Planet Gore:

I must protest as unfair the headline writer's recasting of the sentiments as "global warming, 'just hysteria'?". In truth, global warming is much, much more. It is a ready excuse for whatever afflicts or impedes you, an opportunity for the media to outdo past lows, a wonderful vehicle comfortably seating every exiled adherent of last century's failed "inevitability", and a very lucrative pony for rent-seeking business to ride to riches for making nothing. And it made a bunch of government weathermen briefly into rock stars no longer needing to beg for their annual appropriation of (taxpayer) debt-financed lucre, but whose area of interest actually now picks our pockets for the same amount we send, I submit, far more soberly, to the National Cancer Institute every year.

The Faithful Heritic:

[Reid] Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for current headlines. “What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps?”

We recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and agricultural water-management structures had been discovered emerging from the ice, seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of years. Bryson interrupts excitedly.

“A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never went,” he says. “There used to be less ice than now. It’s just getting back to normal.”

Try it yourself (via London Fog)! President Hitler's plans of subsidize airplanes, burning coal, cutting takes, building nukes and telling the foreign-types to go to hell didn't work out so well in the simulation (see end comments though)

And that's where the simulation falls of the rails -- Europe never voted against any Hitlers.

You've been warned Alberta. Pay the price for Canada to make it's Kyoto commitments or there'll be consequences:

by Charles Adler

As I apply my ink stained fingers to the trusty keyboard, it's been more than 72 hours since Mark Holland, the Liberal Natural Resources critic, belched out the most threatening words I have heard in a political conversation in years.

[...] When I asked Holland whether a Liberal government under Stephane Dion would shut down or limit oil sands production if necessary to meet Kyoto targets, his response was, "Exactly." He then went on to say "I think what you are going to see is we're going to say you cannot exploit that resource, basically go in there and pump it out as fast as you can to give it to the Americans and sell out our national interests and blow apart our emissions targets."

I also heard that Dion is going to ban the use of small jet planes by individuals such as Al Gore, you know, since we're facing the end of the world and everyone -- great and small -- have to make sacrifices. Ha ha, just kidding: that would hurt Quebec, which isn't the point of the exercise.

Mike at The London Fog (inner quote is Richard Gwyn of the Toronto Star) writes:

Let's consider the question of why, quite suddenly, Canadians should overwhelmingly view global warming as an issue that must be dealt with right away, even if this involves some sacrifices.

Richard Gwyn seeks to explain the bizarre, Pet Rock-style appeal of Global Warming. "Science" agrees that it is happening. But Gwyn notes that Canadians account for only 2% of The Gas Formerly Known As C02, and could benefit in many ways from a general warming. And yet, says Gwyn, Canadians are eager to take up the dagger of sacrifice. Sure, there's the Al Gore film -- I would just die to watch that 100 years from now, when the high priests are trying to sell "climate stagnation", or some such.

There's more than a few things worth noting here:

• Mike underestimates the frequencies of these scares: global cooling, Y2K, peak oil, overpopulation, species collapse, ultraviolet zapping, global warming.... They come at least once a decade and people are about sincere and worked up about them as they are about GW. We'll be laughing at Al Gore in a decade's time (well, not me: I'm laughing now), but unfortunately we'll just be on to something else which will require the same solutions -- strip privileges from the middle class, reign in economic freedom, concentrate more power in the hands of technocrats. The solution is always the same.
• Since Harper's election a year ago, CBC radio has been doing a program on GW about once a day. Obviously someone there is agitating for senate posting or maybe even a Governor General's position as a reward for faithful lapdog service. The Globe and Mail and Toronto Star haven't been far behind, and are certainly working hard these days to catch up.
• Don't underestimate to the religious component about GW: if you don't believe in something, you'll believe in anything. Never in my life have I been lectured so often about science by people who don't have the first clue about it. And like all little cult religions, the most important accessory is the hairshirt.
• Canadians are eager to "take up the dagger of sacrifice" although they personally don't plan to lie under the business end of the knife -- they've got the perfect victim in mind. But pay $3.00/litre for gas? What are you crazy? Ban SUVs? But I live on a hill, it's very tricky to get up there you know!

But what about the alarmists? The ones who argue that the only way to save the planet is to stop driving, stop flying and stop consuming? Prof. Jaccard (who told me that he himself tries to live with a “small material footprint”) says: “Environmental activists are using climate change to wrap around their message about how they want humans to behave differently.”

I.e. they got that old time religion.

CBS:

The world's global average temperature has risen about 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit from 1901 to 2005. The two warmest years on record for the world were 2005 and 1998.

What they mean to say is that the warmest year on record was 1998; that doesn't sound very impressive though.

A few excerpts from a Lawrence Solomon article from last Friday's National Post about Hendrik Tennekes:

When Frans Nieuwstadt, a distinguished Dutch meteorologist, engineer, editor and professor, died in 2005, his obituary recounted seminal events in his accomplished life. Among the experiences worthy of mention: Nieuwstadt had studied under the celebrated professor, Henk Tennekes, and along with other colleagues had been instrumental in convincing Tennekes to return to Europe in 1978 to become director of research at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and later chairman of the august Scientific Advisory Committee of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

That's just to set up who he is. We know that only experts are allowed to talk about meteorology and the climate now.

Tennekes, more than any other individual, challenged the models that climate scientists were constructing, saying models could never replicate the complexity of the real world. What was needed was a different approach to science, one that recognized inherent limits in such scientific tools and aimed less to regulate the environment.

In a landmark speech to the American Meteorological Society in 1986, he argued that meteorology was poised to be the first of the post- Newtonian sciences because it was "at odds with the mainstream of the scientific enterprise of the last 300 years. One goal of science is to control nature, but we know we cannot control the weather. The goal of science is prediction, but we stand in front of the limits of predictability."

Meteorology, in other words, would be the first scientific discipline to hit this brick wall. As Tennekes argued, modern theory "unequivocally predicts that no amount of improvement in the quality of the observation network or in the power of computers will improve the average useful forecast range by more than a few days."

[...] Climate modelling is the basis of forecasts of climate change. Yet this modelling, Tennekes believes, has little utility, and "there is no chance at all that the physical sciences can produce a universally accepted scientific basis for policy measures concerning climate change." Moreover, he states: "There exists no sound theoretical framework for climate predictability studies."

Needless to say, this sort of talk didn't endear him to his colleagues.

QOTD via Proud to be Canadian:

I’ve seen countless geology-department professors bury their integrity as they morph from respectable paleontologists or geologists from other specialties, to “climate change” experts, then watch the research funding roll in.

Environment Canada:

St. John's and vicinity

3:49 PM NST Saturday 6 January 2007
Wind warning for
St. John's and vicinity issued

West winds gusting to 120 km/h will develop Sunday morning.

This is a warning that potentially damaging winds are expected in these regions. Monitor weather conditions..Listen for updated statements.

A cold front will sweep across Newfoundland on Sunday. Strong west winds behind the front will gust to 120 km/h over portions of the south coast and east coasts.

They weren't kidding.

This started as a comment on Mark's blog regarding the suitabilty of An Inconvenient Truth as classroom material. If you'd like to followup or comment on this post, please go there (be polite or I won't invite you to post on Mark's blog again!)

I believe the "Chicken Little" is an apt phrase to use because it _is_ folk wisdom. Consider: Global Warming, Global Cooling/Ice Age, The Energy Crisis, Y2K, Everyone to get cancer by 50 due to "toxins", Peak Oil, Global Famine by the 1980s, Critical Resource Shortages by the 1980s and so forth. That's not to say that there aren't global crisii; for example, there's WWII, just that there's a lot more predictions of disasters than actual disasters. However, fairly predictably every 5 years or so there will be a prediction of disaster and a call for action. Also predictably, the solution will always be along the same lines: power and choice must be stripped from the citizen and invested in a small class wise men who will make wise choices to steer humanity through the shoals.

But let's talk about AGW, i.e. Anthropogenic -- human caused -- Global Warming. I think I can fairly non controversially describe this as follows (in broad strokes):

1. Humanity is pulling a lever (i.e. primarily C02 emissions) that is predictably making the climate hotter and/or more unstable
2. If we stop pulling that level, the climate will predictably improve
3. The present value of the costs of AGW (- the benefits) is greater than the PV of stopping pulling the lever

There's two aspects that we can examine AGW and the case for doing something about it: either through modeling or though the historical record.

The climate is an unstable chaotic system, with a rough ice-age to ice-age periodicity of about 10,000 years. Our knowledge of how the atmosphere (and the ocean) works is _very_ incomplete; our present knowledge of the _state_ of the atmosphere and ocean is likewise incredibly crappy: we simply don't measure that many data points. Our knowledge of their _past_ state is even more spotty and goes back at most a century. Then add in other factors such as extraterrestrial effects such as solar energy and the effects of radiation and solar energy output (and composition) and where do we end up? AGW proponents claim a model that can predict the climate to within a few tenths of a degree over the course of a century? Sorry, models of chaotic systems with poor data inputs and incomplete system knowledge _do not_ have this sort of predictive power.

So then we look at the historical record. Now, one expects that when one is making the claim that significantly restructuring is needed in our economy/society (see point #3 above, the PV(future expenses - future benefits) > PV(restructuring costs)) one would expect the people making the claims would put their best foot forward. What do we get? The hockey stick is wrong, and almost certainly fraudulent; polar bears aren't drowning, they're at near peak populations; various glaciers being pointed to melted long before atmospheric CO2 attributable to humans was significant; and so forth. I've documented much of this on my blog over the last 5 years. (This looks good too, though I haven't gone through it in depth).

So what's after that. Lomberg gets physically attacked while giving presentations, ad-homenim attacks are considered debate, people like me are compare to Nazis (the point of the phrase "GW denier"), Nuremberg trials are proposed. Is this science? Truth?   No, it's the voice of goons.

I'm one of these weirdos that believes that science is understandable and access able to all, and furthermore, that science isn't about Truth but about methodology. When I'm told to lie back and think of England, excuse me, lie back and accept without question what selected scientists are saying, I know I'm in the realm of politics, not science and certainly not Truth.

Wow (and follow all the links on that page):

For me the most amazing aspect of the repeated misrepresentation of science related to disasters and climate change is not that political advocates look to cherry pick science or go beyond the state of the science. What is most amazing is that in the face of incontrovertible and repeated misrepresentation that the overwhelming majority of scientists, the media, and responsible advocacy groups have remained mute (with a few notable exceptions such as Hans von Storch).

More than anything else, even the misrepresentations themselves, the collective willingness to overlook bad policy arguments unsupported (or even contradicted) by the current state of science while at the same time trumpeting the importance of scientific consensus is evidence of the comprehensive and pathological politicization of science in the policy debate over global warming. If climate scientists ever wonder why they are looked upon with suspicion among some people in society, they need look no further in their willingness to compromise their own intellectual standards in policy debate on the issue of disasters and climate change.

He gives it 2 1/5 stars and according to Kathy, "the hate mail is already flowing in". Didn't Rick get the memo that speaking our betters speaking truth to power is a lecture, not a dialog: no talking back!

The film is basically a filmed version of a lecture Gore claims he claims he’s given over a thousand times since 1989. Near the end of the film, after dire warnings about our addiction to oil and the disastrous effect that we’re having on the environment, he lists all the places where he’s given the lecture; even if you didn’t count his stint as Bill Clinton’s number two, it’s an impressive record of jet fuel and gasoline consumption.

No doubt many viewers might have an occasion to wince about their own energy consumption habits, but they needn’t fear; just as Gore’s personal hydrocarbon tally gets a pass, his film will let you imagine that you can become part of the solution to the global warming crisis by making only the most reasonable sort of sacrifices, while offloading the greater burden onto governments and corporations.

It would require much more space than a movie review to consider Gore’s science. He claims a universal consensus of scientists on manmade climate change that doesn’t exist, and relies on questionable anecdotes to illustrate its effects, such as the one about polar bears drowning as they lose their ice floe habitats – and illustrates it with a cloying cartoon. The lynchpin of his lecture is a graph that shows the earth’s temperature rising exponentially with the levels of greenhouse gases; even if this now-famous graphic weren’t in dispute, he neglects to mention that levels of atmospheric hydrogen have tended to echo temperature, not the other way around.

Mike has a lengthy post about Al Gore and Global Warming. Of particular interest is this paragraph:

We learned this lesson again the hard way in the US when we were warned that the levees were about to break in New Orleans because of Hurricane Katrina and those warnings were ignored. Later, a bipartisan group of members of Congress, chaired by Representative Tom Davis, a Republican from Virginia, said in an official report: "The White House failed to act on the massive amounts of information at its disposal."

This bipartisan group added that a "blinding lack of situational awareness and disjointed decision-making needlessly compounded and prolonged Katrina's horror".

Actually, the White House was warned that the levees were going to overtop, not break. This is the difference between putting too much water in the bathtub (a few wet towels) and having the bottom falling out of it (tens of thousands of dollars of damage); a person incapable of grasping the difference should probably refrain from lecturing the world on scientific consensus. Like the the melting glaciers of Kilimanjaro (which attempts to pin on C02 an effect that was happening long before), drowning polar bears, melting glaciers and so forth, note the bait and switch to try to sell the unsellable. If there was a strong, or even defensible, case for AGW there'd be no for Gore and his flock of AGW Hysterics to do this.

One of the stories that has been poping up during the last couple of years to reinforce AGW hysteria is that polar bears are drowning and/or going extinct. Although I've heard that polar bears are at all time high populations, it was difficult to find a decent expert reference. Until now (in the Toronto Star of all places!):

Silly to predict their demise

 

Tim Flannery is one of Australia's best-known scientists and authors. That doesn't mean what he says is correct or accurate. That was clearly demonstrated when he recently ventured into the subject of climate change and polar bears. Climate change is threatening to drive polar bears into extinction within 25 years, according to Flannery. That is a startling conclusion and certainly is a surprising revelation to the polar bear researchers who work here and to the people who live here. We really had no idea.

 

The evidence for climate change effects on polar bears described by Flannery is incorrect. He says polar bears typically gave birth to triplets, but now they usually have just one cub. That is wrong. All research and traditional knowledge shows that triplets, though they do occur, are very infrequent and are by no means typical. Polar bears generally have two cubs — sometimes three and sometimes one. He says the bears' weaning time has risen to 18 months from 12. That is wrong.

 

The weaning period has not changed. Polar bears worldwide have a three-year reproduction cycle, except for one part of Hudson Bay for a period in the mid-1980s when the cycle was shorter.

 

One polar bear population (western Hudson Bay) has declined since the 1980s and the reproductive success of females in that area seems to have decreased. We are not certain why, but it appears that ecological conditions in the mid-1980s were exceptionally good.

 

Climate change is having an effect on the west Hudson population of polar bears, but really, there is no need to panic. Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present.

 

It is noteworthy that the neighbouring population of southern Hudson Bay does not appear to have declined, and another southern population (Davis Strait) may actually be over-abundant.

 

I understand that people who do not live in the north generally have difficulty grasping the concept of too many polar bears in an area. People who live here have a pretty good grasp of what that is like to have too many polar bears around.

 

This complexity is why so many people find the truth less entertaining than a good story. It is entirely appropriate to be concerned about climate change, but it is just silly to predict the demise of polar bears in 25 years based on media-assisted hysteria.

Dr. Mitchell Taylor, Polar Bear Biologist,Department of the Environment, Government of Nunavut, Igloolik, Nunavut 

As an aside, note that second-last highlighted sentence; polar bears aren't cuddly playtoys living in harmony with Gaia, they're a thousand pounds of kill-anything-that-movies machines. Update: case in point.

It's raining on the north side of the system and snowing on the south. My assumption is the land is much colder than the water, so precipatation over the lake is rain and as it moves south it cools and becomes snow.

More Global Warming skepticism:

I am a Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University where I have been employed since 1961. I have been performing meteorological research, teaching, and forecasting for the last 53 years. I have participated in many tropical field experiments over the last 50 years. These experiments were directed to the study of cumulus convection, condensation heating, evaporation cooling, sea-air energy-moisture exchange, hurricane formation, etc. These are topics of crucial importance to the physics of global temperature change. But they are not well understood by the human-induced global warming proponents. The incorrect handling of these moist processes is responsible for the major flaws in the human-induced global warming scenarios.

Gray goes on to list 10 reasons why we're in a state of global warming hysteria. However, I think he missed the most import one: GW is the latest answer to the question "why should power be invested to a small group experts ... like me". The 20th century is a catalogue of -isms, each supposedly better than free markets where power is distributed amongst everyone.

"Vindication for skeptics":

One of the most decorated French geophysicists has converted from a believer in manmade catastrophic global warming to a climate skeptic. This latest defector from the global warming camp caps a year in which numerous scientific studies have bolstered the claims of climate skeptics. Scientific studies that debunk the dire predictions of human-caused global warming have continued to accumulate and many believe the new science is shattering the media-promoted scientific “consensus” on climate alarmism.

Claude Allegre, a former government official and an active member of France’s Socialist Party, wrote an editorial on September 21, 2006 in the French newspaper L'Express titled “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (For English Translation, click here) detailing his newfound skepticism about manmade global warming. See here Allegre wrote that the “cause of climate change remains unknown” and pointed out that Kilimanjaro is not losing snow due to global warming, but to local land use and precipitation changes. Allegre also pointed out that studies show that Antarctic snowfall rate has been stable over the past 30 years and the continent is actually gaining ice.

Kilimanjaro, rising ocean levels, drowning polar bears, disappearing glaciers, and so forth -- if these are the best pieces of evidence being put forward for AGW, why don't they actually support the case?

I'm at YYT.