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To: Alex MG who wrote (761019)1/2/2014 10:13:09 PM
From: average joe  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1575450
 
Extreme weather events are increasing: yet another green propaganda myth

By James Delingpole Environment Last updated: November 29th, 2013

3649 Comments Comment on this article



So I'm a speaker at this conference, a month or two ago, and I've just delivered my spiel about the global warming hysteria being a classic example of the madness of crowds. The audience are gratifyingly impressed: some of them have never heard this stuff before, certainly not expressed in quite so forthright a way. Now there are questions from the floor and one of them comes from a university professor.

Actually – I've seen this before, all too many times: it's how the Warmists roll – there's no question being asked, it's more of a rambling, grandstanding statement. The professor roots his statement in the personal, always a good tactic when you're trying to make your case seem likeable, reasonable, down-to-earth. He tells us how on his travels and in his back garden, he's noticed how very much the seasons have been changing in recent decades, how Autumn is definitely lasting longer and Spring is coming earlier, and glaciers are melting and butterflies are doing whatever it is to indicate that things bain't natural and global warming is real. Then he begins invoking "the science." What the scientists are now telling us, apparently, is that climate change isn't so much a case of global warming as of a chaotic system (my, how the Warmists love that phrase!) being disrupted and leading in turn to "extreme weather events" of a greater intensity than ever before.

(Ah yes. That old chestnut. Didn't the BBC once christen it "global weirding"? They surely did…)

As an example of these "extreme weather events", the learned professor eruditely and loftily cites something he calls – with a straight face – SuperStorm Sandy.

At this point, I've heard quite enough. "It's only called 'SuperStorm' Sandy by places like the BBC and the Guardian and the New York Times for emotive propaganda purposes. And you do realise that it wasn't the strongest category of hurricane. Just a cat 3…" (And only a Cat 1, I should have added, by the time it reached shore).

More from James Delingpole:
Climate change is too important to be left to scientists
Is China about to tell the West: 'Game Over'?
On green issues no one talks more 'crap' than David Cameron

This, I'm afraid, is where we're at in the great climate debate – and have been for some time. The scenario I've just described will be familiar to absolutely every climate sceptic who has ever appeared on a public platform anywhere: you've come to fight by the rules of the Geneva convention – but there's the opposition using poison gas, napalm, Red Cross ambulances to transport healthy combat troops, slave labour, torture, whatever means comes to hand at any given moment to help them win at every cost.

By which I mean that climate alarmists threw all moral compunction or intellectual integrity out of the window long ago. As we saw in the Climategate emails they smear; lie; twist data; temper with evidence; bully; exaggerate; abuse the scientific method… almost as a matter of routine. When you debate them in public, though, you imagine somehow that they'll rise to the occasion, that they'll behave a bit better when there are other people watching. They never do though.

Their policy, you might say, has been borrowed from Humpty Dumpty in Through The Looking Glass:
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'
Substitute "piece of cherry-picked evidence" or "factoid" or "scientific reference" or "thing I read somewhere in the Guardian environment pages, can't remember when" for "word" and you'll get an idea of how frustrating it is trying to debate an alarmist. Your case is rooted in empiricism, in observed data, in historical evidence. Theirs might as well have been plucked from a parallel universe – as when, say, the Green party leader Natalie Bennett assured me in a Telegram podcast the other day that if renewables were a disaster for a Britain, how come they'd been such a massive success in continental Europe? No, Natalie – on every objective level renewables have been a total disaster for continental Europe, destabilising the grid, driving up energy prices, killing jobs, causing panic among industries rendered decreasingly competitive by the cost of energy. What you are claiming – whether wittingly or otherwise – is a complete reversal of the truth.

So it was with that professor I mentioned earlier. He hasn't a clue what he's talking about but because he's a professor at a vaguely well-known seat of learning he is able to use his prestige to give the impression of authority. This, on a larger scale, is what Sir Paul Nurse and his nest of Warmists have been doing at the Royal Society: because of his Nobel prize, because he's a knight, because he's head of the world's oldest and most distinguished scientific academy, he is able to make scientific pronouncements which people are inclined to take seriously. Even when he's rumbled – as he was when he got his facts badly wrong on that BBC documentary when he came round to my house to stitch me up - he still emerges with his reputation intact because that's how the world works: most people would rather trust a scientist's lofty credentials than go to the trouble of investigating the veracity of his statements.

All this is a roundabout way of introducing a new report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation into extreme weather events. What the report shows is that – contra m'learned professorial friend at that conference the other day; contra Sir Paul Nurse and the Royal Society – there is no more evidence that there has been a recent increase in extreme weather events than there is that we are in the throes of runaway global warming.

Extreme weather events have happened throughout history. It is in the nature of that "chaotic system" my professor friend (inevitably and tediously) cited.
In November 1970 a tropical cyclone killed 250,000 people in Bangladesh.

In July 1969, a Cat 4 or 5 Hurricane Camille struck the Gulf Coast and killed more than 250 people.

The largest one day outbreak of tornadoes in the mid-West was in April 1974.
None of these events was attributed to "man-made climate change" because – fortunately for the people of the 1970s and earlier – that junk science field had not yet been invented.

But look, don't take my word for it, do your own due diligence. Read Madhav Khandekar's report, follow up his citations, and then ask yourself: "Do I prefer to base my opinions on actual evidence? Or would I rather base them on 'feelings in my bones', 'weird stuff I've noticed about the weather which strike me as odd' and 'things I've heard environmentalists say on the BBC and at the Guardian'?"

It's depressing how many people still persist in taking the latter option. But then, we inhabit a particularly crazed and credulous age.

blogs.telegraph.co.uk



To: Alex MG who wrote (761019)1/2/2014 10:17:25 PM
From: average joe  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1575450
 
Al Gore Forecasted “Ice-Free” Arctic by 2013; Ice Cover Expands 50%
Written by Alex Newman

Wednesday, 18 December 2013 15:52



Self-styled “global-warming” guru Al Gore (shown) and a gaggle of supposed “climate scientists” have egg all over their faces — big time. In 2007, 2008 and 2009, Gore publicly and very hysterically warned that the North Pole would be “ice-free” by around 2013 because of alleged “man-made global warming.” Citing “climate” experts, the government-funded BBC hyped the mass hysteria, running a now-embarrassing article under the headline: “ Arctic summers ice-free ‘by 2013’.” Other establishment media outlets did the same.

Well, 2013 is almost over, and contrary to the alarmist “ predictions” by Gore and what critics refer to as his “doomsday cult,” the latest satellite data show that Arctic ice cover has actually expanded 50 percent over 2012 levels. In fact, during October, sea-ice levels grew at the fastest pace since records began in 1979. Experts predict the expansion to continue in the years to come, leaving global-warming alarmists scrambling fiendishly for explanations to save face — and to revive the rapidly melting climate hysteria.

In September, meanwhile, data also showed that sea ice levels in Antarctica had expanded to record levels for the second year in a row. Of course, by now, virtually everyone who has been following news about “global warming” — now more often referred to as “climate change” owing to public-relations concerns — also knows that global temperatures have not risen for some 17 years. The spectacular lack of warming demolished all 73 of the “climate models” used by the United Nations to push its controversial theories.

According to the dubious theories and predictions advanced by Al Gore and other alarmists, though, none of this should be happening. Speaking to an audience in Germany five years ago, Gore — sometimes ridiculed as “The Goracle” — alleged that “the entire North Polarized [sic] cap will disappear in 5 years.” While the original video of that particular failed prediction appears to have been scrubbed from the Internet, conservative bloggers managed to track down the same footage from other sources. “Five years,” Gore emphasized again, is “the period of time during which it is now expected to disappear.”

The following year, Gore made similar claims at a UN “climate” summit in Copenhagen. “Some of the models ... suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years,” Gore claimed in 2009. “We will find out.” Indeed, the bogus prediction appears wildly off the mark, to put it mildly, but the establishment press and Gore apparently do not want the world to find out.

In fairness, Gore was hardly the only hysterical climate-doomsday proponent to be left looking foolish. In December of 2007, the BBC highlighted alleged “modeling studies” that supposedly “indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.” Incredibly, some of the supposed “experts” even claimed it could happen before then, citing calculations performed by “super computers” that the BBC noted “has become a standard part of climate science in recent years.”

“Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007,” claimed Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, described as researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School who was working with co-workers at NASA to come up with the now-thoroughly discredited forecasts about polar ice. “So given that fact, you can argue that may be [sic] our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.” Other “experts” quoted in the BBC article agreed with the hysteria.

In the real world, however, the scientific evidence demolishing the global-warming theories advanced by Gore, the UN, and government-funded “climate scientists” continues to grow, along with the ice cover in both hemispheres. In the Arctic, for example, data collected by Europe's Cryosat spacecraft pointed to about 9,000 cubic kilometers of ice at the end of the 2013 melt season. In 2012, which was admittedly a low year, the total volume was about 6,000 cubic kilometers — some 50 percent less than the 2013 total. Polar bear populations are thriving, too.

Across the southern hemisphere, the data have proved even more devastating to what supposed “climate scientists” were caught referring to as their “cause” in the deeply embarrassing ClimateGate e-mails. First, the figures from 2012 showed a record high level of sea-ice cover — more than at any point since records began in 1978. This year set another new record, with ice covering more than 19.5 million square kilometers of ocean around Antarctica by September.

Around the world, meanwhile, record low temperatures continue to make a mockery of “global warming” theories. While anecdotal, to be sure, Cairo, Egypt, just saw its first snowfall in more than 100 years. In the United States there have been thousands of new records for cold temperatures and snowfalls just in the month of December. In an extremely bizarre twist, some “climate scientists” have even started claiming that the freezing temperatures are actually more evidence of “global warming.”

To explain the universally acknowledged lack of warming over the last 17 years in defiance of all UN climate theories, government-funded “climate scientists” and the UN have increasingly touted what critics ridicule as “The Theory of The Ocean Ate My Global Warming.” Under heavy political pressure from the Obama administration and other governments, the UN ran with the theory, despite the lack of any observable evidence to suggest the deep ocean is actually eating the UN’s predicted global warming.

Appearing increasingly detached from reality to independent scientists, the UN claimed in its latest global-warming report to be 95 percent sure that human emissions of carbon dioxide were to blame for rising temperatures. Those claims, now widely laughed at around the world, were made despite the fact that every single one of its computer models has been entirely discredited by the lack of warming for the last 17 years. Many experts are now even predicting global cooling.

Top scientists and experts around the world — even many who have served on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — have been ridiculing the global outfit and its discredited “climate” report. Most governments and dictators, however, continue playing along with what some experts call the climate “charade” or “hoax,” mostly due to built-in incentives and taxpayer funds that help perpetuate the unjustified alarmism.

For third-world dictators, the goal appears to be securing trillions in Western taxpayer money under the guise of “climate” reparations and “justice.” For governments ruling wealthier nations, the end-game seems to be carbon taxes and a planetary “climate” regime with unprecedented powers over humanity. Assembled in Warsaw for the latest UN climate summit, even as the implosion of the “science” behind global-warming theories was accelerating, member regimes agreed to finalize a global climate treaty by 2015.

Polls show that despite hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars squandered on global-warming alarmism, the American public still refuses to widely accept the man-made warming theories advanced by an increasingly discredited UN and its allies. A September Rasmussen survey of likely voters, for example, found that just 43 percent of likely U.S. voters believe alleged “global warming” is caused by human activity. About the same number believe it is not.

Despite vicious attacks and threats — some of it exposed in the ClimateGate scandal — scientists are increasingly jumping off the sinking “climate” ship as well. Even some major governments are working to rein in the out-of-control alarmism, with authorities in Australia, elected in a landslide earlier this year, promising to liberate the nation from “carbon taxes” while quashing much of the taxpayer-funded “global-warming” juggernaut. Calls for prosecuting “fraud” by “climate scientists” are growing, too.

So far, despite hyping the absurd claims five years ago, the establishment press has failed to inform its dwindling readership that Al Gore and his fellow alarmists were proven embarrassingly wrong. No apologies have been forthcoming from Gore, either, and none of the “scientists” who made the ridiculous predictions has apologized or lost his U.S. taxpayer-funded job. In fact, almost unbelievably, the establishment press is now parroting new claims from the same discredited “experts” suggesting that the Arctic will be “ice-free” by 2016.

As Gore put it in 2009, “We will find out.”

thenewamerican.com



To: Alex MG who wrote (761019)1/2/2014 10:19:06 PM
From: average joe  Respond to of 1575450
 
Global Warming Panic (for Liberals) Explained