believers seem willing to entertain disproofs.

By Gerard Wynn

LONDON (Reuters) - A new study suggesting a possible lull in manmade global warming has raised fears of a reduced urgency to battle climate change.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of hundreds of scientists, last year said global warming was "unequivocal" and that manmade greenhouse gas emissions were "very likely" part of the problem.

And while the study published in the journal Nature last week did not dispute manmade global warming, it did predict a cooling from recent average temperatures through 2015, as a result of a natural and temporary shift in ocean currents.

Tony Carnie

South African snow adventurer Correne Erasmus-Coetzer has been forced to abandon her dream of becoming the first African woman to cross the icy continent of Greenland on foot.

The dream came to an end this week when the expedition of nine men and women came up against a ferocious wind and snow storm, and rapidly dwindling food supplies, as they approached the quarter-way mark of their 550km slog from the east to west coast of Greenland, across the Arctic Circle.

Erasmus-Coetzer was hoping to create awareness about global warming and raise money for the Durban-based Wilderness Leadership School.

By Tom Hintgen, The Fergus Falls Daily Journal

In a perfect world, local farmers Mike and John Haarstad would have all their corn planted in the ground.

But the world isn’t perfect, and instead the Calisle men are looking at snow on their land.

A week ago the Haarstads began planting corn in their field. What they hoped would be the start of seven to 10 days of corn planting came to an abrupt halt two days later on Friday, April 25.

That’s when Old Man Winter started dumping what would become over a foot of snow.

Elmer Beaureguard

It's May 3rd and it snowed last night, normally we could go out for coffee and complain about it. You know say things like "is it cold enough for ya?" Or "don't know if I should use the boat or the auger for the opener". It's part of being a Minnesotan, we have horrible weather but at least it was fun to complain about, and an ice-breaker (pun intended) with strangers, something to talk about.

But now thanks to AL Gore, we're supposed to be happy that its snowing in May because that means we're not destroying the planet as fast as we thought. And vice versa, if it was 70º and sunny we can't enjoy it, we would just feel guilty while we drive our SUV to the golf course.

By the way, MPR doesn't call it "the weather" anymore now its "the latest news on the climate".