Global Warming skepticism

PETA vs. CEI: A Surprisingly Amiable Exchange of Ideas

by Michelle Minton on October 22, 2010 · 1 comment

in Agriculture, Bureaucrash, Culture, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Sanctimony

Yesterday, the DCist reported that PETA planned a protest outside of the Capital Grille, a meat-centric restaurant here in the nation’s capital.

The point, according to the organization’s press release, is to convince folks that “meat is not green” by showing that the meat and dairy industries contribute to global warming because cows release methane gas into the atmosphere thereby compounding greenhouse gases.

Despite recently released reports that suggest cow-methane production is much less than previously estimated, and that not only cows, but also other animals, marshlands, and anything decomposing produces methane gases, the PETA folks decide to target meat-eaters. Why?

The reason PETA chose meat-eaters as their target is because they are an animal protection group-not a world protection group. The mission of their organization is to prevent animal killing, abuse, and exploitation. They simply latched onto the global warming angle as way to promote their agenda.

CEI staged a counter rally nearby and we were prepared for a shouting match, but to PETA’s credit, they were pretty accepting of our presence. Of course, they may have been a little shy to get in any altercation considering they only had three people and we had about seven folks. We had signs expressing the deliciousness of meat while they had a person dressed as a cow and pamphlets appealing to individuals to consider giving up meat.

While their arguments made it pretty clear that PETA is more concerned with animals than the welfare of humanity, their appeals to the individual to voluntarily change their behavior on an individual level are acceptable and fine way to try and “change the world” and as far as we could tell they weren’t petitioning governments to get involved and prevent the production of meat or consumption of energy as other environmentalists groups do.

Our counter rally, which was more of a pro-meat/pro-humanity rally, seemed to receive a much more enthusiastic reception from passers-by as we handed out Enjoy Capitalism stickers and free sticks of beef jerky.

In the end people love meat and the industrialized production and shipping of meat has substantially improved the quality of life and nutrition for people around the world. Sorry cows.

What goes ’round comes ’round on global warming (my Forbes piece)

by Michael Fumento on March 5, 2010 · 1 comment

in Global Warming

Some global warming skeptics have been using the remarkably cold winter and record snowfalls to attack the idea of global warming. Believers are crying foul. “You’re confusing weather with climate!” they insist.

And they’re right. But they invented the game a long time ago and have been deftly playing it ever since.

Among the complainers is Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, “The Earth is really, really big,” he condescendingly but correctly observes in a nationally syndicated column. “It’s so big that it can be cold here and warm elsewhere – and this is the key concept – at the same time. Even if it were unusually cold throughout the continental U.S., that still represents less than 2% of the Earth’s surface.”

He makes other points, too, but what he somehow misses is that the warmists never hesitate to use any unusual phenomena to assert their case. “Any?” you ask with incredulity. “Any!” I respond with assurance. Check out the list at this Web site. One glance blows you away. It includes everything from “acne” to “yellow fever,” with “short-nosed dogs endangered” in between.

Moreover, time and again the warmists have use terribly cold weather and blizzards to say “global warming is at it again!” and that includes a Bill McKibben column that appeared in the Washington Post just five days before Robinson’s column!

Read about it in my new Forbes Online piece, “Weather Hype, Climate Trype.”

Global warming as religion

by Michael Fumento on February 21, 2010 · 2 comments

in Global Warming

Everything I write that I plan to place in a publication I first run past my best friend Matt, a truly gifted editor. One of his special “talents” in my case, though, is that he has no great expertise in science or health or really any of the topics I write about. Therefore things I often assume the reader will understand he’s able to help me reframe wording and arguments to make them more comprehensible.

What Matt does well is religion. He’s very much a C.S. Lewis fan, but has an extremely broad background in theological writings. He’s more into the moderns than the classics.

As it happens, of all the science and health issues I do write about, which is a lot, the one that’s truly caught Matt’s imagination is global warming. Mind you, sometimes I catch onto things instantly that other people never grasp. It’s part of my forte. But other times I can be a bit slow to grasp what others might more quickly. So I had to ponder Matt’s fascination with global warming whereas you, gentle reader, might have latched onto it pretty quickly.

The answer, of course, is that global warming is a religion.

Mind, I’m not saying it doesn’t have scientific aspects.

The earth has measurably warmed since the mid-1800s. And there is validity to the greenhouse effect theory. We just don’t know why the earth has warmed, save that it also warmed during medieval times without any need for man-made greenhouse gases.

As to the greenhouse effect theory, as I understand it it suffers in two major ways. First, there are all sorts of natural phenomenon that serve to counteract the effect of GHGs reflecting heat back into outer space. Second, we don’t know what concentrations are required to do this reflecting. It could be vastly higher levels than we’re at or in fact will ever reach, because every ton of GHG released into the atmosphere has slightly less of an effect than the ton before.

But many religions have a lot of truth at the core, even as others were made up by a single person out of whole cloth.

The idea of global warming as religion is hardly new, insofar as a Google search on the term brings up seven million references. It appears to have been popularized by the late novelist Michael Crichton whose 2003 essay on it can be found here.

I’m not going to summarize it for you, but save to say global warming has at least two major features associated it with religion.

First is the tremendous reliance on faith. No matter how many times the warmists are refuted on the data, they never waver in their faith. But the second, and the truly obnoxious aspect, is the fanaticism. Religious wars tend to be the bloodiest, and these people tend to be incredibly vicious in every way, whether trying to identify all serious skeptics as being associated with industry (I’ve been “linked to” ExxonMobil in a dozen ways, yet I’ve never gotten a bit of support, financial or otherwise, from any petroleum company) or merely being crackpots.

Today I read we’re “the same people who told you smoking wasn’t harmful.” Golly, I don’t recall ever saying that. I’ve have said smoking is just about the stupidest thing healthwise an individual can do.

Apologies to those of you for whom this is nothing new (but nobody forced you to read this far!), but I thought that what was novel was that my friend, whose tremendous love in life is theology, picked up on this aspect probably without anybody overtly suggesting to him that global warming was a religion. Like the canary in the coal mine, he simply picked up on the danger.

Getting it partly right on weather vs. climate

by Michael Fumento on February 19, 2010 · 1 comment

in Global Warming, Odds & Ends

Eugene Robinson in today’s Washington Post protests that global warming skeptics are using the current (though very long) cold snap in the mid-Atlantic region, which encompasses the nation’s capital, to confuse weather – a short-term phenomenon – with climate.

Robinson, who last year won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, correctly notes that, “the Earth is really, really big. It’s so big that it can be cold here and warm elsewhere – and this is the key concept – at the same time. Even if it were unusually cold throughout the continental United States, that still represents less than 2 percent of the Earth’s surface.”

True enough. And he adds:

Those who want to use our harsh winter to ‘disprove’ the theory that the planet’s atmosphere is warming should realize that anecdotal evidence always cuts both ways. Before the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, crews were using earth-movers and aircraft to deposit snow on the ski runs – the winter had been unusually warm. Preliminary data from climate scientists indicate that January, in terms of global temperatures, was actually hotter than usual. Revelers participating in Rio de Janeiro’s annual carnival, which ended Tuesday, sweltered in atypical heat, with temperatures above 100 degrees. Fortunately, the custom during carnival is not to wear much in the way of clothing.

Again, true enough. And regrettably I once again missed going to the Rio Carnival, but hope springs eternal.

But here’s what he doesn’t say. His people have long played exactly the same game.

There’s a wonderful website that keep a more or less comprehensive list of all the things that warmists have attributed to “global climate change” – and mind you, the very term “global climate change’ was coined precisely to be able to tie any change, including things associated with cooling – to the effects of greenhouse gases. One glance at the site blows you away. I want you to click on this link right now and not continue with this blog until you have.

No. Stop. You didn’t click on the link. Do it now.

Okay, the point is made, isn’t it? It includes everything from “acne” to “yellow fever” with “short-nosed dogs endangered” in between. And there are lots of instances of weather change.

In fact, time and again cold weather and its fall-out, including blizzards, have been attributed to “global climate change.”

This is from an article of mine that appeared 13 years ago:

But there it was, the cover of the Jan. 22 Newsweek: “Blizzards, floods & hurricanes: Blame global warming.” There also was the New York Times front-page article by William K. Stevens headlined “Blame global warming for the blizzard” and a nationally syndicated article by environmentalist Jessica Matthews that ran under titles such as “Brrr, global warming brings our blizzard.”

Moreover, I note. Moreover, I say for emphasis, while this was a perfect opportunity for Robinson to show he was playing fair, he could have pointed out they’re doing it even now.

Moreover, Robinson could have seen it in his own newspaper from just days ago.

There it was, right in the headline of a column by uber-environmentalist Bill McKibben, “Washington’s Snowstorms, Brought to You by Global Warming.”

Time magazine also argues “climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm.”

And of course I could go on and on, but point made.

If you live in the mid-Atlantic, don’t go out without a coat. But hypocrisy is a mantle never worn well.

“Climate change of pace,” (the confessions of Phil Jones), my Forbes Online piece

by Michael Fumento on February 18, 2010

in Odds & Ends

There have been a lot of well-kept secrets among the global warmists – which is primarily why the so-called “Climategate” stolen e-mails proved such a scandal. They showed that, in addition to squelching dissenters, the warmists were admitting things to each other that they were denying to the public. They felt, as a Jack Nicholson character put it, “You can’t handle the truth!”

But now the truth is coming out. One fact is that there has been no statistically significant warming for quite awhile. The other is that temperatures in the Middle Ages, at the very least in the northern hemisphere, were considerably warmer than they are now. (See inset.)

Conceding both these points in a BBC interview was Professor Phil Jones. He was director of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, where the hacked Internet server released thousands of e-mails and other documents. Read about his shockingly honest admissions – and the ramification of them – in my new Forbes Online piece.

U.N. Climate panel pummeled for misinformation, high and low

by Michael Fumento on February 15, 2010 · 1 comment

in Global Warming

From the very top of the earth to the bottom, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just can’t get it right.

I recently wrote of how the panel’s latest (2007) report, the one that split the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, was finally caught on what was an obviously false statement: That the glaciers atop the Himalayas would be melted by 2035 because of global warming. It would take an incredible amount of sustained heat to do that. The only question was what source the panel used, and that proved to be an off-the-cuff assertion by a global warming activist as reprinted in an environmentalist journal – with a mathematical error to boot!

Now it’s been revealed that the panel grossly overstated how much of the Netherlands is below sea level.

Its latest report says 55 percent of the country is below sea level, leaving it highly prone to flooding along rivers that would ostensible rise with warming temperatures. But Netherlanders can take off their clogs and relax. According to the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, just 26 percent of the country is below sea level and 29 percent susceptible to river flooding. You can see a lot of pretty maps regarding the subject by the Dutch Ministry of Transport here.

The IPCC insists that it’s a minor point in a report 3,000 words long and doesn’t affect the core conclusions that human activities, led by burning fossil fuels, are warming the globe. Of course it doesn’t, any more than does the Himalayan nonsense.

But this latest wooden shoe to the butt again illustrates that this allegedly thoroughly documented reports by the allegedly top experts in world has a nasty tendency to simply include anything that will make its case seem stronger. Taken in light of the recent “Climategate” revelations that scientists who came to the “wrong” conclusions had their materially systematically excluded from the report and other IPCC documents, it shows just how shaky this house of cards is.

Scientist at center of email scandal admits no recent warming

by Michael Fumento on February 14, 2010 · 1 comment

in Global Warming, Odds & Ends

There has been no global warming for a long time, as I wrote recently in Forbes Online (“Show Me the Warming,” Nov. 30, 2009).

I noted that Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the warmist bible, the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report—told Congress two years ago that evidence for manmade warming is “unequivocal.” He claimed “the planet is running a ’fever’ and the prognosis is that it is apt to get much worse.” Yet in one of the released emails he admitted that data showed there was no warming “at the moment.” I then explained:

But Trenberth’s “lack of warming at the moment” has been going on at least a decade. “There has been no [surface-measured] warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995,” observes MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen. “According to satellite data, global warming stopped about 10 years ago and there’s no way to know whether it’s happening now,” says Roy Spencer, former NASA senior scientist for climate studies.

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
The atmospheric concentration of CO2 keeps going up, yet temperatures for the last decade have been flat

The importance of this is that during the past decade, we’ve belched so-called “greenhouse gases” (GHGs) into the atmosphere at ever greater rates, from 6,510 million metric tons in 1996 to 8,230 in 2006—a 26% increase. Atmospheric concentrations have also reached the highest levels ever observed.

Now Professor Phil Jones, director the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Center and the central figure in the ‘Climategate’ affair, has conceded there’s been no ‘statistically significant’ warming. Naturally he said it was a “blip” and not a trend, and he may well prove right. But that doesn’t eliminate the problem that this “blip” has been occurring with historic GHG emissions, therefore the grossly simplistic formula of GHG emissions = warming is false.

He also made what may be the strongest admission by a major warmist that the earth could have been warmer during medieval times (about 800 – 1300) when mankind was emitting essentially no GHGs. (Viking ships did use sails, you may recall.) And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

Heretofore, warmists tried to dismiss this altogether or say it only applied to northern climes.

Nevertheless, “There is much debate over whether the MWP was global in extent or not,” Jones admitted, adding “The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.”

He said that, “For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere” and “There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.” Still, “If the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented.”

In that case, he should be informed of a Nature magazine study last year indicating water temperatures in the area of Indonesia were the same in the MWP as they are today.

You can read some of the specific questions and answers here with annotations by Indur Goklany.

Let’s salute Phil Jones’s honesty – even if he only came by it relatively late in life.

Where did all the global warming hurricanes go? (My Forbes article)

by Michael Fumento on December 30, 2009

in Global Warming

The cover of Al Gore’s new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, features a satellite image of the globe showing four major hurricanes – results, we’re meant to believe, of man-made global warming. All four were photoshopped. Which is nice symbolism, because in a sense the whole hurricane aspect of warming has been photoshopped.

As I note in my article in Forbes, it was all really based on just two data points – with the names “Katrina” and “Rita.”

Now with both greenhouse gas emissions and levels in the atmosphere are at their highest, but this year had the fewest hurricanes since 1997, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For the first time since 2006 no hurricanes even made landfall in the U.S.; indeed hurricane activity is at a 30-year low.

Whoops! So much for Gore’s cover and all the hullabaloo.

In a 2005 column, I gave what now proves an interesting retrospective.

“The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name was global warming.” So wrote environmental activist Ross Gelbspan in a New York Times op-ed that one commentator aptly described as “almost giddy.” The green group Friends of the Earth linked Katrina to global warming, as did Germany’s Green Party Environment Minister.

The most celebrated of these commentaries was Chris Mooney’s 2007 book Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming. Mooney, for the record, is also author of the best-selling book The Republican War on Science.

Yet there were top scientists in 2005 such as Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, publishing data showing the Rita-Katrina blowhards had no business building a case around two anomalies. But his paper was squelched by Kevin Trenbarth of “Climategate” fame.

It’s fascinating stuff. Read it!

Santa to move headquarters to Palm Springs!

by Michael Fumento on December 15, 2009

in Global Warming, Odds & Ends

Or somewhere new, anyway. By necessity. So says Al Gore.

In a speech at the Copenhagen climate summit he declared: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

We’re talking a massive relocation of elves, folks.

In a curious twist, Dr. Maslowski thereupon claimed that Gore had distorted his views. ““It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” he told the Times of London. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Another Gore fibbery! But apparently not.

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano obtained a Danish government handout citing the Monterey, California professor’s modeling and reaching the same conclusion as Gore. “Projecting the trend into the future indicates that autumn could become near ice free between 2011 and 2016 (Maslowski, 2009).”

Which simply means Gore didn’t intentionally misrepresent Maslowski, not that either the professor or the former veep is right. Still, you can’t blame Santa for being just a bit nervous.

World Meteorological Organization blows hot air on global warming

by Michael Fumento on December 11, 2009

in Global Warming

“The decade of 2000 to 2009 appears to be the warmest one in the modern record, the World Meteorological Organization reported in a new analysis on Tuesday,” according to the New York Times. “The announcement is likely to be viewed as a rejoinder to a renewed challenge from skeptics to the scientific evidence for global warming, as international negotiators here [in Copenhagen] seek to devise a global response to climate change.”

Yes, and a false and misleading rejoinder at that. The statement appears here in what’s obviously a propaganda sheet. At a glance it would seem to refute my recent assertion in Forbes that there’s been no warming over the past decade.

But it’s a matter of which interpretation do you think counts. Yes, the last decade was warmer than the previous decade. But there has been no warming within that decade. My point remains intact: During the last decade GHG emissions and ambient levels have gone up every year whereas warming has not as this chart shows. That’s the only point I was trying to make, that even as every year the world poured more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the ambient concentrations of those gases rose, there was no rise in warming. The formula of “more GHGs = more warming” is overly simplistic; something is going on in nature that’s seriously impacting temperatures.

Oh, and as far as that “modern record” stuff goes, that’s sneaky stuff too. As I pointed out, and as this graph shows, it was much warmer in the medieval warming period – you know, back when those Viking ships were pumping CO2 in the atmosphere and when the Carolingian empire got most of its power from coal-fired power plants.

So, yeah, the WMO is kinda basically lying.

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