Articles Tagged "Rebecca Terrell"

The notion of the "new normal" of extreme weather is a farce, according to a recent report by the environmental group Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). Extreme Weather Report 2012 was presented at the latest UN Climate Conference in Doha, Qatar, but the only press this landmark study received was when British politician and author Lord Christopher Monckton was kicked out of the conference for presenting it.

The report is actually a massive compilation of scientific studies and news articles from both public and private sources, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Together they indicate claims of "global warming," "climate change" and "climate disruption" are nothing but a ruse to usher in massive carbon taxes and crippling regulations. Like Pavlov's dog, politicians are conditioned to react to any harsh weather event by drooling for higher taxes, notes the study. Naturally, delegates at the UN conference were not interested in the conclusions of the CFACT study.

The Pavlov analogy is appropriate, nevertheless, as this small sampling of items from the report illustrates:

Media reports claim Antarctica is facing potential meltdown from global warming. "Antarctic ice shelf at tipping point," warns a headline from TG Daily. "Deep basin under West Antarctic Ice Sheet suggests greater risk of collapse," cautions Disaster News Network. And msnbc.com quips, "Vast Antarctic ice sheet 'in play' with global warming."

These headlines spin off new research that reveals a previously unknown basin under the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) near the Weddell Sea. Using high-tech ice-penetrating radar, a team of scientists from the U.S. and U.K. discovered the sub-glacial basin they say is nearly the size of New Jersey and makes the ice sheet above it vulnerable to collapse. Their study results are published in the current edition of Nature Geoscience.

"If we were to invent a set of conditions conducive to retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, this would be it," said Don Blankenship , senior research scientist at The University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics. He co-authored the paper with experts from the British Antarctic Survey and the Universities of Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Exeter and York.

Time Magazine is accusing climate change deniers of a vast right-wing conspiracy of deceit that threatens to subvert efforts protecting the Earth from eco-catastrophe. In "Who's Bankrolling the Climate-Change Deniers?" Bryan Walsh bemoans the fact that only a few years ago Republicans such as John McCain and Mitt Romney supported government cap-and-trade programs to restrict industrial emissions of so-called greenhouse gases (GHG) but are now backpedaling. He cites polls showing a growing number of conservatives in the deniers' camp. "That's deeply troubling," Walsh laments, "... despite an overwhelming scientific consensus" confirming imminent calamity.

He highlights two sociologists who blame "climate denialism" on long-term efforts of "conservative groups and corporations to distort global-warming science." Walsh quotes their article in The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society, in which the sociologists claim, "Contrarian scientists, fossil-fuel corporations, conservative think tanks and various front groups have assaulted mainstream climate science and scientists for over two decades. The blows have been struck by a well-funded, highly complex and relatively coordinated denial machine."

Missing from Walsh's diatribe is any actual proof of a well-heeled denial machine or the "settled scientific truth" of climate change. He makes passing mention of two companies, Exxon and Peabody Energy, and a handful of groups including the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and accuses them of infiltrating society through conservative media outlets. No data, no quotes, no evidence. Just chatter.

The New American has raised the ire of Britain's University of East Anglia (UEA) with an article that briefly recalled the Climategate scandal of November 2009, in which hundreds of hacked e-mails from the school's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) brought accusations of conspiracy and fraud against scientists there. The story is still making headlines more than one year later because the scientists involved are high-profile contributors to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization many skeptics believe was created exclusively to provide evidence of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and usher in carbon-restricting climate policies.

In response to the article at TheNewAmerican.com, Simon Dunford, UEA Press Officer, wrote:

We are extremely surprised at the inaccurate and defamatory claim in the final paragrah [sic].... Our scientists were exonerated of any dishonesty or malpractice by a series of independent reviews.... Readers of your article would not know that they had been cleared of any such accusations.

What Dunford calls "independent reviews" have, however, been condemned in the media as whitewashed scams that would have made Nixon blush. The Canada Free Press described them as "the most transparent, manipulated brazen cover up possible." The Financial Post said that "there were serious problems with the conduct of the inquiries. Public and policymakers alike can no longer regard their findings as reliable." The Telegraph reported that the outcome of the inquiries showed "there is no more a culture of accountability and job forfeiture for controversial conduct in AGW circles than there is in parliamentary ones.... The brand remains toxic."

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Several organizations are petitioning Obama's EPA to reconsider its December 2009 endangerment finding regarding greenhouse gases. The finding permits EPA to regulate carbon dioxide and other allegedly dangerous emissions under the Clean Air Act. But recent disclosures have revealed the UN data on which EPA based its decision was fraudulently manipulated and therefore completely unreliable. The source document, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), has been under harsh scrutiny over the past weeks for a number of blunders, including the Climategate scandal, bogus claims about Himalayan glacier melt, false assertions The Netherlands are drowning, deceptive hysteria over conditions in the Amazon, exaggerations of vanishing polar ice caps, and fraudulent cover-up of Chinese temperature data.

On February 12, three organizations filed a Petition for Reconsideration in which they stated, "EPA's Endangerment Finding is based on non-scientific reports by the IPCC and scientifically indefensible global temperature datasets." The three petitioners are the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).

Their petition goes on to explain EPA's data was highly compromised, likely to contain political bias, and never independently verified. A CEI press release also warns the endangerment finding opens the door for EPA to impose crippling regulations on tens of thousands of previously unregulated small businesses.

As much as the scientists at the center of Climategate wish it would just fade away, new evidence keeps surfacing to fan the flames of controversy. The latest item regards weather monitoring stations situated in remote parts of rural China.

The Climategate e-mails implicate two influential climate researchers in fraudulent cover-up of Chinese temperature data. According to The Guardian, the numbers didn't fit with their climate models showing dramatic rise in global warming. The researchers are Dr. Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University (a group influential in composing the UN's keystone climate reports), and Dr. Wei-Chyung Wang, a professor at the University at Albany.

In 1990, Jones and Wang published a paper in the journal Nature concluding the "urban heat effect" has little to do with global warming. They used temperature data from a quickly urbanizing area of eastern China to illustrate their findings, specifically data from 84 weather stations with few significant moves. The issue of moves was important to prove how significantly urban sprawl affected temperature readings at originally outlying stations over time. The UN's 2007 climate report, known as the Fourth Assessment Report or AR4, quoted the Nature paper saying that urban sprawl has little to do with rising global temperatures.

As the United Nations weathers a media beating over its falsified exaggeration of Himalayan glacier melt, new reports are adding fuel to the fire pointing out other blatant errors espoused by the international body.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a comprehensive climate report in 2007 — the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) — that included the Himalayan snafu as well as a dire warning that more than half of The Netherlands is below sea level. It also exaggerated claims about global warming destroying the Amazon rainforest.

According to Fox News, Dutch environment ministry spokesman Trimo Vallaart points out that only 26 percent of his country is below sea level, a far cry from the 55 percent reported in AR4. Vallaart explained IPCC researchers exaggerated the amount by adding the 29 percent of land supposedly threatened by river flooding. He also pointed out that though the Dutch office for environmental planning is an IPCC partner and has the correct figures, the mistake has gone uncorrected.

“The entire polar ice cap … could be completely ice free within the next five to seven years.” So claimed global-warming magnate Al Gore at last December’s UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

The scientist he referenced, Dr. Wieslav Maslowski, is a Department of Oceanography professor with the U.S. Naval Post-Graduate School. Maslowski denied making the prediction in an interview with the U.K. Times Online. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.” A shamefaced Gore admitted gleaning the “ballpark figure” from a conversation he had with Maslowski several years ago. Yet only days before Gore’s Copenhagen speech, the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) published a report of Maslowski’s research. It read, “Should the present trend of sea ice melt continue, some models suggest that the Arctic Ocean could become near ice free in the summer time within one decade.”

To further confuse things, DMI records show practically identical total sea ice area measurements in the Arctic for the past five years. However, DMI qualifies its data, noting that the age and thickness of Arctic ice is changing dramatically and citing research from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Colorado that Arctic sea ice is melting at a rate of 11.2 percent per decade. The NSIDC explains that more ice than usual has been melting in summer months during recent years. New ice cover is relatively thin, weak, and more vulnerable to melting. Remarking on the data, NSIDC Director Mark Serreze said, “We still expect to see ice-free summers sometime in the next few decades.”

Two German physicists have written a paper debunking the "theory" of the greenhouse gas effect by demonstrating how it violates basic laws of physics. Their paper, Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within the Frame of Physics, was published last year in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Modern Physics.

The authors are Gerhard Gerlich, a professor of mathematical physics at the Technical University Carolo-Wilhelmina in Braunschweig, and Ralf Tscheuchner, a retired professor of theoretical physics and freelance lecturer and researcher in physics and applied informatics.

Gerlich and Tscheuschner first define carbon dioxide as a trace gas accounting for less than one percent of air's volume and mass. They say even a doubling of the concentration of atmospheric CO2 would hardly change the thermal conductivity of air. If it did, the change would be well within margins of error currently in place.