Articles Tagged "Lorne Gunter"

For more than two weeks now, scientists with doubts about the dangers of global warming have been buzzing about what appears to be a huge admission from the United Nations.

A draft of the UN's next five-year assessment report has been leaked and appears to show what the skeptics have been saying for years: Carbon dioxide has less effect on global temperatures than thought, the sun is a bigger "driver" of climate change, and global temperatures have not risen appreciably in the past 16 years.

We skeptics need to take a breath. I have no doubt the draft of AR5 (Fifth Assessment Report) says exactly what the skeptics claim, namely that the UN and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has overestimated the effect CO2 has on global temperatures, underestimated the effects of the giant ball of burning gas in the sky and, as a consequence, incorrectly predicted how much Earth will warm in the coming century.

It's a fact, though, that in the climate change debate, the truth doesn't matter.

James Hansen is at it again. Hansen, who runs NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, is usually billed as a climate scientist – not to mention the godfather of the current global warming concern.

But Hansen knows spends as much time marching in demonstrations and petitioning governments for action on climate change as he does doing research. He engages in plenty of unscientific rhetoric, such as calling trains taking coal to electrical generating stations “death trains” because of the carbon dioxide given off by burning coal to generate power. He has even testified in court in Britain on behalf of environmentalist vandals who sought to infiltrate a power plant and cause it to shut down.

Hansen and two other authors published a study this week that claims extreme weather events, especially droughts, are increasing in frequency and intensity and that it is “99% certain” that the cause is manmade global warming.

Nice conclusion – if your intent is to scare the public and politicians into action. But even many scientists not known as global warming sceptics have shaken their heads in disbelief at the sloppiness of Hansen’s latest work.

Kumi Naidoo, Greenpeace’s executive director, called last week’s United Nations eco-conference in Rio de Janeiro an “epic failure.”

Good.

The Rio 20 conference (so named because the first big global-warming conference was held at the same Brazilian resort 20 years ago) produced nothing that could be called a success — not even a qualified one.

Few UN conferences ever produce much of worth, anyway. But at the very least they can usually come up with a final communique that all the participants can point to to show their trip wasn’t wasted.

Not Rio.

For nearly a decade now, the tiny Pacific island-group nation of Tuvalu has made news for its government’s claim that the archipelago is being swallowed up by rising sea levels caused by global warming. The island government has even considered suing the world’s largest industrial powers for emitting the carbon dioxide that many scientists believe is trapping solar radiation in the atmosphere and leading to allegedly higher global temperatures. When the highly vaunted UN climate summit in Copenhagen in Dec. 2009 failed to produce a successor agreement to the 1997 Kyoto accords, the Tuvalu delegation was not shy about expressing its disgust and outrage, claiming that world leaders had consigned them to a slow extermination. (So slow — over 100 years — that almost no current Tuvaluns will live long enough to be killed by the encroaching oceans and their descendents will have plenty of time to row to safety. But let’s not pick nits.)

Now comes word that a drought afflicting the four-island, five-atoll state has dried up nearly all the fresh water there. The United States, Australia and New Zealand have airlifted in potable supplies and desalination plants, but even so, Tuvalu has only about half the daily water supply its inhabitants need.

This, too, is being blamed on manmade climate change, although, it is known that the immediate cause of the low rainfall is a powerful La Nina, which (not to nitpick again), is a cooling of the Pacific’s surface over a broad area near the equator.

Over the past decade, global surface temperatures have flatlined. While 2010 was a warm year in the northern hemisphere and 2011 has been warm in much of the U.S., globally temperatures have failed to surpass 1998. Despite all the histrionics about man-made global warming, the predicted temperature rise has failed to materialize even as CO2 emissions have increased. Pat Michaels, a climatologist who is currently senior fellow for research and economic development at George Mason University in Virginia, wrote in the Wall Street Journal in late July, ”there has been no statistically significant warming trend since November of 1996 in monthly surface temperature records.”

So what’s happened? Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate analysis section at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, thinks he knows. The heat is hiding out in the deep oceans just waiting to pounce at some point in the future and make the Earth every bit as hot as he and his fellow alarmists have said it would become all along.

Anything is possible, I suppose, but of all the global warming theories I’ve heard, this is among the most far-fetched.

There’s an axiom in science known as Occam’s Razor: The simplest explanation is the most likely. So what is the simplest explanation for the lack of significant warming in the past 15 years? Man-made emissions do not have as much impact on climate as the United Nations and its vaunted climate models have theorized. It hasn’t gotten appreciably warmer because CO2 from cars and factories is not as much of a “driver” of climate change as many scientists have postulated. Something else is behind climate change.

Suppose an ossuary – an ancient burial box – containing the skeletal remains of Jesus of Nazareth was discovered. Its contents would prove a challenge to the central fact of Christianity, that Jesus was god made man who ascended to Heaven whole – bones and all – after his crucifixion.

That would be big news, right? The significance of it would be debated in religious circles around the world, as well as in newspapers and on 24/7 news channels. Or it would be, if the remains didn’t come under the control of some Christian organization whose leaders had a vested interest in suppressing reports about the discovery.

One way or the other, though, some faithful Christians would deny the find was real. Then when that position was no longer defensible, they would continue to insist the bones were immaterial.

Well, something similar may be happening in the climate change debate, whose basic premise – that manmade carbon dioxide emissions are causing dangerous climate change – has become religious dogma to many scientists, politicians, activists and fundraisers.

I was in the United States last week during the heat wave that snaked its way up from Texas and the South across the Eastern Seaboard and into central Canada. For sure, it was stinkin’ hot. One night, my family and I went to a Pittsburgh Pirates game when the humidex temperature was 41C. There wasn’t enough frozen lemonade in the stadium to make that comfortable.

From all the headlines and waitress small talk about the heat, you would have imagined the hot, muggy weather was unusual. Yet, throughout the entire week of sweltering temperatures and sizzling news stories, just 0.6% of nearly 6,000 U.S. weather stations witnessed a record daily high.

According to the climate blog Hockey Schtick, “there were no records broken on July 17, July 18, July 19, or July 20th. A total of four stations broke records on July 21, 20 on July 22, and 10 on July 23, 2011.” And we’re not talking about all-time record highs – the highest temperature ever recorded at a specific location – but merely daily records. No U.S. weather station recorded its highest temperature ever during the heat wave of 2011, and just 34 hit historic highs for a single date.
If we were suffering the effects of global warming, wouldn’t you think there would be higher highs, that each year’s heat wave would be worse than the last? If the planet was slowly getting hotter, wouldn’t you imagine a quarter of weather stations would break daily heat records during each summer’s peak temperatures and some smaller percentage – 10% or even 5% — would see all-time highs?

Last month, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, announced that investment in alternative energy in Europe fell 34% in just the first three months of 2011. Why would it fall by a third in so short a time? Because European governments have begun withdrawing the huge subsidies they pay to green-energy companies, and massive tax dollars are about the only thing that make most green-energy projects make economic sense.

Much of the investment in alternative energy is obviously what’s called “subsidy farming,” i.e. planting a little money in a project in the hopes of reaping a harvest of taxpayer-subsidized profits because, if left to market forces, green energy makes little sense.

If you want to know what’s ahead for Ontario taxpayers and electricity consumers, just look at what’s going on in Europe. Thanks to Premier Dalton McGunity’s green-energy dreams, Ontarians, like Europeans, will be paying big bucks for all types of energy — including old, cheap sources such as coal and hydro – and getting little more “clean” energy than now.
Ontario’s green-energy plan, introduced in 2008, was always dependent on the “if you build it, they will come” theory. If only enough tax dollars could be used to subsidize the construction of wind farms and solar panels and algae ponds for biodiesel, eventually there would be enough of these clean sources to make them economically viable competitors to coal and oil.

A great deal of wind has gone out of the climate-change sails since the revelations a year-and-a-half ago of major data manipulation by many of the world’s leading climate scientists.

Late last month, a report by two sea-level experts — James Houston, director emeritus of engineer research and development for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Robert Dean, professor emeritus of civil and coastal engineering at the University of Florida — examined historic data from tidal monitors around the United States, and determined that sea levels rose very little in the 20th century and that, to the extent they rose at all, their rate of rise has begun to fall.

Sea levels have not exactly begun to fall yet, but the rate at which they are rising has slowed considerably and this deceleration has likely been occurring for the past 80 years.

This finding, the researchers added, is consistent with what they and others have found from checking tidal gauges worldwide, too. What little sea-level rise there was in the last century was insignificant. Moreover, the rate at which the seas are rising has decelerated appreciably in the last few decades, contrary to the predictions by computer climate models that show the sea rising quickly and catastrophically as global warming melts glaciers and polar ice caps.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is as lefty as our own dear CBC. Recently it sent reporter Margot O’Neill away to Oxford University for a year to study the state of environmental reporting. She returned recently to bemoan the fact that in the year since the Climategate emails and the UN climate summit debacle in Copenhagen there have been far fewer prominent climate change stories in Western press.

Her theory (and the theory of every source she seems to have talked to — all anonymous) is that scientists and reporters are simply doing a lousy job of explaining why climate change is still an impending disaster. But here’s another theory: In the past year, more of the public has seen through the shaky science of climate change and the questionable conclusions of the UN and some of the world’s most well-known climate scientists.

The house of cards has collapsed because its underlying assumptions were wrong to start with, not because the public cannot be made to care or because there exists some vast conspiracy to suppress the truth. The Emperor has been seen to be the naked fool he is.

“Where did all the climate change stories go?” O’Neill wonders. She quotes an unnamed BBC reporter saying “The [programmers] are against it because it loses ratings. The wave [of public interest] has gone. There is climate change fatigue. That is why I am not [reporting] it now.”

She adds that “even reporters at The Guardian, which especially targets environmental reporting, complain that it’s difficult to get a run. Another UK broadcast journalist said he was warned that putting climate change on prime time would risk losing a million viewers.”