.
Duke
dean and climate activist Chameides speaks to US House in 2012 and 2013:
4/29/13, "
House Hears About Climate,"
by Bill Chameides, GreenGrok blog
. "The
Republican Party wants to rehabilitate its image on science." On June 19, (2012) Bill Chameides, dean of the (Duke University) Nicholas School of the
Environment, testified before the House Energy and Commerce
Committee,
advocating greater federal action to combat climate change." "Chameides had
"
a three-year stint as chief scientist of Environmental Defense."
----------------------------------------------------------
4/30/13, "
Global Warming Alarm: Continued Cooling May Jeopardize Climate Science And Green Energy Funding!" Forbes, Larry Bell
"
The past 17 years of flat global temperatures are creating a big chill
for lots of global warming doom-premised industries. Those experiencing
cold sweats must certainly include legions of climate scientists who
have come to depend upon the many tens of billions of taxpayer bucks for
studies that would have little demand
without a big crisis for the
public to worry about. And that amount pales in comparison with the
hundreds of $ billions we spend on generous subsidies, lost tax revenues
and inflated consumer costs for otherwise non-competitive
“green
energy” industries which
depend upon those scary climate reports, or the
insane economic penalties imposed upon all segments through EPA’s climate-premised regulatory rampage.
Cooler temperatures blow ill-winds for government bureaucrats,
crony-capitalist rent- seekers, and other hucksters whose ambitions
depend upon hot air.
Even Western Europe, the cradle of carbon-caused
climate craziness and cap-and-trade corruption, is feeling a cold draft.
As Alister Doyle, reporting from
Reuters in Oslo,
recently observed:
“Weak
economic growth and the pause in warming is undermining governments’
willingness to make a rapid billion-dollar shift from fossil fuels.
Almost 200 governments have agreed to work out a plan by the end of 2015
to combat global warming.”
In April, the
Parliament in Strasbourg voted against artificially propping up the price of Emission Trading System
carbon permit prices following the collapse of energy demand in
connection with the Continent’s economic crisis. While the low price of
carbon allowances is great for energy customers, you can be assured that
it is viewed very differently by so-called “renewable” energy and
carbon credit trading promoters who depend upon higher-than-market
fossil fuel prices to stay in business. The Parliament’s veto reflects
encouraging recognition that
unwarranted, economy-ravaging carbon
rationing is a feverish folly.
Gosh…Where Did All of Those Expensive Climate Models Go Wrong?
A scientist who commented in a Climategate email was badly mistaken when he observed:
“It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make
billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected
regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and
simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate
variability.” As it turned out, our policymakers did make those
horrendously costly decisions based upon
highly speculative model
projections, mostly reported by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC).
Still, another researcher probably got it right, anticipating some very troubling consequences:
“What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multi-decadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably…” Even Paul Ehrlich, best known for his 1968 doom and gloom book,
“The Population Bomb”, recognizes this peril.
Writing
in a March 2010
Nature
editorial that a barrage of challenges countering the notion of a
looming global warming catastrophe has his alarmist colleagues more
alarmed than usual,
he said:
“Everyone is scared s***less [fecally void], but they don’t know what to do.”
There is good reason for this cooling climate consternation. As David Whitehouse at the Global Warming Policy Foundation
points out:
“If
we have not passed it already, we are on the threshold of global
observations becoming incompatible with the consensus theory of climate
change.”
Whitehouse notes that there has been no statistically significant
increase in annual global temperatures since 1997. He goes on to say: “If
the standstill (lower temperatures) continues for a few more years, it
will mean that no one who has just reached adulthood, or younger, will
have witnessed the Earth get warmer during their lifetime.” (Since 1997, atmospheric CO2 has increased from 370 ppm to 390 ppm.)
These observed developments have prompted the U.K.’s Met Office
Climate Center (the national weather service) to quietly revise its
projections. They now say:
“The latest decadal prediction suggests
that the next five years are likely to be a little bit lower than
predicted from the previous prediction.” The predicted increase
from 2013 through 2017 was 0.43 degree Celsius above the 1971-2000 mean,
while the previous prediction said temperature would increase 0.54
degree from 2012 through 2016.
Simply stated, it will be cooler than
they expected!
The London Daily Mail published a chart that, as they say,
“reveals how [the IPCC’s] ’95 % certain’ estimates of the Earth heating up were a spectacular miscalculation.” Comparing
actual temperatures against the IPCC’s 95% certainty projections, the
lines track closely until recent years, at which point the line
representing the observed temperatures
“is about to crash out of” the boundaries of the lowest projections. They were supposed to climb sharply after 1990.
Whereas the IPCC has
predicted that temperatures will rise by 3 degrees Celsius by 2050 if CO
2
doubles from pre-industrialized levels of 1750,
The Research Council of
Norway plugged in real temperature data from 2000 to 2010 and
determined that
doubling would cause only a 1.9 degree Celsius rise. Another study published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences links temperature changes from 1750 to natural changes (such as sea temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean) and suggests
“…the anthropogenic global warming trends might have been overestimated by a factor of two in the second half of the 20th century”.
Peter Stott, a researcher who
authored the most recent IPCC report
chapter on global climate projections, has found that climate model
projections of an alarming temperature rise are
inconsistent with past
observations. When he and his colleagues at the U.K.’s Met Office forced
the amount of global warming predicted by the models to equal the
amount of warming actually observed, the projected future rise to
accompany human greenhouse gas emissions dropped substantially. In other
words, the better climate models match the past,
the less scary the
likely future looks.
Stott isn’t alone.
Within the past two years, at least seven
peer-reviewed studies published in the scientific literature have
concluded that the influence of doubling the amount of CO
2 in
the Earth’s atmosphere is likely to be
substantially lower than IPCC
has determined and have ruled out the high-end projections.
James Annan, formerly a strong defender of Michael Mann’s infamously
flawed alarmist “hockey stick” graph and an expert on “climate
sensitivity” to CO
2 and other influences,
recently concluded in his blog that IPCC is increasingly acting in a wholly unscientific manner. He referred to a list of scientists polled as largely constituting
“the
self-same people responsible for the bogus analyses [he] criticized
over the years, and which even if they were valid then, are certainly
outdated now”.
Annan also said:
“Since IPCC can no longer defend their old
analyses in any meaningful manner, it seems they have to resort to an
unsupported ‘this is what we think, because we asked our pals’…
having
firmly wedded themselves to their politically convenient long tail of
high values, their response to new evidence is little more than sticking
their fingers in their ears and singing ‘la la la I can’t hear you’.”
Those IPCC reports serve as the primary basis for EPA’s regulatory
actions under the Clean Air Act…as are the president’s statements that
his administration’s policies are based upon
“the overwhelming judgment of science.” Asserting in his State of the Union Address that global warming played a role in fueling deadly and destructive storms
like Hurricane Sandy, President Obama said:
“We
must do more to combat climate change…It’s true that no single event
makes a trend. But the fact is, the 12 hottest years on record have all
come in the last 15. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods – all
are now more frequent and intense.”
But there’s a big disconnect from facts here. In reality, there has
been no increase in the strength or frequency of landfall hurricanes in
the world’s five main hurricane basins during the past 50-70 years;
there has been no increase in the strength or frequency in tropical
Atlantic hurricane development during the past 370 years; the
U.S. is
currently enjoying the longest period ever recorded without intense
Category 3-5 hurricane landfall; there has been no trend since 1950
evidencing any increased frequency of strong (F3-F-5) U.S. tornadoes;
there has been
no increase in U.S. flood magnitudes over the past 85
years; and long-term sea level rise is not accelerating.
Well Then, If IPCC Is Wrong, What About Those Recent Heat Waves?
Reacting to hot temperatures in much of the U.S. last summer, former
NASA employee and eternal anti-fossil fuel activist James Hansen warned
us that August was
“the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet.” Echoing this, Al Gore lamented on his website,
“dirty weather is created by “dirty energy” …” a lot of people are saying out loud, ‘I’m too hot!’ “. Even
NOAA said that the lower 48 had seen the warmest year on record in 2012.
Yet as well-known
Climate Depot blogger Marc Morano, recognizes:
“NOAA can only claim that 2012 was the warmest single year on record
through statistical tricks…including “adjusting” raw data and adding
data to the overall data set from stations that did not exist when the
record first started being recorded. Absent these illegitimate actions,
the measured temperatures from the 1930s still match or exceed the
measured temperatures from the 1990s and 2000s.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, we haven’t heard much in the media about the
fact that in June last year, 46 U.S. cities, including some in the Deep
South, set or tied record lows…
or that Alaska, which isn’t part of the
lower 48, has been reporting some of the coldest winters on record since
2000. According to the Alaska Climate Research Center at University of
Alaska-Fairbanks, that record has held true for 19 of 20 National
Weather Stations sprinkled from one corner of the state to another.
The New York Times breathlessly reported:
”The
temperature differences between years are usually measured in fractions
of a degree, but last year’s 55.3degree average [in the contiguous U.S.
states] demolished the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree
Fahrenheit.” But somehow they didn’t see fit to mention that 2008
was two degrees cooler than 2006,
or that 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2008,
2009, 2010, and 2011 were all cooler than 1998 by a larger margin than
2012 was hotter than 1998.
And, by the way, don’t forget that the U.S.
isn’t the globe.
Those contiguous states, which omit Alaska and Hawaii,
represent only 1.58% of the Earth’s surface.
During most of the 2011-2012 winter, the
Bering Sea witnessed an ice extent between 20 to 30 percent above the 1979 to 2000 average, with the highest February expanse ever measured.
Fellow Forbes contributor James Taylor reported
that
Antarctic sea ice also set record,
with the largest amount of ice
ever recorded occurring on day 256 of the 2012 calendar year. In fact
Antarctic sea ice has been growing ever since satellites first began
measuring it 33 years ago, and the expanse exceeded the 33-year average
throughout 2012.
Hot and Cold Blasts from the Past; Be Careful What You Wish For:
Much of recent warming alarmism centered upon a temperature trend that began in the 1980s, occurring less than a decade after our planet came
out of a
three-decade cooling trend that led many to fear a coming Ice Age. As
climatologist and fellow
Forbes contributor Patrick Michaels recalls:
“When
I was going to graduate school, it was gospel that the Ice Age was
about to start. I had trouble warming up to that one too.” Referring to recent alarmism, he observes:
“This (greenhouse hysteria) is not the first climate apocalypse, but it’s certainly the loudest.”
As the late world-renowned atmospheric scientist Reid Bryson, formerly a leader in voicing Ice Age concern in the 1970s, said:
“Before
there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million
years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was
changing, okay?” Bryson told the Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News in 2007
“All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd. Of course it’s going
up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial
Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because
we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.” He went on to comment:
“You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.”
It might be worth mentioning that some heavyweight U.S. solar
physicists are once again predicting that Planet Earth may very well be
heading into a period of
protracted cooling due to a lengthy spell of
low sunspot activity…
potentially another “Little Ice Age”.
This announcement that came from scientists at the U.S. National Solar
Observatory and U.S. Air Force Laboratory was
based upon three different
analyses of the Sun’s recent behavior.
One of the world’s leading solar scientists, Habibiullo Abdussamatov,
head of the Russian Academy of Sciences Pulkovo Observatory in St.
Petersburg and director of the Russian segment of the international
Space Station, agrees that Planet Earth may be in for a long cold spell.
He points out that
deep cold periods have occurred five times over the last 1,000 years. Each is correlated with declines in solar irradiance, much like we are experiencing now.
Dr. Abdussamatov believes:
“A global freeze will come about
regardless of whether or not industrialized countries put a cap on their
greenhouse gas emissions. The common view of Man’s industrial activity
is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a
misinterpretation of cause and effect.” He predicts that a new
Little Ice Age will commence around 2013/2014, the depth of the decline
will occur around 2040, and a deep freeze will last for the rest of this
century.
The last Little Ice Age, which occurred in the middle of the 16th century, wasn’t broadly regarded as a good time. That period lasting about 150
years,
killed millions in Europe, ending soon after Washington’s troops
suffered
brutal winter temperatures at Valley Forge in 1777, and
Napoleon’s experienced a bitterly cold retreat from Russia in 1812.
Whether cooling continues or not, is there any reason at all to
panic? No, and by the same token if, for any reason, global warming
resumes as it probably will, again and again following intermittent
cool-downs, let’s be grateful for the many human health and welfare
benefits it brings. Let’s celebrate times when CO
2-dependent agriculture flourishes over extended growing seasons,
and when cold-related death rates decline.
Let’s accept the fact that climate changes for many reasons without
permission or help from us…it always has…always will…and not always for
the worse. And let’s be skeptical about advice from
alarmists who
obviously depend upon scare tactics to sell us a hot bill of goods." via Tom Nelson
===================================
This is how climate profiteer EDF operates:
In 2009 Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) took over 13,000 pounds (approx.
$21,000 US) from the UK government as partial funding for a "project entitled
"Influencing climate security policy and legislation in Texas."...The money was used to fly two Texan state politicians, including the climate sceptic Republican
Troy Fraser,
to the UK to receive a briefing with climate scientists and government officials. A conference was also held at the Texas Capitol in Austin in which
a video of Prince Charles personally addressing Texan politicians on the subject of
climate change was shown."
=================================
Duke University is business partners with the federal government as many are. Without CO2 terror, both would lose billions:
7/1/2012,
"Duke lobbying weighs dollars and advocacy," dukechronicle.com,
by Yeshwanth Kandimalla
"As
a recipient of millions in federal dollars and a tax-exempt nonprofit,
the University navigates a delicate boundary when it comes to political
advocacy.
Duke’s
lobbying expenditures have averaged around $418,000 annually from 2008
to 2011, according to University disclosures. The spending is crucial to
help secure funding and other University interests at the federal
level, said Chris Simmons, associate vice president for federal
relations and one of three registered lobbyists employed directly by the
University.
In 2011, the University received nearly $1.4 billion from
the federal government in the form of research grants, hospital
reimbursements and financial aid....
President
Richard Brodhead periodically sends letters to members of North
Carolina’s congressional delegation outlining Duke’s priorities in
federal appropriations. In a letter sent in February, Brodhead called on
Sens. Richard Burr, R-N.C. and Kay Hagan, D-N.C. and Rep. David Price,
D-N.C., to support more than
the National Institutes of
Health, more than
$7 billion for the National Science Foundation and
more than
$150 million for the National Endowment for the Humanities."...
====================================
Duke University's Chameides' interest in North Carolina legislative matters prompted a courteous response. The blog post below from June 2012 "
was written
in response to a blog post by William Chameides, Dean
of Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. If there were errors in
Burton’s analysis surely Chamedes would point them out, don’t you think?"
6/11/12,
"The point of the bill is to conform policy to science," Dan Burton
.
"Climate Movement activists are pushing scientifically ungrounded
policies, which would have severe economic consequences for North
Carolina. This bill represents “push-back,” to force policymakers to
conform policy
to what the science really tells us about sea level rise....
Regulatory rulemakers create a type of “law” which impacts citizens
just as much as bills passed by the Legislature, but often with
considerably less direct citizen input than is possible
when laws are
enacted by legislators who must stand for election every two years.
There’s real danger that rulemakers, under pressure from
special
interest groups, will subordinate geophysical science to political
science, codifying scientific nonsense into North Carolina’s body of
rules and regulations.
Nobody should want that!""...
.
====================================
In 2011 alone the US aimed to spend “$10.6 million (taxpayer dollars) a day to study, combat, and educate about climate change.”
===================================
6/4/12, “Climate change stunner: USA leads world in CO2 cuts since 2006,” Vancouver Observer, Saxifrage
“Not only that, but as my top chart shows, US CO2 emissions are falling even faster thanwhat President Obama pledged in the global Copenhagen Accord.…
Here is the biggest shocker of all: the average American’s CO2 emissions are down to levels not seen since 1964 --over half a century ago. …Coal is the number two source of CO2 for Americans. Today the average American burns an amount similar to what they did in 1955, and even less than they did in the 1940s. …It is exactly America’s historical role of biggest and dirtiest that makes their sharp decline in CO2 pollution so noteworthy
and potentially game changing at the global level.”...
===================================
Global Warming ‘action’ was mandated and institutionalized in US government in 1990 by George Bush the 1st in the “U.S. Global Change Research Act of 1990.” CO2 reduction is mentioned near the end in Sec. 204, item 4.
Devoting 13 federal agencies to ‘climate’ matters is hardly lagging in “action.”
Trillions have been taken from US taxpayers for climate endeavors via agency budget allocations, tax subsidies, diversion of US military to climate or green projects, countless federal regulations, vast sums shipped out in no strings foreign aid for ‘climate’ capacity building, etc.
Other countries’ CO2 hasn’t dropped despite hundreds of billions spent on cap and trade and extra taxes. This isn’t to say the US government hasn’t become business partners with the ‘climate’ industry.
---------------------------------------
News of US CO2 plunge has been described as:
========================
4/26/13, "Industrialized nations' greenhouse gas emissions dipped in 2011," Reuters
========================
=========================
China will burn more and more coal for years to come. The US has no say in the matter:
.
"The
interview is blunt and crystal clear in laying out the demographic and
economic realities that will, for many years to come, slow any shift
from Chinese dependence on coal."
==========================
Global warming pause, Der Spiegel, Jan. 2013:
=========================
Citation for EDF taking funding from UK government to persuade Texans to buy into CO2 terror:
4/3/12, "Rick Perry criticises UK initiative to influence US climate sceptics," UK Guardian, Leo Hickman
"
Rick Perry, the governor of Texas and former Republican presidential candidate,
has criticised the UK's Foreign Office for funding
an environmental group (EDF) which aimed to "educate" Texan policymakers
about climate science and "move them from a state of denial and
inaction to one of acceptance and effective action"."...
========================
US 'climate action' in Nov. 2012 included giving $6 billion US taxpayer dollars for 'clean energy' to the Sultan of Brunei who owns 5000+ cars and to the Pres. of Indonesia, whose country is so corrupt even the World Bank says crime adds 20% to costs.
Below, one of the Sultan of Brunei's cars:
7/24/12, "The
Sultan's Cars," wheel to wheel blog.
.
