Guest Post by Steven Goddard
Last weeks’ top Antarctic AGW story was :
due to CO2, of course.
This week the #1 story is :
but the increase in size is due to “stratospheric ozone depletion” which is of course also caused by man-made gases.
So Antarctic ice is disappearing faster than expected due to man, and it is also expanding in size due to man. Meanwhile, the early autumn temperature in Vostok, Antarctica is a toasty -95F, a nice warm up from the -104F temperatures earlier this week.
Oh, and one minor problem with the ozone hole theory “The ozone hole occurs during the Antarctic spring, from September to early December” – but the positive ice anomaly occurred during the autumn and winter (March through July) as represented by the red line below.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.south.jpg
And while the ozone hole was present, ice was normal. So the ice excess probably has nothing to do with the ozone hole.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/polar/polar.shtml
The AGW standard for broad acceptance of new theories seems to be “not completely implausible – if you avoid actually looking at the body of data or what you might have said last week.“
Thankyou so much, Steven Goddard.
Its really brilliant you take up all these pseodu science things.
Obviously, this new convenient ozone explanation for the ice growth was manufactured, and its a grreat help for debaters around the world that you guys do these analyses.
Heres a little simple graphic, if you can use it:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/peer1.gif
I’m sure I heard somewhere that ‘the science is settled’ on AGW.
Even if we accept that these new ‘discoveries’ can be laid at the feet of mankind, how do you rationalise all of these new ‘facts’ with settled science?
So much spin even the pro-AGW crowd must be getting dizzy.
“the pro-AGW crowd” is too much of a mouthful. It should be “the AGWAs.” (The 2nd A stands for “Alarmist.”)
Mike Lorrey
“we should be seeing some attenuation in the ozone hole by now if that was the cause.”
Can you attenuate a hole?
Nylo,
Thanx for those funny links! A sample:
“Marring the Bali conference for the first time this year [2027] were thousands of arrests for alleged anti-green hate speech crimes. Many conference observers expected this as the inevitable result of last year’s U.N. Global Court ruling that classified anti-green rhetoric in public as a hate crime.”
And:
“As Mr. Gore boarded Green-1, the high efficiency Boeing 797 hybrid jet (sporting a smaller version of the standard heated swimming pool)…”
As usual, they are exploiting the public’s general ignorance of scientific issues. As long as they can keep combining causes and effects, they can continue to extend the AGW gravy train.
Re: SSSailor (19:22:40) : 23 4 2009
“Mr. DeLong Contemplates the under the radar conflict (war?) brewing among the special interest entities that influence the governance of our (US) society. Specifically, The Climate Changers v Financiers v Industrial Interests.”
This is starting to happen. There is a lot of money in energy generation and the competition is intense and costly. Some new entrants fail on thir own, but enter the picture propped up by large subsidies. Now, the competitors who get no subsidies, or worse, an emissions tax, have long memories and like to even the playing field. Not many planners take their analyses to this point, but here is what has happened in Scandanavia.
“Denmark trades power in the Nord Pool, which has announced that from October the spot floor price for surplus power will drop from zero to minus EUR 20 cents/kWh. In other words, wind generators producing power in periods of low demand will have to pay the network to take it. Nord Pool said that “A negative price floor has been in demand for some time – especially from participants trading Elspot in the Danish bidding areas. … Curtailment
of sales may give an imbalance cost for the affected seller and thus creates a willingness to pay in order to deliver power in the market.” This is likely to have a negative effect on the economics of wind power in the region, since a significant amount of Denmark’s wind power
production is affected. World Nuclear News 1/4/09, Nord Pool 4/2/09.”
The lesson is that huge subsidies to get wingless birds to fly are just a start. The real test comes when the predators drop in.
Hello, America
I read WUT everyday.Here in UE,there is absolutely nothing too conterpart the religion.I’m Belgian citizen,and there is nothing too discuss here,in the media, off even by the neighbors.Science is definitively settled, just open your wallet and let politicians robe your money.They subsidie even with taxpayer money solar panel,and let me say, you not often see the sun light here.
But about the argument/I will post that in french, soo You will be able too learn a bit about this wonderfull language.Sorry for that.
Le trou dans la couche d’ozone, dont on attribue l’origine erronément aux CFC,chose que en son temps j’ai combattu en vain(déjà AlGor était au devant de la scène?) créerait,du fait du refroidissement provoqué, ce qui reste encore à prouver,des hautes pressions,ce qui entraînerait un changement des vents.ceux-ci provoqueraient des cassures dans la banquise, et la mer ainsi libérée gèlerait aussitôt ce qui expliquerait l’augmentation de la surface de celle-ci?
Faut-il être “scientifique” pour écrire de telles âneries?Lorsque la banquise se brise, et que les morceaux sont libérés et poussés au large,cela s’appelle des icebergs,et ceux-ci n’attendent pas gentiment que la glace se reforme pour se recoller à la banquise, ils partent au large, et vont embêter les hardis navigateurs sous des latitudes plus hautes.
De plus,si des hautes pressions régnaient sur le pole sud,il n’y neigerait pas abondamment comme cela s’observe.Parfois je me demande si ces “scientifiques” ne sont pas en réalité hébergés dans une clinique psychiatrique?
It would seem that if one had a quest (say, to reduce global warming) that one would have both an objective (an optimal temperature) and a means of measuring when that objective has been reached.
Has anyone seen an AGW scientist even posit an optimal Global Mean Temperature, or what they would do if the temperature fell beneath that? Would they start promoting CO2? Does the lack of thought on this issue indicate that they never intend to actually solve climate issues?
I recently had a brief blog discussion with a climate professor at the University of Washington, who said he was attempting to reach out to non-scientists. There were probably 2 dozen good, solid questions (like the one above) asked of him by several non-scientists. The poor guy never had a chance. Once he saw how hard it was outside his insulated little world, he, dumbfounded, refused to even acknowledge most of them, and the answers he did give had largely been dismissed years ago, showing an alarming degree of ignorance of the world outside academia. If anyone else wonders why they keep pumping out the same stuff, it’s because each unfounded claim they accept as truth serves as an unquestioned baseline for the next step. It was as if he couldn’t comprehend why the rest of us didn’t accept his beliefs as proven fact. I weep for science, too.
It is fascinating, philosophically, that there is little or no debate regarding what earth temperature is optimal. The objective to keep everything “as is” presumes that we have the ability to do this AND that it is the right thing to do. Maybe it is better for the planet as a whole to be warmer(or colder). After all, humans have flourished in this climate and human activities are cited(amongst warmers) as the cause.
Jim, Rick,
This (from 2007) should answer your question:
http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/10/03/al-gore-getting-rich-spreading-global-warming-hysteria-media-s-help
And in response to the Global Optimum Temperature question posed by Rick: if it falls below a stated optimum then you sell carbon ‘debits’ instead of ‘credits’ (god, I hope I didn’t just give one of these sycophants an idea!). What do they really care about their credit endowment to aboriginal tribes to buy better sandals (and windmills) instead of an improved standard of living ayway?
Make them give the sandals back (and shut off the windmill), then allow industry to increase Co2 to compensate. I await the day, with a sickening knot in my gut, when we are told how great the cap&trade system is working and how we are actually able to control polar ice extent. Win + win, and happy joy, joy…barf.
The new and flourishing carbon market makes money on both sides of the graph. Fits in rather nicely with the, ‘black is white’, ‘up is down’, etc mindset.
We need to get someone in the MSM to administer a major slapdown, is there no one up to the task?
Sorry, 2nd paragraph, last word = anyway. This keyboard sucks, I’d go get a new one but am concerned about the expansion of my carbon footprint. 😉
Look, all they have to do is to create some climate model that shows rate X of Antarctic cooling, or warming or melting. It doesn’t matter if the model is junk, just that it shows X.
Next, conduct some measurements, (or make up data ala Steig) that shows the rate is actually Y. If Y is greater than X, then just proclaim it worse than expected!
Does it matter that X was wrong? No. Does it matter that Y may also be wrong? No. It only matters that Y is greater than X.
If Y had been less than X, you never would have heard about it.
John Galt (10:50:05) :
“Look, all they have to do is to create some climate model that shows rate X of Antarctic cooling, or warming or melting. It doesn’t matter if the model is junk, just that it shows X.
Next, conduct some measurements, (or make up data ala Steig) that shows the rate is actually Y. If Y is greater than X, then just proclaim it worse than expected!
Does it matter that X was wrong? No. Does it matter that Y may also be wrong? No. It only matters that Y is greater than X.
If Y had been less than X, you never would have heard about it”.
John, why don’t you make a long story short:
They cheat, lie and manipulate.
That’s what they do.
Steven Goddard (22:24:02) :
“I propose a balanced ice budget. Let’s move ice from the South Pole to the North Pole. Except that the North Pole doesn’t need any more ice.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
Perhaps we can send the extra 630,000km2 of global ice to Venus? They need it more than we do.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/iphone/images/iphone.anomaly.global.png
Ice seems to be the only thing running a surplus these days. No wonder governments choose to focus on the imaginary ice economy – instead of something real”.
Start an advertising campeign immediately!
Eat more ice, eat more ice!
Of course everyone here knows that God controls the climate. when will those silly scientists stop being so silly ?
The Charlotte Tea Party Speech
by John Lewis (April 20, 2009)
The Charlotte Tea Party Speech by Dr. John David Lewis, Dept. of Political Science, Duke University was first first delivered on April 15, 2009, Charlotte, North Carolina. This is a slightly revised version by Dr. Lewis for printed publication. Permission is given to read this in full, wherever defenders of liberty may gather.
It is high time for a tea party in America!
But to do this right, we need to understand what it means. So I want to think back for a moment to what happened over 200 years ago, at the time of the original Boston Tea Party.
The Founders of this nation brought forth a radical idea. It was truly radical, practiced nowhere before this time.
This idea was the Rights of Man. The Founders saw each of us as endowed with certain inalienable rights, rights that may not be separated from our nature as autonomous beings.
These inalienable rights are:
· The Right to Life–the right to live your own life, to choose your own goals, and to preserve your own independent existence.
· The Right to Liberty, which is the right to act to achieve your goals, without coercion by other men.
· The Right to the Pursuit of Happiness, to act to achieve your own success, your own prosperity, and your own happiness, for your own sake.
· And the Right to Property—the right to gain, keep, and enjoy, the material products of your efforts.
Unless I’m mistaken I don’t see anything here about a right to happiness. I see a right to the pursuit of happiness: the right to take the actions needed to attain one’s own happiness. Nor do I see any rights to things at all—no rights to food, clothing, healthcare or diapers. There is only a right to act to achieve those things. This is called freedom.
These rights to act—the rights to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness—are founded on a certain view of man. Each of us is an individual, autonomous, moral being, with the right to choose his own values and capable of directing his own life.
Look at the person next to you, and look in the mirror—do you see the individual sovereign human being, existing for his own sake, with the right to live, to love, and to act?
This idea—the Founders’ idea of the individual Rights of Man—led to a radical view of government. Government was not to be inherited by the force of an entrenched aristocracy as in Europe, imposed by the divine right of kings through generations of oppression, or enforced by the force of a club.
Government in America was to be designed and instituted by thinking men, for a single purpose: to protect and defend the Rights of Man.
This is what the American Declaration of Independence says: “To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.” Thinking men, armed with the idea of rights, created a government limited to the protection of individual rights.
For centuries in Europe, the relationship between the people and the government had been that of serf to master: everyone was a servant of the ruling elite. In America, this was turned upside down: government became the servant of the individual. The very reason for a government–and its purpose–is to secure our inalienable, individual rights.
The results in America speak for themselves: the greatest most prosperous nation the world has ever seen. I here quote the writer Ayn Rand (and if you want to understand what is happening today, read her novel Atlas Shrugged). Ayn Rand, speaking to the graduating class at West Point, said that the United States was the first and only moral nation in the history of man, the first nation founded on a moral principle, the Rights of Man, and with a moral purpose, to secure these rights for all men.
This principle of rights is so strong that over years the Americans were able to correct the original shortcomings that the Founders’ could not overcome. Slavery and the denial of women’s suffrage both fell when the principle of rights was properly applied to all men. To correct the original errors did not require the Americans to overthrow the principle, but rather to strengthen and to deepen it, to apply it to everyone, and to renew their commitment to it.
And that is what we must do today.
Because something very bad has happened in America over the last century. A cancer has implanted itself in the land of the free. A cancer has grown in our government and in our society. The cancer is the idea that government is no longer to be the defender of our rights, but rather the grantor of wishes.
Over the past century the idea took hold that government’s purpose was not to secure our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but rather to satisfy our needs, whims and wants. That idea has been implanted in our schools, our media, and our government.
Do you wish for a better house? There’s a government housing agency to give it to you, with taxes extorted from those who buy their own house. Do you wish for health care? There is a government agency who will extort it from others and give it to you. Do you need food? There is a welfare agency to grab the wealth needed to give you food stamps.
And who will provide these handouts? The government, many people say, the all-powerful being that looms over us and grants our wishes. But who is to provide the goods that government hands out? Every person who works and produces, and whose property, gained by the sweat of his efforts, is taken from him by force.
The government has, once again, become a ruling aristocracy, set up as our masters, disposing of our lives.
This cancer has now grown to the point where this ruling elite controls a budget of over four thousand billion dollars a year—more money than can be conceived by the human mind. The government had to grow this big—and it will continue to grow until it destroys this nation—because it is acting according to the idea that it is morally right to take the wealth from those who produce it, and to give it to those who want it.
At the root of this idea is a view of man that is totally at odds with the vision of the Founders: the modern vision of man as a whining dependent, who begs for the needs of life from an all-powerful governing aristocracy. This ruling elite claims the moral right to distribute the wealth of those who earn it to those who wish for it.
If we are going to challenge this monstrosity, if we are going to expunge this cancer, then this is what we must reject. We need to regain the vision of ourselves held by the American Founders. We need to stand up, and assert ourselves as autonomous moral beings, with the right to our own life, liberty and the pursuit of our own happiness. We need to reject the claim that we are weak and dependent beggars, and to assert our own competence to run our own lives.
It is going to take as great a commitment to destroy this cancer as it took to build it. We’re going to have to be strong, we’re going to have to be independent in our thinking, and we are going to have to reject handouts when they are offered to us. And we’re going to have to speak out.
At its heart, the economic and political crisis is a deeper problem—a moral problem. The cause of the crisis today is the worship of need, and the view of man as too stupid to act for his own sake, and worthy of being milked of all his values, to provide for others. This is what we must reject.
Do you think that this is a conspiracy to seize your wealth? It is far worse than that. As Ayn Rand wrote, “It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.”
This is an attempt to seize your life, to destroy your sense of self as an independent human being, and to replace it with a being with no self-esteem and no capacity for individual action—a being doomed to beg for sustenance from an all-powerful ruling elite.
This ruling elite, looking down on us right now, cannot understand gatherings such as these, in which free people gather to defend liberty. They think that this must be orchestrated by a vast conspiracy, because they cannot understand how autonomous human beings might gather by their own choice, to affirm their commitment to liberty.
Our so-called leaders think this because they don’t see autonomous moral beings at all. They see only serfs, sniveling and whining, begging their masters for the scraps needed to survive, acting as a collective mob rather than as thinking individuals.
Look at yourselves again. Do you see in your face, and in the face of the person next to you, the slave of a group, with no moral status, no rights and no liberties, who is bound from birth to serve? Or do you see an autonomous being with the right to live for his own sake?
Will you knuckle under and become a helpless dependent? Or will you stand tall, and defend your right to your own life, your own liberty, your pursuit of your own individual happiness, and your own property?
It is time to stand up, to say no to the creed of dependence, to assert ourselves, to assert our own moral status, to defend our right to our own lives and property, and to make our voices heard.
Thank you very much.
John David Lewis
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5505
Jim (07:47:42) :
For me, 1 – 2ºC warmer than now would be fine.
The Sahara would probably be greener, increased growing seasons, fewer tropical cyclones and my arthritis may not bother me so much.
Great stuff but the catastrophe merchants would of course claim the opposite would happen.
DaveE
John F. Hultquist (23:04:04) :
Allan M R MacRae (21:31:49) : “It also seems probable that the USA will never regain its global prominence.”
The people of the USA — via government, non-gov organizations, private labors and donations – have made a tremendous effort since the end of WW2 to improve the well being of many people and their countries. Much of this effort has been wasted but much has worked. It should be no surprise if the US is not quite as primary over the next 30-50 years as it was in the past 50. We call some of these countries friends. They and others need to share more of the burden of raising standards all over the world. Instead there seems to be a collective rush to the 1800s.
***********************************
Agreed John. I do not expect other countries to be nearly as generous as the USA has been since 1945 – in fact, some of these countries are run by criminal thugs, and life with them at the controls could become quite difficult.
Thanks for sharing that America is like Nineveh/assyria….
And it will be judged like em.If they were juged then,we will
never escape!
I’m no conspiracy fan, but I see a great many educated people being quite persistent on expanding the AGW agenda, and a sickening amount of cash being thrown at the “problem”. I can NOT believe that all (or any) of them believe what they’re saying to us. And even a fool like me knows that periods of lowered global temps cause extinctions every time. I also know a bit about basic survival preparations. Preparation for extreme cold translates fairly in a hot spot, but high-temp prep to cold environs, not so well. What I’m looking at here is population control. These people are not nice. They’re talking us into killing ourselves, our kids and grandkids, and most are making a nice living doing it. A frozen human sacrifice to the gods of Elitism.
Jim (07:47:42) :
It is fascinating, philosophically, that there is little or no debate regarding what earth temperature is optimal. The objective to keep everything “as is” presumes that we have the ability to do this AND that it is the right thing to do. Maybe it is better for the planet as a whole to be warmer(or colder). After all, humans have flourished in this climate and human activities are cited(amongst warmers) as the cause.
Jim, that is a very good point. If the powers that be seem to feel that they can control the climate with a bit of CO2 modification, why not a global discussion of the optimum temp.,……must be pretty easy just to ‘dial it in’.
Keith & Jim,
Before the debate can begin there has to be a little reflection on the part of the debaters.
Since there’s no such thing as an average climate of the Earth, we’d have to pose the question: “what would be the optimum climate for where you live and what would be the optimum climate for all the other places, where other people live but you like to visit or at least watch travel shows about?”
To be democratic we would have to record everybody’s reply then feed the data into a powerful computing machine.
Some of the responses would clearly be unbelievable, so they would have to be adjusted from their raw state, but it would be a bit undemocratic to only adjust some people’s replies.
Obviously, all opinions would need to be approriately tuned.
I suspect that very few in the inhabited world would want it much cooler in general than it is now and we’ve heard already they’re not keen (except me and most other Canadians) on having more warmth.
There is really only one conclusion; the optimum climatic conditions for the Earth are those that existed from the putative Little Ice Age until just prior to the Industrial Revolution.
Once carbon capture and containment have been perfected we should be able to judiciously release precise amounts of CO2 in regional doses to keep the measurements in line with the forecasts. Given that convection is proven insignificant (not worth modeling) , the warming could be localized and reversible.
I have noticed that my own tastes in weather vary constantly. I often complain about it.
Oliver,
“warming localised and reversible”is a good idea it sounds a little like the Urban Heat Island effect.
These GW,CC, carbon sequestration and other manipulations sounds like a politicians utopian dream to control climate, they seem to be able to control (or imagine they do) every thing else.
As for the optimum climate,I live in a hot summer,cold winter inland Australian climate,I can adapt, but my wife wants to live in the tropics.
So why not leave the world as it is so there is one less thing to argue about.
The real cause for the “global warming effect” is all the hot air coming from the United Statas Democratic Party, Obama, and his congressional SS. Of course Al Gore will go down as the biggest con man in history—enough said!
And then there is Henry Waxman, the man with pig nostrils that would do a better job as a chimney sweep, rather than his current job as Californias Nazi on congress.