National Post Denial Series

[styky]

<a href=http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/comment/story.html?id=73f39d90-644f-4117-880c-204c3a4fe4a3>THE DENIER SERIES - PART XXX VII
Why melting of ice sheets 'is impossible'</a>

[Brown envelope]

This was on the boob tube last night.

http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/denialmachine/video.html

I guess the irony of CBC showing this was lost on their execs.

[styky]

<a href=http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/comment/story.html?id=bfeddc8e-90d7-4f54-9ca7-1f56fadc7c2b>THE DENIER SERIES - PART XXX VIII

Climate change by Jupiter
Published: Saturday, November 10, 2007</a>

[styky]

<a href=http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/comment/story.html?id=0808f510-8577-44c4-bd13-af843c4d55c6>THE DENIER SERIES - PART XXX IX

Green hero slammed as climate heretic</a>

[CdnRepublican]

Since 1998 the world has gotten colder on average.

Gee, mid Nov. and already snow here.

Last October it snowed in Detroit.

Worst winter on record in parts of Ok. Tx. B.C. and Alta. last year.

Worst winter ever in 2003 for Russia and Eastern Europe - thousands died.

2004 Moscow had snow in June [i was there].

Antarctica at its largest size in recent memory.

Greenlands warmest year was 1941.

Between '45 and '75 the earth cooled as Co2 went up.

Etc.

GW is an intelligence test. There is no point in talking to those who drink kool-aid, buy tshirts and belong to the cult. No point at all. Just fight their hysteria.

[WereYouAware]

32,000 deniers
That's the number of scientists who are outraged by the Kyoto Protocol's corruption of science
Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post Published: Saturday, May 17, 2008

Question: How many scientists does it take to establish that a consensus does not exist on global warming? The quest to establish that the science is not settled on climate change began before most people had even heard of global warming.
The year was 1992 and the United Nations was about to hold its Earth Summit in Rio. It was billed as -- and was -- the greatest environmental and political assemblage in human history. Delegations came from 178 nations -- virtually every nation in the world -- including 118 heads of state or government and 7,000 diplomatic bureaucrats. The world's environmental groups came too -- they sent some 30,000 representatives from every corner of the world to Rio. To report all this, 7,000 journalists converged on Rio to cover the event, and relay to the publics of the world that global warming and other environmental insults were threatening the planet with catastrophe.
In February of that year, in an attempt to head off the whirlwind that the conference would unleash, 47 scientists signed a "Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming," decrying "the unsupported assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from the burning of fossil fuels and requires immediate action."
To a scientist in search of truth, 47 is an impressive number, especially if those 47 dissenters include many of the world's most eminent scientists. To the environmentalists, politicians, press at Rio, their own overwhelming numbers made the 47 seem irrelevant.
Knowing this, a larger petition effort was undertaken, known as the Heidelberg Appeal, and released to the public at the Earth Summit. By the summit's end, 425 scientists and other intellectual leaders had signed the appeal.
These scientists -- mere hundreds -- also mattered for nought in the face of the tens of thousands assembled at Rio. The Heidelberg Appeal was blown away and never obtained prominence, even though the organizers persisted over the years to ultimately obtain some 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners.
The earnest effort to demonstrate the absence of a consensus continued with the Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change -- an attempt to counter the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Its 150-odd signatories also counted for nought. As did the Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship in 2000, signed by more than 1,500 clergy, theologians, religious leaders, scientists, academics and policy experts concerned about the harm that Kyoto could inflict on the world's poor.
Then came the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine's Petition Project of 2001, which far surpassed all previous efforts and by all rights should have settled the issue of whether the science was settled on climate change. To establish that the effort was bona fide, and not spawned by kooks on the fringes of science, as global warming advocates often label the skeptics, the effort was spearheaded by Dr. Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences and of Rockefeller University, and as reputable as they come.
The Oregon petition garnered an astounding 17,800 signatures, a number all the more astounding because of the unequivocal stance that these scientists took: Not only did they dispute that there was convincing evidence of harm from carbon dioxide emissions, they asserted that Kyoto itself would harm the global environment because "increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant
and animal environments of the Earth."
The petition drew media attention, but little of it was for revealing to the world that an extraordinary number of scientists hold views on global warming diametrically opposite to those they are expected to hold. Instead, the press focussed on presumed flaws that critics found in the petition. Some claimed the petition was riddled with duplicate names. They were no duplicates, just different scientists with the same name. Some claimed the petition had phonies. There was only one phony: Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, planted by a Greenpeace organization to discredit the petition and soon removed. Other names that seemed to be phony -- such as Michael Fox, the actor, and Perry Mason, the fictional lawyer in a TV series -- were actually bona fide scientists, properly credentialled.

[free_life2]

Beware the next ice age.

[icemachine]

Yup here's a guy who knows the causes of Climate Change - Dr. Earl Aagaard, of Pacific Union College's biology department, wrote "The Importance of the Intelligent Design Theory for Seventh-day Adventists." He invites us to vaccinate ourselves against all seductive materialistic influences and to make it abundantly clear that we accept the Bible account of Creation as true.

[Peter O'Donnell]

There is a third possibility in this debate, which is not very often heard above the shouting.

Logically speaking, the debate is not exhausted by these two possibilities:

-- the earth will warm up due to human activity
-- the earth will remain in its current climate or cool down because natural variation is dominant

There are other possible outcomes.

The two hemispheres are not always in balance with regard to glaciation. The recent trends suggest that southern ice cover is increasing while northern ice cover is decreasing. This imbalance seemed to ramp up in 2007, with the southern hemisphere recording a maximum (since 1970 at least) in overall sea ice extent, and the northern hemisphere seeing a large ice-free anomaly in the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia and Alaska.

That ice-free anomaly seemed to feed back a large dose of snow and, against the expectations of the AGW lobby, the Canadian arctic then became locked into a severe deep freeze that spread to Greenland, depressed the jet stream and led to the heavy snowfalls in eastern Canada as well as much of Asia where the same process unfolded.

Getting back to the pure logic of the situation, a third option (and there are others) would include natural warming of the northern hemisphere combined with cooling of the southern hemisphere.

One reason for this is that perihelion, the closest approach of the earth to the Sun, is slowly advancing into January, placing it ever closer to the heart of northern winter and southern summer. This reduces the heating deficit over the far northern latitudes in Jan-Feb, and increases the deficit over the Antarctic in their deepest portion of southern winter.

Personally, I think the most likely outcome is that natural variation will eventually remove the ice pack from the Arctic Ocean, a circumstance that might lead to larger accumulations of land ice for a time because of enhanced snowfall. This could take place over the next 30-50 years, but I don't think it would have much to do with greenhouse gases.

Because of this third option, a lot of the current debate may be meaningless, because what we should probably be planning for is rising sea levels that we can't reasonably expect to lower. The rise won't be catastrophic if only the sea ice melts, in fact it will be rather subtle. But we can't count on the land ice remaining totally in place in Greenland, it would be reasonable to expect a gradual meltdown of one third of the ice there over two or three centuries.

Part of the reasoning for this third option is simply long-term -- we are not yet at the peak of the inter-glacial in astronomical cycles and with the perihelion advancing further into January, the odds are stacked in favour of milder northern winters.

Human activity clearly has some effect, probably not as great as the AGW lobby says, but I do not wish to underestimate the unrelated sooty deposition effect if China and other countries in southeast Asia continue to belch out massive clouds of air pollution. This effect changes the albedo of the arctic ice and snow to allow for faster melting without a rise in temperatures, although that can follow due to the absence of ice or snow.

Widespread ideas that it is now getting colder and will get even colder are somewhat premature, in my view, although I don't entirely dismiss them. A lot of the debate is very anecdotal, but it remains the case that the arctic ice margin is shrinking north in the sector between Labrador and Novaya Zemlya, and now we are seeing recent fluctuations on the other side of the basin as well.

I take the Buddhist approach to all this, it is what it is, and I don't think anyone should be too set in their expectations of what it will become in the near future. Climate has many feedback processes that can quickly reverse short-term trends. As a species, we would be smart to consider that the climate change science is at best a very weak approximation of a more complex reality, and at worst a complete deception. But that doesn't mean that the opposite will actually happen.

Continued references to background theories that "explain everything" are also overblown, there may be promising leads buried in these theories, but reality in climate is a very complex business and we have to accept that the process may in fact be quasi-random ... long-term prediction may be no more sensible than trying to "model" winning numbers in the 6-49 lottery. People keep searching, but efforts usually end up losing accuracy after the built-in seasonal persistence or moving anomaly patterns already observable die out to white noise.

[BlawBlaw]

My personal opinion is that human activity has an effect on the global climate but that effect is and remains [i]de minimus[i]. That is, whatever effect we have on the climate as humans is vastly overborne by the natural processes, particularly geological and solar.

Climate change has become 4 parts religion and one part science in that many premises and conclusions remain articles of faith rather than being "proven" in any usual sense of the word. David Suzuki has no formal training in climatology, and neither does your typical second year liberal arts major university student who takes it upon themselves to advocate for the cause. Al Gore had no formal training in climatology although he has significant financia interests in companies that would benefit from acceptance of human-caused-climate-change.

I have no formal training in climatology. I do have formal training in logic and argumentation which is why I merely blink curiously at climate change advocates; they simply don't make a lot of sense.

[styky]

The Deniers: Our spotless sun
Posted: May 31, 2008, 3:07 AM by NP Editor
Lawrence Solomon, The Deniers, Climate change, global warming, carbon dioxide, sunspots
With the debate focused on a warming Earth, the icy consequences of a cooler future have not been considered


<center>By Lawrence Solomon</center>
You probably haven’t heard much of Solar Cycle 24, the current cycle that our sun has entered, and I hope you don’t. If Solar Cycle 24 becomes a household term, your lifestyle could be taking a dramatic turn for the worse. That of your children and their children could fare worse still, say some scientists, because Solar Cycle 24 could mark a time of profound long-term change in the climate. As put by geophysicist Philip Chapman, a former NASA astronaut-scientist and former president of the National Space Society, “It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age.”
The sun, of late, is remarkably free of eruptions: It has lost its spots. By this point in the solar cycle, sunspots would ordinarily have been present in goodly numbers. Today’s spotlessness — what alarms Dr. Chapman and others — may be an anomaly of some kind, and the sun may soon revert to form. But if it doesn’t – and with each passing day, the speculation in the scientific community grows that it will not – we could be entering a new epoch that few would welcome.
Sunspots have been well documented throughout human history, starting in the fourth century BC, with written descriptions by Gan De, a Chinese astronomer. In 1128, an English monk, John of Worcester, was the first person known to have drawn sunspots, and after the telescope’s arrival in the early 1600s, observations and drawings became commonplace, including by such luminaries as Galileo Galilei. Then, to the astonishment of astronomers, they saw the sunspots diminish and die out altogether.
This was the case during the Little Ice Age, a period starting in the 15th or 16th century and lasting centuries, says NASA’s Goddard Space Centre, which links the absence of sunspots to the cold that then descended on Earth. During the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, a time known as the Maunder Minimum (named after English astronomer Edward Maunder), astronomers saw only about 50 sunspots over a 30-year period, less than one half of 1% of the sunspots that would normally have been expected. Other Minimums — times of low sunspot activity — also corresponded to times of unusual cold.
The consequences of the Little Ice Age, because they occurred in relatively recent times, have come down to us through literature and the arts as well as from historians and scientists, government and business records. When Shakespeare wrote of “lawn as white as driven snow,” he had first-hand experience – Europe was bitterly cold in his day, a sharp contrast to the very warm weather that preceded his birth. During the Little Ice Age, the River Thames froze over, the Dutch developed the ice skate and the great artists of the day learned to love a new genre: the winter landscape.
In what had been a warm Europe , adaptations were not all happy: Growing seasons in England and Continental Europe generally became short and unreliable, which led to shortages and famine. These hardships were nothing compared to the more northerly countries: Glaciers advanced rapidly in Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia and North America, making vast tracts of land uninhabitable. The Arctic pack ice extended so far south that several reports describe Eskimos landing their kayaks in Scotland. Finland’s population fell by one-third, Iceland’s by half, the Viking colonies in Greenland were abandoned altogether, as were many Inuit communities. The cold in North America spread so far south that, in the winter of 1780, New York Harbor froze, enabling people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island.
In the same way that the Earth shivered when sunspots disappeared, the Earth warmed when sunspot activity became pronounced. The warm period about 1000 years ago known as the Medieval Warm Period — a time of bounty in which grapes grew in England and Greenland was colonized — also was a time of high sunspot activity, called the Medieval Maximum. Since 1900, Earth has experienced what astronomers call “the Modern Maximum” — the 20th century has again been a time of high sunspot activity.
But the 1900s are gone, along with the high temperatures that accompanied them. The last 10 years have seen no increase in temperatures — they reached a plateau and then remained there — and the last year saw a precipitous decline. How much lower and for how long the temperatures will fall, if at all, no one yet knows — the science is far from settled on what drives climate.
But many are watching the sun for answers, and for good reason. Several renowned scientists have been predicting for some time that the world could enter a period of cooling right around now, with consequences that could be dire. “The next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do,” believes Dr. Chapman. “There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the U.S. and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it.”
We are now at the beginning of Solar Cycle 24, so named because it is the 24th consecutive cycle that astronomers have listed, starting with the first cycle that began in March, 1755, and ended in June, 1766. Each cycle lasts an average of approximately 11 years; each is marked by sunspots that first erupt in the mid latitudes of the sun, and then, over the course of the 11 years, erupt progressively toward the sun’s equator; each is marked by a change in the polarity of the sun’s hemispheres; each changes the temperature on Earth in ways that humans don’t fully understand, but cannot in all honesty deny.
<center>Financial Post </center>
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com


Photo: The spotless Sun, as it appeared yesterday at 12:48 p.m. The Sun’s spotlessness is giving rise to speculation of another Little Ice Age.
(Solarcycle24.com)

<a href=http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/05/30/the-deniers-our-spotless-sun.aspx>source w/links in article</a>

[CdnRepublican]

In the same way that the Earth shivered when sunspots disappeared, the Earth warmed when sunspot activity became pronounced. The warm period about 1000 years ago known as the Medieval Warm Period — a time of bounty in which grapes grew in England and Greenland was colonized — also was a time of high sunspot activity, called the Medieval Maximum. Since 1900, Earth has experienced what astronomers call “the Modern Maximum” — the 20th century has again been a time of high sunspot activity.

None of the UN-eco fascist models take into account the sun, sunspot activity, cloud cover, or oceanic warming/cooling.

How can any sensible person take models such as these seriously.

It would be like modeling a hockey game outcome and ignoring the star players; the goaltender; and the time.

[styky]

If you go to the link you'll find all the story links or you can go back through this thread.


<a href=http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/10/02/meet-the-deniers.aspx>Meet the Deniers</a>
In Saturday's National Post, James Cowan writes about Lord Christopher Monckton and Lord Nigel Lawson, two men who consider themselves skeptics about manmade climate change.

This isn't the first time we've covered this topic. Check out our long-running series The Deniers, interviews and profiles of many other climate change skeptics.

The National Post's sensational series on scientists who buck the conventional wisdom on climate science. Written by Lawrence Solomon, the series profiles the ideas and the scientists who do not share the “consensus” United Nations’ theories on climate change and global warming. Read them all.

Here is the series so far:

Statistics needed -- The Deniers Part I
Warming is real -- and has benefits -- The Deniers Part II
The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science -- The Deniers Part III
Polar scientists on thin ice -- The Deniers Part IV
The original denier: into the cold -- The Deniers Part V
The sun moves climate change -- The Deniers Part VI
Will the sun cool us? -- The Deniers Part VII
The limits of predictability -- The Deniers Part VIII
Look to Mars for the truth on global warming -- The Deniers Part IX
Limited role for C02 -- the Deniers Part X


\End the chill -- The Deniers Part XI
Clouded research -- The Deniers Part XII
Allegre's second thoughts -- The Deniers XIII
The heat's in the sun -- The Deniers XIV
Unsettled Science -- The Deniers XV
Bitten by the IPCC -- The Deniers XVI
Little ice age is still within us -- The Deniers XVII
Fighting climate 'fluff' -- The Deniers XVIII
Science, not politics -- The Deniers XIX
Gore's guru disagreed -- The Deniers XX

The ice-core man -- The Deniers XXI
Some restraint in Rome -- The Deniers XXII
Discounting logic -- The Deniers XXIII
Dire forecasts aren't new -- The Deniers XXIV
They call this a consensus? -- Part XXV
NASA chief Michael Griffin silenced - Part XXVI
Forget warming - beware the new ice age -- Part XXVII
Open mind sees climate clearly -- Part XXVIII
Models trump measurements -- Part XXIX
What global warming, Australian skeptic asks -- Part XXX

In the eye of the storm of global warming -- Part XXXI
From chaos, coherence -- Part XXXII
The aerosol man -- Part XXXIII
The Hot Trend is cool yachts -- Part XXXIV
You still need your parka in Antarctica -- Part XXXV
IPCC too blinkered and corrupt to save -- Part XXXVI
Why melting of ice sheets 'is impossible' -- Part XXXVII
Climate change by Jupiter -- Part XXXVIII (Financial Post)