timeimmortal

It seems that Al Gore borrowed a sequence from the global warming propaganda flick movie The Day After Tomorrow for his own movie/presentation, . The sequence in particular was a “flyby” of ostensibly melting icecaps.

The woman in charge of CGI for The Day After Tomorrow evidently admitted that her department allowed Gore to use the sequence. Of course, one wonders why Gore needed to use it in the first place? Did the situation “on the ground” — i.e. in the real ice caps, not the CG ones — not reflect the picture of “reality” that Gore was attempting to paint?

Al Gore confesses a financial motive is, at least in part, behind his passionate advocacy on global warming/climate change-related issues.

Anyone surprised?

Can we make up our minds already?

Global temperatures will drop slightly this year as a result of the cooling effect of the La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said.

The World Meteorological Organization’s secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC it was likely that La Nina would continue into the summer.

This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory.

But experts say we are still clearly in a long-term warming trend - and they forecast a new record high temperature within five years.

La Niná, eh? Surely this cooling trend has nothing at all to do with the fact that solar cycle 24 has only just started, meaning that we are still in a period of “solar minimum” — a minimum which has, historically, corresponded to periods of colder-than-average weather, including the Little Ice Age?

To be fair, this doesn’t make me question climate change per se…of course, the climate (being a non-static system) can be expected to change, and indeed it does. It does make me question the received wisdom of global warming alarmism, however. No net change in global temperature since 1998? Al Gore hadn’t even lost the election then!

Ed Darrell writes in with a response to this article, in which I remark on David Warren’s observations that once again, the latest fad among the rich and trendy in the West (that is, environmentalism) is serving only to further oppress those who live in poverty in Third World nations, as the biofuel craze drives the price of food through the roof world-wide.

…environmentalism seems to have become just one more playground for wealthy Westerners, a way we can wring our hands and make ourselves feel good for having done something, the same as when we banned DDT. And yet we do not, by our actions, achieve any meaningful positive environmental impact. Indeed, the only impact we manage to achieve is that, in our selfish desire to be “green,” we further impoverish and condemn to a most terrible fate thousands or millions of people living in poorer nations. And in the end, our selfishness backfires on us as well — the same “green” fuels we might desire to use in our cars are, in fact, very difficult to produce, and the production processes far more polluting than those used to refine crude oil into petrol.

But then, that pollution happens elsewhere, and not in our back yards or on the roads upon which we drive. We do not see it, and so can safely pretend it does not exist.

But, had we listened to the “environmentalists” about DDT in 1962, and dramatically reduced its broadcast use, it would still be effective against mosquitoes that carry malaria. Rachel Carson was right about DDT — it’s a killer, especially released willy-nilly in the wild. Bald eagles were just big canaries in our mine.

If we must designate a culprit in the DDT annals, it would be those who thought we could just poison the heck out of Africa and forget about the people there, rather than make serious efforts to fight malaria. Malaria is a complex problem, and throwing poison into the wild won’t improve the health care system, make governments stable, educate people how to look out for their own health and well being, or stimulate the economies so people can afford adequate housing to protect them from malaria-bearing mosquitoes.

Environmentalism is based in increasing our knowledge about God’s creation and where humans can and should fit in, and asking the question, “How can we be better stewards of this planet?” I think you may have given short shrift to those grander ideas.

Malaria really isn’t that complex a problem to solve — the ancient Romans knew exactly what they were doing when they dredged the swamps of Old Italy and wiped out mosquito breeding grounds on that little archipelago. In South American nations where comprehensive DDT programs were implemented, the same effects were achieved without the need to dredge swamps and destroy the natural habitats of other forms of wildlife.

The fact of the matter is, even the WHO ended its ban on DDT because the resurgence in malaria-related deaths marched in lockstep with the DDT ban in the first place. And in much the same way as Western use of biofuels is killing the poor in the Third World, the countries primarily afflicted by a resurgence in malaria (and the countries in which most malarial deaths occur as a result of the pressure by the West to ban the use of DDT) are poor, Third World countries. Western environmentalism, like every other fashionable trend, piggy-backs itself on the suffering and blood of the poor elsewhere in the world, and all so rich white folks can pump an alternative fuel into their SUV and tell themselves that they’re working to save the planet (even though that fuel cost more, in terms of pollutants released, to produce than normal petroleum does).

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was not a scientific study or a comprehensive research paper. It was a novel, and then a fictional one. And on the merits of the picture she painted with that novel, the West rushed to ban the use of DDT world-wide, despite the fact that DDT was later demonstrated to cause none of the harmful effects it was blamed (and banned) for. It does not cause eggshell thinning in avian populations, the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concedes that it does not pose a carcinogenic risk to human beings, and that it likewise poses no mutagenic/teratogenic danger. It does not appear to have any damaging effect on freshwater aquatic ecosystems either.

It was banned because of a work of fiction and the knee-jerk, guilt-ridden emotionalism of Western liberalism. And the poor, globally, in many Third World countries, will and have paid with their lives for that particular Western fad.

The thing is, DDT was effective — damn effective. In Venezuela, it reduced the number of cases of malaria from over eight million in 1943 to eight hundred by 1958. India and modern Italy saw similar dramatic reversals (Italy, in particular, recorded only 37 cases of malaria in 1967, down from over 400,000 roughly fifteen years earlier).

It would be nice to believe that environmentalists only want to increase our knowledge about the creation that God has made us stewards over. But the evidence on the ground tends to paint a different picture, and then not a pleasant one. environmentalism may have had noble intentions at its origin, as feminism did. But, like feminism, environmentalism has shaped itself into something much more malevolent. In the case of environmentalism, it has become a weird mash-up between those who would use it as a vehicle to advance an explicitly socialist (if not outright Marxist) political and economic agenda, and those who would use bad science to play upon the knee-jerk guilt of the modern Western liberal and by so doing enrich themselves (Al Gore would be a great example here).

Mike Brock has an interesting analysis of changes in average global temperature relative to changes in solar activity. While a lot of people still attempt to downplay the role of the Sun in changes in Earth’s climate (sidetracking the discussion into things like CO2 and methane), the best evidence we have still seems to suggest, in no uncertain terms, that all the gases humanity can pump into the air count for almost nothing compared to the effect that the Sun has on Earth’s climate.

Indeed, since the ending of the last solar cycle, since which time no new sunspots — a good indicator of an active star — have been observed, the Earth’s global average temperature has reversed almost all of the 0.6 C rise above “average” that was observed at about this time last year.

That’s not to say that humanity should just pump industrial and agricultural emissions into the atmosphere all willy-nilly — that would be stupid, because some of those emissions have other harmful effects not related to global warming (although others are mostly harmless). We should do our best to curb the emission of substances which cause, for example, cancers or respiratory maladies. But there is no point in trying our damndest to break otherwise healthy, functioning Western economies in pursuit of a phantom goal of “reversing” a trend over which we have no control anyhow.

It might have seemed timely that in New York an array of leading climatologists and other experts should have gathered for the most high-powered international conference yet to question the “consensus” on global warming. After three days of what the chairman called “the kind of free-spirited debate that is virtually absent from the global warming alarmist camp”, the 500 delegates issued the Manhattan Declaration, stating that attempts by governments to reduce CO2 emissions would “markedly diminish further prosperity” while having “no appreciable impact” on the Earth’s warming.

This inevitably attracted the kind of hysterical abuse that has become so familiar from warmist fanatics, tellingly contrasting with the measured arguments put forward by the scientists present. One was Anthony Watts, the meteorologist who last year famously forced NASA’s Goddard Institute to correct a fundamental error in its data on US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s but the 1930s.

On his website, Watts Up With That, he is currently posting a corrected version of the global temperature graph, combining satellite and surface data from all four main official sources. A measure of his scrupulous reporting is that although this shows a recent dramatic dip in temperatures, he cautiously explains that it is not yet conclusive evidence that the world has entered a new cooling phase (as he points out, there was temporarily an even sharper drop after the “peak” El Niño year 1998).

But can we doubt that, if the data showed the opposite, the media would be rushing to report this as yet further “proof” that the planet is heating out of control? The fact is that, for all their caveats that this drop in temperatures can be explained by the cooling effect of La Niña, the official orthodoxy that “more CO2 means more warming” is facing its most serious challenge yet. In light of the colossal price we are all in so many ways being asked to pay for it, the data in coming years will be more than interesting.

One cannot, hopefully, have failed to notice that the climate change alarmism movement has become a moneymaking enterprise for some, while for others it has become a vehicle through which policies of massive state intervention in industry — that is, socialism — is demanded and advocated for. The science upon which the movement is based is shoddy and uncertain at best (if not outright an outright fallacy in many respects), and the outcomes of the changes that folks like Al Gore and David Suzuki are demanding would be crippling and disastrous.

It’s a good thing, then, that more and more evidence is now coming to light demonstrating just what kind of lies are being told to us, the Western public.

Count Roland writes in again with some follow-up regarding my previous response to him.

Agreed.

But the hypothesis was looking at the methane produced by large swaths of putrifying organic matter, as in vast rice paddies. Also, the period of NA buffalo depopulation coincides with the tail end (1700-1850) of a deepening mini ice age between ~1300 and ~1900. At the begininng of that, likely somehow related, the bl;ack death eliminated populations in Eurasia, likely impacting rice production among other things, reducing methane as well.

Also, it did not say that human induced methane production caused global warming - it said that such production slowed global cooling such that by now, given solar output, a pivot point for the commencement of an ice should be well past but we have not arrived at it, yet. But then again, perhaps the sun is acting a little differently this cycle.

However, a point that can be gleened from this hypothesis. If it is solar activity that is the principal factor and is in a ‘downward’ general cycle with some upticks (we are talking 1000’s and 100’s of years respectively) our human global warming, as little as it may be, may be the only barrier between us and and ice age which would cover most of the developed world with ice. Another way to say this is to remember that the last hundred years’ supposed “hockey stick” is but a fraction of an average glacial cycle let alone the longer solar cycles we have yet to gather the data for. Last time I checked, looking at the smallest fraction - a prooftext, of data and giving a conclusion is not good science.

I think the maxim “correlation does not imply causation” is relevant here with regard to the observation of the correlation between buffalo depopulation (1700-1850 AD) and the “tail end” of a “mini ice age” (1300-1900 AD), especially since a) the aforementioned “mini ice age” was already long in progress by the time buffalo depopulation began, and b) while significant, buffalo were not the only source of methane production in the world, and it seems suspect to suggest that even as catastrophic a decline in population as they underwent would precipitate sweeping changes in global average temperature, especially since by the time the buffalo were being hunted to the brink of extinction, the rice paddies would have been back in action.

There is also to be considered the observation that post-1850, the “mini ice age” came to an end (i.e. temperatures began to rise), even though the buffalo herds were no longer churning out massive quantities of methane (and at the time, cattle farming wouldn’t have made up the shortfall; it doesn’t even manage to do that today). One could potentially point to the Industrial Revolution as the culprit in this case, although given the analysis that has been done about the insignificance of CO2 and other industrial emissions as a driver of global temperature change, that thesis also falls deeply into question.

It serves to note that the Sun is only now coming to the end of an unusually energetic cycle that has, among other things, triggered warming trends on other planets in our solar system, Mars and Neptune to name but two. That diminishment in solar activity has already triggered a downward shift in global average temperature that has more or less undone the warming trend that Al Gore et. al. were so up in arms about, as one would expect if one accepts the theory that CO2 does almost nothing to affect changes in global average temperature, and that the Sun effects profound changes in same.

I also question whether it is humanity’s minimal contribution to changes in the average global temperature that stave off a coming ice age; personally, I tend to think that even under the most carefully controlled conditions, nature will do whatever it damn well pleases. Yes, there are cyclical patterns in climate, as there are in many things, but those patterns can shift for any number of reasons. The Sun has been unusually active for the last while, and is now entering a phase where it is much less energetic than it has been. This may trigger a mild drop in the global average temperature, or it may trigger an extreme drop in same, thus ushering in a new ice age. Either way, I don’t think anything humanity does, in terms of emissions, will offset the results to any meaningful extent. It has been said that even if humanity ceased all CO2 production (even from out of our own lungs), we would have an effect on the global average temperature that one would need percents of percents to measure properly — i.e. statistically and quantitatively insignificant. Even if methane had a hundred times the impact of CO2 in the atmosphere, cutting all our methane emissions would still only result in a change in global average temperature of a percent, or perhaps a few percent (if we were lucky).

If humanity wanted to really stave off a coming ice age, we’d find a way to maximize our production of water vapour, since it is vapour that contributes the most to the atmosphere’s ability to retain heat. But even then — next to the natural water cycles of the planet, our contribution at present is almost meaningless, and it would be a mighty effort indeed to change that.