Posted by Richard on December 5, 2009
I understand that a growing number of young people rely on comedy news like The Daily Show to keep them up on current events. That's generally a bit troubling. But in the case of Climategate, it may be good news. Because while all the broadcast networks are basically ignoring the story, Jon Stewart is doing a terrific job of covering it. Enjoy:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Scientists Hide Global Warming Data | ||||
|
||||
HT: Black & Right
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: climate, comedy, global warming, gore, humor | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on December 3, 2009
A quick update from Instapundit (for the benefit of my legions of readers who aren't familiar with that obscure Tennessee blogger):
OOPS: Former NASA climate scientist pleads guilty to contract fraud. “A former top climate scientist who had become one of the scientific world’s most cited authorities on the human effect on Earth’s atmosphere was sentenced to probation Tuesday after pleading guilty to steering lucrative no-bid contracts to his wife’s company.”
Related, from the ClimateGate emails: “We need to show some left to cover the costs of the trip Roger didn’t make and also the fees/equipment/computer money we haven’t spent otherwise NOAA will be suspicious.”
'Nuff said. These "scientists" promoting AGW are both charlatans and crooks. They're not just fraudulently promoting their ideological agenda, they're also enriching themselves in the process.
But by all means, check out Instapundit's links. Especially the second one's quoted notes from Ian "Harry" Harris. And check out the the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, apparently from the same person. And those of you familiar with the FORTRAN and/or IDL programming languages might be interested in this post and its links (thanks, David B.).
Given that, according to Shakespeare, "the better part of valor is discretion," maybe the world's leaders should just cancel the Copenhagen climate summit. After all, its entire agenda is premised on now-discredited conclusions created by sloppy and unscientific computer models using raw data that was deliberately massaged to hide the truth and then destroyed.
And maybe someone should tell John Travolta, Sheryl Crow, Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Oprah Winfrey, Trudie Styler (wife of Sting), and other strident advocates of making the rest of us lower our carbon emissions, not to fly their private jets to Copenhagen.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: climate, fraud, global warming, pseudoscience | 2 Comments »
Posted by Richard on November 28, 2009
David Aitken (who really should be posting this stuff at his blog instead of just emailing his friends) called it, "Not just the smoking gun, but the bullet." The UK TimesOnline reported that "the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures" destroyed the raw data it used to arrive at its conclusions in support of anthropogenic global warming (AGW):
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.
The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.
In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”
… Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.
Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.
Well, that explains why they've refused to reveal their raw data and stonewalled all previous requests. One of the core principles of the scientific method is transparency — you share with others exactly how you arrived at your conclusion so that they can replicate your results or disprove them. The proponents of the AGW theory have fought such openness every step of the way, as if they had something to hide. It's reasonable to conclude that they do. Indeed, it would be foolish and naive to assume that they do not.
Some recent comments on the TimesOnline post put things in perspective nicely:
One of them said in the leaked emails that he'd rather delete the raw data than release it, maybe he did just that!Truth Orator, yes one could theoretically back out the corrections but that in turn implies trust in those values being archived correctly. What we've seen so far is a rather chaotic organisation when it comes to documentation etc.The whole thing is an utter disgrace and a blot on British scientific work.
Whitbread Tankard wrote:
One of them said in the leaked emails that he'd rather delete the raw data than release it, maybe he did just that!David Aitken wrote:Reversing the alterations is probably impossible because the alterations were probably done by 1 or more complex algorithms that may no longer exist. It's not just a matter of adding or subtracting a simple number.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: climate, fraud, global warming, pseudoscience | 2 Comments »
Posted by Richard on October 7, 2009
On the last day of summer, amidst unusually cold weather and an early natural snowfall, Loveland Ski Area fired up its snowmaking machinery. Tomorrow morning, it opens for the season:
"We took advantage of the cold temperatures and got an early start making snow this year. Those extra days paid off and we are opening a week earlier than last season," Snowmaking and Trail Maintenance Manager Eric Johnstone said in a prepared statement. "Now we can move some equipment to other trails and try to open more terrain as quickly as possible."
Loveland will open with an 18-inch base on the opening day run, which includes three trails totaling over a mile in length.
Arapahoe Basin, which usually competes with Loveland to open first, said snowmaking is going well there and will open on Friday at 9 a.m.
It's the earliest opening in 40 years, and it follows one of the coolest summers on record (both in Colorado and nationally), with numerous low temperature records and mountain snows in late July. But that won't stop the global warming zealots from continuing to predict that Colorado's ski industry is doomed.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: colorado, global warming, mountains, skiing, snow | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on August 26, 2009
Turn up your air conditioner. Fire up the barbecue grill. Gas up your SUV and take a road trip. If human CO2 production is in fact warming the planet, you'll be helping to make the desert bloom. And millions of Africans will thank you. This happy news comes from those right-wing shills for industry at National Geographic:
Desertification, drought, and despair-that's what global warming has in store for much of Africa. Or so we hear.
Emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent.
Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall.
If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities.
This desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago.
The green shoots of recovery are showing up on satellite images of regions including the Sahel, a semi-desert zone bordering the Sahara to the south that stretches some 2,400 miles (3,860 kilometers).
Images taken between 1982 and 2002 revealed extensive regreening throughout the Sahel, according to a new study in the journal Biogeosciences.
The study suggests huge increases in vegetation in areas including central Chad and western Sudan.
The transition may be occurring because hotter air has more capacity to hold moisture, which in turn creates more rain, said Martin Claussen of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, who was not involved in the new study.
…
In the eastern Sahara area of southwestern Egypt and northern Sudan, new trees-such as acacias-are flourishing, according to Stefan Kröpelin, a climate scientist at the University of Cologne's Africa Research Unit in Germany.
"Shrubs are coming up and growing into big shrubs. This is completely different from having a bit more tiny grass," said Kröpelin, who has studied the region for two decades.
In 2008 Kröpelin-not involved in the new satellite research-visited Western Sahara, a disputed territory controlled by Morocco.
"The nomads there told me there was never as much rainfall as in the past few years," Kröpelin said. "They have never seen so much grazing land."
"Before, there was not a single scorpion, not a single blade of grass," he said.
"Now you have people grazing their camels in areas which may not have been used for hundreds or even thousands of years. You see birds, ostriches, gazelles coming back, even sorts of amphibians coming back," he said.
"The trend has continued for more than 20 years. It is indisputable."
Sounds pretty good to me. I think I'll go increase my carbon footprint.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: africa, global warming, rain, research, science | 6 Comments »
Posted by Richard on June 24, 2009
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats are trying to ram through the Waxman-Markey "Cap and Trade" bill this week. It seems that the more radical, expensive, and consequential a bill is, the less time the Democrats want to allow for consideration and debate. This godawful 1200-page monster that no one has read is projected to cost us $2 trillion in just the next eight years and almost $10 trillion by 2035. More accurately described as "Cap-and-Tax," it would be by far the largest tax increase in the history of the world.
It's debatable which is the more radical and dangerous — this so-called energy bill or the health care reform bill still being drafted. Robert E. Murray says it's Waxman-Markey:
Perhaps the most destructive legislation in our country's history will, as soon as this week, be voted on in the House of Representatives: the Waxman-Markey tax bill in the guise of addressing climate change.
It will have adverse and lingering consequences for every American. It will raise the cost of electricity in our homes, the fuel for our cars and the energy that produces our manufacturing jobs, with little or no environmental benefit.
…
All Americans in the Midwest, South and Rocky Mountain regions will be most drastically affected because the climate change legislation will destroy the nation's coal industry and the low-cost electricity it has provided to these regions for generations.
Wealth will be transferred away from almost every state to the West Coast and New England.
In other words, from the red states to the blue states. As the Church Lady would say, "How convenient."
The legislation discards coal and low-cost energy with it by setting an unattainable cap on carbon dioxide emissions by 2020, with the first reductions due by 2012.
…
Reliable estimates show that this bill will cost each American family at least $3,000 more in energy costs each year, notwithstanding the $2 trillion cost to the economy in just eight years. The chief executive of one of the nation's major utilities recently said it best in the Wall Street Journal:
"The 25 states that depend on coal for more than 50% of their electricity . . . will have to shut down and replace the majority of their fossil fuel plants as a result of the climate change legislation."
Supporters of the bill claim that won't happen because of carbon credits it gives to utilities and investments it makes in "carbon capture" technologies. Nonsense (emphasis added):
… But this technology will not be commercially available for at least 15 to 20 years, long after the reductions are required in 2012 and long after our coal plants are shut down and our manufacturing jobs are exported to China, India and other countries.
All these countries have stated that they will not place any restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions. China alone, which has surpassed the United States in carbon dioxide emissions, brings a new 500-megawatt coal-fired power plant on line every week. They will have low-cost electricity, and America will massively export more jobs to them.
Investor's Business Daily called it intense pain for no environmental gain, and said the immediate economic consequences would be disastrous:
… The bill would also cause an additional 1.1 million job losses each year, raise electricity rates 90% after adjusting for inflation, provoke a 74% hike in inflation-adjusted gasoline prices, and add $1,500 to the average family's annual energy bill, says Heritage.
The Congressional Budget Office says the poorest one-fifth of families could see annual energy costs rise $700 — while high-income families could see costs rise $2,200. Harvard economist Martin Feldstein estimates that the average person could pay an extra $1,500 per year for energy. And those are just direct energy costs.
The bill requires CO2 emissions to be cut 83% by 2050, reducing them to the 1908 level. If you're now cheering because you believe the dire predictions of global climatic catastrophe, guess what? It won't make a difference (emphasis added):
Even worse, the draconian rules would have no detectable benefits, even assuming CO2 does cause climate change. Using global warming alarmists' own computer models, research climatologist Chip Knappenberger calculated that the painful 83% reductions would result in global temperatures rising a mere 0.1 degrees F less by 2050 than doing nothing. That's because Chinese and Indian emissions would quickly dwarf America's job-killing reductions.
Call and/or email your congresscritter today. Or send a letter via the National Taxpayers Union. Go to American Solutions and sign the petition. Contribute to the ad campaign if you can. Let's stop this misbegotten monstrosity.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: congress, economy, energy, environmentalism, global warming, pelosi | 1 Comment »
Posted by Richard on February 9, 2009
For those who view virtually all human activity with alarm and worry incessantly about the "fate of the earth," here's something else to fret about, courtesy of my CalTech-grad math-and-science whiz friend.
Tongue planted firmly in cheek, David noted that the prevailing winds over the vast majority of the earth's surface are from west to east. Therefore, if we build a sufficiently large number of wind turbines, they will slow the earth's rotation and lengthen our days.
Although he can do calculations in his head that would take me hours on the computer, David did not offer an estimate as to what would be a sufficiently large number.
It's also not clear to me what impact, if any, slowing the earth's rotational period would have on global climate.
But surely, wind energy advocates enamored of the precautionary principle are obligated to prove that their plans won't change the earth's rotational period or affect the climate.
Don't even get me started on all those dead birds.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: change, environmentalism, global warming, science, technology | 2 Comments »
Posted by Richard on January 12, 2009
The people who want us to give up meat, grow our own veggies, put on a sweater, and shiver in the dark in order to "save the planet" are now suggesting that we step away from the keyboard to counter global warming:
Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.
While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”
…
Wissner-Gross has also calculated the CO2 emissions caused by individual use of the internet. His research indicates that viewing a simple web page generates about 0.02g of CO2 per second. This rises tenfold to about 0.2g of CO2 a second when viewing a website with complex images, animations or videos.
The Times article mentioned that Wissner-Gross created a website called CO2Stats, but left the impression that it's just about his research. Actually, CO2Stats sells website owners environmental absolution in the form of carbon offsets and related nonsense. So Wissner-Gross makes money off the environmental guilt his "research" fosters.
According to the Times, someone claims that a Second Life avatar uses nearly as much energy as the average Brazilian. That, of course, will lead to widespread disapproval — it's bad enough that you Second Lifers are warming the planet, but you're also consuming so much more than your "fair share" of the world's wealth (never mind that you're also producing more than your "fair share"). And just for your amusement — shame on you:
“It’s not an unreasonable comparison,” said Liam Newcombe, an expert on data centres at the British Computer Society. “It tells us how much energy westerners use on entertainment versus the energy poverty in some countries.”
Though energy consumption by computers is growing – and the rate of growth is increasing – Newcombe argues that what matters most is the type of usage.
If your internet use is in place of more energy-intensive activities, such as driving your car to the shops, that’s good. But if it is adding activities and energy consumption that would not otherwise happen, that may pose problems.
Huh. I consider "adding activities and energy consumption" to be signs of progress and increasing wealth, and thus to be desirable. But to the radical environmentalists, human activity — especially material progress and wealth creation — is always a problem.
Maybe I'll join Second Life just to increase my carbon footprint.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: computers, environmentalism, global warming | 2 Comments »
Posted by Richard on January 3, 2009
Two quotes for today (both from a Late Late Show rerun):
I took a test to be an American. What did you do?
— Craig FergusonIt's so cold I saw Al Gore burning tires.
— Larry the Cable Guy
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: craig ferguson, global warming, immigration reform, pseudoscience | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on December 25, 2008
Courtesy of TheChillingEffect.org and GoredEarth.com, here's this week's climate cartoon:
Merry Christmas, everybody!
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: christmas, global warming, humor | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on August 1, 2008
I mentioned this site the other day in the comments to this post, but it's so deliciously funny that I don't want you to miss it. It's called Cheatneutral, and it puts the concept of carbon offsets into perspective:
What is Cheat Offsetting?
When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain and jealousy in the atmosphere.
Cheatneutral offsets your cheating by funding someone else to be faithful and NOT cheat. This neutralises the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience.
Can I offset all my cheating?
First you should look at ways of reducing your cheating. Once you've done this you can use Cheatneutral to offset the remaining, unavoidable cheating
Don't just glance at the home page. Check out the rest of the site (especially "About" and "Our projects"). These are apparently global warming believers, but they recognize the absurdity and hypocrisy of carbon offsets, and they have a great sense of humor.
Also, they appear to be legitimate. If you want to offset your cheating, you pay the £2.50 fee via PayPal, and they promise to email you a certificate "so you can prove to your loved one that your playing away has been successfully offset." If you sign up as an Offset Project, they promise to pay you that fee when you're matched with a cheater, and they say they don't take a cut. (I'll let you know if I'm matched and receive a payment.)
Why not become a project? Or maybe you need to buy a certificate?
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: environmentalism, global warming, humor | 2 Comments »
Posted by Richard on July 10, 2008
From Andrew Bolt at NEWS.com.au comes word of the first known hospitalization of a sufferer of "climate change delusion":
Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children's Hospital say this delusion was a "previously unreported phenomenon".
"A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne with an eight-month history of depressed mood . . . He also . . . had visions of apocalyptic events."
(So have Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery, Profit of Doom Al Gore and Sir Richard Brazen, but I digress.)
…But never mind the poor boy, who became too terrified even to drink. What's scarier is that people in charge of our Government seem to suffer from this "climate change delusion", too.
Here is Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday, with his own apocalyptic vision: "If we do not begin reducing the nation's levels of carbon pollution, Australia's economy will face more frequent and severe droughts, less water, reduced food production and devastation of areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu wetlands."
And here is a senior Sydney Morning Herald journalist aghast at the horrors described in the report on global warming released on Friday by Rudd's guru, Professor Ross Garnaut: "Australians must pay more for petrol, food and energy or ultimately face a rising death toll . . ."
Wow. Pay more for food or die. Is that Rudd's next campaign slogan?
Well, Barack Obama warned us a while back that "[w]e can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times …" Being forced to pay more for food and energy seems positively moderate compared to being forced to eat less and turn off the furnace. (Although, to be fair, I don't think Obama has claimed that failure to adopt his statist agenda would lead to mass deaths. Not yet, at least.)
But this is actually a very sad story, because this 17-year-old is merely exhibiting an extreme version of apocalyptic beliefs that are rampant among young people in Western nations, who have undergone years and years of enviro-whacko indoctrination at the hands of their teachers. I suspect there will be many more cases of acute climate change delusion.
I remember a segment from one of John Stossel's special reports (I think it was Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death?) in which he talked with a bunch of kids, maybe 9 or 10 years old, about the environment. All these kids were convinced of impending environmental catastrophes, and more or less resigned to inheriting a poisoned, inhospitable planet, a grim future in which they were likely to die young. As they talked about it, their shoulders slumped, their eyes were filled with sadness, and it seemed that every ounce of the joy of childhood had been drained out of them. It was very disturbing.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: environmentalism, global warming, mental health | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on June 12, 2008
Today is Carbon Belch Day. Did you register, like I suggested on Monday? As I noted then, increasing your carbon footprint could help protect our forests.
Using the Carbon Belch Calculator, I determined that my one-day carbon belch will emit about 129 pounds of CO2 (the average American's daily output is 41 pounds). Why not calculate your carbon belch? Then, be sure to register your belch by taking the Carbon Belch Day Pledge. Pledgers have already registered over 110 million pounds of CO2 to be released this day!
Finally, if you can afford it, buy some carbon debits:
Perhaps the most absurd aspect of the entire Climate Alarmist agenda is the burgeoning "carbon credit" industry. To offset our green guilt, we are told to "buy" carbon credits to supposedly neutralize our CO2 footprint. Somehow, this bogus idea of environmental indulgences has become accepted as a real and valid way to deal with our Carbon Guilt.
That's why we've "created" Carbon Belch Debits (CBDs) — a meaningless term that will have just as much impact on Al Gore's "planetary emergency" as the carbon credits.
To increase my carbon belch, I'll be taking a longer lunch so I can run some errands (in an SUV! by myself!), and I'll eat beef. When I get home, I'll mow the lawn. It could wait until the weekend, but what the heck — it's for a good cause. Then I'll spend the evening doing about what I did on March 29 in protest of Earth Hour: maximizing my home energy consumption. (Now that I think about it, that 129 pound calculation is probably an underestimate because the Carbon Belch Calculator has no place to enter all the extra energy consumption I plan.)
As I said back in March, "My ancestors didn't survive the Black Plague and Dark Ages, create the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, and bring about the past two hundred years of astonishing scientific and technological progress so that we could huddle in the dark."
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: energy, environmentalism, global warming, protests | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on June 10, 2008
For the second time in four years, Seattle Parks and Recreation tried last week to ban beach bonfires (they’re already restricted to a handful of fire rings and require a permit). Why? To save the planet, of course:
According to a memo to the park board from the staff released Thursday, “The overall policy question for the Board is whether it is good policy for Seattle Parks to continue public beach fires when the carbon … emissions produced by thousands of beach fires per year contributes to global warming.”
Apparently, they’ve again backed down — at least for now. But this is yet another illustration of how immune to reason, logic, and reality the AGW true believers are. Banning bonfires to prevent global warming is only slightly less inane and absurd than banning pictures of guns on T-shirts to prevent plane hijackings.
Meanwhile in California, development is grinding to a halt and the Governator has declared an official statewide drought because of a water supply crisis. What caused this crisis? The New York Times story doesn’t mention the precipitating event until paragraph 18 (emphasis added):
Even more significant, a judge in federal district court last year issued a curtailment in pumping from the California Delta — where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers meet and provide water to roughly 25 million Californians — to protect a species of endangered smelt that were becoming trapped in the pumps. Those reductions, from December to June, cut back the state’s water reserves this winter by about one third, according to a consortium of state water boards.
So 25 million of California’s 38 million residents have their water supply threatened in order to prevent a two-inch fish from meeting its demise in a water pump instead of in the mouth of a larger fish. Unbelievable.
These Gaia-worshipping eco-nuts are at base profoundly anti-human. When a lightning-caused wildfire consumes thousands of acres of forest, they say it should be allowed to burn because that’s “nature’s way.” But when humans harvest trees, they say that’s raping the land — and an infinitesimally smaller bonfire on a beach threatens the planet. When beavers dam a creek and flood a mountain valley, they say it’s natural and beautiful. But when humans do the same thing, they call it despoliation. No one gives a moment’s thought to the farts of bears, bison, or wildebeest. But the farts of our livestock are a cause for grave concern.
To the environmentalist true believers, every species of plant, animal, fungus, and microbe on Earth is entitled to live in the manner to which it’s suited — except human beings. They look upon their own species as alien interlopers who threaten the pristine perfection that would exist if we all just went away. It’s the Bambi and Peaceable Kingdom myths commingled with a deep-seated self-loathing, and it’s disgusting.
(HT: Skeptics Global Warming)
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: climate change, environmentalism, global warming | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on June 10, 2008
It should be obvious to anyone who compares, say, the north coast of Alaska (top picture) to a tropical rainforest (bottom picture) that living things struggle when it's cold and thrive when it's warm.
[UPDATE: Sorry, Internet Explorer 6 users — I just discovered you couldn't see the right-aligned pictures. I have no idea why and lack the patience to investigate. This seems to fix things.]
If you remember your high school biology lesson on photosynthesis, you also know that CO2 is a natural fertilizer for plants, which remove the life-giving carbon and release the O2.
So there's really nothing all that unexpected about the NASA data on the Earth's biomass. Scientists analyzing the satellite measurements of plant matter on land were nonetheless surprised. Lawrence Solomon, a long-time environmentalist and recovering Anthropogenic Global Warming True Believer, explains (emphasis added):
The planet is the greenest it's been in decades, perhaps in centuries.
…
Why the increase? Their 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, a gas indispensable to plant life. CO2 is nature's fertilizer, bathing the biota with its life-giving nutrients. Plants take the carbon from CO2 to bulk themselves up — carbon is the building block of life — and release the oxygen, which along with the plants, then sustain animal life. As summarized in a report last month, released along with a petition signed by 32,000 U. S. scientists who vouched for the benefits of CO2: "Higher CO2 enables plants to grow faster and larger and to live in drier climates. Plants provide food for animals, which are thereby also enhanced. The extent and diversity of plant and animal life have both increased substantially during the past half-century."
Screw Al Gore and the doomsayers — that sounds good to me. Unfortunately, it may be coming to an end, and all those "save the planet, reduce your carbon footprint" efforts may be horribly misguided (emphasis added):
This blossoming Earth could now be in jeopardy, for reasons both natural and man-made. According to a growing number of scientists, the period of global warming that we have experienced over the past few centuries as Earth climbed out of the Little Ice Age is about to end. The oceans, which have been releasing their vast store of carbon dioxide as the planet has warmed — CO2 is released from oceans as they warm and dissolves in them when they cool — will start to take the carbon dioxide back. With less heat and less carbon dioxide, the planet could become less hospitable and less green, especially in areas such as Canada's Boreal forests, which have been major beneficiaries of the increase in GPP and NPP.
Doubling the jeopardy for Earth is man. Unlike the many scientists who welcome CO2 for its benefits, many other scientists and most governments believe carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant that must be removed from the atmosphere at all costs. Governments around the world are now enacting massive programs in an effort to remove as much as 80% of the carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere.
If these governments are right, they will have done us all a service. If they are wrong, the service could be all ill, with food production dropping world wide, and the countless ecological niches on which living creatures depend stressed. …
All the Gaia-worshippers' finger wagging aside, I don't believe that air conditioning and SUVs have played much of a role in 20th-century warming and CO2-level increases. Nonetheless, I think we all ought to do what we can to preserve the Earth's biomass by countering the misguided efforts of Al Gore's disciples. I'm going to help protect our forests by increasing my carbon footprint. I encourage you to join me — pledge to participate in Carbon Belch Day on June 12.
(HT: Watts Up With That?)
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: environmentalism, global warming | Leave a Comment »
Truely unbelievable!
Whitbread Tankard wrote: