Alarmists losing so badly they are scared of letters to editors
Alarmists losing so badly they are scared of letters to editors
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/10/alarmists-losing-so-badly-they-are-scared-of-letters-to-editors/
Those who depend on silencing opponents have already lost the intellectual war. But they cling to the hope that they can keep the news of their loss from spreading. “Should newspapers ban letters from climate science deniers? The Guardian Graham Readfearn The LA Times decides not to print letters from readers claiming there’s no evidence for human-caused climate change” Note the example Readfearn chooses of a letter most dangerous and unworthy: “Here’s an excerpt from a Letter to the Editor, printed earlier this week in The Australian newspaper. “While [temperatures] have been higher than before the past 15 years, they have not increased in line with fossil fuel emissions, just as they failed to do over the 1948-77 period. This makes incorrect the theory that fossil fuel emissions cause temperature increases.” Des Moore, South Yarra, Victoria. Wrongheaded and simplistic views like this …” Except it’s not wrongheaded and Readfearn is the one who is simplistic, not Des Moore. (As it happens, the unworthy know-nothing denier was probably the same Des Moore who used to be the deputy secretary of the Australian Federal Treasury). Would Australia really be better […]Rating: 10.0/10 (6 votes cast)
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Warmist points out LATimes bans letters from skeptics — but prints horoscopes!
Warmist points out LATimes bans letters from skeptics — but prints horoscopes!
Graham Readfern writes in the Guardian: Editors are obviously in a difficult position. Moderating comments on stories takes time (I know this myself, after moderating more than 10,000 comments on an environment blog I used to write for News Ltd). Guardian columnist George Monbiot has written how companies specialise in creating fake online identities in […]
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New paper finds another amplification mechanism by which the Sun controls climate – Published in the Journal of Quaternary Sciences
New paper finds another amplification mechanism by which the Sun controls climate
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/10/new-paper-finds-another-amplification_15.html
A new paper published in the Journal of Quaternary Sciences finds climate change in the Caribbean over the past millennium “was probably controlled by solar forcing and modulated by the combined influence of El Niño Southern Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation.” According to the authors, “The record suggests extended episodes of drought occurred during the so-called Little Ice Age (1400–1850 CE), which were associated with El-Niño-like conditions in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean and controlled by low natural radiative [solar] forcing.” The paper adds to hundreds of other peer-reviewed publications finding solar amplification mechanisms by which tiny changes in solar activity can cause climate change, and that solar effects on climate are modulated by natural ocean and atmospheric oscillations.Solar forcing of Caribbean drought events during the last millenniumMICHAEL J. BURN*, SUZANNE E. PALMERAnthropogenic climate change is expected to increase the frequency of drought events in the earth’s subtropical regions. However, the climate dynamics of these regions are not fully understood and debate surrounds how external forcing factors such as solar and volcanic forcing influence long-term rainfall patterns in the subtropics. Here, we present the first high-resolution reconstruction of Caribbean drought events over the last millennium based on analyses of sediment geochemical data from a continuous high-resolution coastal lake-sediment record in Jamaica. The record suggests extended episodes of drought occurred during the so-called Little Ice Age (1400–1850 CE), which were associated with El-Niño-like conditions in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean and controlled by low natural radiative [solar] forcing. Comparison of the Jamaican drought record with previously published palaeoclimatic archives from within the circum-Caribbean region suggests that dry conditions were associated with the southward migration of the Hadley Cell, a stronger North Atlantic High and the concomitant intensification of the north-east trade winds and the Caribbean Low Level Jet. We conclude that pre-industrial climatic change in the region was probably controlled by solar forcing and modulated by the combined influence of El Niño Southern Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation.
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Paper finds another amplification mechanism by which the Sun controls climate – Published in Climate of the Past
Paper finds another amplification mechanism by which the Sun controls climate
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/10/paper-finds-another-amplification.html
A paper published in Climate of the Past finds the position of the Southern Hemisphere Westerly Winds, “an important zonal circulation that influences large-scale precipitation patterns and ocean circulation,” “is significantly correlated with reconstructed solar activity during the past 3000 years.” The paper may represent another solar amplification mechanism by which small changes in solar activity are amplified to large effects on climate.
Horizontal axis is years before the present
Clim. Past, 7, 339-347, 2011www.clim-past.net/7/339/2011/doi:10.5194/cp-7-339-2011
Solar-forced shifts of the Southern Hemisphere Westerlies during the HoloceneV. Varma1, M. Prange1,2, F. Lamy2,3, U. Merkel2, and M. Schulz1,21Department of Geosciences, University of Bremen, 28334 Bremen, Germany2MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, University of Bremen, Leobener Strasse, 28359 Bremen, Germany3Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, 27568 Bremerhaven, GermanyAbstract. The Southern Hemisphere Westerly Winds (SWW) constitute an important zonal circulation that influences large-scale precipitation patterns and ocean circulation. Variations in their intensity and latitudinal position have been suggested to exert a strong influence on the CO2 budget in the Southern Ocean, thus making them a potential factor affecting the global climate. In the present study, the possible influence of solar forcing on SWW variability during the Holocene is addressed. It is shown that a high-resolution iron record from the Chilean continental slope (41° S), which is interpreted to reflect changes in the position of the SWW, is significantly correlated with reconstructed solar activity during the past 3000 years. In addition, solar sensitivity experiments with a comprehensive global climate model (CCSM3) were carried out to study the response of SWW to solar variability. Taken together, the proxy and model results suggest that centennial-scale periods of lower (higher) solar activity caused equatorward (southward) shifts of the annual mean SWW.
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Climatologist Dr. David Legates: Climate Alarmists Seek Shelter From Public Storm: ‘When the data consistently conflict with their hypothesis, reputable scientists revise the hypothesis. Five-alarm climate scientists desperately seek new shells, and new excuses’
Climate Alarmists Seek Shelter From Public Storm
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/10/climate-alarmists-seek-shelter-from.html
Climate Alarmists Seek Shelter From Public Storm
By DENNIS M. MITCHELL AND DAVID R. LEGATES10/16/13 INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY
Children playing on the beach often discover a fascinating biological behavioral pattern among hermit crabs. Place a dozen in a cardboard box, and in minutes the crabs exit their shells and try to occupy another.
This mild stress-induced behavior probably reflects their lifelong drive to continue growing by repeatedly commandeering larger shells.
Similarly, climate alarmists are scrambling to find new shelter from the stress coming from a public that increasingly realizes their doom-and-gloom predictions of climate catastrophe are based on shoddy data, faulty computer models and perhaps outright deception.
Despite a measured absence of warming over the last 16 years, they repeatedly cried “wolf.” Alarmists demanded that the world transform their energy and economic systems, slash fossil fuel use and accept lower living standards to reflect the politically manufactured science.
Even as growing evidence conflicted with their dogma, the money, fame and power were too good to surrender for mere ethical reasons.
Former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson wailed her agency would need at least 240,000 new EPA employees (each making some $100,000 per year, plus benefits) that she said would be needed just to administer new carbon dioxide regulations — and control nearly everything Americans make, drive, ship and do!
The EPA currently employs some 20,000 people at an annual budget of over $8 billion. The new hires alone would cost taxpayers another $24 billion annually — plus hundreds of billions of dollars in economic pain, manufacturing shutdowns and new job losses that the EPA’s CO2 regulations would inflict.
Year after year, alarmists have changed their protective shells for more absurd answers regarding where the Earth has mysteriously stashed all the energy that greenhouse gases supposedly trapped.
For years, alarmists said ocean waters were storing the missing energy. But when the ARGO project demonstrated that the heat was not in the ocean, at least down two kilometers beneath the surface, one prominent alarmist responded, “We are puzzled at the results.”
When the data consistently conflict with their hypothesis, reputable scientists revise the hypothesis. Five-alarm climate scientists desperately seek new shells, and new excuses.
The “puzzling” facts triggered the predictable alarmist tactic of attacking the data and claiming the heat was hiding in the really deep ocean.
Ignoring the physics of the problem — how …
Europe’s wind & solar dream becomes a nightmare: The New Dark Continent – ‘Wind and solar mandates are breaking Europe’s electric utilities’
Europe’s wind & solar dream becomes a nightmare
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/10/europes-wind-solar-dream-becomes.html
The New Dark Continent
Wind and solar mandates are breaking Europe’s electric utilities.
WSJ.COM 10/16/13: Before the Obama Administration marches America to renewable-energy nirvana, it may want to inspect what success looks like in Europe. The Continent is much closer than the U.S. to realizing its dream of replacing carbon energy sources with wind and solar, and the dream is starting to look like a nightmare.
Last week the CEOs of Europe’s 10 largest utilities finally cried uncle and called for a halt to wind and solar subsidies. Short of that, they want subsidies of their own. They want to be paid, in essence, not to produce power.
The root cause of all this is the Continent’s so-called feed-in tariffs for renewable energy, which began in Germany in 1990. A feed-in tariff is a form of mandate that gives solar and wind installations a guaranteed price, usually well above the market price, and ensures that any energy they produce gets priority on the electrical grid. When solar and wind plants are producing, their energy must be taken first, ahead of other kinds of power.
By requiring utilities to take this power—and requiring consumers to pay for it—Germany has increased renewables to 25% of its overall capacity. Berlin wants to push that to 35% in 2020 and 80% by 2050. Not every country in Europe has been as ambitious as Germany, but the European Union’s renewables target across the entire Continent is also 20% by 2020.These wind and solar subsidies have increased Europe’s energy costs by 17% for consumers and 21% for industry in the last four years. But more ominous is the havoc the mandates are creating for utilities. Old-fashioned power plants, especially coal and nuclear, have traditionally provided what is called “base load” power. These plants produce the power to run refrigerators and street lights and the rest of the 24/7 needs of a modern economy. This was the power that consumers used first—until Europe went mad for renewables.
The trouble is, no one knows how much power renewables can provide at any particular moment. Imagine having a car that runs on gasoline, with a solar array on the roof. But instead of using the solar power when you needed it, the car was required to add this solar power to the engine’s output whenever it was available.
So you’re …
Australian Prime Minister Locks In Death Of Carbon Tax
Australian Prime Minister Locks In Death Of Carbon Tax
http://www.thegwpf.org/australian-prime-minister-locks-death-carbon-tax/
Tony Abbott has flagged retrospective legislation to backdate the abolition of the carbon tax to July 1 next year if parliament delays his repeal bills and threatened businesses with fines of up to $1.1 million if they fail to pass on price cuts flowing through from scrapping the tax.
The Prime Minister and Environment Minister Greg Hunt yesterday released draft legislation detailing the abolition of the carbon tax, which will be the first order of business when parliament resumes on November 12. Mr Abbott said he hoped the Senate would vote on the bills before Christmas and declared they would give Labor a chance to “repent of its massive breach of faith with the Australian people in the last parliament”.
Asked about Labor’s vow to block the repeal of a carbon price, Mr Abbott said he was confident public pressure on the opposition not to defy “the mandate of the Australian people at the election” would be “irresistible”.
If the bills are not passed by July 1, and the government is forced to wait for the new Senate, the carbon tax repeal bills will apply retrospectively to that date.
The Prime Minister said the abolition of the carbon tax would leave households $550 a year better off.
The government estimated that power prices would go down by 9 per cent and gas prices would go down by 7 per cent, making the average power bill $200 a year lower and the average gas bill $70 a year lower.
Mr Abbott rejected demands by billionaire Clive Palmer, who is disputing a $6.2m carbon tax liability, that all carbon tax receipts be refunded.
He said businesses would be obliged to pay the tax until it was abolished, warning that people needed “to meet their obligations under tax law and that’s true under the existing carbon tax law”.
Bill Shorten has said Labor continues to support a carbon price and would not support the repeal.
Mr Abbott said the Opposition Leader was a “political pragmatist” and a “political survivor” and he believed Labor would learn the lesson that it could not defy the public’s view.
He said the repeal of the carbon tax represented a major contribution to the government’s deregulation agenda by removing about 440 pages of legislation and reducing business compliance costs by about $100m a year.
The Australian Competition and …
Peter Glover: Dismantling The West’s Energy-Climate Paradigm — ‘The world’s leading Western economies have forsaken the best interests of the people’
Peter Glover: Dismantling The West’s Energy-Climate Paradigm
http://www.thegwpf.org/peter-glover-dismantling-wests-energy-climate-paradigm/
All the signs are, when it comes to the fundamentally key national issue of energy security, that the world’s leading Western economies have forsaken the best interests of the people.
Good governance is a rare thing. Government acting in the best and common interest of the people is nothing less than the highest democratic ideal. And yet, as history plainly reveals, government all too easily loses sight of its ‘representation of the people’ mandate, diverting instead down the path of elitist, theoretical and ultimately self-serving policies bereft of any sense of realpolitik. Take the West’s prevailing energy-climate paradigm.
All the signs are, when it comes to the fundamentally key national issue of energy security, that the world’s leading Western economies have forsaken the best interests of the people. They have done so by confusing (energy) reality and (climate) theory as being of the same magnitude. As Einstein put it, “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”
Former UK Chancellor Lord Nigel Lawson put his finger on the nub of the matter writing in Parliament’s The House Magazine recently. Lawson pointed out that when he was Secretary of State for Energy some 30 years ago “the purpose of energy policy was to ensure a reliable supply of energy, for business and households alike, at the lowest possible cost.” Today, as he rightly observes, “the sole purpose” of the UK’s new Energy Bill – “the worst within living memory” – “is to enable the UK to reach the ambitious decarbonisation targets enshrined in Labour’s Climate Change Act.” In pursuit of compliance with EU directives, we might add. But Lawson’s observations could just as easily apply to the inherent contradictions endemic in the energy-climate beliefs of Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and the (unelected) elites at the European Commission or the United Nations.
30 years ago, when Lawson was UK Chancellor, the climate science consensus theorized that the planet was set on a course for a new ice age via global cooling. Today, the consensus has reversed believing we are inexorably – thanks to man’s carbon emissions – set on a course of global warming. In both situations energy security remained an ever-present practical reality for government. Climatology was then, and still is today, in the baby-science phase of theoretical possibilities. One can only wonder then at the crass stupidity …
Has Climate Hysteria Killed Eco-Journalism? ‘The news for environmental journalism in the U. S. is grim and getting grimmer. From 85 weekly science sections in newspapers in the U.S in 1989, there were just 19 left by 2012’
Has Climate Hysteria Killed Eco-Journalism?
http://www.thegwpf.org/climate-hysteria-killed-eco-journalism/
The news for environmental journalism in the United States is grim and getting grimmer. From 85 weekly science sections in newspapers in the U.S in 1989, there were just 19 left by 2012.
On Mar. 1, the New York Times announced it was discontinuing the Green Blog that tracked environmental and energy news. In January, the paper had dismantled its three-year-old environment pod.
“Without journalists to uncover stories and speak to authoritative sources, the public loses.” — FERN’s Samuel Fromartz
This year, too, Johns Hopkins University retired its 30-year-old science writing programme, following in the footsteps of Columbia University which, in 2009, closed its earth and environmental science journalism programme because of a poor job market.
Like climate change, the demise of science reporting is a slowly unfolding tragedy (sic), say many environmental journalists in the United States.
At a time when conversations should be revolving around climate change, energy, natural resources and sustainable development, space for environmental reporting and coverage in the United States seems to be shrinking.
The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the fifth in a series, says the evidence is now overwhelming that humans are the primary drivers of global warming.
“A potential knowledge gap arises as environmental journalism shrinks. The public learns less about environmental and related health issues, but at the same time may fall prey to unscientific claims that often hold sway on the Internet,” a worried Samuel Fromartz, the editor-in-chief of the non-profit Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN), told IPS on the sidelines of the 23rd annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists, held earlier this month in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
“Without journalists to uncover stories and speak to authoritative sources, the public loses,” he said.
Scott Dodd, editor of On Earth.org of the Natural Resources Defence Council, and who considers climate change the “most urgent story of our times”, told IPS that environmental issues are “consistently under-covered”.
From 85 weekly science sections in newspapers in the U.S in 1989, there were just 19 left by 2012.
Full story
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