FDXLAG

And who funds those peer reviewers and can they get a job if they don't come to the left conclusion?

jungle

Corporate and politically funded hacks exist on both sides of the argument.
Unfortunately "peer reviewed" science has taken on the same mantle as the average criminal conspiracy in the climate game.


"I'm not like you." How true, and I'm not willing to commit crimes against humanity and the economy without the slightest logical proof that those actions would have any effect at all on the environment.

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Environmentalists Are Killing Environmentalism
By Dr. Tim Ball Friday, March 19, 2010


Aesop (620-564 BC) the Greek writer famous for his fables told of the boy who falsely cried wolf. Environmentalists have falsely cried wolf and effectively undermine environmentalism the need to live within the confines of a finite planet. They misled, exaggerated and made a multitude of false predictions to the detriment of the environment and people’s willingness to be aware and concerned. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was a major starting point that blamed DDT for many things including thinner eggshells none of which proved correct.



Indeed, as Paul Driessen identified in Eco-imperialism: Green Power, Black Death, banning DDT led to millions of unnecessary deaths from malaria that exceed deaths from AIDS in Africa.

A myriad of false stories made headlines over the last 40 years. All are conditional that is they’re prefaced by words like, ‘could’ and ‘maybe’, but the public generally remembers the terse and unconditional headlines. Ultimately almost all the stories were subsequently proved incorrect, but that never makes the headlines. Remember such stories as sheep and rabbits going blind in Chile because of thinning ozone.

Well as scientists at Johns Hopkins showed it was due to a local infection.

We heard of frogs born deformed and humans were blamed because of pollution. Biologist Stan Sessions showed it was due to a natural parasite.

Each week some natural phenomenon is presented as unnatural and by implication due to human activity. A book is needed to list all the claims and threats made that have not occurred, have proved false or are unfounded.

Global warming, and latterly climate change, became the major plank of environmentalist’s religious campaign. They used it to dictate and control how everyone else should live and behave, as a survey of the web pages of Greenpeace, the Sierra Club or Friends of the Earth show. The level of commitment is a real problem. It’s exaggerated by the declining economy and people experience the economic impacts of their tactics and extremism.

Leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) disclosed what several scientists had suspected for a long time about the corruption of climate science. Subsequent exposure of the problems with the IPCC Reports led distinguished oceanographer Dr. Robert Stephenson of the U.S. Office of Naval Research and NASA to say, “Even when exposed, the IPCC leaders claimed it was their “right” to change scientific conclusions so that political leaders could better understand the report.” “To the world’s geophysical community, these unethical practices and total lack of integrity by the leadership of the IPCC have been enough to reveal that their collective claims were - and are - fraudulent.” But Bruce Cox, the executive director of Greenpeace “blamed the hacked emails to being politically motivated.”

John Bennett, executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada, made the same argument, saying: “Mann and his colleagues were simply speaking in their own high-level code, and a number of things were taken out of context.

His remarks underscore lack of understanding of climate science, the serious limitations of the IPCC Reports and what the emails actually disclose. It is not surprising because on March 10 UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said, “Let me be clear: the threat posed by climate change is real. Nothing that has been alleged or revealed in the media recently alters the fundamental scientific consensus on climate change. Nor does it diminish the unique importance of the IPCC’s work.”
Environmentalism was what academics call a paradigm shift. Thomas Kuhn defined them as “a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions.” Some attribute the composite photo of the Earth, taken by astronauts in Apollo 8 as the symbolic start of the new paradigm of environmentalism.

Environmental groups grabbed the concept and quickly took the moral high ground preaching that only they cared about the Earth. They went to extremes putting any plant or animal ahead of any human activity or need. Extreme environmentalists profess an anti-humanity, and anti-evolution philosophy. Humans are an aberration according to Ron Arnold, Executive Vice-President of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. “Environmentalism intends to transform government, economy, and society in order to liberate nature from human exploitation.” David Graber, a research biologist with the National Park Service claims Darwin’s evolution theory doesn’t apply to humans. “Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line – at about a billion years ago – we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”

Climate scientists at the CRU used the IPCC, a political vehicle established by the UN, to provide the false scientific basis for all energy and environmental policies. They created what Essex and McKitrick called the Doctrine of Certainty in their book Taken by Storm. They define this as, “The basic not-to-be-questioned assertions of the Doctrine are:

1.The Earth is warming.
2.Warming has already been observed.
3.Humans are causing it.
4.All but a handful of scientists on the fringe believe it.
5.Warming is bad.
6.Action is required immediately.
7.Any action is better than none.
8.Claims of uncertainty only cover the ulterior motives of individuals aiming to stop needed action.
9.Those who defend uncertainty are bad people.
They conclude, “The Doctrine is not true. Each assertion is either manifestly false or the claim to know it is false.” Remember this was written before disclosure of the emails and the many IPCC errors.

But the most devastating proof of the scientific inadequacies of the IPCC Reports is the complete failure of every prediction they have made. They were as wrong on every issue as the Club of Rome Limits to Growth predictions. Ability to predict weather accurately is difficult in 24 hours and virtually impossible beyond 72 hours. AGW proponents claimed weather was different than climate and predictable with a degree of certainty. This is false because climate is an average of the weather. If their claim was correct forecasts in the brief 20 years since their first Report in 1990 would be correct. Every one is wrong. They tried to avoid the problem by switching to a range of scenarios but even the lowest wrong. These are facts Ban Ki Moon and environmental groups can understand. By ignoring them and crying wolf when the wolf is already in the flock undermines the logical and reasonable adoption of environmentalism.

Environmentalists took over environmentalism and preached to everyone how they knew best and only they cared. How dare they? We are all environmentalists. With blind faith they, deceived, misdirected, threatened, destroyed jobs, careers, opportunities and development. Now those who paid the price will be less willing to listen or support genuine environmental concerns.

N2264J

Dr. Tim Ball, never trained in the climate sciences, has taken money from big oil and gas.

Dr. Tim Ball: The Lie that Just Won't Die

by Richard Littlemore

The deathless and - in many specific respects - completely fictional meanderings of Dr. Tim Ball have begun appearing again on right-wing blogs all over the net. At City Troll, at Convenient Untruth and at New Orleans Lady, the same tired and retreaded old climate rant paints Dr. Ball as the courageous victim of a plot to silence a well-meaning skeptic.

But Ball can't even tell the truth about his own resume. His claim to be the first Climatology Ph.D. in Canada is a total falsehood; his degree was in historical geography - not climatology - and it was nowhere near the first ever granted to someone writing vaguely in the field. It also was granted by the university as a doctor of philosophy, not the more prestigious "doctor of science" that Ball claims in these articles.

He claims as well to have been a professor (again of climatology) at the University of Winnipeg for 32 years, while he confirmed in his own Statement of Claim in a pending lawsuit (look here ) that he was a professor (of geography, never climatology) for just eight years.

Dr. Ball claims never to have been paid by oil and gas interests, but if you look here , you'll find a Globe and Mail story in which Dr. Barry Cooper, the man behind Ball's former industry front group, the Friends of Science , offers this clumsy admission: "[The money's] not exclusively from the oil and gas industry," says Prof. Cooper. "It's also from foundations and individuals. I can't tell you the names of those companies, or the foundations for that matter, or the individuals."

Here you'll find a podcast of Dr. Ball talking to the Ottawa Citizen , saying that he goes out of his way to ignore who might be paying his bills, but crediting the energy industry lobby firm, the High Park Group . And here, you'll find High Park Group veteran Tom Harris, telling the Toronto Star that his new industry front group, the Natural Resources Stewardship Project , was created at the suggestion of High Park Group president Timothy Egan.

Tom Harris, executive director of the NRSP, is credited by New Orleans Lady for passing along this version of the Ball tirade, also printed Monday on the right-wingy website, Canada Free Press. Yet all of these factual inconsistencies have been brought to Harris's attention on previous occasions.

It is inevitable that this post will be criticized as an ad hominem attack on dear Dr. Ball (and perhaps on Harris, as well). But how can you argue science with someone who doesn't feel bound by the limits of truth?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just endured an unprecedented process of vetting and peer-review to produce a document, the veracity of which has been double-checked and endorsed by thousands of the best scientists in the world. It must be soul-destroying to see a long-retired geographer who rarely published during his colourless academic career and who never conducted any research in atmospheric science dismiss that effort without a shred of evidence or a hint of good conscience.


Richard Littlemore | Dr. Tim Ball: The Lie that Just Won't Die

FDXLAG

So he refutes none of his claims just attacks his honesty. If we are talking about those islands near India erroding who would be better to ask, a doctor of climatology or a doctor of geography? BTW where did algore get his doctorate in climatology, we certainly know where he gets his money and his honesty has been well documented.

jungle

The funny thing is, everyone sees the flaws in the UN reports, but they can only attack the messengers. Such a pitiful grasping at straws.
Attack the messenger
Deny political/corporate funding
Deny that none of the forecasts have come true
Deny the UN corruption and lack of real scientific background at the UN, what great discoveries has the UN handed the world?


Just show us one reasonable forecast, one reasonable solution, one reasonable cause/effect relationship.

But you can't, can you?

KC10 FATboy

You are fear mongering.

You are akin to the WWF commercials (unfortunately, not the wrestlers but the World Wildlife Fund) that keep showing the same lame imagery of polar bears floating on artic ice as they infer that Global Warming is breaking up the ice, causing them to drown, and thus kill off the species. But reality is completely different !!!

Polar bear populations are the highest they've ever been.

Canada's growing polar bear population 'becoming a problem,' locals say

mosteam3985

Hey N2264J,

Why don't you back up your claims with some actions? OK here's what you do, I've got a great idea here......

1.Go home and shut EVERYTHING off. No electrical, gas or anything going.
2.Stop breathing because for God's sake your giving off CO2
3.Never ever drive or fly again because your Cessna exhaust is absolutely shredding the ozone to pieces and I want it there for my grandkids.
4.Invent a machine that makes it so you never have to do anything but maintain living in order to use up zero resources because they will all be gone in about 3 1/2 years if you don't.

That will just about do it!


I'm just messing with you man, but seriously, you really didn't make any claims on the pro-global warming front. All you gave us was proof that there was some idiot somewhere that made a bunch of crap up. Unfortunately that happens on both ends of the spectrum whether you "believe" in global warming or not. I'm not sayin....I'm just sayin.

jungle

Almost all of us do everything we can to use the least amount of energy in our daily lives for a number of very good reasons. That makes us all conservationists.
But for people interested in making money or gaining control, whether they be politicos or corporate interests, that ugly old Nanny with a very bad temper and a loaded pistol is needed. She goes by the name of Coercion. She is always wrong and completely without reason, except to those who employ her to their own purposes.------------------------------------------------------------------------




James Lovelock: 'Fudging data is a sin against science'In his first major interview since the climate-change emails scandal, James Lovelock says he is disgusted by the actions of some scientists, applauds 'good' climate sceptics, and warns that global warming could even lead to war
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Leo Hickman guardian.co.uk, Monday 29 March 2010 17.00 BST Article history
James Lovelock Photograph: Murdo Macleod

As you travel along the drive to James Lovelock's house, located in a remote, wooded valley on the Cornwall-Devon border, you pass a sign by a gated cattle grid. "Experimental station," it reads. "Site of a new natural habitat. Please do not trespass or disturb."

Thirty years ago, Lovelock planted 20,000 trees to create the much more biodiverse habitat around his home. But you suspect that, had this fiercely independent scientist and globally respected environmental thinker been around 3.8 billion years ago when life first erupted on this planet, he would have organised a similar notice to be placed somewhere prominent.

After all, Lovelock – now into his 90s but still fit enough to be invited aboard Richard Branson's soon-to-launch commercial spacecraft – is the man who first developed the "Gaia theory" in the late 1960s: the still-challenging idea that Earth is one giant, self-regulating organism whose equilibrium is being very much disturbed by the actions of one species. Lovelock has been warning with increasing urgency that the survival of that species – Homo sapiens – is now gravely threatened by the "Revenge of Gaia", the title of one of his more recent bestselling books.

He is billed as an Old Testament-style prophet for our times, predicting fire and brimstone for a damned generation if it does not urgently and radically change its polluting ways. But in person Lovelock has a becalming presence, even when firing off verbal thunderbolts at the various "dumbos" with whom we have bestowed our collective fate: namely, "the politicians, scientists and lobbyists".

The past four months, he says, have only hardened his disdain for this grouping; a turbulent period that has seen efforts to tackle climate change undermined by the online release of the hacked University of East Anglia emails, the failure of the Copenhagen climate conference, the (forced) admission by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that its latest report contained some minor mistakes, and the onset of an exceptionally cold winter across some parts of the northern hemisphere.

Leaning back into his swivel chair in his modest office-cum-laboratory, from where he writes and conducts the odd commissioned experiment for the Ministry of Defence and MI5 ("it's nothing that interesting; just health-and-safety work", he says when probed for more detail), Lovelock directs his first wave of ire at the reports that climate scientists had been caught up in the email scandal. He was, he says, "utterly disgusted" when he first heard about the allegations. (He didn't read the actual emails when they were posted online, adding that: "Oddly, I felt reluctant to pry.")

During this discussion, Lovelock recalls the "corruption of science" that occurred during the attempts to link chlorofluorocarbons with the hole in the ozone layer in the 1980s. "Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I'm not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It's the one thing you do not ever do."

Lovelock says the events of the past few months have seen him warm to the efforts of some climate sceptics: "What I like about sceptics is that in good science you need critics that make you think: 'Crumbs, have I made a mistake here?' If you don't have that continuously, you really are up the creek.

"The good sceptics have done a good service – but some of the mad ones, I think, have not done anyone any favours. Some, of course, are corrupted and employed by oil companies and things like that. Some even work for governments. For example, I wouldn't put it past the Russians to be behind some of the disinformation to help further their energy interests. But you need sceptics, especially when the science gets very big and monolithic."

And the sceptics are right, he says, to be deeply distrustful of scientists who are overly reliant on computer models, particularly when it comes to predicting future climate scenarios: "We're not that bright an animal. We stumble along very nicely and it's amazing what we do do sometimes, but we tend to be too hubristic to notice the limitations. If you make a model, after a while you get suckered into it. You begin to forget that it's a model and think of it as the real world."

It is obvious, both from talking to Lovelock and reading his work, particularly his most recent books, that he doesn't have the highest opinion of mankind's capabilities to see the long game and act accordingly.

"I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle as complex a situation as climate change," he responds, when asked whether we are up to the task as a species of tackling climate change. "We're very active animals. We like to think, 'Ah yes, this will be a good policy,' but it's almost never that simple. Wars show this to be true. People are very certain they are fighting a just cause, but it doesn't always work out like that. Climate change is kind of a repetition of a wartime situation. It could quite easily lead to a physical war."

Hopelessness is a response, one senses, never far from a Lovelock audience. He is not one to toss around crumbs of comfort when he believes they're not justified, and displays a great deal of contempt for what he believes to be the naive idealism and ideologies of much of the current environmental movement – a significant proportion of which still looks up to him with a certain reverence. For example, it was his high-profile switch a few years ago to promoting nuclear energy as the best hope for saving ourselves that helped convince many environmentalists to rethink their instinctive opposition to this technology. Now, he says, he is not convinced that any meaningful response to "global heating", as he likes to call it, can be achieved from within the modern democracies of the western world.

"We need a more authoritative world," he says resolutely. "We've become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say. It's all very well, but there are certain circumstances – a war is a typical example – where you can't do that. You've got to have a few people with authority who you trust who are running it. They should be very accountable too, of course – but it can't happen in a modern democracy. This is one of the problems.

"What's the alternative to democracy? There isn't one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while."

But with public confidence in climate science taking such a knock in recent months, what will it take to convince the public that urgent action really is required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – or, as is Lovelock's preference, to adapt and prepare the lifeboat for a changing climate?

"There has been a lot of speculation that a very large glacier in Antarctica is unstable," he says, referring to Pine Island glacier or "the Pig", as the scientists now monitoring it like to call it. "If there's much more melting, it may break off and slip into the ocean. I'd say the scientists are not worried about it, but they are keeping a close watch on it. It would be enough to produce an immediate sea level rise of two metres – something huge. And tsunamis. That would be the sort of event that would change public opinion – or a return of the dustbowl in the American midwest. Another IPCC report won't be enough; we'll just argue over it like now."

(I later contact Dr Robert Bindschadler, the Nasa scientist who leads the team monitoring the Pig. "No one expects full collapse of the system as quickly as [in the next] 100 years," Bindschadler responds, "'but even if it did, the mean rate of sea level rise would 'only' triple the current rate of rise. No one would get their feet wet overnight.")

On a noticeboard behind Lovelock hangs a photograph of a huge wind turbine. As an active anti-wind farm campaigner, does it infuriate him that so much investment is now being poured into renewable energy infrastructure? "I've always said that adaptation is the most serious thing we can do," he says. "Are our sea defences adequate? Can we prevent London from flooding? This is where we should be spending our billions. If wind turbines really worked, I wouldn't object to them. To hell with the aesthetics, we might need them to save ourselves. But they don't work – the Germans have admitted it.

"It's like the Common Agricultural Policy, which led to corruption and inefficiencies. A common energy policy across Europe is not a good idea. I'm in favour of nuclear for crowded places like Britain for the simple reason that it's cheap, effective and exceedingly safe when you look at the record."

His views on carbon emissions trading, as is being touted by the EU and others, are equally dismissive: "I don't know enough about carbon trading, but I suspect that it is basically a scam. The whole thing is not very sensible. We have this crazy idea that we are setting an example to the world. What we're doing is trying to make money out of the world by selling them renewable gadgetry and green ideas. It might be worthy from the national interest, but it is moonshine if you think what the Chinese and Indians are doing [in terms of emissions]. The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful."

Lovelock freely admits that, at 90, he won't be around to see the results of the "experiment" humans are currently conducting with the atmosphere. It's what, in part, gives him the licence to speak with such frankness. But for anyone younger, Lovelock's prognosis for our species is hard to hear, let alone accept. That a black, rain-laden cloud is welling up over the nearby moorland as I set off to leave only acts to darken the mood.

jungle

There is no need to belittle N2264J. I have full confidence he is doing everything reasonable to reduce his carbon footprint, as are all of us.
The sad thing is that there are a great many people who would like to profit from this, perhaps sign the death warrant of billions and coerce what they consider to be "proper". This type of coercion extends into many other areas of our life.

mosteam3985

I wasn't trying to belittle him, I was trying to come across sounding like he came across sounding when I read his previous posts. N2264J I apologize if you felt belittled. It's just that you came across like just because someone made some stuff up that it changed everything. I realize that's probably not what you were going for but it's how it felt when I first read your post.

My apologies to a fellow Cessna pilot