Articles Tagged "Web Article"

"Just three years ago the politics of global warming was enjoying its golden moment,”

Newsweek’s Stefan Theil writes. “Now, almost everywhere, green politics has fallen from its lofty heights.” Culprits include reality, “two of the harshest winters on record in the Northern Hemisphere;” utility, “an epic economic crisis;” and credibility, “last November’s ‘climategate’ affair over irregularities in the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

The green golden age, Theil’s “A Green Retreat” points out, coincided with an Academy Award for Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth and Australia’s Kevin Rudd becoming the world’s first environmentalist elected leader. But Newsweek conspicuously omits a key component of 2007’s global-warming zeitgeist: the magazine’s own propagandistic “The Truth about Denial” cover story whose verbiage implicitly likened skeptics of man-made climate change to Holocaust deniers. “Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change,” the article lamented.

Three summers ago, the crusading article by Sharon Begley, which used the ominous phrase “the denial machine” more than a dozen times, caused such a stir within Newsweek that one of its longest serving writers subsequently took to its pages to denounce the piece. Robert J. Samuelson wrote in Newsweek that Newsweek had provided a case study of how “self-righteous indignation can undermine good journalism.” The piece, Samuelson wrote, was “a highly contrived story.” And that’s just what the friends of the weekly thought.

If the notion “the science is settled” isn’t dead by now, then it just got a few more 30D spikes pounded into its coffin. Make no mistake about it: THERE IS NO CONSENSUS.

Der Spiegel’s Axel Bojanowski has just published online a 7-part piece on the climate war between scientists. http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/0,1518,688175-7,00.html

The above story comes from pgosselin.wordpress.com, to see the first page of this German article I have taken an image from Google Translate

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Friday the country will pull out of the Kyoto environmental agreement if a compromise cannot be found concerning the reduction of carbon emissions.

"All countries, including developed and developing economies, should reach an agreement, or, if we do not agree on this [the common terms of carbon emissions reduction], Russia will not prolong its participation in the Kyoto agreement - you cannot have it both ways," the president said.

The statement came after the BRIC summit in Brazil's capital, Brasilia. The top-level talks, bringing together the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, were aimed at improving the current global economic situation and strengthen cooperation between the four countries.

The Kyoto Protocol is a legally binding agreement restricting carbon emissions, some points of which expire in 2012. A new global climate deal is needed to continue efforts beyond 2012.

The controversial UN climate summit, which took place in the Danish capital, Copenhagen, in December 2009, was originally expected to see the signing of a new agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, but countries only agreed to try to keep average increases in global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius.

Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk must be a sucker for punishment if he’s putting himself up for the job of deputy United Nations climate chief (Van Schalkwyk has SA nod for UN job, March 9).

That’s because the UN’s flagship climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has become a laughing stock as revelations pile up about dodgy science, erroneous forecasts and outright manipulation of data. Not for nothing is it known in sceptic circles as the International Panel of Climate Crooks.

Meanwhile, newer published studies around climate science, more accurate temperature records from satellites, and freezing snow and blizzards in much of the northern hemisphere continue to undermine the thesis of man-made global warming.

The tide is turning.

The smart money is on global warming going the same way as bird flu, swine flu, Y2K, the ozone layer, the population explosion, the food crisis, the energy crisis, global cooling and the litany of Armageddon-type predictions of the past 30 years that never came to pass.

This is an extract from the Hilary Benn webchat at the Official site of the Prime Minister's Office, I came across this gem question from a James Goff.....pity James was unable to go back and ask Hilary Benn about an obligation to use science instead of politics when it comes to AGW. Thank you James, if this is a regular webchat then maybe some Climate Realists should take part next time.

Read the transcript

James Goff: Will you admit that the anthropogenic global warming theory is a fraudulent scam to make money and impose new laws? Climategate, Glaciergate, Africagate, Amazongate? What’s next, Defragate? The so-called science is flawed and does not stand up to scrutiny, as demonstrated time and time again. If you sincerely believe in this, then have a televised debate with Lord Monckton, Christopher Booker, Richard North or James Delingpole, I’m sure all would happily oblige.

Hilary replies: Crumbs James. I disagree. I am not a scientist but I have read what the consensus of scientific opinion is, and in the light of what they say and of the evidence it seems to me that we have an obligation to act.

AMSTERDAM (AP) - Top U.N. climate change official Yvo de Boer told The Associated Press on Thursday that he was resigning after nearly four years, a period when governments struggled without success to agree on a new global warming deal.

His departure takes effect July 1, five months before 193 nations are due to reconvene in Mexico for another attempt to reach a binding worldwide accord on controlling greenhouse gases. De Boer's resignation adds to the uncertainty that a full treaty can be finalized there.

De Boer is known to be deeply disappointed with the outcome of the last summit in Copenhagen, which drew 120 world leaders but failed to reach more than a vague promise by several countries to limit carbon emissions - and even that deal fell short of consensus.

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I was reading this article from Quadrant On Line when I came upon this paragraph:

The weight of evidence is such that modellers are frantically revising their strategies. They are asking for an international climate computing centre and $5 billion (for 2000 times more computing power) to solve this new problem in climate forecasting. The monumental size of the task they have set themselves cannot be exaggerated.

It struck me (not for the first time) just how much the modellers, in fact the entire climate science community, has invested in the AGW theory. We know how much this theory has cost the world but it should not be underestimated how overwhelming the influence of money has had on the science. Prior to the global warming alarm few people even knew there was a branch of science dealing with the climate, actually is there one now? Now tremendous resources are given to the sciences based solely on the fact that global warming has been sold as a threat to humanity.

How global-warming deniers are running circles around the U.N.'s top climate body.

Three years ago, Rajendra K. Pachauri was accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N.'s climate science panel. Now the IPCC head is under fire from critics for a catalogue of recent embarrassments: his initial kneejerk defense of the "Climategate" emails (Pachauri first questioned the motives of those who had hacked into the University of East Anglia's email system, then said there was "virtually no possibility" that IPCC findings were impacted), the fight he picked with the Indian environmental minister when the latter questioned certain data on glacier melt within India (Pachauri called the government report's "voodoo science"), and the steamy soft-core novel, Return to Almora, he released last month (somewhere between memoir and fantasy, it features the sexual exploits of a 60-something globetrotting climate expert, and has scandalized an Indian public not accustomed to its masturbating scenes and erotic explicitness).

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In a lengthy academic paper, President Obama’s regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein, argued the U.S. government should ban “conspiracy theorizing.”

Among the beliefs Sunstein would ban is advocating that the theory of global warming is a deliberate fraud.

Sunstein also recommended the government send agents to infiltrate “extremists who supply conspiracy theories” to disrupt the efforts of the “extremists” to propagate their theories.

In a 2008 Harvard law paper, “Conspiracy Theories,” Sunstein and co-author Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard law professor, ask, “What can government do about conspiracy theories?”

“We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories.”

THE global warming crisis is now being rebranded as a climate change crisis because it seems that instead of getting warmer, we may actually be getting colder.

Some years ago the New Scientist published a report based on an interview with an Indian glaciologist who predicted that the glaciers in the Himalayas would disappear by 2035 as a result of global warming.

This could have catastrophic water implications for people living in some of the most densely populated areas. As many as half-a-billion people are dependent on water from the Himalayas.

The new data, released in recent weeks, indicates that 30 of the 96 glaciers in the Himalayas actually increased in mass during 2007-2008. Glaciers are also expanding in the Antarctic, New Zealand, and Norway.