50 to 1 Project: still in with a chance of proceeding

 One thing we shall need for years to come is good quality materials to help repair the damage done in politics and in education by the past decades of overblown alarmism about CO2.  This video project promises to provide exactly that, and may yet manage to go ahead on a reduced budget.  Here is the latest update:



Donations by credit-card or PayPal can be made here: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/50-to-1-project-the-true-cost-of-action-on-climate-change

Note added 30 May 2013.  Good news - the project is going ahead!  Details here:
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/50-to-1-project-the-true-cost-of-action-on-climate-change?c=activity

Note added 29 July 2013.  It looks like all the interviews and the studio-work  has been completed, and they are going flat-out on animation with a target release date of 'around about' 25th August.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIsBMM0m9Vc&feature=youtu.be

Carter Shreds the Climate Propaganda Pumped Out to Children for Decades

Prof Bob Carter shreds the case for alarm over CO2 and climate in this lecture from 2011, recently put on toYouTube. It is a public lecture on "Climate Context as a basis for Better Policy",
given at the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, June 2011  (h/t http://spielclimate.blogspot.co.uk/ and through them https://twitter.com/Climate_con/statuses/336167271582035968)


This deserves the 'must-see' label!  Not only does he expose the shoddy science, he also exposes the shoddy policies and shoddy politicking and shoddy PR efforts that have thrived upon it.

This should be recommended viewing for every teacher in the world.

I also think there are seeds in this video for ideas that could be used as and when the 'authorities' get round to creating a decent curriculum on climate for schools.  That might have to precede publishers willing to risk new books aimed at the young, and suitable for schools, with a more realistic and optimistic view of our climate system and our impact on it.

That might include the fact that we have never been in a stronger position than we are now to cope with climate variations.  So parents might like to take the initiative and tell their children that.  There will be troubles ahead from climate, just as there have been in the past.  But we are more ready than ever before to handle them.  Our abundant supplies of affordable energy are part of that.

‘Fifty to One’ sounds like it would make a good resource about climate policy for use in schools

As someone who has not been convinced that recent increases in CO2 are an important or dominating driver of the climate system, I find the speculations about temperature changes as promoted by the IPCC quite hard to get excited about.  However that is not the case with many influential or powerful people – they are very excited indeed, and want us all to put a stop to world development in a dramatic fashion.  Dramatic reductions in fossil-fuel consumption along with dramatic increases in the use of inefficient generation technology such as windturbines, will in my view increase the cost of energy supplies and thus make it harder to cope with climate variation in years to come.

The discussion of climate change is now so heated, and polarised, that it will take remarkable efforts for one side to get through to the other.  This proposed video, 50 to 1, is one such effort, or so it seems to me.  Remarkable because it will take the IPCC methods and use them to demonstrate that the actions proposed to ‘stop climate change’ are many times more expensive than those that would be involved in adapting to it.  About fifty time more, according to some!

The appeal has not reached the halfway mark in sums promised, and we are at the halfway mark of the appeal’s planned duration.  I hope all readers will consider donating.  Lots of small donations might inspire a few huge ones.

Donations by credit-card or PayPal can be made here: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/50-to-1-project-the-true-cost-of-action-on-climate-change

They will only be taken up if a sufficiently large sum is reached to enable the project to proceed.

Note added 30 May 2013.  Good news - the project is going ahead!  Details here:
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/50-to-1-project-the-true-cost-of-action-on-climate-change?c=activity

Children and Carbon Dioxide: don't let the zealots terrorise one by demonising the other.

'Of all of the world's chemical compounds, none has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide. Thanks to the single-minded demonisation of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That's simply not the case. Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.

The cessation of observed global warming for the past decade or so has shown how exaggerated NASA's and most other computer predictions of human-caused warming have been—and how little correlation warming has with concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As many scientists have pointed out, variations in global temperature correlate much better with solar activity and with complicated cycles of the oceans and atmosphere. There isn't the slightest evidence that more carbon dioxide has caused more extreme weather.'

Extract from a Wall Street Journal piece by Harrison H. Schmidt and William Happer, 8th May, 2013.

'Mr. Schmitt, an adjunct professor of engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was an Apollo 17 astronaut and a former U.S. senator from New Mexico. Mr. Happer is a professor of physics at Princeton University and a former director of the office of energy research at the U.S. Department of Energy.'

 

Note added 18 May 2013 Here is a video clip showing Happer participating in a tv discussion triggered by the above letter (h/t Bishop Hill):