WITH GLOBAL WARMING CAME THE GRAVY TRAINS
GLOBAL WARMING WAS NOT A BIG DEAL UNTIL THE MONEY SHOWED UP
“Skeptics advancing alternative explanations (hypotheses) for climate variability represent the way the researcher community used to operate, before politics, policy outcomes, and billions of dollars got involved”. Roy Spencer. Ph. D. Climatologist former NASA Scientist.
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The Australian Government appointed Tim Flannery, later to become Australian of the year in 2007, as its Climate Commissioner, who predicted that the nation’s dams would never be full again and major Australian cities would need desalination plants to cater for our water needs. In a later report, he said “climate change cannot be ruled out” as a factor in recent flooding rains, which led to some of those dams overflowing. The apparent contradiction accompanied predictions that heatwaves, made worse by concrete, asphalt and buildings, will cause
deaths and violence in western Sydney. But the most spectacular of his dud predictions came in March 2011, “even if we cut emissions today temperatures are not likely to drop for about a thousand years”
And later, “Before I was the Chief Climate Commissioner, I expressed my own views and some of those have been debated back and forth over time, but when you’re working with a team of experts, we have with the Climate Commission, you can be absolutely rigorous, you can have direct access to the best information”. (IPCC).?
Roy Spencer. Ph. D. Climatologist Author former NASA Scientist. A moderate skeptic who acknowledges global warming but is not convinced that it is caused by Carbon Dioxide. Below are excerpts from his website.. .
Unlike the global marching army of climate researchers the IPCC has enlisted, we do not walk in lockstep. We are willing to admit, “we don’t really know”, rather than mislead people with phrases like, “the warming we see is consistent with an increase in CO2?, and then have the public think that means, “we have determined, through our extensive research into all the possibilities, that the warming cannot be due to anything but CO2.
The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that is the only way they can get their computerized climate models to produce the observed warming is with anthropogenic (human-caused) pollution. But they’re not going to find something if they don’t search for it. More than one scientist has asked me, “What else COULD it be?” Well, the answer to that takes a little digging… and as I show, one doesn’t have to dig very far.
But first let’s examine the basics of why so many scientists think global warming is man made. Earth’s atmosphere contains natural greenhouse gases (mostly water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane) which act to keep the lower layers of the atmosphere warmer than they otherwise would be without those gases. Greenhouse gases trap infrared radiation — the radiant heat energy that the Earth naturally emits to outer space in response to solar heating. Mankind’s burning of fossil fuels (mostly coal, petroleum, and natural gas) releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and this is believed to be enhancing the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect. As of 2008, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 40% to 45% higher than it was before the start of the industrial revolution in the 1800?s.
It is interesting to note that, even though carbon dioxide is necessary for life on Earth to exist, there is precious little of it in Earth’s atmosphere. As of 2008, only 39 out of every 100,000 molecules of air were CO2, and it will take mankind’s CO2 emissions 5 more years to increase that number by 1, to 40.
The “Holy Grail”: Climate Sensitivity Figuring out how much past warming is due to mankind, and how much more we can expect in the future, depends upon something called “climate sensitivity”. This is the temperature response of the Earth to a given amount of ‘radiactive forcing’, of which there are two kinds: a change in either the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth, or in the infrared energy the Earth emits to outer space.
The ‘consensus’ of opinion is that the Earth’s climate sensitivity is quite high, and so warming of about 0.25 deg. C to 0.5 deg. C (about 0.5 deg. F to 0.9 deg. F) every 10 years can be expected for as long as mankind continues to use fossil fuels as our primary source of energy. NASA’s James Hansen claims that climate sensitivity is very high, and that we have already put too much extra CO2 in the atmosphere. Presumably this is why he and Al Gore are campaigning for a moratorium on the construction of any more coal-fired power plants in the U.S.
You would think that we’d know the Earth’s ‘climate sensitivity’ by now, but it has been surprisingly difficult to determine. How atmospheric processes like clouds and precipitation systems respond to warming is critical, as they are either amplifying the warming, or reducing it. This website currently concentrates on the response of clouds to warming, an issue which I am now convinced the scientific community has totally misinterpreted when they have measured natural, year-to-year fluctuations in the climate system. As a result of that confusion, they have the mistaken belief that climate sensitivity is high, when in fact the satellite evidence suggests climate sensitivity is low.
The case for natural climate change I also present an analysis of the Pacific Decadale Oscillation which shows that most climate change might well be the result of….the climate system itself! Because small, chaotic fluctuations in atmospheric and oceanic circulation systems can cause small changes in global average cloudiness, this is all that is necessary to cause climate change. You don’t need the sun, or any other ‘external’ influence (although these are also possible…but for now I’ll let others work on that). It is simply what the climate system does. This is actually quite easy for meteorologists to believe, since we understand how complex weather processes are. Your local TV meteorologist is probably a closet ‘skeptic’ regarding mankind’s influence on climate.
Climate change — it happens, with or without our help.
Geoff Gough Off to Seoul
According to the leader newspaper, Manningham Council have agreed to contribute $3,000 towards the cost of Councillor Geoff Gough’s trip to a government sustainability conference in Seoul, South Korea between April 8-12. CEO, Joe Carbone said the five day program will discuss low carbon dioxide development, resilience and adaption, biodiversity, Eco-mobility or environmentally- transport options, green urban economy and smart urban infrastructure. The Councillor’s attendance would enable council to be exposed to new approaches and technologies to respond to climate change and promote sustainability.
Critical Decade (Click to open)
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In May 2012, Federal Climate Commissioner Professor Lesley Hughes said western Sydney is getting hotter and drier than the rest of Sydney……HELL!
“If we compare western Sydney with the rest of Sydney, the number of hot days in western Sydney used to be three times as many as eastern Sydney, and now it’s four times,” she said.
“So what we are seeing is not only rising temperatures but some parts of the country are getting disproportionally hotter.”
The report, part of the Commission’s series titled “The Critical Decade”, predicts by century’s end that sea-levels will rise by 1.1 metres, putting more than 40,000 New South Wales homes and 250 kilometres of highway at risk.
Global Greening, due to the increase in carbon dioxide, could be the next problem facing the planet with our forests, the ones we have not destroyed, growing at an alarming rate with our crops, orchards and market gardens thriving and producing more food for our increasing population.
The consensus figure was a yearly average of 3.0 billion tons of carbon dioxide caused by deforestation. Three billion tons of anything is a lot, but it’s hard to grasp just how much — particularly when it’s tons of CO2, which we don’t have any everyday experience in weighing. One way to look at it is that the average U.S. car emits about 5 tons of CO2 a year from the tailpipe, so three billion tons is the equivalent of 600 million cars — about twice as many as there are in the whole United States.
“God has cared for the trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools”..John Muir
A good read, I’m sure this debate will go on for a long time.
I hope we are going to challenge Cr Gough, to share his findings with us?
Will he come back and propose more spending?
Maybe you could ask the Transdev bus company – I expect the largest public fleet in the council, whether have they any programs of alternate fuels, or green house gas reduction programs? Does the council have any programs they have tried in the past, and what outcomes where measured? For that matter what does their fleet consist of, trucks? Corporate cars?
How can you trust council bureaucrats when it comes to environmental issues? Why is council sending Geoff Gough to the Seoul sustainable conference, other than it being just another junket, to discuss the latest methods of obtaining a lower carbon dioxide footprint etc.etc. when its own track record shows it is not interested in delivering a basic green energy plan?
In December 2007 Manningham Council released a statement to the Manningham Leader newspaper that the Doncaster Hill would become one of Melbourne’s greenest villages. A grand plan to top buildings with wind turbines and solar panels, build its own electricity grid etc. Seven years later there are no wind turbines or solar panels on any of its high rise buildings.
Hank
I think it is unfair to suggest that Geoff Gough regards his trip to the climate change conference as a junket. We should wait and see what he has to say when he returns home. I dare say Manningham Council would expect to receive a full report and a presentation from him .
The last thing Geoff Gough needs to be doing in Seoul is to over indulge in food and drink which is why I don’t think it is a junket trip.
Ivan
Like so many things, global warming has become a political football and we know how politicians will latch on to something that is vote catching which they then have to go through with. So they created a carbon tax which was just another means of generating something for people to do which didn’t cure anything in the end. What should be mentioned is that once you start tinkering with these things there is a cost to the environment for the tinkering. The most obvious example is generating electricity by the use of nuclear energy instead of using fossil fuels like coal, which has contributed to our present day prosperity, because we have been brainwashed into believing that higher amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere precedes higher temperatures when the opposite has been proven to be true.
The release of emails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia onto the web gave rise to Climategate. The documents and emails exposed the fraudulent activity of a coterie of paleoclimate scientists, showing how they tortured data to create the notorious hockey stick graph used to promote the myth of man-made global warming. They subverted the scientific method, the peer review process and bullied scientific journals to suppress evidence contradicting their assertions.
Global temperatures have always been chaotic a phenomena of nature.
Carbon Dioxide is a natural gas, not a pollutant as some of our politicians are claiming, it’s surplus in the atmosphere is due to deforestation and overpopulation which go hand in hand. If man can clean up car exhaust emissions thanks to strong policies and penalties how about some strong policies to control population and preserve our forests.
The auto industry has been pushed to innovate and engineer a greener, cleaner car. According to industry research, a typical new car today is more than 99 percent cleaner burning than its 1960s counterpart. This improvement saves consumers money at the pump as well as health care expenses and lives due to reduced pollution loads. And a new generation of hybrid and electric cars is driving automotive efficiency to even newer heights.
Whether or not you believe in man made global warming you have to be concerned about the way climate science has been conducted, especially about researchers’ preparedness to block access to climate data and downplay flaws in their data, about the siege mentality and scientific tribalism at the heart of the most important international issue of our age.
Report in Telegraph 11/10/2007
Al Gore’s environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth contains nine key scientific errors, a High Court judge ruled yesterday.
The judge declined to ban the Academy Award-winning film from British schools, but ruled that it can only be shown with guidance notes to prevent political indoctrination.
Courvent
I think the Sun has played a major role in varying cosmic temperatures. I can remember when we first viewed Mars through the school telescope you could see quite large ice caps but today they are clearly much smaller. NASA says the Martian South Pole’s ice cap has been shrinking for three summers in a row. Could it be said that both earth and Mars are experiencing a warming period caused by just another phase of the Sun?
There was no UN IPCC organization created to promote global cooling through the 70s and early 80s, nowhere near the tens of billions being spent today on the promotion of man-made global warming. Fears of a coming ice age, showed up everywhere in peer-reviewed literature, at scientific conferences, voiced by prominent scientists and throughout the media but it collapsed because it could not obtain government funding.
Algalon
I have serious doubts about the credibility and the purpose of our climate commission when the two major causes of global warming deforestation and overpopulation are not even mentioned in their “Critical Decade” alarmist report.
Rain forests once covered 14% of the earth’s land surface; now they cover a mere 6% and experts estimate that the last remaining rain forests could be consumed in less than 40 years. Deforestation accounts for about 20% of global emissions of CO2.
Deforestation makes way for crops and cattle to feed and house our increasing population.
Deforestation in tropical rainforests adds more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than the sum total of cars and trucks on the world’s roads. According to the World Carfree Network (WCN), cars and trucks account for about 14 percent of global carbon emissions, while most analysts attribute upwards of 15 percent to deforestation.
What is the point of reducing our prosperity, imposing a carbon tax or some sort of carbon trading plan, if it is being undermined by unbridled deforestation? Would it be easier to provide grants to these countries in return for preserving their forests?
A lecturer from the University of Melbourne wrote; “The inexorable increase in human numbers is exhausting conventional energy supplies, accelerating environmental pollution and global warming, and providing an increasing number of failed states where civil unrest prevails”.
Geoff is still an elected representative of the people of Manningham.
What action is to be taken at 2016 elections?
I sense that we prefer to sit back and criticise and don’t like to commit ourselves.
Gough ,no mate of mine, has a position with generous remuneration simply because he gets elected.
Each week I receive a copy of Leader online. Raidid has more information than Leader.
How to expand readership?