Articles Tagged &quot;Lawrence Solomon&quot;

LAWRENCE SOLOMON WORLD TEMPERATURES

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Lawrence Solomon: Not easy being green (Series of disasters for the climate doomsayers)

Friday, March 1st 2013, 1:18 PM EST

Co2sceptic (Site Admin)

It’s not easy being green these days, especially if you’re a die-hard doomsayer of the global warming persuasion. Arctic ice has made a comeback, advancing so rapidly that the previous decade saw less ice at this time of the year than exists today. And previously balmy Arctic temperatures just nose-dived, according to the Danish Meteorological Institute, which has tracked Arctic temperatures since 1958.

Alarmists shudder when looking south, too, at the stats from Antarctica. There the sea ice extent started growing early this year, and the ice cover remains stubbornly above average. All told, the global sea ice — including both polar caps — now exceeds the average recorded since 1979, when satellites began their measurements.

Disasters are another disaster for the doomsayers, as documented in an October article by University of Colorado-Boulder Prof. Robert Pielke Jr., one of the world’s foremost experts in disasters and climate change. “Flooding has not increased over the past century, nor have landfalling hurricanes,” he reported. “Remarkably, the U.S. is currently experiencing the longest-ever recorded period with no strikes of a Category 3 or stronger hurricane.”

Pielke went on to note that the U.S. has seen a decline in drought over the past century, and that “Over the past six decades, tornado damage has declined after accounting for development that has put more property into harm’s way.” Similar conclusions apply to typhoons in China, bushfires in Australia, and windstorms in Europe. High-profile weather events have always and will always be with us; they just haven’t been as fateful of late. Moreover, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change earlier last year agreed that long-term climate change can’t be blamed for damage from extreme events.

The Holy Grail of proof to most doomsayers, of course, is the temperature, which global warming models insisted would rise in lock-step with increases in carbon dioxide. When the temperatures started to plateau in the late 1990s, doomsayers scoffed at the skeptics who noted that the models failed, taking comfort from the global warming leadership who explained every which way that the skeptics were torturing the statistics to falsely show warming had stopped. Now the leadership itself — the U.K.’s Met Office, NASA’s Jim Hansen, and the IPCC’s Rajendra Pachauri — all admit to temperatures having reached a standstill for the better part of two decades. The lowly global warming believer is left with little but the promises from their leaders that, sooner or later, those temperatures will rise again.

Source Link: financialpost.com/m/wp/fp-comment

LAWRENCE SOLOMON PUBLIC POLLS

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Lawrence Solomon: Celsius not rising

Friday, February 8th 2013, 7:22 AM EST

Co2sceptic (Site Admin)

Public opinion won’t change as long as temperatures don’t

Question: How do people decide whether global warming is for real?

Answer: They poke their noses outside their doors or watch the weather report on television. If they’re reminded that the weather has been unseasonably warm of late, the public tends to fret over dire consequences of global warming; if the weather has been on the cool side, the public tends to scoff at the fear mongering. In polls on global warming, Gallup data shows a swing of almost 10% for each degree Celsius that one year differs from another.

This finding and others appear in The influence of national temperature fluctuations on opinions about climate change in the U.S. since 1990, a University of British Columbia study published this week in Climatic Change. The findings explain why governments, environmentalists, foundations, the media, universities, renewable energy multinationals and myriad others have so little to show for their $80-billion-dollar-plus, decades-long efforts to persuade the public that climate change will be calamitous — most Westerners do not fear climate change. Those billions — whether spent in studies, public relations campaigns, or other forms of propaganda trumpeting the hottest climate ever — can be blown away by a short snowstorm or a lowly back-porch thermometer that refuses to rise. While many factors — political ideology, age and education among them — influence what the public believes on global warming, the single biggest factor in a change in public opinion is an individual’s experience with temperature, which the authors of the study believe could account for about half of the change.

Source Link: opinion.financialpost.com

LAWRENCE SOLOMON 2012 USA ELECTION

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2012 USA Election: Lawrence Solomon: How Obama lost the left

Saturday, June 23rd 2012, 9:12 AM EDT

Co2sceptic (Site Admin)

Disappointed supporters realize there’s little difference between him and Romney

I could say about Mitt Romney, I think he’s a real gentleman. I think he’s been very successful. I think he’s really smart. And I don’t agree with everything that he believes, but I agree with a lot of it. And I think that he’d probably make a good president.” These words, from an interview last month with CNN, came from Ted Turner, the man who founded CNN, married Jane Fonda, pledged a $1-billion gift to UN causes and was one of Barack Obama’s biggest donors in support of his run for president in 2008.

“The Obama administration is a bit exhausted. It’s not all that strong,” stated billionaire financier George Soros in an interview at Davos, in explaining why he didn’t see much difference between an Obama and a Romney presidency. Like Turner, Soros was one of Obama’s earliest and biggest backers. Now he admits to being “a bit disappointed” in the man he worked so hard to help make president.

“I think Romney has shown in the past — in his previous years as a moderate or progressive — that he was fairly competent as a governor and also running the Olympics,” former president Jimmy Carter told MSNBC, in explaining “I would be comfortable” with Romney as president. Carter has publicly criticized Obama for failing to lead.

Source Link: opinion.financialpost.com

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Lawrence Solomon: Green power failure

Saturday, May 12th 2012, 7:04 AM EDT

Co2sceptic (Site Admin)

Climate mania impoverishes electricity customers worldwide

Global-warming-related catastrophes are increasingly hitting vulnerable populations around the world, with one species in particular danger: the electricity ratepayer. In Canada, in the U.K., in Spain, in Denmark, in Germany and elsewhere the danger to ratepayers is especially great, but ratepayers in one country — the U.S. — seem to have weathered the worst of the disaster.

America’s secret? Unlike leaders in other countries, which to their countries’ ruin adopted policies as if global warming mattered, U.S. leaders more paid lip service to it. While citizens in other countries are now seeing soaring power rates, American householders can look forward to declining rates.

The North American exemplar of acting on the perceived threat of global warming is Ontario, which dismantled one of the continent’s finest fleets of coal plants in pursuit of becoming a green leader. Then, to induce developers to build uneconomic renewable energy facilities, the Ontario government paid them as much as 80 times the market rate for power. The result is power prices that rose rapidly (about 50% since 2005) and will continue to do so: Ontarians can expect power prices that are 46% higher over the next five years, according to a 2010 Ontario government estimate, and more than 100% higher according to independent estimates. The rest of Canada may not fare much better — the National Energy Board forecasts power prices 42% higher by 2035, while some estimates have Canadian power prices 50% higher by 2020.

The story throughout much of Europe is similar. Denmark, an early adopter of the global-warming mania, now requires its households to pay the developed world’s highest power prices — about 40¢ a kilowatt hour, or three to four times what North Americans pay today. Germany, whose powerhouse economy gave green developers a blank cheque, is a close second, followed by other politically correct nations such as Belgium, the headquarters of the EU, and distressed nations such as Spain.

Source Link: opinion.financialpost.com

LAWRENCE SOLOMON HENRIK SVENSMARK PIERS CORBYN UPDATED

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Lawrence Solomon: The lost debate: Updated by Piers Corbyn

Saturday, May 5th 2012, 3:49 AM EDT

Co2sceptic (Site Admin)

Readers resist the triumph of cosmic rays over CO2

Last fall, after public opinion polls showed most of the Western world’s citizens had turned against global-warming alarmism, after governments started to slash their subsidies for renewable energy, and after whining from the alarmists showed that they, too, knew the game was over, I concluded that Al Gore et al. had decisively lost the global-warming debate.

Global temperatures had stopped climbing, hurricanes hadn’t materialized in abnormal numbers, the Arctic ice had largely recovered while the Antarctic ice had steadily grown, polar bear populations were on the increase, and on and on — in effect, every major global-warming scare had been debunked. As important, the alarmists could no longer rhetorically ask, “If humans aren’t changing the climate through CO2, what is?”

There was now an impressive answer: cloud cover, caused by the interaction of cosmic rays and the Sun. To the distress of the alarmists, new research at the Danish Space Research Institute and Geneva-based CERN were affirming this cosmic ray-Sun theory, and other prestigious scientific bodies were giving it credence. Last week, in one of the few columns I’ve written in the last six months on the now-passé issue of global warming, I described the Royal Astronomical Society’s publication of an important new work that continues the ascendancy of this theory.

Updated below with MUST READ comments from Piers Corbyn

Source Link: opinion.financialpost.com

LAWRENCE SOLOMON HENRIK SVENSMARK JAMES LOVELOCK

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Lawrence Solomon: Censored science

Saturday, April 28th 2012, 5:03 AM EDT

Co2sceptic (Site Admin)

Why media ignore scientists who tackle taboos

True to form, the overwhelming majority of press outlets failed to report the juiciest global-warming gossip of the week — a change of heart on the issue by one of the world’s most celebrated environmentalists. Also true to form, the press failed to report the most profound science story of the week — a startling theory that not only absolves humans of blame in global warming but sheds light on another taboo subject: shortcomings in Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Unlike their coverage of the political establishment or the corporate establishment, journalists will rarely be skeptical of the scientific establishment. Perhaps these unskeptical journalists don’t question scientists out of a belief that scientists’ pronouncements are free of the self-interest that taints politicians or corporations. Or perhaps these journalists, who are themselves rarely scientifically literate, blindly accept the views of scientific authority figures because they lack the training to assess rival views. Or perhaps these journalists fear being subjected to ridicule if they buck politically correct views. Whatever the reasons for journalistic deference to dogma in science, the victim is the information-consuming public, which at best is kept in the dark, at worst is duped.

Source Link: financialpost.com

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Lawrence Solomon: Dare to question establishment science

Saturday, April 7th 2012, 6:20 AM EDT

Co2sceptic (Site Admin)

Well-informed conservatives realize that much of what passes for science today is deeply compromised

The better educated you are, the more likely you are to put your trust in science, or so says what scientists call the “knowledge deficit model” of scientific literacy. So why do conservatives become more and more skeptical of the scientific establishment on issues such as global warming as they become more and more educated? And why do conservatives, who once held science in very high regard, now hold it in relatively poor odour?

This rising distrust among better-educated conservatives “is a significant finding and the opposite of what many might expect,” said Gordon Gauchat, author of a study published last week in the American Sociological Review that portrays educated conservatives somewhat as a species of their own. Gauchat, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina, offers several possible explanations for what makes conservatives tick in his study, Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere: A Study of Public Trust in the United States, 1974 to 2010.

Unlike uneducated, ill-informed conservatives who are incapable of reconciling scientific truths with their ideology, Gauchat theorizes, “educated or high-information conservatives will hold hyper-opinions about science, because they have a more sophisticated grasp about what types of knowledge will conform with or contradict their ideological positions, and they will prefer to believe what supports their ideology.” Well-educated conservatives have boosters in this task, too, as the Los Angeles Times explained in an approving editorial that elaborated Gauchat’s views: “Right-wing think-tanks, funded by corporate interests to undermine the scientific consensus on such expensive-to-fix phenomena as climate change, have proliferated, as have conservative cable-TV networks, blogs and radio talk shows. In general, these outlets are talking to a well-educated audience. And they’re presenting a very one-sided view of scientific issues.”

Source Link: opinion.financialpost.com

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Lawrence Solomon: How U.S. charities fund Greens

Saturday, January 21st 2012, 4:17 AM EST

Co2sceptic (Site Admin)

Americans should be able to influence Canada's environmental debates. They should not be able to do so under the radar.

But they do, and not just in the case of the proposed Northern Gateway oil pipeline from the oil sands of Alberta to the West Coast - today's hot environmental topic. Unbeknownst to most Canadians, over the past two decades Canada's fabulously influential environmental movement increasingly has had U.S. paymasters. As elsewhere, he who pays the piper calls the tunes.

It wasn't always so, and foreign money wasn't always a problem. Canada's environmental groups in the 1970s and 1980s were a diverse lot advocating all-over-the map solutions to the many environmental problems they tackled. The Canadian groups would write up funding proposals for their ideas, shop them around to potential funders on both sides of the border, sometimes finding takers among them, sometimes not. It was largely a hit and-miss operation, and especially hard to obtain funding from the U.S. foundations, which tended to favour U.S. environmental groups. In this marketplace of ideas few funding proposals found much favour, and most environmental groups on both sides of the border struggled to survive.

Source Link: nationalpost.com

ENERGY & FUEL LAWRENCE SOLOMON

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Lawrence Solomon: The Green Goliath takes on nuclear

Saturday, December 10th 2011, 3:35 AM EST

Co2sceptic (Site Admin)

Renewables lobby tackles nuclear subsidies — but not its own.

Thirty years ago, ragtag environmentalists idealistically opposed nuclear power and the monopoly utilities that kept it in business, arguing that wind, solar, biomass and ethanol were more economic as well as cleaner. It was a David versus Goliath battle, and also a battle between free markets and government regulation, because in those days, before the unions hijacked much of the renewable energy movement, environmentalists wanted only a fair contest in which governments didn’t pick winners.

Today, environmentalists are still fighting the nuclear industry. But they’re no longer ragtag and their beloved renewable energy industry is no longer different from the nuclear industry. Now it’s Goliath vs. Goliath, and also a grotesque beauty contest, with each parading its figures in front of government judges, each hoping the government will pick them as winners.
A press release this week from the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association — local representatives of what has become a multi-billion-dollar, multinational-dominated industry — marks the start of the latest contest. “Ontario must phase out all power subsidies,” this lobby organization demands, in announcing the release of its study, Nuclear Power: Where is the Business Case?

The Green Goliath claims its books look better than nuclear’s because it relies on fewer subsidies. “An apples to apples comparison is not only fair, it is the smart thing to do,” Green Goliath says, while refusing to compare apples to apples. “Currently, new green power purchases for hundreds of feed-in tariff program projects collectively will cost Ontarians $220-million per year — but pending repairs at the Darlington nuclear plant alone will cost $10-billion,” it says disingenuously, comparing apples (the ongoing annual costs of renewables) to oranges (the one-time capital costs of nuclear). “Building new nuclear reactors at Darlington is calculated to add a minimum of $26-billion or more to public debt.”

Source Link: opinion.financialpost.com