quote from below: .... during the three-day hearing, the court heard that the critically-acclaimed film contains a number of inaccuracies, exaggerations and statements about global warming for which there is currently insufficient scientific evidence.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/a ... ge_id=1811

Schools must warn of Gore climate film bias
Last updated at 17:36pm on 3rd October 2007

Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth has been called unfit for schools because it is politically biased and contains serious scientific inaccuracies and 'sentimental mush'.

Schools will have to issue a warning before they show pupils Al Gore's controversial film about global warming, a judge indicated yesterday.

The move follows a High Court action by a father who accused the Government of 'brainwashing' children with propaganda by showing it in the classroom.

Stewart Dimmock said the former U.S. Vice-President's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, is unfit for schools because it is politically biased and contains serious scientific inaccuracies and 'sentimental mush'.

He wants the video banned after it was distributed with four other short films to 3,500 schools in February.

Mr Justice Burton is due to deliver a ruling on the case next week, but yesterday he said he would be saying that Gore's Oscar-winning film does promote 'partisan political views'.

This means that teachers will have to warn pupils that there are other opinions on global warming and they should not necessarily accept the views of the film.

He said: 'The result is I will be declaring that, with the guidance as now amended, it will not be unlawful for the film to be shown.'

The outcome marks a partial victory for Mr Dimmock, who had accused the 'New Labour Thought Police' of indoctrinating youngsters by handing out thousands of Climate Change Packs to schools.

Mr Dimmock, a lorry driver from Dover with children aged 11 and 14, said at the outset of the hearing: 'I wish my children to have the best education possible, free from bias and political spin, and Mr Gore's film falls far short of the standard required.'

His solicitor John Day, said yesterday that the Government had been forced to make 'a U-turn', but said it did not go far enough.

He said 'no amount of turgid guidance' could change the fact that the film is unfit for consumption in the classroom.

The case arises from a decision in February by the then Education Secretary Alan Johnson that DVDs of the film would be sent to all secondary schools in England, along with a multimedia CD produced by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs containing two short films about climate change and an animation about the carbon cycle.

David Miliband, who was Environment-Secretary when the school packs were announced, said at the time: 'The debate over the science of climate change is well and truly over.'

But during the three-day hearing, the court heard that the critically-acclaimed film contains a number of inaccuracies, exaggerations and statements about global warming for which there is currently insufficient scientific evidence.

The Climate Change Resource Pack has now been sent to more than 3,500 schools and is aimed at key stage 3 pupils - those aged 11 to

Children's Minister Kevin Brennan said last night: 'The judge's decision is clear that schools can continue to use An Inconvenient Truth as part of their teaching on climate change in accordance with the amended guidance, which will be available online today.

'We have updated the accompanying guidance, as requested by the judge to make it clearer for teachers as to the stated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change position on a number of scientific points raised in the film.'

quote from below: The Times has warned of four separate climate changes since 1895.

http://www.businessandmedia.org/special ... xecsum.asp

Fire and Ice

Journalists have warned of climate change for 100 years, but can’t decide weather we face an ice age or warming

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Thanks to the release of Al Gore’s latest effort on global warming – this time in book and movie form – climate change is the hot topic in press rooms around the globe. It isn’t the first time.

The media have warned about impending climate doom four different times in the last 100 years. Only they can’t decide if mankind will die from warming or cooling.

As the noise from the controversy has increased, it has drowned out any debate. Journalists have taken advocacy positions, often ignoring climate change skeptics entirely. One CBS reporter even compared skeptics of manmade global warming to Holocaust deniers.

The Society of Environmental Journalists Spring 2006 SEJournal included a now-common media position, arguing against balance. But that sense of certainty ignores the industry’s history of hyping climate change – from cooling to warming, back to cooling and warming once again.

The Media Research Center’s Business & Media Institute (formerly the Free Market Project) conducted an extensive analysis of print media’s climate change coverage back to the late 1800s.

It found that many publications now claiming the world is on the brink of a global warming disaster said the same about an impending ice age – just 30 years ago. Several major ones, including The New York Times, Time magazine and Newsweek, have reported on three or even four different climate shifts since 1895.

In addition, BMI found:

“Global Cooling” Was Just as Realistic: Several publications warned in the 1970s that global cooling posed a major threat to the food supply. Now, remarkably, global warming is also considered a threat to the very same food supply.


Glaciers Are Growing or Shrinking: The media continue to point to glaciers as a sign of climate change, but they have used them as examples of both cooling and warming.


Global Warming History Ignored: The media treat global warming like it’s a new idea. In fact, British amateur meteorologist G. S. Callendar argued that mankind was responsible for heating up the planet with carbon dioxide emissions – in 1938. That was decades before scientists and journalists alerted the public about the threat of a new ice age.


New York Times the Worst: Longtime readers of the Times could easily recall the paper claiming “A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable,” along with its strong support of current global warming predictions. Older readers might well recall two other claims of a climate shift back to the 1800s – one an ice age and the other warming again. The Times has warned of four separate climate changes since 1895.

quote from below... "The human impact on the atmosphere is simply too small to have a major effect on global temperatures," Dr Gray said.

He said his beliefs had made him an outsider in popular science.

"It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong," he said. "But they also know that they'd never get any grants if they spoke out. I don't care about grants."

http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/ ... 38792.html

Gore gets a cold shoulder

Steve Lytte
October 14, 2007

ONE of the world's foremost meteorologists has called the theory that helped Al Gore share the Nobel Peace Prize "ridiculous" and the product of "people who don't understand how the atmosphere works".

Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.

His comments came on the same day that the Nobel committee honoured Mr Gore for his work in support of the link between humans and global warming.

"We're brainwashing our children," said Dr Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University. "They're going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It's ridiculous."

At his first appearance since the award was announced in Oslo, Mr Gore said: "We have to quickly find a way to change the world's consciousness about exactly what we're facing."

Mr Gore shared the Nobel prize with the United Nations climate panel for their work in helping to galvanise international action against global warming.

But Dr Gray, whose annual forecasts of the number of tropical storms and hurricanes are widely publicised, said a natural cycle of ocean water temperatures - related to the amount of salt in ocean water - was responsible for the global warming that he acknowledges has taken place.

However, he said, that same cycle meant a period of cooling would begin soon and last for several years.

"We'll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realise how foolish it was," Dr Gray said.

During his speech to a crowd of about 300 that included meteorology students and a host of professional meteorologists, Dr Gray also said those who had linked global warming to the increased number of hurricanes in recent years were in error.

He cited statistics showing there were 101 hurricanes from 1900 to 1949, in a period of cooler global temperatures, compared to 83 from 1957 to 2006 when the earth warmed.

"The human impact on the atmosphere is simply too small to have a major effect on global temperatures," Dr Gray said.

He said his beliefs had made him an outsider in popular science.

"It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong," he said. "But they also know that they'd never get any grants if they spoke out. I don't care about grants."

Still flogging your dead horse, lw? Gore just got a Nobel prize for his work. Don't go nuts on us now.

I found this one quite interesting.

quote from below for the ADD inclined: I have read dozens of scientific papers. I have talked with numerous scientists. I have studied. I have thought about it. I know I am correct. There is no run away climate change. The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril. I am incensed by the incredible media glamour, the politically correct silliness and rude dismissal of counter arguments by the high priest of Global Warming.

http://media.newsbusters.org/stories/we ... am-history

By Noel Sheppard | November 7, 2007 - 17:58 ET


If the founder of The Weather Channel spoke out strongly against the manmade global warming myth, might media members notice?

We're going to find out the answer to that question soon, for John Coleman wrote an article published at ICECAP Wednesday that should certainly garner attention from press members -- assuming journalism hasn't been completely replaced by propagandist activism, that is.

Coleman marvelously began (emphasis added, h/t NB reader coffee250):

It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create in [sic] allusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the "research" to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus.

Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them, then teamed up with movie, media and other liberal, environmentalist journalists to create this wild "scientific" scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda. Now their ridiculous manipulated science has been accepted as fact and become a cornerstone issue for CNN, CBS, NBC, the Democratic Political Party, the Governor of California, school teachers and, in many cases, well informed but very gullible environmental conscientious citizens. Only one reporter at ABC has been allowed to counter the Global Warming frenzy with one 15 minutes documentary segment.

[...]

I have read dozens of scientific papers. I have talked with numerous scientists. I have studied. I have thought about it. I know I am correct. There is no run away climate change. The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril. I am incensed by the incredible media glamour, the politically correct silliness and rude dismissal of counter arguments by the high priest of Global Warming.

In time, a decade or two, the outrageous scam will be obvious.

Let's hope so, John; let's hope so.

Related articles:

Harvard Paper Calls Al Gore a Hypocrite

Renowned Environmentalist Calls Biofuels‘Crime Against Humanity’

John Stossel: ‘Don’t Look to Government to Cool Down the Planet’

UN Climate Panel to Discuss Global Warming at Tropical Resort

Global Warming Tutorial Media Should be Required to Watch
Vote for Stephen McIntyre's Climate Audit as Best Science Blog



—Noel Sheppard is an economist, business owner, and Associate Editor of NewsBusters.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... ook125.xml

Christopher Booker: Planet-saving madness

We are set on a course of 'planet saving' madness

The scare over global warming, and our politicians' response to it, is becoming ever more bizarre. On the one hand we have the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coming up with yet another of its notoriously politicised reports, hyping up the scare by claiming that world surface temperatures have been higher in 11 of the past 12 years (1995-2006) than ever previously recorded.

This carefully ignores the latest US satellite figures showing temperatures having fallen since 1998, declining in 2007 to a 1983 level - not to mention the newly revised figures for US surface temperatures showing that the 1930s had four of the 10 warmest years of the past century, with the hottest year of all being not 1998, as was previously claimed, but 1934.

On the other hand, we had Gordon Brown last week, in his "first major speech on climate change", airily committing his own and future governments to achieving a 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 - which is rather like prime minister Salisbury at the end of Queen Victoria's reign trying to commit Winston Churchill's government to achieving some wholly impossible goal in the middle of the Second World War.

Mr Brown's only concrete proposal for reaching this absurd target seems to be his plan to ban plastic bags, whatever they have to do with global warming (while his government also plans a near-doubling of flights out of Heathrow).

But of course he is no longer his own master in such fantasy exercises. Few people have yet really taken on board the mind-blowing scale of all the "planet-saving" measures to which we are now committed by the European Union.

By 2020 we will have to generate 20 per cent of our electricity from "renewables". At present the figure is four per cent (most of it generated by hydro-electric schemes and methane gas from landfill).

As Whitehall officials privately briefed ministers in August, there is no way Britain can begin to meet such a fanciful target (even if the Government manages to ram through another 30,000 largely useless wind turbines).

Another EU directive commits us to deriving 10 per cent of our transport fuel from "biofuels" by 2020. This would take up pretty well all the farmland we currently use to grow food (at a time when world grain prices have doubled in six months and we are already face a global food shortage).

Then by 2009, thanks to a mad gesture by Mr Blair and his EU colleagues last March, we also face the prospect of a total ban on incandescent light bulbs.

This compulsory switch to low-energy bulbs, apart from condemning us to live in uglier homes under eye-straining light, is in practice completely out of the question, because, according to our Government's own figures, more than half Britain's domestic light fittings cannot take them.

This year will be remembered for two things.

First, it was the year when the scientific data showed that the cosmic scare over global warming may well turn out to be just that - yet another vastly inflated scare.

Second, it was the year when the hysteria generated by all the bogus science behind this scare finally drove those who rule over us, including Gordon "Plastic Bags" Brown, wholly out of their wits.

The great row over under-funding of our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, led in the Lords by five former Chiefs of the Defence Staff, has so far missed a hugely important part of the story, although it was hinted at by General Sir Mike Jackson when he was interviewed on the Today programme.

Alas, John Humphrys failed to pick up the significance of Jackson's observation that "we may not have enough to do the things which we do now and the things which we may have to do in the future".

The problem with our defence spending in recent years is not that the Ministry of Defence has been starved of cash. On the contrary, it has been earmarking colossal sums for projects designed to equip us to fight imaginary wars in the future, as part of the European Rapid Reaction Force to which Tony Blair and Geoff Hoon committed us around 2000: £20 billion on the Navy's two giant carriers (with planes and infrastructure); £16 billion on FRES, a new family of vehicles for the Army; not to mention the £20 billion already committed to Eurofighters for the RAF.

It was the diversion of resources into planning for that imaginary future that took the eyes of the MoD and the then-Chief of the Defence Staff off the need to equip our forces adequately for the totally different type of insurgency war they have actually been having to fight.

The MoD is belatedly trying to make amends for this disastrous blunder, for instance equipping our troops with properly mine-protected Mastiffs, instead of the unprotected Snatch Land Rovers that have caused so many deaths. It may also help that enthusiasm for the EU's fantasy armed forces of the future has been on the wane.

But no one at the time shared that enthusiasm more obviously (or was happier to send those hopelessly inadequate Land Rovers to Iraq) than the officer who was then Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Mike Jackson.

Desmond Swayne, MP for New Forest West, tells me of a fearful problem affecting Hampshire schools, which have been told by the county education officer, Ian Beacham, that under new rules teachers must no longer drive pupils in mini-buses unless they have a full "passenger vehicle licence" - "a huge and expensive undertaking which entitles them to drive a coach or bus".

Threatening many extra-curricular activities, such as away sporting fixtures, this is causing such grief that Mr Swayne has asked in Parliament whether it is right that teachers should be forbidden to drive children in this way.

Schools minister Jim Knight didn't know the answer but said he would look into it. Harriet Harman, Leader of the House, suggested that Mr Swayne should move for a debate on the issue.

Had those ministers or Hampshire's education officer learned to use Google, they might have found in seconds that this is all a fuss about nothing. The two relevant EU directives on driving licences, 91/439 and 2003/59, make clear that teachers are exempted from the licensing requirements, as does a leaflet available at the click of a mouse on the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency website.

But does it not say something about the way we now allow our laws to be made in Brussels that neither ministers nor a council official responsible for enforcing them appear to know what those laws say?

• On October 19, 1999 I reported here a remarkable "personal message" sent out to Britain's small businesses over the signature of Nick Montagu, then head of the Inland Revenue Board. He told them how "exciting and important" it was for him and his staff to be "at the forefront of implementing the new Labour Government's policy agenda".

How apt, in light of the mega-grief they are currently causing the Government, that eight years later our incompetent tax-gatherers appear to be playing such a significant part in New Labour's impending downfall.

You may have missed this


U.N. Report: Global Warming Could Be 'Abrupt, Irreversible'

Friday, November 16, 2007

VALENCIA, Spain — Climate change is here, and it's getting worse, the year's final report by a U.N. panel will say when it's officially released Saturday.

"Warming of the climate system is unequivocal," the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Summary for Policymakers begins in a statement meant to dispel any skepticism about climate change.

It goes on to say that global warming could lead to "abrupt and irreversible" results, such as the widespread extinction of species, according to persons familiar with the final draft who requested anonymity because the summary was not yet public.

• Click here to visit FOXNews.com's Natural Science Center.

Working until dawn Friday, negotiators hashed out week-long disputes on the language, one of its authors said.

Provisional agreement on the text — which is about 20 pages and summarizes thousands of pages of data and projections — required compromises among the more than 140 delegations, but resulted in a "good and balanced document," said Bert Metz, a Dutch scientist who helped draft the report.
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The brief Summary for Policymakers is expected to get final approval later Friday after a longer version of about 70 pages is reviewed and adopted.

It is to be released at 11 a.m. Spanish time Saturday — 5 a.m. EST — by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Until then, the text is supposed to remain confidential.

The paper will be an "instant guide" to policymakers at a critical meeting next month in Indonesia, which could launch a round of complex talks on a new international accord for controlling carbon emissions and other human activity that is heating the planet.

Though it contains no previously unpublished material, the summary pulls together the central elements of three lengthy reports released earlier this year by the IPCC.

They describe observations of the changing climate, the potentially disastrous impacts of global warming and the tools available to slow the warming trend.

The document "is a clear message to policymakers," said Hans Verolme, of the World Wide Fund for Nature, one of the environmental groups acting as observers. "The scientists have done their job. They certainly deserved the Nobel Prize. Now the question is, what are the policymakers going to do with it?"

The panel shared this year's Nobel Peace Prize with Vice President Al Gore.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/u ... 983816.ece

Fall in weather deaths dents climate warnings
David Smith

GREEN scientists have been accused of overstating the dangers of climate change by researchers who found that the number of people killed each year by weather-related disasters is falling.

Their report suggests that a central plank in the global warming argument – that it will result in a big increase in deaths from weather-related disasters – is undermined by the facts. It shows deaths in such disasters peaked in the 1920s and have been declining ever since.

Average annual deaths from weather-related events in the period 1990-2006 – considered by scientists to be when global warming has been most intense – were down by 87% on the 1900-89 average. The mortality rate from catastrophes, measured in deaths per million people, dropped by 93%.

The report by the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change, a grouping of 41 mainly free-market bodies, comes on the eve of an international meeting on climate change in Bali.

Indur Goklany, a US-based expert on weather-related catastrophes, charted global deaths through the 20th century from “extreme” weather events.

Compared with the peak rate of deaths from weather-related events in the 1920s of nearly 500,000 a year, the death toll during the period 2000-06 averaged 19,900. “The United Nations has got the issues and their relative importance backward,” Goklany said.

The number of deaths had fallen sharply because of better warning systems, improved flood defences and other measures. Poor countries remained most vulnerable.

Greenpeace attacked the International Policy Network, one of the Civil Society organisations, which is publishing the report in Britain.

“The International Policy Network is known for being in the pay of the world’s biggest oil company,” a spokesman said.

The network said: “Funding for this project has come entirely from private individuals and foundations.”

60mph winds blow balmy month away

High winds and rain are likely this weekend, ending the spell of unusually settled autumn weather.

Met Office forecasters say a large depression, which formed over the mid-Atlantic last week, will pass over Britain today.

The strongest winds will be felt over the south coast, with winds reaching 60mph and cloudy wet skies. The rest of Britain should be mainly dry with sunny spells for central and northern Scotland.

Tomorrow will also be unsettled, starting mainly dry but with further wet and windy weather expected.

The arrival of unsettled weather marks the end of one of the warmest and quietest Novembers in the weather records.


Have your say
Articles like this don't matter to zealots of the "global warming" religion. To them, the facts don't matter and never will. One day they'll wake up, smell the roses and realize they have been made fools of. Then they'll be off to the next "hot thing" designed to destroy Western civilization. As the US suffers through unusually cold early Dec weather with a lot more to come, I for one would yearn for REAL global warming, not just the promise of it from our eco-nuts.

Dennis Kelly, New Carlisle, OH/USA
Dennis Kelly, New Carlisle, Ohio
Please notice that Greenpeace does not disput the assertions.
Mickey Campagna, Alexandria, VA/USA
How typical of Greenpeace - if you have no defense for the message, attack the messenger.
Bob Devlin, Baltimore, USA/Maryland

http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog ... ove_normal

Sunday, December 09, 2007
Southern Hemisphere Ice Cover Remains Well Above Normal
By Alexandre Aguiar, MetSul Weather Center, Brazil

Southern Hemisphere’s ice cover now is at the same level as last June, i.e., a level seen during the last winter in the Southern Hemisphere. Besides, there are two more millions square kilometers of ice now compared to December 2006. And the large positive anomaly has persisted since September.

Icecap note: In the Northern Hemisphere, the ice and snow cover have recovered to within 1% (one snowstorm) of normal with the official start of winter still more than 12 days away

Decided to put this one in for posterity....

A plan written on a piece of paper is going to save the world from oblivion. That's rich.

http://malaysia.news.yahoo.com/ap/20071 ... b07b8.html


UN chief: World risks oblivion without deal to battle global warming

By JOSEPH COLEMAN,Associated Press Writer AP - Wednesday, December 12

BALI, Indonesia - The human race faces oblivion if it fails to confront global warming, the U.N. secretary-general said Tuesday, as delegates to the U.N. climate conference haggled over a new document strengthening a call for deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by rich nations.


U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon arrived on the resort island of Bali to preside over the final days of the two-week conference, which aims to set an agenda and deadline for talks that will lead to a climate change pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.

Ban urged quick action as negotiators worked on a final conference decision document. A version obtained by The Associated Press on Tuesday included guidelines for industrialized countries to cut their emissions overall by 2020 by between 25 percent and 40 percent.

"The situation is so desperately serious that any delay could push us past the tipping point, beyond which the ecological, financial and human costs would increase dramatically," Ban said in a speech to delegates.

"We are at a crossroad," he added. "One path leads to a comprehensive climate change agreement, the other to oblivion. The choice is clear."

The latest draft of the document, to be released at the conference's conclusion Friday, included a new mention of "quantified national emission limitation and reduction commitments" for industrialized countries.

The United States rejected the 1997 Kyoto pact in part because it included mandatory emissions cuts, and Washington has supported only voluntary targets. The word "commitment" _ which was not in an earlier draft obtained over the weekend _ was likely to draw opposition from the U.S. delegation.

The United States has publicly opposed mentions of targets or emissions cuts guidelines in the Bali document, arguing that it was premature to state goals at such an early date. Negotiations for a post-Kyoto pact are to last at least two years.

U.N. officials, however, say the numbers are only guidelines to be hashed out in coming talks. The European Union, developing countries and environmentalists have argued strenuously in favor of including general goals in the Bali declaration.

The latest draft included dozens of changes from the earlier version, suggesting that negotiators were far from reaching agreement on a final wording. In past years, talks on the declaration on the last day have dragged on into the night to the next morning.

Stavros Dimas, the European commissioner for environment, said emissions guidelines were crucial to prevent global temperatures from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial levels. The European Union has committed itself to 20 percent to 30 percent reductions below 1990 levels by 2020.

"We need this range of reductions by developed countries," he told reporters Tuesday. "Science tells us that these reductions are necessary. Logic requires that we listen to science."

Australia, despite its sudden embrace of the Kyoto pact, has shied away from supporting the emissions goals yet, saying it must await the conclusion of a study sometime next year.

"We recognize the need for an interim target," said Penny Wong, Australia's minister for climate change. "We have a clear process of scientific and economic analysis to determine what that interim target should be."

Canada and Japan also oppose inclusion of the suggested figures.

Environmentalists urged them to reconsider.

"This is not the direction we need to be going in. The stakes are too high for this kind of political games," Alden Meyer, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said earlier in the day.

In one of the first concrete results of the talks, negotiators said Tuesday they had agreed on the oversight structure of a fund to help developing countries build seawalls and take other steps to adapt to the effects of climate change.

Delegates decided to let the Global Environment Facility _ a U.N. body that helps developing countries with environmental projects _ run the fund, though some countries accuse the facility of being slow to distribute money.

The GEF has only about US$60 million (?40 million), though the World Bank has estimated some tens of billions of dollars (euros) a year will be needed for adaptation. Nothing has been done at Bali to develop new sources of revenue.

The struggle over targets coincided with the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Kyoto accord on Dec. 11, 1997, in Japan. The U.N. cut up a giant birthday cake to mark the occasion.

The Kyoto pact requires 36 industrial nations to reduce carbon dioxide and other industrial, transportation and agricultural gases blamed for global warming by an average 5 percent below 1990 levels in the next five years.

The U.S. is the only major industrial nation to reject Kyoto. President George W. Bush contended the emissions cuts would harm the U.S. economy, and should have been imposed on China, India and other fast-growing poorer economies.

For some reason, these type of factoids don't seem to be reported in the regular news section of the newspapers. I'm guessing it just doesn't fit into most folks perception of reality at this point, so isn't considered real news.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbc ... Y/10575140

Year of global cooling
By David Deming
December 19, 2007
Al Gore says global warming is a planetary emergency. It is difficult to see how this can be so when record low temperatures are being set all over the world. In 2007, hundreds of people died, not from global warming, but from cold weather hazards.



Since the mid-19th century, the mean global temperature has increased by 0.7 degrees Celsius. This slight warming is not unusual, and lies well within the range of natural variation. Carbon dioxide continues to build in the atmosphere, but the mean planetary temperature hasn't increased significantly for nearly nine years. Antarctica is getting colder. Neither the intensity nor the frequency of hurricanes has increased. The 2007 season was the third-quietest since 1966. In 2006 not a single hurricane made landfall in the U.S.



South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Buenos Aires, snow fell for the first time since the year 1918. Dozens of homeless people died from exposure. In Peru, 200 people died from the cold and thousands more became infected with respiratory diseases. Crops failed, livestock perished, and the Peruvian government declared a state of emergency.



Unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007. Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever. In northeastern Australia, the city of Townsville underwent the longest period of continuously cold weather since 1941. In New Zealand, the weather turned so cold that vineyards were endangered.



Last January, $1.42 billion worth of California produce was lost to a devastating five-day freeze. Thousands of agricultural employees were thrown out of work. At the supermarket, citrus prices soared. In the wake of the freeze, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked President Bush to issue a disaster declaration for affected counties. A few months earlier, Mr. Schwarzenegger had enthusiastically signed the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, a law designed to cool the climate. California Sen. Barbara Boxer continues to push for similar legislation in the U.S. Senate.



In April, a killing freeze destroyed 95 percent of South Carolina's peach crop, and 90 percent of North Carolina's apple harvest. At Charlotte, N.C., a record low temperature of 21 degrees Fahrenheit on April 8 was the coldest ever recorded for April, breaking a record set in 1923. On June 8, Denver recorded a new low of 31 degrees Fahrenheit. Denver's temperature records extend back to 1872.



Recent weeks have seen the return of unusually cold conditions to the Northern Hemisphere. On Dec. 7, St. Cloud, Minn., set a new record low of minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit. On the same date, record low temperatures were also recorded in Pennsylvania and Ohio.



Extreme cold weather is occurring worldwide. On Dec. 4, in Seoul, Korea, the temperature was a record minus 5 degrees Celsius. Nov. 24, in Meacham, Ore., the minimum temperature was 12 degrees Fahrenheit colder than the previous record low set in 1952. The Canadian government warns that this winter is likely to be the coldest in 15 years.



Page 1 of 2 next |Email |

http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20080103/94768732.html

A cold spell soon to replace global warming
13:54 | 03/ 01/ 2008

MOSCOW. (Oleg Sorokhtin for RIA Novosti) – Stock up on fur coats and felt boots! This is my paradoxical advice to the warm world.

Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases.

The real reasons for climate changes are uneven solar radiation, terrestrial precession (that is, axis gyration), instability of oceanic currents, regular salinity fluctuations of the Arctic Ocean surface waters, etc. There is another, principal reason—solar activity and luminosity. The greater they are the warmer is our climate.

Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.

This is my point, which environmentalists hotly dispute as they cling to the hothouse theory. As we know, hothouse gases, in particular, nitrogen peroxide, warm up the atmosphere by keeping heat close to the ground. Advanced in the late 19th century by Svante A. Arrhenius, a Swedish physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner, this theory is taken for granted to this day and has not undergone any serious check.

It determines decisions and instruments of major international organizations—in particular, the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Signed by 150 countries, it exemplifies the impact of scientific delusion on big politics and economics. The authors and enthusiasts of the Kyoto Protocol based their assumptions on an erroneous idea. As a result, developed countries waste huge amounts of money to fight industrial pollution of the atmosphere. What if it is a Don Quixote’s duel with the windmill?

Hothouse gases may not be to blame for global warming. At any rate, there is no scientific evidence to their guilt. The classic hothouse effect scenario is too simple to be true. As things really are, much more sophisticated processes are on in the atmosphere, especially in its dense layer. For instance, heat is not so much radiated in space as carried by air currents—an entirely different mechanism, which cannot cause global warming.

The temperature of the troposphere, the lowest and densest portion of the atmosphere, does not depend on the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions—a point proved theoretically and empirically. True, probes of Antarctic ice shield, taken with bore specimens in the vicinity of the Russian research station Vostok, show that there are close links between atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and temperature changes. Here, however, we cannot be quite sure which is the cause and which the effect.

Temperature fluctuations always run somewhat ahead of carbon dioxide concentration changes. This means that warming is primary. The ocean is the greatest carbon dioxide depository, with concentrations 60-90 times larger than in the atmosphere. When the ocean’s surface warms up, it produces the “champagne effect.” Compare a foamy spurt out of a warm bottle with wine pouring smoothly when served properly cold.

Likewise, warm ocean water exudes greater amounts of carbonic acid, which evaporates to add to industrial pollution—a factor we cannot deny. However, man-caused pollution is negligible here. If industrial pollution with carbon dioxide keeps at its present-day 5-7 billion metric tons a year, it will not change global temperatures up to the year 2100. The change will be too small for humans to feel even if the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions doubles.

Carbon dioxide cannot be bad for the climate. On the contrary, it is food for plants, and so is beneficial to life on Earth. Bearing out this point was the Green Revolution—the phenomenal global increase in farm yields in the mid-20th century. Numerous experiments also prove a direct proportion between harvest and carbon dioxide concentration in the air.

Carbon dioxide has quite a different pernicious influence—not on the climate but on synoptic activity. It absorbs infrared radiation. When tropospheric air is warm enough for complete absorption, radiation energy passes into gas fluctuations. Gas expands and dissolves to send warm air up to the stratosphere, where it clashes with cold currents coming down. With no noticeable temperature changes, synoptic activity skyrockets to whip up cyclones and anticyclones. Hence we get hurricanes, storms, tornados and other natural disasters, whose intensity largely depends on carbon dioxide concentration. In this sense, reducing its concentration in the air will have a positive effect.

Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change. Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind. Man’s influence on nature is a drop in the ocean.


Earth is unlikely to ever face a temperature disaster. Of all the planets in the solar system, only Earth has an atmosphere beneficial to life. There are many factors that account for development of life on Earth: Sun is a calm star, Earth is located an optimum distance from it, it has the Moon as a massive satellite, and many others. Earth owes its friendly climate also to dynamic feedback between biotic and atmospheric evolution.

The principal among those diverse links is Earth’s reflective power, which regulates its temperature. A warm period, as the present, increases oceanic evaporation to produce a great amount of clouds, which filter solar radiation and so bring heat down. Things take the contrary turn in a cold period.

What can’t be cured must be endured. It is wise to accept the natural course of things. We have no reason to panic about allegations that ice in the Arctic Ocean is thawing rapidly and will soon vanish altogether. As it really is, scientists say the Arctic and Antarctic ice shields are growing. Physical and mathematical calculations predict a new Ice Age. It will come in 100,000 years, at the earliest, and will be much worse than the previous. Europe will be ice-bound, with glaciers reaching south of Moscow.

Meanwhile, Europeans can rest assured. The Gulf Stream will change its course only if some evil magic robs it of power to reach the north—but Mother Nature is unlikely to do that.

Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, Merited Scientist of Russia and fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, is staff researcher of the Oceanology Institute.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.

quote from below: Given the number of worldwide cold events, it is no surprise that 2007 didn't turn out to be the warmest ever. In fact, 2007's global temperature was essentially the same as that in 2006 - and 2005, and 2004, and every year back to 2001. The record set in 1998 has not been surpassed. For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to accumulate - it's up about 4 percent since 1998 - the global mean temperature has remained flat. That raises some obvious questions about the theory that CO{-2} is the cause of climate change.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/edito ... arming_go/

HOME / GLOBE / OPINION / OP-ED
JEFF JACOBY

Br-r-r! Where did global warming go?

Globe Columnist / January 6, 2008

THE STARK headline appeared just over a year ago. "2007 to be 'warmest on record,' " BBC News reported on Jan. 4, 2007. Citing experts in the British government's Meteorological Office, the story announced that "the world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007," surpassing the all-time high reached in 1998.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the planetary hot flash: Much of the planet grew bitterly cold.

In South America, for example, the start of winter last year was one of the coldest ever observed. According to Eugenio Hackbart, chief meteorologist of the MetSul Weather Center in Brazil, "a brutal cold wave brought record low temperatures, widespread frost, snow, and major energy disruption." In Buenos Aires, it snowed for the first time in 89 years, while in Peru the cold was so intense that hundreds of people died and the government declared a state of emergency in 14 of the country's 24 provinces. In August, Chile's agriculture minister lamented "the toughest winter we have seen in the past 50 years," which caused losses of at least $200 million in destroyed crops and livestock.

Latin Americans weren't the only ones shivering.

University of Oklahoma geophysicist David Deming, a specialist in temperature and heat flow, notes in the Washington Times that "unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007." Johannesburg experienced its first significant snowfall in a quarter-century. Australia had its coldest ever June. New Zealand's vineyards lost much of their 2007 harvest when spring temperatures dropped to record lows.

Closer to home, 44.5 inches of snow fell in New Hampshire last month, breaking the previous record of 43 inches, set in 1876. And the Canadian government is forecasting the coldest winter in 15 years.

Now all of these may be short-lived weather anomalies, mere blips in the path of the global climatic warming that Al Gore and a host of alarmists proclaim the deadliest threat we face. But what if the frigid conditions that have caused so much distress in recent months signal an impending era of global cooling?

"Stock up on fur coats and felt boots!" advises Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and senior scientist at Moscow's Shirshov Institute of Oceanography. "The latest data . . . say that earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012."

Sorokhtin dismisses the conventional global warming theory that greenhouse gases, especially human-emitted carbon dioxide, is causing the earth to grow hotter. Like a number of other scientists, he points to solar activity - sunspots and solar flares, which wax and wane over time - as having the greatest effect on climate.

"Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change," Sorokhtin writes in an essay for Novosti. "Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind." In a recent paper for the Danish National Space Center, physicists Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen concur: "The sun . . . appears to be the main forcing agent in global climate change," they write.

Given the number of worldwide cold events, it is no surprise that 2007 didn't turn out to be the warmest ever. In fact, 2007's global temperature was essentially the same as that in 2006 - and 2005, and 2004, and every year back to 2001. The record set in 1998 has not been surpassed. For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to accumulate - it's up about 4 percent since 1998 - the global mean temperature has remained flat. That raises some obvious questions about the theory that CO{-2} is the cause of climate change.

Yet so relentlessly has the alarmist scenario been hyped, and so disdainfully have dissenting views been dismissed, that millions of people assume Gore must be right when he insists: "The debate in the scientific community is over."

But it isn't. Just last month, more than 100 scientists signed a strongly worded open letter pointing out that climate change is a well-known natural phenomenon, and that adapting to it is far more sensible than attempting to prevent it. Because slashing carbon dioxide emissions means retarding economic development, they warned, "the current US approach of CO{-2} reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it."

Climate science isn't a religion, and those who dispute its leading theory are not heretics. Much remains to be learned about how and why climate changes, and there is neither virtue nor wisdom in an emotional rush to counter global warming - especially if what's coming is a global Big Chill.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

http://ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.asp ... 9412587175

The Sun Also Sets
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, February 07, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Climate Change: Not every scientist is part of Al Gore's mythical "consensus." Scientists worried about a new ice age seek funding to better observe something bigger than your SUV — the sun.

Back in 1991, before Al Gore first shouted that the Earth was in the balance, the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study using data that went back centuries that showed that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles.

To many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better "eyes" with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth's climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.

And they're worried about global cooling, not warming.

Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity.

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.
Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.

Tapping reports no change in the sun's magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.
Tapping oversees the operation of a 60-year-old radio telescope that he calls a "stethoscope for the sun." But he and his colleagues need better equipment.

In Canada, where radio-telescopic monitoring of the sun has been conducted since the end of World War II, a new instrument, the next-generation solar flux monitor, could measure the sun's emissions more rapidly and accurately.

As we have noted many times, perhaps the biggest impact on the Earth's climate over time has been the sun.

For instance, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research in Germany report the sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years, accounting for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth's temperature over the last 100 years.

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada's Carleton University, says that "CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales."

Rather, he says, "I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet."

Patterson, sharing Tapping's concern, says: "Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth."
"Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again," Patterson says. "If we were to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than 'global warming' would have had."

In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov made some waves — and not a few enemies in the global warming "community" — by predicting that the sun would reach a peak of activity about three years from now, to be accompanied by "dramatic changes" in temperatures.
A Hoover Institution Study a few years back examined historical data and came to a similar conclusion.

"The effects of solar activity and volcanoes are impossible to miss. Temperatures fluctuated exactly as expected, and the pattern was so clear that, statistically, the odds of the correlation existing by chance were one in 100," according to Hoover fellow Bruce Berkowitz.

The study says that "try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global temperatures."

The study concludes that if you shut down all the world's power plants and factories, "there would not be much effect on temperatures."

But if the sun shuts down, we've got a problem. It is the sun, not the Earth, that's hanging in the balance.

Another 'basic' debunking of Gore...not making any claims myself here but thought it would be of use here

http://thenewamerican.com/node/7009


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