Articles Tagged "CO2 Propaganda"

I have just been listening to Uncertain Climate, the first in BBC “Environment Analyst” Roger Harrabin’s two-part Radio 4 investigation into the politics of climate change. The announcer introduced it as a programme “on an unusual aspect of global warming that you won’t have heard in the news headlines”. This was touching, but would only have been accurate had it added the phrase “if your only source for those news headlines is the BBC website”.

Anyhoo, I listened to it so that you don’t have to. The programme was rather what you would have expected the BBC and Environment Analyst Roger Harrabin to make on global warming – which is to say apparent sweet reasonableness and noble questing-for-truth disguising a deal of disingenuousness, special pleading, (presumably) unconscious bias, and economy with the actualité. (Hat tip: Nick Mabbs)

Its slipperiest trick, to my mind, was giving so much space – almost unchallenged but for some (heavily edited) interpolations from an underrepresented Nigel Lawson – to former UN ambassador Sir Crispin Tickell.

When the final lofty analysis of the CAGW scare gets to be written up by Sir Christopher Booker’s or Lord Delingpole’s grandson in about 2050 (by which time it will have become superabundantly clear, as polar bears maraud outside the freezing walls of Carlisle, and Mount Kilimanjaro becomes the favoured skiing destination of Boris Johnson’s descendants, that global cooling is and always was the far greater threat), at least one chapter will be dedicated to the deleterious influence of this pompous, insufferable mandarin in skewing the climate debate with his hysterically overblown claims of the eco disasters awaiting us. (In the 1970s he wrote a book worrying we were all going to be done for by Global Cooling. But Sir Crispin doesn’t much talk about this any more.)

Now, as the earth does not become rapidly overheated from CO2 (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere, nor the Arctic sea ice disappearing, nor the Pacific atolls drowning, nor the Amazonian jungle drying up, all as previously touted by the IPCC and their gendarmes and adjuvants, a new slogan on the supposed danger of CO2 is increasingly being heard, namely “Ocean Acidification”.

The supposedly happening Ocean Acidification, frequently termed “the other effect of CO2”, is largely based on unrealistic biological experiments, actual measurements over an insufficient time to allow any definite trend delineation, and a lack of understanding of the chemistry involved.

Oceans and most freshwater bodies are alkaline

Water is acidic if the pH is below 7 and alkaline if it is above 7. The pH of the oceans and most freshwater is approximately 8 to 8.2. The pH fluctuates with the seasons, increasing in spring and summer, decreasing after that. As the level of CO2 in the air is nearly constant, one has to ask:

A recent paper published in the PNAS, "Expert credibility in climate change" is being used as propaganda to claim that 97% of all climate scientists agree with the IPCC and the need for government action on climate change. An analysis of this paper does not support these conclusions.

PNAS reviewers and author's William R. L. Anderegg, James W. Prall, Jacob Harold and Stephen H. Schneider are apparently Google Scholar illiterate since searching for just the word "climate" with an author's name will bring results from non-peer-reviewed sources such as books, magazines, newspapers, patents, citations, duplicate listings and all sorts of other erroneous results. Such as 16,000 from the Guardian, 52,000 from Newsweek and 115,000 from the New York Times. There is no "peer-reviewed journal only" search option in Google Scholar.

Cherry Picking:

It is clear the authors cherry picked away skeptics using subjective criteria,

"we imposed a 20 climate-publications minimum to be considered a climate researcher."

So if a scientist published only 19 or less papers on the climate he is not considered an "expert". They did this intentionally as they noted,

"researchers with fewer than 20 climate publications comprise ≈80% the UE group."

Volume of publications does not indicate scientific truth nor does it denote expertise. It cannot be ignored that skeptics extensively publish peer-reviewed papers so they have to use this propaganda to subjectively define "experts". An objective criteria for determining if an author has done climate research would be if an author has or has not published a paper on the climate. Expertise is simply an opinion and who is considered an expert will change based on who you talk to.

Click source to read FULL report with links

The following page is taken from the Met Office site, it's a typical one sided view of climate change that should NOT be part of our child's education. If any of you can get together and put forward a counter view of climate change for child education from a Climate Realist perspective, please contact us.

Live resources for Key Stages 1 through to 5

The Met Office is hosting a series of free video conferences for schools and colleges in England. Offering a unique and interactive aid to learning in the classroom, each 45 minute presentation is bespoke, having been tailored around the questions your students want to put us and is delivered by our own weather and climate experts.

This service is funded by the Department for Education

Before you apply, please read the following important information.

Please ensure your school or college has the facility to run a video conference before applying.

Schools and colleges must be registered with JANET. You will be required to enter your venue address as registered with JANET in our online booking form. Please ensure this is entered accurately as the video conference will be booked using these details.

As the number of available video conferences is limited, schools and colleges can only participate in one conference during the 2010-11 programme.

Driven by a constantly expanding need for electricity, Chile is considering building seven new dams and a transmission line through its southern wilderness. This isolated land of condors and monkey puzzle trees is home to the third largest reserve of frozen freshwater in the world—the Southern Ice Field. Critics say the environmental risks have not been fully examined, and the risk to southern Chile's unique ecosystems is unacceptably high. Proponents of the dam project argue that hydroelectricity is a clean source of energy, just waiting to be tapped. Chile needs the 3500 MW/yr of power to meet its development goals and lacks indigenous oil or coal reserves. Moreover, the electricity from the dams would displace dirty generation, greatly reducing Chile's greenhouse gas emissions. Give all the benefits, why are so many people, within Chile and without, so opposed to the dams—opposed to the point of preferring new coal plants?

The HidroAysen project is the most ambitious dam proposal in the history of Chile. Along with proposing the construction of 5 dams on two of Patagonia's most pristine rivers, the Pascua and Baker, it plans on building a 2000 km high-voltage transmission line North to Santiago, creating the world's longest clear-cut. The proposed dams would flood rare temperate rainforests and some of Patagonia's best ranching lands. The rainforest areas that the dams and transmission lines would eliminate do not exist anywhere else on the planet—more than 50% of the plant species found in southern Chile are found nowhere else. Along with altering Chile's environment from the south to the Central Valley, the project threatens future damming of other rivers in Patagonia. Activists fear, that once the transmission line is in place, rivers such as the Puelo, Yelcho, Palena and the Futaleufu will also be scheduled for damming.

With virtually no coal, oil or natural gas, Chile imports more than 95% of its fossil fuels. Half the country's electricity comes from plants fueled by Argentinean oil or gas and Columbian coal. The other half comes from existing hydropower schemes, many of them in the central zone around the Biobío River. As a result, Chile has the most expensive energy in South America. Add to that often contentious relationships with neighboring countries and Chile's energy position is a disaster waiting to happen.

Click source to read FULL report from Doug L. Hoffman

Dear Jenny,

RE: A09-106726/106458/JA/Id - Act on CO2 adverts

Thank you for sending me the Final Adjudication with regards my complaint about the government's "Act on CO2" campaign.

Within that final adjudication there are blatant untruths, the greatest of all being that 40% of atmospheric carbon dioxide comes from human activity.

Please refer to a table from the US Dept of Energy, as used by the UN IPCC themselves, clearly indicating that the best estimate is around three percent only, nowhere near the 40% that is claimed in the adjudication.

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/FTPROOT/environment/057304.pdf page 26:

I came across the above bill board from Oxfam and felt it overstated it's case on "Man Made" Climate Change.

We have recently seen a reversal on one campaign via the advertising standards Ed Miliband's adverts banned for overstating climate change by Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor, The Sunday Times.

The bill board heading reads:

"You might have read that the climate change talks are dead in the water"

"Bit of irony there for the thousands who'll be hit by floods"

The Science Museum is revising the contents of its new climate science gallery to reflect the wave of scepticism that has engulfed the issue in recent months.

The decision by the 100-year-old London museum reveals how deeply scientific institutions have been shaken by the public’s reaction to revelations of malpractice by climate scientists.

The museum is abandoning its previous practice of trying to persuade visitors of the dangers of global warming. It is instead adopting a neutral position, acknowledging that there are legitimate doubts about the impact of man-made emissions on the climate.

Even the title of the £4 million gallery has been changed to reflect the museum’s more circumspect approach. The museum had intended to call it the Climate Change Gallery, but has decided to change this to Climate Science Gallery to avoid being accused of presuming that emissions would change the temperature.

Click source to read more, and well done to the Science Museum for putting the "Science" back into the Museum , may it continue to spread into the main stream media.

Interviews by Melanie Reid, Simon de Bruxelles and Anjana Ahuja:

Raphael Rossiter,10, North London

If I was to rate my worry on a scale of one to ten, I’d put myself at six or seven. A politician came to my school and told us how climate change threatened countries with floods. He said the North Pole will melt. I just gasped. I hadn’t thought about it until then. The politician also said we should have less meat and fish on our school menu, because that was more sustainable.

When I think about climate change, I imagine floods and no blue sky. My friend told me that if floods came in the winter, it could create an ice age and you’d have to be as high as a church to be safe. Mum always has BBC News on in the car, and there’s always scientists talking about some update on climate science. I think there’s a 50-50 chance we’ll be OK in the future. People are starting to do something. My family uses as little electricity as possible and recycles everything.

Abigail Burden, 8, Middlesex

I think it’s all to do with the Sun getting warmer and all the ice melting. It doesn’t worry me and I don’t usually talk about it with my friends. The teachers don’t really mention it. Nothing scares me. But I do think about the polar bears. They are dying out because they don’t have enough food and that makes me sad.

I walk to school every day and turn the tap off when I brush my teeth. I turn the lights off when I leave a room and I recycle. I try not to waste anything.

Government adverts that used nursery rhymes to warn of climate change have been branded by experts as "simplistic communication tools" that have set back the fight against global warming back by several years.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled that the adverts created on behalf of the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and based on the children's poems Jack and Jill and Rub-A-Dub-Dub made exaggerated claims about the threat to Britain from global warming.

The ruling is a further blow to the Government's efforts to raise awareness of the threat of global warming following the "climategate" scandal and questions about the United Nations's presentation of the risks of global warming.

Two posters juxtaposed adapted extracts from the nursery rhymes with prose warnings about the dangers of global warning.

One began: "Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. There was none as extreme weather due to climate change had caused a drought." Beneath was written: "Extreme weather conditions such as flooding, heat waves and storms will become more frequent and intense."

Ed Gillespie, the co-founder of Futerra Sustainability Communications, said it was "rubbish communication" that has given climate change sceptics another opportunity to cast doubt on the science.