Did you know that the phrase, “global warming” first appeared in scientific literature 35 years ago this week? According to Grist magazine, Wally Broecker first mentioned the phrase in Science magazine in an article published on August 8, 1975. Did you hear that the Senate allowed the “climate bill” to die recently and very likely won’t resurrect it this year? Is that a good think or a bad thing? Many environmental groups feel the bill, which dealt with putting a cap and a price on the amount of carbon a company could produce, “cap and trade”… was so watered down from the version the House passed last June, that it was better left to fade away…. Another point of view was that it was the “best we could have hoped for” and now we are no where…debatable..any thoughts?
Some disturbing statistics from the past few weeks: 17 countries have reported their highest EVER recorded temperature this summer. According to a recent report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization (NOAA): the last decade is the hottest decade on record, the past 12 months the hottest ever, the past 6 months, also, the hottest ever, and June is the hottest month ever recorded (we are waiting on July data). Cautiously, while remembering “weather” is just that, these consistent trends point to a warming climate out of whack with nature. Something to consider as millions of people in Pakistan are displaced by flooding, flooding is wrecking havoc in China, and Russia is experiencing a “once in 1000 year” heat wave. FYI, I just read a novel of my son’s, The Carbon Diaries, by Saci Lloyd, it is set in London, after “wacky weather” plays havoc with the British Isles, forcing the population to go on extreme “carbon rationing” – is the book about to play out in Russia?!
On a more inspirational note, In the News this week we look at some incredible
The Climb Against Coal, Mt. Rainer Summit July 2010
Moms from Washington State who climbed a mountain to bring attention to climate change. In Climate Mama News, we get a first hand account of climate change in the Rockies. Our Video Peeks of the Week are a “home slideshow” from Rocky Mountain National Park showcasing the mountain pine beetle, and a heart rendering call to action by the people from Earth Hour. Scroll down and check out the Climate Mama interview for Yahoo! Shine, at BlogHer ’10 in NYC. We met some amazing women at the BlogHer conference, many of who we will be introducing you to in the coming weeks!
How many continents have set a record high temperature this year? or for that matter when was the last record for a continent.?
Having written for a decade that the Earth has been cooling, it was rather disconcerting to receive a news release from Accuweather reporting that “The year 2010 is on track to become the hottest year on record since modern record keeping began, according to climate researchers at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).”
It turns out there is an explanation for the unusual levels of heat from Russia to Pakistan to Japan. It is a meteorological phenomenon called “blocking events” and they are related to the jet stream.
An August 10 article by Michael Moore in New Scientist explained, “According to meteorologists monitoring the atmosphere above the northern hemisphere, unusual holding patterns in the jet stream are to blame. As a result, weather systems sat still. Temperatures rocketed and rainfall reached extremes.”
The public has been buffeted for decades as the global warming fraud produced reams of reports that the Earth was heating dramatically. It wasn’t. In November 2009, the “Climategate” scandal broke, revealing that the data put forth by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was rigged, false, a scam.
A handful of rogue climatologists working together from East Anglia, England, to Penn State University provided deliberately false information. At the time their private emails were leaked they were seriously worried because a natural cooling cycle had begun in the late 1990s.
Thus, while news of 2010 being potentially one of the hottest years since 1880 seems to give new life to the discredited global warming claims, it doesn’t.
The New Scientist article further explained that, “Renowned for its influence on European and Asian weather, the jet stream flows between 7 and 12 kilometers above ground. In its basic form it is a current of fast-moving air that bobs north and south as it rushes around the globe from west to east.”
Climatologist, Dr. Tim Ball, took note, writing on August 16 that, “Finally, a weather person has mentioned the word ‘blocking’ when talking about the heat and fires in Moscow. It’s a natural event as the world shifts from the warming trend of the 1990s to a cooling trend since 2000.”
The IPCC assaults on valid and verifiable measurements of the Earth’s actual climate were difficult for people with no knowledge of meteorology to debunk, but NOAA has been engaged in similar chicanery. Its report, “State of the Earth’s Climate 2009”, prepared under the direction of the U.S. National Climate Data Center, was equally flawed and deceptive.
Unreported in both the IPCC and NOAA reports is the fact that countless faulty weather stations, often placed near heat sources, and malfunctioning weather satellites make it virtually impossible to make any kind of accurate evaluation of short or long term climate trends.
Moreover, whether the Earth is warming or cooling, all manner of unusual weather events always occur. They are, in themselves, literally meaningless when it comes to forecasting trends.
That is why, in the midst of a new and natural cooling cycle based on reduced solar sunspot activity, we are having a very warm summer and possibly even a very warm year thanks to a jet stream experiencing “blocking events.”
We all need to get passed the notion that humans have anything to do with the weather. It is too vast, too chaotic, and too unpredictable to rationally suggest that a little bit of carbon dioxide is driving the whole thing. It has virtually nothing to do with the climate whereas the Sun has everything to do with it.
There are rumors that the Senate will attempt to take up yet another version of the Cap-and-Trade bill passed in the House during a lame duck session. Based on the bogus global warming, it is a total fraud, a scheme to sell “carbon credits” and make a few people rich while the rest of us are fleeced by rising energy costs. If it passes, those that vote for it will truly be traitors because they will have doomed any economic recovery. It is a nation-killer.
What the Chinese really think of ‘Man Made Global Warming’
By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: August 11th, 2010
445 Comments Comment on this article
Low-income coal miners rest before starting their shift in a privately run coal mine close to You Fang Liang, Ningxia Province, north eastern China (Photo: EPA)
One of the great lies told us by our political leaders in order to persuade us to accept their swingeing and pointless green taxes and their economically suicidal, environmentally vandalistic wind-farm building programmes is that if we don’t do it China will. Apparently, just waiting to be grabbed out there are these glittering, golden prizes marked “Green jobs” and “Green technologies” – and if only we can get there before those scary, mysterious Chinese do, well, maybe the West will enjoy just a few more years of economic hegemony before the BRICs nations thwack us into the long grass.
This is, of course, utter nonsense. The Chinese do not remotely believe in the myth of Man-Made Global Warming nor in the efficacy of “alternative energy”. Why should they? It’s not as if there is any evidence for it. The only reason the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming myth has penetrated so deeply into Western culture is… No. I’m going to save that stuff for my fairly imminent (Nov?) book on the subject which I hope you’re all going to buy.
What do the Chinese think about CAGW? Well, until now it was largely a question of educated guesswork, based on inferences like the fact that it was the Chinese who derailed the Copenhagen negotiations. But thanks to a new book called Low Carbon Plot by Gou Hongyang we know exactly what the official view is.
Ozboy – one of the finest commenters in this parish as well as proprietor of the Liberty Gibbet website – sets the scene nicely:
The argument [that China leads the world in renewable energy technology investment] rings a little hollow when you consider Beijing plans to build coal-fired power stations at the equivalent rate of one Australia, per year, for the next twenty-five years. The reputed Chinese fascination with renewable energy looks at best, a very long-term fallback position; at worst, a façade.
That’s what makes what you’re about to read even more startling. It’s a book called Low Carbon Plot, by Gou Hongyang and, as it’s freely available in China’s government-controlled bookstores, carries Beijing’s nihil obstat. No English translation is currently available, but our own China correspondent, Locusts, has translated the introduction from the original Mandarin, and (not entirely without risk to himself) has asked me to make it publicly available on this forum. At four thousand words, it’s a little long to insert onto a blog page, but you can navigate to it from the Rare Scribblings menu option at the top, or just click here.
It’s not so much an eye-opener as it is a bombshell. If true, it shows the Chinese government as rejecting CAGW in its entirety, believing it a conspiracy between Western governments and business to protect their own way of life, at the expense of the entire developing world—in other words, 80% of the world’s population.
Ozboy does not exaggerate.
Here, for example, is the author’s damning verdict on the Climate Change industry. Noting the irony of the spate of freezing cold weather that greeted the Copenhagen summit, the author wrily notes:
It was as if the freezing cold winter was having a laugh at all of these “Global Warming” theories. If the world was warming at an ever quickening pace, as all of these environmentalists say, then whence from such extreme cold? Whenever there are any doubts about Global Warming, it is almost as though environmentalists turn everything around and claim that this is too, a result of Global Warming. The Greenhouse Effect has turned in to a big basket, no matter what bad thing it is, just chuck it in.
He is even more damning about solar power in which, let it not be forgotten, China is supposed to be the world’s most shining example of just how well it can work.
First, he neatly captures the wishy-washy, John-Clare-esque pastoral utopianism which drives greenies to throw commonsense out of the window and pursue “renewable energy” regardless of all the facts:
Isn’t this the most beautiful thought possible, no pollution, everywhere is just greenery mountains and rivers, people won’t need to worry about coal mines collapsing, no need to worry about forests being chopped down, no need to worry about rising sea levels submerging island nations. It is as if, if only humanity could adopt clean energy, then all of our problems would be resolved with one sweep of the knife. But is the result really thus?
There is a very real problem staring everybody in the face. Solar power, wind power, can they be implemented on a large scale? Can they provide large scale industries with enough electricity? Can they supply trains with the power to fly along the tracks?
It is obvious, that the answer is in the negative.
He then – rather daringly, I think – weighs into the environmental unsoundness of this supposedly clean energy source:
Is solar power really clean? Investigations show that the base silicon that solar panels rely on is extracted via a energy intensive, heavily polluting industry. And where is this industry based? China.
China has already become the world’s biggest photovoltaic industrial market. The most important ingredient in solar power is polycrystalline silicon. The efficiency of manufacturing the panels is rather low, and a lot of pollution is generated as a by-product. When local industries started producing polycrystalline silicon, they were mostly reliant on outdated technology. Apart from high energy consumption, for every ton of pure polycrystalline silicon created, there were also more than 8 tons of ammonium chlorid[adized] silcon as by-product, as well as [other shit that a cursory look at google translate doesn’t answer].
The prosperity of China’s solar power industry, at the price of the environment of those rather weak distant regions, in order to attract commerce and investment, in order to collect tax revenue, very many environmental appraisal programmes have not yet been strictly implemented.
Here is the author eloquently demolishing the Carbon = Poison meme:
Will the increase in Carbon Dioxide definitely lead to the planet warming? Although there have been many many reports published by research institutes that verify this, but from the viewpoint of the history of man, and scientific method, the theories have not yet achieved scientific proof.
But, after many years of repeated indoctrination from every kind of propaganda machine, and the mixing together of environmental pollution and the exhaustion of natural resources, people have already formed a conditioned reflex, when the wind blows, the grass bends with it, and quickly hang these things on the hook of “carbon”, and attempted to get rid of carbon at a faster rate. We need to start peeling, and get back to the real world, and cannot stick labels everywhere. “Carbon” is the same “carbon” it was before, we must not get in to too much of a fluster. It is with polluted water/effluent, acid rain, destructive logging and waste with which we must struggle over the long term.
And here he is concluding that it is a fiendish plot – a new Cold War to all intents and purposes – by the West to suppress the economic growth of the BRICS nations.
Behind the back of the demonizing of “carbon”, we must recognize that it is the sinister intention of the Developed Countries to attempt to use “carbon” to block the living space of the Developing Countries.
There is only one Earth, natural resources are limited. If according to current technological conditions, and Developing Countries had the same living standard as Developed Countries, then we’d need at least 3 to 5 Earth’s to satisfy our appetites. This is what Developed Countries are most afraid of, the development of the Developing Countries poses an enormous threat to their way of lives.
In 2008, the price of foodstuffs substantially increased, a certain President actually said that the primary reason was because suddenly, one day, 300 million Indians started to eat two bowls of rice, and one billion Chinese started to drink milk.
In the eyes of some Westerners, the many developing countries have absolutely no right to enjoy the same standard of life as them.
If we really are equal, are of one mind, and together protect the Earth – our garden, we really can see a beautiful utopia in the future. But the Developed countries do not in the slightest wish to take any responsibility, they have set up double standards over “carbon emissions”, everywhere reflecting their arrogance and selfishness.
Behind “the Carbon Plot” is national interest, it is the bitter struggle for the right to existance for every country.
At this time, we again see the struggle between two camps, Europe, the USA and other developed countries, and China, India, Brazil, and Russia as the representatives of the Developing Countries, owing to their common interest, now walking closely together.
Personally, I think his conclusion says more about BRICs chippiness and paranioa than it does socio-political actualite. The CAGW scam owes much more to an attempted power grab by the left in order to achieve “environmentally” in the 21st century what it couldn’t achieve economically in the 20th Century, viz: total state control of the means of production, in the guise of ecological correctness.
But it doesn’t really matter whether the author is right or wrong in what he thinks. What matters is simply that this IS how the Chinese think, which, whether you love China or loathe it is fantastically good news for those of us in the realist/sceptics camp. China, after all, is the world’s future dominant economic power and, this being so, it makes an absolute nonsense of attempts by the EU and the US to hamper our industrial growth by imposing on our economies eco-taxes and eco-regulations which the Chinese intend to ignore completely.
This truth hasn’t hit home yet: not in the EU; not in the Cleggeron Coalition; not in Obama’s USA. Here’s my bet. The first to see sense on this will be whichever Republican administration takes over from Obama’s one-term presidency in 2012. From that point on – by which time we’ll have had two more exceptionally cold winters to concentrate our minds – British and European environmental policy will look increasingly foolish and irrelevant.