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Feb 7 07 1:08 PM
Quote:Sen. Brad Avakian, (D) Washington County, is sponsoring the bill. He said global warming is so important to state policy it's important to have a climatologist as a consultant to the governor. He denied this is targeted personally at Taylor. "Absolutely not," Avakian said, "I've never met Mr. Taylor and if he's got opinions I hope he comes to the hearing and testifies."
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Feb 8 07 10:12 AM
Quote:2. Find something, anything to make themselves depressed.
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Quote:VX, you should talk. You're one of the most depressed people on the board
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Feb 11 07 6:46 PM
Quote:Global Warming HypocrisyBy Henry LambMonday, February 5, 2007The up-tick in global warming propaganda in recent days is to set the stage for the release of the Fourth Assessment Report from the International Panel on Climate Change. Surprise, surprise, the report will say the sky is falling - faster and faster.For people who have watched this process since the beginning, this report, at least the executive summary of the report, is mostly hogwash, word-smithed by policy wonks and media specialists, to scare the gas out of the economy.The First Assessment Report was developed by a fairly balanced group of scientists from around the world, and released in 1990. The report was quite extensive, and dealt primarily with capturing and storing carbon dioxide.The Second Assessment Report was adopted by a fairly balanced group of participating scientists in December, 1995. Then, the lead author of the report, B. D. Santor, acting with the consent of the Co-chair of the Working Group, John Houghton, and with the consent of the Executive Secretary of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, Michael Cutajar - changed the report significantly, without the approval of the scientists.Dr. Freidrich Seitz, President emeritus of Rockefeller University, and former President of the National Academy of Sciences, said:"I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report. Nearly all the changes worked to remove hints of the skepticism with which many scientists regard global warming claims."A hundred distinguished scientists, meeting in Leipzig, Germany, released a joint statement on July 10, 1966 which said:"There is still no scientific consensus on the subject of climate change. On the contrary, most scientists now accept the fact that actual observations from earth satellites show no climate warming whatsoever."From that point forward, any scientist who dared to offer research results that did not affirm the conclusions of the IPCC, has been denied invitations to participate in the IPCC studies, denied funding, and/or denigrated publicly by politically motivated scientists and/or the media. Any scientist who dares express skepticism is at once denounced as a pawn for the oil and coal industry.The opposite is true: advocates of global warming are pawns of the global warming industry. And, indeed, global warming is an industry. In 1996, at the same U.N. meeting at which the Second Assessment Report was released, Mohamed T. El-Ashry, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), released its quarterly report. He told the delegates that his agency had leveraged $462.3 million into $3.2 billion in climate change projects. And that was just the beginning.In the last decade, billions and billions of dollars have been spent by governments and foundations on research and mitigation programs related to global warming. To the endless bureaucracies, recipients of grant awards, and non-government organizations, it is imperative that the global warming hysteria continue - to produce the funding that provides their livelihood. Their incessant hype has convinced many people, including legislators, that ridiculous policies should be enacted to prevent carbon dioxide from reaching the atmosphere.Senator James Inhofe is one of the few in Congress who really knows that the science of climate change is in its infancy, and no one really knows whether human activity has any impact on the climate at all. After all, the earth was warmer during the "Global Medieval Optimum," (1100-1250) when gas-guzzlers didn't exist. The same global warming zealots who manipulated the science to distort the Second (and subsequent) Assessment Reports, reinterpreted the science that has stood for more than a century, to now deny that there was a Global Medieval Optimum.This study, produced by Michael E. Mann and Raymond S. Bradley in 1999, was shown to be flawed in a subsequent study by Drs. Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas. Global warming advocates extol the Mann study and decry the Soon/Baliunas study. Real science welcomes conflict as a challenge, and evidence that further study is required.Global warming hypocrits, such as the Weather Channel's Heidi Cullen, who wants the American Meteorological Society to decertify any weatherman who doesn't toe the global warming line, continues to disparage scientists and others who dare to disagree with her/their conclusions.The Second Assessment Report was released in 1996 to instill fear, and stir up support for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. This current round of global warming hype, including the Fourth Assessment Report, is designed to instill fear, and stir up support for forcing the U.S. to join theKyoto crowd in adopting energy restrictions that will have no effect on the climate, but will severely impact the economy.U.S. policy makers, and the public, would do well to reject the propaganda from the global warming hypocrites.
Feb 11 07 7:01 PM
Quote:An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate changeNigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the orthodoxy must be challengedWhen politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change due for publication in a few months time. They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.The small print explains very likely as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britains top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latterday Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers. And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heatwaves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as this winters billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages. The early arrival of migrant birds in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adlie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean.So one awkward question you can ask, when youre forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is Why is east Antarctica getting colder? It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. While youre at it, you might inquire whether Gordon Brown will give you a refund if its confirmed that global warming has stopped. The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.That levelling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago.Climate history and related archeology give solid support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century episode, or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a long string of similar events produced by a hyperactive sun, of which the last was the Medieval Warming.The Chinese population doubled then, while in Europe the Vikings and cathedral-builders prospered. Fascinating relics of earlier episodes come from the Swiss Alps, with the rediscovery in 2003 of a long-forgotten pass used intermittently whenever the world was warm.What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to solar activity and going on long before human industry was a possible factor? Less than nothing. The 2007 Summary for Policymakers boasts of cutting in half a very small contribution by the sun to climate change conceded in a 2001 report.Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate. The suns brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism.He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The suns magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier.The only trouble with Svensmarks idea apart from its being politically incorrect was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.Thanks to having written The Manic Sun, a book about Svensmarks initial discovery published in 1997, I have been privileged to be on the inside track for reporting his struggles and successes since then. The outcome is a second book, The Chilling Stars, co-authored by the two of us and published next week by Icon books. We are not exaggerating, we believe, when we subtitle it A new theory of climate change.Where does all that leave the impact of greenhouse gases? Their effects are likely to be a good deal less than advertised, but nobody can really say until the implications of the new theory of climate change are more fully worked out.The reappraisal starts with Antarctica, where those contradictory temperature trends are directly predicted by Svensmarks scenario, because the snow there is whiter than the cloud-tops. Meanwhile humility in face of Natures marvels seems more appropriate than arrogant assertions that we can forecast and even control a climate ruled by the sun and the stars.
Feb 11 07 9:02 PM
Quote:Sun's fickle heart may leave us cold * 25 January 2007 * From New Scientist Print Edition. * Stuart ClarkThere's a dimmer switch inside the sun that causes its brightness to rise and fall on timescales of around 100,000 years - exactly the same period as between ice ages on Earth. So says a physicist who has created a computer model of our star's core.Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, modelled the effect of temperature fluctuations in the sun's interior. According to the standard view, the temperature of the sun's core is held constant by the opposing pressures of gravity and nuclear fusion. However, Ehrlich believed that slight variations should be possible.He took as his starting point the work of Attila Grandpierre of the Konkoly Observatory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2005, Grandpierre and a collaborator, Gbor goston, calculated that magnetic fields in the sun's core could produce small instabilities in the solar plasma. These instabilities would induce localised oscillations in temperature.Ehrlich's model shows that whilst most of these oscillations cancel each other out, some reinforce one another and become long-lived temperature variations. The favoured frequencies allow the sun's core temperature to oscillate around its average temperature of 13.6 million kelvin in cycles lasting either 100,000 or 41,000 years. Ehrlich says that random interactions within the sun's magnetic field could flip the fluctuations from one cycle length to the other.These two timescales are instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with Earth's ice ages: for the past million years, ice ages have occurred roughly every 100,000 years. Before that, they occurred roughly every 41,000 years.Most scientists believe that the ice ages are the result of subtle changes in Earth's orbit, known as the Milankovitch cycles. One such cycle describes the way Earth's orbit gradually changes shape from a circle to a slight ellipse and back again roughly every 100,000 years. The theory says this alters the amount of solar radiation that Earth receives, triggering the ice ages. However, a persistent problem with this theory has been its inability to explain why the ice ages changed frequency a million years ago."In Milankovitch, there is certainly no good idea why the frequency should change from one to another," says Neil Edwards, a climatologist at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. Nor is the transition problem the only one the Milankovitch theory faces. Ehrlich and other critics claim that the temperature variations caused by Milankovitch cycles are simply not big enough to drive ice ages.However, Edwards believes the small changes in solar heating produced by Milankovitch cycles are then amplified by feedback mechanisms on Earth. For example, if sea ice begins to form because of a slight cooling, carbon dioxide that would otherwise have found its way into the atmosphere as part of the carbon cycle is locked into the ice. That weakens the greenhouse effect and Earth grows even colder.According to Edwards, there is no lack of such mechanisms. "If you add their effects together, there is more than enough feedback to make Milankovitch work," he says. "The problem now is identifying which mechanisms are at work." This is why scientists like Edwards are not yet ready to give up on the current theory. "Milankovitch cycles give us ice ages roughly when we observe them to happen. We can calculate where we are in the cycle and compare it with observation," he says. "I can't see any way of testing [Ehrlich's] idea to see where we are in the temperature oscillation."Ehrlich concedes this. "If there is a way to test this theory on the sun, I can't think of one that is practical," he says. That's because variation over 41,000 to 100,000 years is too gradual to be observed. However, there may be a way to test it in other stars: red dwarfs. Their cores are much smaller than that of the sun, and so Ehrlich believes that the oscillation periods could be short enough to be observed. He has yet to calculate the precise period or the extent of variation in brightness to be expected (www.arxiv.org/astro-ph/0701117).Nigel Weiss, a solar physicist at the University of Cambridge, is far from convinced. He describes Ehrlich's claims as "utterly implausible". Ehrlich counters that Weiss's opinion is based on the standard solar model, which fails to take into account the magnetic instabilities that cause the temperature fluctuations.From issue 2588 of New Scientist magazine, 25 January 2007, page 12
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