Unfortunately, some misuse science. Some of their intentions, are far from benevolent. They see science as a mechanism for political power and control. There is great danger from those who would use science for political control over us.

How do they do this? They instill, and then continuously magnify, fear. Fear is the most effective instrument of totalitarian control.

Chet Richards, physicist,

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/science_in_an_age_of_fear.html

Monday 5 July 2010

This should scare 'em - life underwater, War of the Worlds, floods, damaged planet

How long are the good people of England going to tolerate the pushing of this ignorant and frightening nonsense on to their children?


'Climate change forms the focus for South Hill Park’s Big Day Out on Saturday.....
The theme sees the festival imagine what the world would be like if we lived underwater and as part of this, Reading’s Global CafĂ© will present its take on the topic while a children’s procession at 5.30pm will feature a large crustacean created by their own hands. It will be inspired by H G Wells’ War Of The Worlds.
There will also be a special performance by Sound Interventions, who will present Drift, an outdoor show which imagines, in an abstract way, what our environmental crimes might soon be doing to planet earth.
Drift will be a procession staged on top of a flood, will use recycled instruments and include a fire show....
There’s a strong family focus to the event, especially during daylight hours, with the festival’s daytime activities climaxing in a children’s parade at 5.30pm.'

Why Would You Believe This? (3 of 8): '[because of rising CO2] Hundreds of millions of people may not have enough water. Floods, heat waves and droughts may affect millions more. The ensuing migration could make the world a very unstable place.'

Contentious chunk number 3, from the reasons given as to why we should be worried about climate change caused by humans, and why we should ensure our children are worried too - according to a now defunct site promoting Schools' Low Carbon Day (1).  I want to continue with this Fisking to provide a coverage which may be of wider interest.

'Hundreds of millions of people may not have enough water. Floods, heat waves and droughts may affect millions more. The ensuing migration could make the world a very unstable place.'

This is blatant and shameless scaremongering.  The cautious verbs 'may' (twice) and 'could' (once) provide the authors with some protection from total ridicule.  It has long been the case that these calamities 'may be true', or 'could happen'.  And of course, we know for sure that there will be people 'short of water', that there will be 'floods, heatwaves, and droughts', and that there have been already substantial migrations and there may well be more.

Despite the frail, or completely lacking, justification for their views, campaigners under the banner of 'agw' or 'climate change, have had a substantial influence and are intent on entrenching this in society by indoctrinating children.  We must therefore take these campaigners seriously - indeed they have already done serious harm around the world: to children and to vulnerable adults, to the poor and hungry, to the environment, to science, to politics, and to technology.

Here they want to scare children with three things: floods, heat waves, and droughts.  As is usual with environmental scare stories, a search of the literature will soon reveal major flaws in the reasoning.  For the examples below, I have taken reports from the 'Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change' which exists to: 'disseminate factual reports and sound commentary on new developments in the world-wide scientific quest to determine the climatic and biological consequences of the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content.'  See (2).

FLOODS: for more examples, see (3).
Example of scientific study
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V8/N1/C2.php
What was learned
'In describing the results of their analyses, Mudelsee et al. report finding, for both the Elbe and Oder rivers, "no significant trends in summer flood risk in the twentieth century," but "significant downward trends in winter flood risk during the twentieth century," which phenomenon -- "a reduced winter flood risk during the instrumental period" -- they specifically describe as "a response to regional warming." '
What it means
The results of this study provide no support for the IPCC "concern" that CO2-induced warming will add to the risk of river flooding in Europe.  If anything, they suggest just the opposite.'

HEAT WAVES: for more examples, see (4).
Example of scientific study
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V10/N24/C1.php
What was learned
'Because of the fact that depletion of soil moisture (which has long been predicted to accompany CO2-induced global warming) results in reduced latent cooling, Fischer et al. found that during all simulated heat wave events, "soil moisture-temperature interactions increase the heat wave duration and account for typically 50-80% of the number of hot summer days," noting that "the largest impact is found for daily maximum temperatures," which were amplified by as much as 2-3°C in response to observed soil moisture deficits in their study....'
What it means
'....In light of these complementary global soil moisture and river runoff observations, it would appear that the anti-transpiration effect of the historical rise in the air's CO2 content has more than compensated for the soil-drying effect of concomitant global warming; and this observation brings us to the ultimate point of our Journal Review. Based upon (1) the findings of Fischer et al. (2007) that soil moisture depletion greatly augments both the intensity and duration of summer heat waves, plus (2) the findings of Robock et al. (2000, 2005) and Li et al. (2007) that global soil moisture has actually increased over the past half century, likely as a result of the anti-transpiration effect of atmospheric CO2 enrichment - as Gedney et al. (2006) have also found to be the case with closely associated river runoff - it directly follows that the increase in soil moisture caused by rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations will tend to decrease both the intensity and duration of summer heat waves as time progresses.'

DROUGHT: for more examples, see (5).
Example of scientific study
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V9/N37/C1.php
What was learned
'In the words of the two researchers, "droughts have, for the most part, become [1] shorter, [2] less frequent, [3] less severe, and [4] cover a smaller portion of the country over the last century." '
What it means
'It would seem to be nigh unto impossible to contemplate a more stunning rebuke of climate-alarmist claims concerning global warming and drought than that provided by this study of the United States. And as evidenced by the many materials archived under Drought in our Subject Index, much the same findings are being reported all around the world.'

I will give examples for Asia and Africa in the next {but one] post of this series, but for now I want to end with some general points.

In relatively warm periods, such as the Roman one, and the Medieval Warm period, and our current one, humanity and the rest of nature thrived.  A cool period would be worse than a warm one for both. There is little doubt that the end of our mostly very pleasant interglacial is due within a few thousand years, and that if there is to be a credible climate-related mass migration, it will be such as the evacuation of Northern Europe - a process which would begin as soon as the winter snows fail to melt in the summer - for the ice sheets will not slide slowly down from the north, they will grow on the spot through successive winters.  There is no indication that this will happen soon.  But, as and when it does, the wealthier we are, the more technologically advanced we are, the better educated we are, the more chance that it will be handled in a competent and humane fashion.  Scaring children about heat and CO2, rubbishing real scientists trying to accumulate real knowledge instead of toeing a political line, denigrating technology, crippling our lowest cost sources of energy, and promoting guilt, fear, and ignorance in the young - none of that will help - they merely disrupt progress and cause harm.

References
(1) http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2010/06/schools-low-carbon-day-concerned.html
(2) http://www.co2science.org/index.php
(3) http://www.co2science.org/subject/f/subject_f.php.
(4) http://www.co2science.org/subject/h/heatwaves.php
(5) http://www.co2science.org/subject/d/subject_d.php

Sunday 4 July 2010

Primary school forced to turn off wind turbine after bird deaths

I imagined it went a bit like this:

(1) We believed you when you said CO2 was a threat, and windmills part of the answer.

(2) We believed you when you said children in primary schools should be told of climate threats.

(3) We believed you when you said our windturbine would kill only one bird a year.

But then reality started to intrude.  14 dead birds in six months.  Headteacher coming in early to clean them up before the children arrived.  Children being upset by birds killed during the school day.  And, at last:

Windturbine shut down.

Now perhaps the teachers, having seen (3) was a lie, will review what they have done on (2), and that will surely take them into (1) and the dawn of a shocking realisation: humanity's CO2 has a negligible effect on climate, but it does benefit plants, and thus in due course, insects, birds, bees, herbivores, and people.

Story of the turbine here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/7870929/Primary-school-forced-to-turn-off-wind-turbine-after-bird-deaths.html

Some pathos here:

We've tried so hard to be eco-friendly but now we can't turn it on.
"We can't get rid of it either because we bought the turbine we had to apply for grants and the grant from the Department of Energy and Climate Change states that it has to stay on site for five years."
This tiny turbine only wasted £20,000, killed 14 birds, and disturbed perhaps a few dozen children.  And it is hard to get rid of.  Scale this up to the UK's national programme of massive subsidies for windfarms.....Looking to the future of these, Dreadnought's poem comes to mind:
I met a traveller from a distant shire
Who said: A vast and pointless shaft of steel
Stands on a hill top… Near it, in the mire,
Half sunk, a shattered turbine lies, whose wheels
And riven blades and snarls of coloured wire
Tell that its owners well their mission read
Which did not last nor, nowhere to be seen,
The hand that paid them and the empty head.
And scrawled around the base these lines are clear:
‘My name is Milibandias, greenest Green.
Look on my works, ye doubters, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round this display
Of reckless cost and loss, blotless and fair,
The green and pleasant landscape rolls away.
Note: Ed Miliband was an energy secretary in the previous government of the UK, and a prominent climate alarmist.

Note added 7 October 2011: Another school in England loses its turbine, and nearly some of its pupils: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/06/wind-turbine-fail-school-left-holding-the-bag-for-53000/

Note added 14 March 2012: a windfarm in the States may shut down at night because of a dead bat - post at Bishop Hill.  A comment on this post also gives a local newspaper link for the above story: http://www.dorsetecho.co.uk/news/localnews/8252862.Portland_school_turns_off_wind_turbine_to_halt_seabird_slaughter/

'Meghan Cox Gurdon: Leaving the lights on won't kill a polar bear' - a journalist reacts to adult hysteria reaching children

Extract from a piece today in the Washington Examiner (hat tip:http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/) :

'Two small girls appeared in the kitchen. One of them looked vexed; the other looked worried.

"Can you please tell her that global warming isn't real?" asked the exasperated party.
Through my mind swept a series of possible responses. They ranged from the instinctive ("People are suffering from hysteria."), to the equivocal ("Many believe it's real and many do not."), to the blandly reassuring, ("Sweetheart, it's not something you need to worry about.").
"Why do you ask?" I punted.
"Someone told her that if she leaves a light on, a polar bear would die."
Blandness and equivocation disappeared.
"Nonsense," I told the child. "Grown-ups are investigating global warming and arguing about it. The one thing I can tell you is that you shouldn't be afraid to turn the lights on. It's not going to affect a polar bear either way." '

Source: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/local/Leaving-the-lights-on-won_t-kill-a-polar-bear/article/12489




The article concludes (my emphasis added):

'Put aside the debate over climate science for a moment. These are adult matters, or at least they should be. It's iniquitous for grown-ups -- who themselves are roiled over the subject -- to transfer their anxieties to children who are too young to wrap their minds around the issues, let alone "save" the Earth.
It's unfair. Ultimately, it may also redound to the environmental movement's disadvantage. For just as children discover that there is no Santa Claus and no tooth fairy, they'll eventually stumble on the statistics indicating that the world hasn't warmed appreciably for a decade. In other words, today's 8-year-olds may grow up to discover that the guilt and fear perpetuated upon them in childhood were based mostly on vapor, on adult hysteria. We ought to protect them from that, at least.'


Amen to that.  Oh for ten thousand times ten thousand of articles like this one to be published!

Thursday 1 July 2010

Schools' Low Carbon Day - illegal here, illegal in Germany, illegal everywhere?

The now 'disappeared' Schools' Low Carbon Day (1) may be an example of an illegal intervention in schools, one forbidden by the Education Act of 1996.  This same act led to a legal decision awarded against Albert Gore's film 'An Inconvenient Truth' (2):


'The decision by the government to distribute Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth has been the subject of a legal action by New Party member Stewart Dimmock.  The Court found that the film was misleading in nine respects and that the Guidance Notes drafted by the Education Secretary’s advisors served only to exacerbate the political propaganda in the film.  In order for the film to be shown, the Government must first amend their Guidance Notes to Teachers to make clear that 1.) The Film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument. 2.) If teachers present the Film without making this plain they may be in breach of section 406 of the Education Act 1996 and guilty of political indoctrination. 3.) Nine inaccuracies have to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children.'

Another political party in the UK, UKIP, has recently suggested that Schools' Low Carbon Day may also be illegal (3):

'The event, held on June 24, focuses on teaching children how to reduce their carbon footprint in the interests of stopping global warming and even encourages schoolchildren to drink less milk because cows produce greenhouse gases.
UKIP’s joint deputy leader said: “The notion that environmental pressure groups disguised as concerned parents should infiltrate 1,600 schools with a political propaganda message dressed up as scientific concern for the planet is contrary to the provision of the education acts, which forbid political activity in schools.
“It is now apparent that global warming is not happening at the predicted rate and it is now increasingly understood among scientists that the rapid but not unprecedented rate of warming from 1976 to 2001 was chiefly of natural and not of human origin.
“Even if the UN‘s alarmist and wildly exaggerated estimates on the warming effect of co2 are correct, shutting the global economy down completely for half a century would do no more than prevent less than 1°C of warming – at a hideous cost not only to human lives worldwide but also to the environment itself.”


I noted that on the now defunct website, Greg Clarke MP, former Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change was quoted as supporting the initiative:
'It is our children and grandchildren that will be most affected by climate change. We have a duty to equip them to deal with the challenges that it presents, and ‘Schools' Low Carbon Day’ works towards this goal.'


Breaking another law, several sites described the people behind Low Carbon Day, 'Mothers Against Climate Change', or 'Cool the World', as a 'registered charity', which it is not.  Here are the sites:

http://www.healthypages.co.uk/newsitem.php?news=6265
http://ethicalandgreen.com/2010/03/29/schools-low-carbon-day/
http://naturalmatters.net/news-view.asp?news=4151
http://www.ukteachersforums.co.uk/archive/index.php?t-420417.html
http://www.newportlearn.net/caerleon/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=152
http://breastfeedingmums.typepad.com/breastfeedingmums_blog/2010/03/schools-low-carbon-day-launches-to-educate-1-million-children-about-climate-change-.html
http://www.greenlivingtips.com/blogs/510/Schools-Low-Carbon-Day.html


 
Here is a school which seems to have taken part.
http://www.wolverley.worcs.sch.uk/2010/06/21/low-carbon-week-21st-25th-june/




Meanwhile, in Germany it is also illegal to engage in political indoctrination in schools.  Here are two examples (4):


In Germany departments of education in all states have their schools spread the message that the country is endangered by “climate change”. So a documentary of Report MĂĽnchen (a political magazine in a public German TV channel) of 2007 showed an activist of a German campaign group telling young students in Bremen that their City (elev. 12m) would eventually be swallowed by “rising sea level”. In our next study we will have a closer look at such activities which are illegal by German law.  

We found a perfect  example of green climate indoctrination in the German state of Baden-WĂĽrttemberg. Selected 8th-graders were detached to a private enterprise and brainwashed for 8 days each to become “Student Mentors for Climate Protection”, with the task to mobilize their co-students for participation in all kinds of greenish activity. Costs are shared between the Ministery of Education and Ministery of Environment. That the Code of Education in that state prohibits any kind of political indoctrination ...was apparently [overlooked] by those ministers who compete for environmental image.'


If any of these examples can be adequately substantiated, I hope that someone somewhere will be in a position to take some legal action in order to help reduce the risk of this sort of nonsense happening again and again.


(4) Quote taken from notes 1) and 2) in the References of the report 'Rescue from the Climate Saviors', downloadable via: http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/06/rescue-from-climate-saviors.html





Tuesday 29 June 2010

Why Would You Believe This? (2 of 8): 'Without very significant action, temperature changes of at least 2°C, and possibly 3°C or 4°C are expected to happen by the end of this century.'

This is the second sentence taken from the position statement at the Schools' Low Carbon Day site (1), part of their justification for wanting to worry schoolchildren about the climate:

'Without very significant action, temperature changes of at least 2°C, and possibly 3°C or 4°C are expected to happen by the end of this century.'

Why would anyone believe this?  The first, and most superficial, reason is that most of us rely on newspapers, magazines, and TV for information on climate.  We have recently been faced with scary stories about global warming, later modified to the general-purpose, timeless, and incontrovertible  'climate change'.  This sleight of hand allowed whatever natural disasters took place (floods, blizzards, hurricanes, etc) to be blamed on fossil fuels, while still retaining the same underlying threat of scary hotness to come.

This is not new.  It is merely the media exercising its preference for bad news over good.

Here are some media nuggets from the past, alongside the temperature trends for the time:

1) Cooling: approx. 1885 - 1915.
                
     'Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age.'  New York Times, October, 1912.

2) Warming: approx. 1915 - 1945.

         'Next Great Deluge Forecast by Science: Melting Polar Ice Caps to Raise the Level of the Seas and Flood the Continents.' New York Times, 15 May, 1932.

3) Cooling: approx. 1945 - 1975.
                
'The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.' Nigel Calder, International Wildlife Magazine, 1975.

4) Warming: approx. 1975 - 2005.
              
  'Scientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible.'  Time Magazine, 09 April, 2001.

5) Cooling next?  The headlines have already started:

'The Mini Ice Age Starts Here: The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.'  Daily Mail, 10 Jan, 2010.

Sources for the media quotes: (2), (3), and (4). Useful essay on the media and climate here: (5).

How can we get these short-term trends into perspective?
At any time at any location on the planet, it will either be warming on average or cooling on average, depending on the period of time and/or the spatial area the averaging is taken over.  Average your temperatures over a few years, and you have one trend, average over a few hundred years, you have another, over a few thousand, another still.  So it is a messy business.  And to make matters worse, we have no temperature records at all except for the most recent centuries.  A lack of thermometers, and earlier still, a lack of humans, over most of the life of the planet means that we guess at past temperatures using proxies, such as tree-rings (since one of many things influencing tree growth is temperature), isotope ratios in ice cores (since this ratio depends on the air temperature at the time of capture), and numerous other items such as fossils or pollen found in earth cores (since it may be possible to tie some of them to temperature bounds).  Ancient documents and carvings permit speculation about harvest times, and major weather-related events such as floods and droughts.  Archeological digs  reveal details about diets and buildings, and geological explorations reveal previous sea levels, and the movements of continents.

On the really big picture, covering millions of years, we know (or think we do) that the planet was mostly ice-free at the poles.  The relatively short periods when there are 'permanent' icecaps are known as Ice Ages.  We are in one right now.

During Ice Ages, which can last many hundreds of thousands of years, there are warm spells known as Interglacial Periods, or just Interglacials.  These are shown as the purple blips in this temperature reconstruction from ice cores, spanning more than 400,000 years:
Source: (6).

During these interglacials, the ice cover disappears every summer in the temperature zones, such as most of North America, and Northern Europe.  We humans thrive in such areas during interglacials, since we can grow crops, and not be displaced by inconvenient ice sheets.  There is some evidence that the previous interglacial was warmer than our one (7).

Let us now home-in on the last 5,000 years:
Source: (8).

We can see that on this big picture, we are in a cooling trend in what may well be near the end of our interglacial period.  Superimposed on this trend, are many appreciable excursions, many of which are associated with clear effects on human settlements and civilisations.

Now let us home in on the past 1000 years or so.
The global Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age are shown clearly on the temperature reconstruction using by the IPCC in 1990-2001.  There are hundreds of studies of the Medieval Warm Period showing up in many places across the globe -  see Jo Nova's report here (9).  However, it was not politically convenient for the IPCC to have such a period warmer than our own.  In 2001-2003, they replaced it with the infamous 'hockey-stick' plot also shown in the diagram below, in blue.  The dismal story of how this artefact was created and jealously guarded for years, is vividly told in Montford's book, The Hockey Stick Illusion (10).  It is not an edifying tale, but it is well worth reading for insight into the unscientific attitudes and methods of the small core of alarmists whose temperature reconstructions were so gratefully adopted by the IPCC.

 Source: (11).

We have been on a gentle warming trend pulling out of the Little Ice Age in the 19th and 20th centuries at overall rates of around 0.6 to 0.7C per century in estimated global average temperature, with shorter-term periods of more rapid warming, or of cooling, superimposed in approximately 30-year long spells.  These can be seen on the next graphic, constructed using Hadley Centre data (12) to demonstrate the striking similarity in warming/cooling cycles in the 19th and 20th centuries, despite, of course, the large differences in ambient CO2 levels between them.

Source: (12).

But what of real temperatures, as opposed to reconstructions or constructed 'global averages'?  The longest temperature record using thermometers is the Central England Temperature (CET) set, which extends back to the 17th century.  The Czech physicist Lubos Motl has stepped through this set year by year, calculating the overall temperature trend for the previous 30 years at each step (13).  He found nothing unusual about these trends in the 20th century:

'In the late 17th and early 18th century, there was clearly a much longer period when the 30-year trends were higher than the recent ones. There is nothing exceptional about the recent era. Because I don't want to waste time with the creation of confusing descriptions of the x-axis, let me list the ten 30-year intervals with the fastest warming trends:


1691 - 1720, 5.039 °C/century 1978 - 2007, 5.038 °C/century 1977 - 2006, 4.95 °C/century
1690 - 1719, 4.754 °C/century       1979 - 2008, 4.705 °C/century 1688 - 1717, 4.7 °C/century
1692 - 1721, 4.642 °C/century       1694 - 1723, 4.524 °C/century 1689 - 1718, 4.446 °C/century
1687 - 1716, 4.333 °C/century


You see, the early 18th century actually wins: even when you calculate the trends over the "sufficient" 30 years, the trend was faster than it is in the most recent 30 years. By the way, the most recent 1980-2009 tri-decade didn't get to the top 10 results at all; if you care, it was at the 13th place.  You can also see that the local trends are substantially faster than the global trends: that's because the global variations are reduced by the averaging over the globe. '

This helps confirm that nothing at all unusual has been observed in temperatures in modern times.  Nothing unusual.  Nothing untoward.  Nothing to get alarmed about.  The same is true of other climate measures such as rainfall, storm intensities and frequencies, sea surface temperatures, and polar ice fluctuations.  The alarms of the alarmists are going off only in their computers, and not in the world outside.

So what can we say about the future?  If we naively project the cooling/warming cycles alone, we can expect a cooling phase for the next 20 to 30 years or so, superimposed on a continuing slow warming, as shown in this diagram:
Source: (14).  The red dot shows where we are just now.


So where do the forecasts of 2C or more rises (some say 8C or more) come from?  They come from computer models within which CO2 is given a more dramatic role by the insertion of a positive feedback parameter to amplify its effects (a feedback not observed in practice, and not even plausible given the relative stability of our climate on the big scale despite major disturbances such as solar dimming, and, incidentally, periods of far far higher ambient levels of CO2).  This imagined feedback is needed to produce alarm, since it is widely accepted that CO2 on its own has only a very modest effect, say a few tenths of a degree rise from a doubling of CO2 levels [see Update at foot of this post].  Others of course dispute whether this is even credible, since the so-called 'greenhouse effect' is neither important nor required to explain why greenhouses get hot.  It is a totally inappropriate phrase that deserves to be discarded.  Other physicists have posited that increasing CO2 will actually tend to cause a modest reduction in temperatures by changing the density of the atmosphere, an atmosphere in which compression and expansion of air are important determinants of temperature.  For some recent criticisms of the naive greenhouse theory promoted as gospel by the IPCC, see (15) to (22) incl.  A review of climate forecasts from several sources is given here: (23).

What of the immediate future?  The reality is we do not know what the temperatures will be at the end of the 21st century.  This is currently way beyond our forecasting skills.  We can only speculate, and in so speculating, a certain 'modest stillness and humility' would be in order.  Not the tiger-like roars we have had to endure from the loudhailers of the IPCC.  We would also benefit from further increases in ambient CO2 levels, since they would make possible a substantial increase in agricultural productivity.  Overall, on the shaky grounds of past performance, we can 'expect' a temperature change by the end of the century of about 1C.  Most people would be better off with a continued gentle warming, and if CO2 levels continue to grow, we'd all benefit from a substantial boost to plant growth rates.  All in all, nothing there to get scared about.  No need to frighten the children.

But we can be sure climate variation will continue, and it is sensible to review our abilities to cope with a spread in temperatures and other measures of climate.  In general, the more wealth, the more advanced low-pollution technologies, and the more robustness to face challenges.  One of the most heartening features of the late 20th and early 21st century has been the greater economic freedoms in India and China which have led to a dramatic rise in standards of living where massive poverty had once seemed all but inevitable.  They are benefitting greatly from burning coal and oil, just as we did and continue to so do, even as we deploy cleaner sources such as nuclear reactors, and hydro.  It seems more than likely that coal-fired power stations will increase in number, and in efficiency, before eventually disappearing as better technologies are developed.  We do not benefit from self-hating neuroses about our industrial past and future. Furthermore, we do no good anywhere by transferring these ill-founded climate neuroses on to the next generations.  The promotion of facile alarmism into our schools is threatening to depress not only educational standards, but more importantly, the spirits of the young, with lurid tales of a dangerous future due to the very technologies which have brought us so much progress..

Finally, the bit in our 'sentence du jour' about 'very significant action' begs the question of whether we have the first clue about how to direct climate in specific directions, even in principle, and even if so, whether we have the resources to do it.

References

(1) An apparent group called 'Mothers Against Climate Change' had a website pushing climate alarmism, 'green energy', and carbon trading on to schoolkids and their parents.  The site is now defunct, but their statement of reasons why they wanted to get their children worrying about climate is reproduced here: http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2010/06/schools-low-carbon-day-concerned.html
(2) The NYT quotes from: http://www.saveportland.com/Climate/index.html
(3) More quotes and timelines from 1890 onwards: http://anhonestclimatedebate.wordpress.com/2009/08/02/climate-change-alarmism-timelin/
(4) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242011/DAVID-ROSE-The-mini-ice-age-starts-here.html#ixzz0rsqGy94C
(5) Overview of journalists and climate variations over the past hundred years or so (' It would be difficult for the media to do a worse job with climate change coverage.'): http://www.businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2006/fireandice/fireandice.asp
(6) Chart showing interglacials in context: http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c013480b280e3970c-pi
(7) Comments on paper showing last interglacial warmer than ours in Antarctica ('Unless you are a young Earth creationist, it should be obvious to you that the paper shows that comments that 4 °C or even 2 °C of warming would be threatening for life don't seem compatible with the reconstructions of the climate.'): http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/06/antarctica-4-c-warmer-130000-years-ago.html
(8) Chart showing last 5,000 years or so: http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c01310f4ff7a6970c-pi
(9) A useful reference to the hundreds of studies confirming the MWP as being global, along with a critique of the hockey stick ('These maps and graphs make it clear just how brazen the fraud of the Hockey Stick is.'): http://joannenova.com.au/2009/12/fraudulent-hockey-sticks-and-hidden-data/
(10) 'The Hockey Stick Illusion', by A.W. Montford, Stacey International, 2010.
(11) A composite chart showing the infamous hockey-stick plot, and a schematic previously used by the IPCC which more accurately reflects the existence of the MWP: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/10/when-the-ipcc-disappeared-the-medieval-warm-period/
(12) From the site Global Warming Science: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/SixtyYearCycle.htm
(13) Central England Temperatures summarised by warming and cooling spells, with link to CET data: http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/01/warming-trends-in-england-from-1659.html
(14)  Future temperatures and IPCC projections, graphic due to Dr Syun Akasofu: http://joannenova.com.au/2009/11/a-simple-proof-that-global-warming-is-not-manmade/
15) Challenging the naive blackbody approach, a paper by Hertzberg, Schreuder and Siddons notes that the Moon, for example, has mass and can store heat.  Unlike a blackbody.  Linked to here: http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=5770
(16) A meteorologist asks us to get anthropogenic CO2 into perspective ('The atmospheric greenhouse effect is a flea on the back of an oceanic elephant and the influence of CO2 but a microbe on the back of the flea and the influence of anthropogenic CO2 but a molecule on the back of the microbe.'): http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=1562
(17) Bootstrapping energy through the magic of re-radiation, and other curiosities discussed here: http://claesjohnson.blogspot.com/
(18) Violating 1st law of thermodynamics: http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=5903&linkbox=true&position=3
(19) Saturation of radiative role of CO2: http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/06/physicist-co2-greenhouse-effect-is.html
(20) CO2 as a response to temperature variations, not a driver of them: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/09/a-study-the-temperature-rise-has-caused-the-co2-increase-not-the-other-way-around/
(21) Rebuttal of greenhouse effect ('While it is now more-or-less accepted that greenhouses don’t work this way, what isn’t so well known is that neither does the Greenhouse Effect.'): http://www.countingcats.com/?p=4745/
(22)Not in our type of atmosphere ('On a global scale, however, there cannot be any direct water vapor feedback mechanism, working against the total energy balance requirement of the system.'): http://climatology.suite101.com/article.cfm/no-greenhouse-effect-in-semi-transparent-atmospheres
(23) An overview of a selection of temperature projections here ('The CO2 based models appear to be overestimating the amount of warming.'): http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_TemperatureProjections.htm

Update (30 June 2010).   I think my claim that 'since it is widely accepted that CO2 on its own has only a very modest effect, say a few tenths of a degree rise from a doubling of CO2 levels.' is overstating things a bit given the widespread promotion of higher values.  I should have said 'around 0.5 to 1.5C' instead to encompass more of the published claims.  The broad argument for about 1C without positive feedback, and less than 1C with negative feedbacks is given by Lindzen, e.g. in his recent address to the Heartland conference, and in a Wall Street Journal article last year:



(14a) ('The satellite records of outgoing heat radiation show that the climate is dominated by negative feedbacks and that the response to doubled and even quadrupled CO2 would be minimal.'): http://www.heartland.org/full/24841/Climate_Alarm_What_We_Are_Up_Against_and_What_to_Do.html

(14b) Slightly more technical ( ('You now have some idea of why I think there won't be much warming due to CO2' ): http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/18/dr-richard-lindzens-heartland-2010-keynote-address/

I have also fixed a few typos in the original post.

Note added 7 March 2012.  In the 4th last paragraph above I state 'They come from computer models within which CO2 is given a more dramatic role by the insertion of a positive feedback parameter to amplify its effects'.  This year I have come across claims in blog comments that this positive feedback is not inserted into these computer models, but rather emerges from them as a result rather than as an input.  While I do not find this convincing, I mention it here in case there is real substance to this claim.  Since such feedback, and its consequences in the models such as a hotspot in the troposphere, has not actually been observed, this possible lack of a deliberate feedback parameter (or coding) is actually worse news for the plausibility of the models since it would then be a harder flaw  to locate and correct.

Monday 28 June 2010

Schools' Low Carbon Day gone not with a bang but a whimper

Good news! The mysterious website pushing Schools' Low Carbon Day has self-destructed.

No pictures. No stories from successful events. No quotes from enlightened children.

Only this (my italics):

'Low Carbon Day has now happened!

Thank you for taking part.

We don't have the resources to continue the site anymore but please email info@cooltheworld.com if you need anything.'


See: http://www.lowcarbonday.com/

Perhaps someone made some screen captures, or can dig the old pages out of a web archive somewhere?

I reproduced their foundation 'thinking' here: http://climatelessons.blogspot.com/2010/06/schools-low-carbon-day-concerned.html

I shall continue with my promised Fisking of these sorry sentences, on the grounds that similarly shallow thinking may be being used elsewhere to justify who knows what harmful nonsense.