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Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

Al gore better lay in a good supply of antacids . . . . this one is gonna really rile up his guts.

Scientific American goes Full Denialist



http://tinyurl.com/27eaook

 
Thucydides said:
A 29 page thread with technologies, facts figures and "real" numbers exists here.

The reason most of these technologies are not used is because they are extremely marginal, or have giant technical issues to overcome (or both). Unless they have an effective marketing team that can extract government subsidies, they will probably always remain marginal or niche players, much like wind energy actually is.

Building or rebuilding nuclear powerplants is the only practical and effective "Green" solution in both senses of the word, but a powerful lobby exists to oppose nuclear energy in any form (even new inherently safe systems powered by Thorium salts, or "pebble" based high temperature gas cooled reactors). For the present, I would strongly advocate conservation and efficiency measures, mostly for you, the consumer and taxpayer, to save money and protect your wealth.

I'm sure I had read somewhere that nuclear energy also requires heavy government subsidies.  It was an article in the National Post on the conservative argument against nuclear power.

Otherwise, I quite agree.  It is the cleanest and most efficient form of energy available with the smallest footprint.
 
RangerRay said:
I'm sure I had read somewhere that nuclear energy also requires heavy government subsidies.  It was an article in the National Post on the conservative argument against nuclear power.

Otherwise, I quite agree.  It is the cleanest and most efficient form of energy available with the smallest footprint.

With the current coal and natural gas prices in North America nothing else is competitive. Not wind. Not solar. Not all the other schemes. All only become viable with subsidies some of which are very long term. An example would be Ontario Power Authority's Standard Offer Program for Solar PV Energy which pays 42 cents a kw/h which is a huge subsidy and will be given out for 20 years.
 
saw this at SDA earlier today . . .

$535 million and no Green Jobs . . .  Obama channeling his inner Dulton maybe ?

Hot Air:

The Obama administration made Solyndra, a solar-power manufacturing company, a symbol of its “green jobs” push in the Porkulus program. Barack Obama himself toured the factory, as did Barbara Boxer. Taxpayers ended up sinking $535 million into building Solyndra a new facility that promised to add jobs in the clean-energy sector. Instead, now that Solyndra has its new facility, it’s closing another older facility and will lay off dozens of employees and cancel the contracts for 150 more contract workers:

Solyndra Inc., the high-flying solar panel maker once touted by President Barack Obama as a model for a green energy future, said Wednesday it has scuttled its factory expansion in Fremont, a move that will stop the company’s plans to hire 1,000 workers.

Solyndra said it will also close an existing factory in the East Bay. That will leave the company with one Fremont factory, a new plant visible from Interstate 880.

All this for only $535,000,000 taxpayer dollars :)

http://tinyurl.com/2aojd6b
 
Climate alarmists show their true colours:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100064423/on-the-anniversary-of-climategate-the-watermelons-show-their-true-colours/

James Delingpole
James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including Welcome To Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future And It Doesn't Work, How To Be Right, and the Coward series of WWII adventure novels. His website is www.jamesdelingpole.com.

On the anniversary of Climategate the Watermelons show their true colours

By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: November 19th, 2010
886 Comments Comment on this article

Green on the outside, red on the inside....

Watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside. This is the theme of my forthcoming book on the controlling,  poisonously misanthropic and aggressively socialistic instincts of the modern environmental movement. So how very generous that two of that movement’s leading lights should have chosen the anniversary of Climategate to prove my point entirely.

The first comes courtesy of German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer who has openly admitted what some of us have been saying for some time: that “Climate Change” has nothing to do with man’s modest and thoroughly unthreatening contribution to global mean temperatures, nor even with the plight of baby polar bears so sweet you could almost hug them if you didn’t know they’d take your arm off in a trice. All it is, really, is a Marxist exercise in minority grievance-mongering and wealth redistribution on a global scale.
Or, as Edenhoffer so helpfully puts it it Neue Zurcher Zeitung: (H/T Global Warming Policy Foundation):

First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.

And if that sounds sinister, wait till you hear what our old friend Nicholas “Lord” Stern has gone and done. Nicky, you’ll remember, was the funny little World Banker responsible for possibly the most hysterically overblown policy document in the entire history of the great Global Climate Change Scam: the infamous Stern Review which recommended, inter alia, that we all go veggie in order to spare the planet from hideous boiling man-made meltdown.

Now, “Lord” Stern (of Brentford, no less) has gone one better. He has got it into his dear little head that he has the power, influence and importance to dictate terms to the US economy. If America doesn’t toe the line on CO2 emissions reductions, he has threatened, then it could jolly well find itself the victim of an international trade boycott.

I would give you the link to the Times article in which Ben Webster’s interview appears, but sadly it’s hidden behind a paywall. Still, Watts Up With That has the gist:

Lord Stern said that Europe and the Far East (sic) were forging ahead of the US in controlling emissions and switching to low carbon sources of energy. They would not tolerate having their industries undermined by American competitors that had not paid for their emissions. “If you are charging properly for carbon and other people are not, you will take that into account,” he said. “Many of the more forward-looking people in the US are thinking about this. If they see a danger on the trade front to US exports that could influence public discussion.”

Asked what type of US products could face restrictions, Lord Stern said: “Aircraft, clearly, some cars, machine tools — it’s not simply what’s in the capital good, it’s what kind of processes the capital good is facilitating.”

What a mellifluous turn of phrase the man has: “what kind of processes the capital good is facilitating.” Doesn’t it just make you SO happy to think that this veritable Gerald Manley Hopkins among economists has the ear of several G20 leaders?

But I don’t believe a word of his threat, do you? Not, at least, in so far as the Far East is concerned. Can anyone seriously imagine China or Japan or any of the Asian tiger economies severing trade links with the US in order to make a political point about a non-existent environmental problem based on “science” which they all know is a crock. For China, for the BRICs economies generally in fact, AGW is just a handy pretext for milking the Western nations of what money they can. It’s certainly not an issue over which they’d choose to lose money on a point of principle.

Where the European Union is concerned, on the other hand, Lord Stern’s toys-out-of-pram scenario looks frighteningly plausible. Frightening, that is, for those of us unfortunate enough to live in the EU and to be one of the US’s bigger trading partners; not frightening at all for the US, though, for whom if we carry on going in the direction we’re heading at the moment the EU will soon be a sclerotic, socialistic irrelevance.

Here’s my prediction: with the exception of crazed socialist relicts like California (which really ought to be allowed to secede and take its proper place on the North American continent as a kind of comedy pariah state), the US is going to grow increasingly bored with the Great Global Warming Scam. Cap and trade will go the way of the failed Chicago carbon exchange – and with it all prospects of a binding global agreement on carbon emissions.

But that’s only the beginning of the fun. Thanks to the glorious mid-terms, the House is about to fill up with red meat conservatives who know “Climate Change” is a crock and will be hoping to secure some kind of Climate Nuremberg. Then, when Obama goes in 2012, the whole AGW issue will as far as America is concerned be dead in the water.

Not in Europe, unfortunately. Increasingly, the EUSSR will look as irrelevant as the old USSR, burdened with entirely unnecessary eco-taxes and regulations, destroyed by the watermelons of the green movement. Sad, isn’t it?
 
Experts claim 2006 climate report plagiarized
Article Link
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

An influential 2006 congressional report that raised questions about the validity of global warming research was partly based on material copied from textbooks, Wikipedia and the writings of one of the scientists criticized in the report, plagiarism experts say.

Review of the 91-page report by three experts contacted by USA TODAY found repeated instances of passages lifted word for word and what appear to be thinly disguised paraphrases.

The charges of plagiarism don't negate one of the basic premises of the report — that climate scientists used poor statistics in two widely noted papers.

But the allegations come as some in Congress call for more investigations of climate scientists like the one that produced the Wegman report.

"It kind of undermines the credibility of your work criticizing others' integrity when you don't conform to the basic rules of scholarship," Virginia Tech plagiarism expert Skip Garner says.

U.N. CONFERENCE:Negotiators give talks another try

Led by George Mason University statistician Edward Wegman, the 2006 report criticized the statistics and scholarship of scientists who found the last century the warmest in 1,000 years.

"The report was integral to congressional hearings about climate scientists," says Aaron Huertas of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. "And it preceded a lot of conspiratorial thinking polluting the public debate today about climate scientists."

But in March, climate scientist Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts asked GMU, based in Fairfax, Va., to investigate "clear plagiarism" of one of his textbooks.

Bradley says he learned of the copying from a year-long analysis of the Wegman report made by retired computer scientist John Mashey of Portola Valley, Calif. Mashey's analysis concludes that 35 of the report's 91 pages "are mostly plagiarized text, but often injected with errors, bias and changes of meaning." Copying others' text or ideas without crediting them violates universities' standards, according to Liz Wager of the London-based Committee on Publication Ethics.

Allegations under review

"The matter is under investigation," says GMU spokesman Dan Walsch by e-mail. In a phone interview, Wegman said he could not comment at the university's request. In an earlier e-mail Wegman sent to Joseph Kunc of the University of Southern California, however, he called the plagiarism charges "wild conclusions that have nothing to do with reality."

The plagiarism experts queried by USA TODAY disagree after viewing the Wegman report:

• "Actually fairly shocking," says Cornell physicist Paul Ginsparg by e-mail. "My own preliminary appraisal would be 'guilty as charged.' "


More on link
 
Watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside. This is the theme of my forthcoming book on the controlling,  poisonously misanthropic and aggressively socialistic instincts of the modern environmental movement. So how very generous that two of that movement’s leading lights should have chosen the anniversary of Climategate to prove my point entirely.

Conservative commentators comparing everyone who doesn't agree with them to some sort of insidious Communist infiltration group shows some pretty frank colours on its own. It reeks of McCarthyism  - political opportunism, paranoia about what cannot be seen and cannot really be proved and an "enemy" that is created from thin air.

NASA disagrees with you? They're co-opted.
The scientific organisations (ie, national academies) with the largest membership, and most accountable internal operations? Questionable.
Governments (Environment Canada, etc.) ? Questionable.
Polls showing the vast majority of scientists? Questionable.

Not questionable are pajamas media, the individual scientists quoted or select journalistic pieces. It makes this discussion a pointless self-congradulaory talk-shop with assertions backed by circular logic.
 
jhk87 said:
Conservative commentators comparing everyone who doesn't agree with them to some sort of insidious Communist infiltration group shows some pretty frank colours on its own. It reeks of McCarthyism  - political opportunism, paranoia about what cannot be seen and cannot really be proved and an "enemy" that is created from thin air.

No worse than the lefty loonie tunes that want to kill everyone that isn't willing to forsake technology and slide back to the years before fire. Or the ones that want me to pay India (one of the major producers of green house gases) carbon credits for driving my car ::)

Global warming will cease being a problem when the scientists that proclaim it and Al Gore retire with their ill gotten gains. It's a self licking ice cream cone.
 
jhk87 said:
Thanks for making my point.

You had a point?  His comparison to a watermelon was 100% bang on. The environmental movement is no longer about the environment but about income redistribution.
 
You're right. Vague allegories linking anything to some ongoing Communist plot aren't bombastic and unproductive at all.
 
jhk87 said:
You're right. Vague allegories linking anything to some ongoing Communist plot aren't bombastic and unproductive at all.

Thanks for critiquing and clarifying the point(s) of your own posts.
 
My posts have generally espoused the problems with trusting blogs and heavily biased media organisation versus credible and accountable scientific bodies, not some sort of "plot." To be fair, I did mention Joe McC, but it was supposed to be illustrative of the witch-hunt mindset that many sceptics seem to have fallen into. Simply writing off those who disagree with you (regardless of experience and training) as "red" or conspiratorial, especially when it's regarding large organisations with extensive accountability mechanisms, is folly. Simply shouting louder doesn't make one correct.

Besides, the idea that it's all about income redistribution is more than a bit misleading. There are many approaches being advocated  - from improved industrial design to cap and trade (which I disagree with) to carbon capping and pollution taxing, and to some, (intentional) geoengineering, hardly the red commie plot that would see the UN take over the world.
 
jhk87 said:
My posts have generally espoused the problems with trusting blogs and heavily biased media organisation versus credible and accountable scientific bodies, not some sort of "plot." To be fair, I did mention Joe McC, but it was supposed to be illustrative of the witch-hunt mindset that many sceptics seem to have fallen into. Simply writing off those who disagree with you (regardless of experience and training) as "red" or conspiratorial, especially when it's regarding large organisations with extensive accountability mechanisms, is folly. Simply shouting louder doesn't make one correct.

Besides, the idea that it's all about income redistribution is more than a bit misleading. There are many approaches being advocated  - from improved industrial design to cap and trade (which I disagree with) to carbon capping and pollution taxing, and to some, (intentional) geoengineering, hardly the red commie plot that would see the UN take over the world.

If it is truly about the environment and not income redistribution by whatever means, then why are some countries exempt from carbon penalties? Is their carbon burning more efficiently and cleaner than ours?

If you want to address pollution then I'm all for it. If you want me to pay for "carbon credits" so China can build more coal fired hydro plants kindly go jump in the nearest lake.
 
If you want allegory...

On one hand we have the witch hunt (skeptics), and on the other the inquisition (zealots).

In the end it will be the common man that gets burned at the stake.
 
Forgive me, but weren't both the "witch hunts" and the "inquisition" creatures of the State?

It seems to me that currently many states are on the side of the hunters and inquisitors in pursuit of the heretic deniers.
 
True enough, but I was making the point that each side of the argument was as bad as the other, and that the guy in the middle will ultimately loose.

Just the same, I agree with your observation that it's we heretics that are the ones being hunted by the state.
 
Cancún climate change summit: Japan refuses to extend Kyoto protocol
Article Link

Talks threatened with breakdown after forthright Japanese refusal to extend Kyoto emissions commitments

The delicately balanced global climate talks in Cancún suffered a serious setback last night when Japan categorically stated its opposition to extending the Kyoto protocol – the binding international treaty that commits most of the world's richest countries to making emission cuts.

The Kyoto protocol was adopted in Japan in 1997 by major emitting countries, who committed themselves to cut emissions by an average 5% on 1990 figures by 2012.

However the US congress refused to ratify it and remains outside the protocol.

The brief statement, made by Jun Arima, an official in the government's economics trade and industry department, in an open session, was the strongest yet made against the protocol by one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases.

He said: "Japan will not inscribe its target under the Kyoto protocol on any conditions or under any circumstances."

The move came out of the blue for other delegations at the conference.

"For Japan to come out with a statement like that at the beginning of the talks is significant," said one British official. "The forthrightness of the statement took people by surprise."

If it proves to be a new, formal position rather than a negotiating tactic, it could provoke a walk-out by some developing countries and threaten a breakdown in the talks. Last night diplomats were urgently trying to clarify the position.

The move provoked alarm among the G77, the grouping of developing countries who regard the Kyoto protocol as the world's only binding agreement on climate change cuts.


More on link
 
ModlrMike said:
True enough, but I was making the point that each side of the argument was as bad as the other, and that the guy in the middle will ultimately loose.

Just the same, I agree with your observation that it's we heretics that are the ones being hunted by the state.

"Hunted by the state" and "burned at the stake?" I hardly think so. And no-one has really addressed the idea of source self-checks, internal accountability mechanisms, and the "everyone but me is compromised" position being taken by many a sceptic.
 
Given the long term deflationary economy of Japan, opting out of Kyoto was the sensible thing to do. Why burden yourself with extra (and totally unnecessary) costs? When the money is going to be used to either fill the pockets of third world kleptocrats or subsidize foreign competition, then paying Kyoto Danegeld is even stupider. "When you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane".

So now we have two nations opting out, as well as nations like Canada, which only pay lip service (although there are still internal costs to pay as various agencies demand tax dollars for these "causes"). If all goes well, there will be deadlock in Cancun (funny how these conferences take place in posh resorts) and we will be spared the blackmail. Any bets on what the *next* global crisis demanding international intervention and the transfer of billions of dollars of wealth from the West will be?
 
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