From the “fight fire with fire fight silliness with silliness” department comes this press release from CFACT:
PLAY METHANE MADNESS ON GORE’S CLIMATE PROPAGANDA DAY – SEPTEMBER 14.
PUT A CORK IN GLOBAL WARMING HOT AIR (AND FLATULENCE).
“Put a cork in it, Al!”
That’s the message students are sending Al Gore, radical climate campaigners and assorted other bohemians, grant-seekers and profiteers seeking to cash in on the manmade global warming disaster craze.
Al Gore is calling on folks to make September 14 a day of climate action, through a series of propaganda videos that he will be broadcasting worldwide. The Collegians For A Constructive Tomorrow call for a day of genuine “climate realism,” instead. CFACT Collegians are responding with a bit of online levity.
CFACT’s Methane Madness game trains online players to help “Pal Gore” control the climate by corking cows and watching them float away. Methane is more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas but less than 1% of atmospheric greenhouse gases come from cattle. Even so, radical climate campaigners call for shutting down our cattle and dairy industries, along with much of the rest our economy. They’d even like us to go vegan.
However, climate science IS NOT SETTLED; computer models are biased, and observations don’t reflect the models; man’s impact on climate and atmosphere is dwarfed by nature’s; Climategate is just the tip of the corrupt science iceberg; more scientists find the courage to match their analysis every day and declare against the scare; offsets are a scam; citizens can now spot warming propaganda; alternative energy is inefficient; carbon profiteers rake in tax dollars but don’t affect the climate; economies in crisis can’t afford the waste; consensus is not science; there has never been a consensus; freedom and prosperity are the proven path to cleaner environments; our meat and dairy industries are home-based, thriving industries that feed multitudes and employ the nicest people you’ll ever meet; developed nations have enough to eat for the first time in history; et cetera, et cetera.
WHOA! All those dreary, inconvenient facts! Gore won’t enjoy those. As Scarlett O’Hara said, “I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about that tomorrow.” For Al, tomorrow never comes.
If players succeed in corking all the cows, Methane Madness they can move on to further levels and put a cork in Gore & Company’s hot air.
Don’t worry. CFACT’s always been about free speech. Corks come out. Gore and his celebrity buddies can go right back to spewing their hot air. It will take cold facts for realism to triumph over alarmism on climate. CFACT wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Jobs just aren’t waiting for us when we graduate, the way they used to be,” said Methane Madness player Josh Smith, a student at University of Wisconsin. “Al Gore preaches we should live with less – while he flies
from mansion to mansion. I don’t even know how I’m going to pay my student loans. Put a cork in it, Al!”
Methane Madness is available to play online (9-14) at www.MethaneMadness.com.
If levity’s not your bag, you can always find plenty of solid global warming facts and analyses debunking the scare at www.CFACT.org and www.ClimateDepot.com. You’ll find them fascinating and entertaining.
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Of course, no article on methane, cows, and silliness would be complete without this image:
In all of the decades-long idiocy about cow flatulence and methane, no-one ever mentions that before the beef cattle industry the Great Plains were home to a herd of 60+ MILLION American Bison, which outclass their poorer domestic bovine cousins in body mass by about 40% and, consequently, outgassed proportionally. When doing energy balances, one is SUPPOSED to subtract out extant conditions when examining a (perceived) impact. No-one EVER considers Buffalo Farts!
Oh….. Prairie Oysters!!!!!
“All those dreary, inconvenient facts! Gore won’t enjoy those.”
I don’t think facts bother Al at all; he just calls them bulls**t and moves on.
Tomorrow is another day. And the day after tomorrow too…
How about a board game called “Greendigger” that uses fiat money emissions certificates, government loan guarantees, and tax subsidies to create a green empire. You could start with, say, 100,000 pre-IPO Google stock options and then deposit the post-IPO proceeds in your offshore shell company which purportedly champions the green revolution but is in fact invested in conventional companies like any other stock fund but is somewhat sheltered from USA taxes. In this game Greendigger you really get to behave just like a hypocritical green demagogue while evading US taxes at the same time!!! Not to mention that you can repeatedly filch extra funds from the public purse. Fun for the whole green family!
I was, unfortunately, in a meeting all day – so missed all the “reality”. Was it interesting? Do you think it would be possible to have “reality” some other time so I can see what it looks like?
REPLY: Read the header of WUWT, but your confusion this may underscore a fatal fault with Gore’s timing of the event – Anthony
Anyone in Scotland
I’m trying to gather support for a scottish association of climate sceptics, and I’d be interested to hear any ideas for names or other comments particularly anyone else who has tried something similar.
I’ve started two threads on my blog:
General comments for discussion
Unscientific poll of name
I’m sorry to report that the game is just too slow to play on my PC. And there’s no button to stop the game once it’s started (I had to close my browser). It needs some work.
REPLY: Might be the server is overloaded due to popularity – Anthony
Played the game… turns out I’m not very good at shooting corks up cows arses…. Watt’s Up With That??????? 🙂
Wait just a minute, that’s not Elsie.
Elsie the Cow would never anything like that.
In order to stop the methane from cows, the corks would actually need to go in the other end, since the majority of it comes from belching. They have the right end for stopping the climate nonsense from Al, though. Methane of course, like C02 is odorless, colorless, and harmless to our climate. It doesn’t matter in the slightest, unless your paycheck depends on it like Big Al and his cronies.
I found out that my daughter’s elementary school was having a green week in which they discussed global warming among other things. One of the suggestions that the school sent home was to discuss our recycling. I asked my daughter what they said made the Earth warm. She said, The cows keep pooting and it warms the Earth.”
Sadly, this was the only way that a skeptical teacher had to avoid telling the class that CO2 and the emitters of CO2 were evil, while still obeying the edict to teach global warming. So, our recycling bin has a picture of a cow farting provided by my 8 year old.
In regards to the picture of the cow. Are the flames coming from the end of the cow, or from Big Al? Where’s his head these days?
I’m still waiting for something tot happen that will bring my attention to this climate reality day besides going to skeptic websites so far I haven’t seen it. My email is Gore free my Facebook page is Gore free, my iGooge page is almost Gore free, it would be totally Gore free if I hadn’t set it up to search for global warming. I doubt that many people set up their home pages to search for global warming so I doubt most people even know about climate reality day.
That’s pretty funny as Conan would say.
On a scale of 1 to 5, I’d give it
5 Udders UP!
The game would be a lot more fun if Al and some of his pals like Mann, Pachuri, etc. were the targets. Would need 2 corks each tho – one in each end.
yet again, we can blame (un-educated) bureaucrats for the (methane) belching cows…..
Basically, ‘it was decided’ that after WWII, the UK should become self-sufficient in (people) food.
Therefore agriculture must ‘be improved’ and be more productive – and so it was.
Part of that improvement was the introduction, development and widespread use of so called ‘ryegrass’ (species: Lolium) as a feed for livestock.
It is a very productive grass, responds well to fertilizer and CAN be very nutritious but……
the minute the grass throws up a flower head and/or starts to set seed, it becomes quite indigestible to the cows that are forced to eat it. Because of this, it goes right through their stomach and basically rots in their intestines – that’s where the methane comes from.
If modern cows are fed on good old fashioned grass, there is no methane ‘problem’ because they can digest the stuff properly, as the bison did/do since time immemorial.
Just to show what fools they are, this is taken from the top two lines of their facebook page:
24 Hours of Reality
Today at 7:00pm – Tomorrow at 9:00pm
That would seem to actually be 26 hours, but then I am not a rich rent-seeker, so I am sure I am not
qualified to issue an opinion on that.
It must have been horribly hot and parched on the Great Plains, what with millions of Buffalo, Elk, Deer and Antelope doing flaming raspberries. It should have caused the region to turn to desert, and the herds went extinct. But that didn’t happen until we came here and shot them all. Something is turned upside down in this madcap AGW belief.
Are you ready for some La Nina?
Well methane “madness” is right. I believe hay is now also a pollutant in the US, or will be soon. And I agree that farming folk are often some of the nicest folk you could hope to meet, who have enough to deal with already, what with the vagaries of the climate over time due to natural variations in its state (think 1930’s dust bowl).
TomG(ologist) says:
September 14, 2011 at 8:48 am
In all of the decades-long idiocy about cow flatulence and methane, no-one ever mentions that before the beef cattle industry the Great Plains were home to a herd of 60+ MILLION American Bison, which outclass their poorer domestic bovine cousins in body mass by about 40% and, consequently, outgassed proportionally. When doing energy balances, one is SUPPOSED to subtract out extant conditions when examining a (perceived) impact. No-one EVER considers Buffalo Farts!
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I’ve considered buffalo farts and CO2/methane emissions a number of times. But now that you mention it I wonder (out of academic interest only) how many cows there are in the USA.
There are quite a few where I live. Aberdeen Angus.Tasty.
What about insect farts? The number of insect individuals massively exceeds the number of buffalo, cow and human individuals added together (I’d imagine).
What are we going to do about insect farts?
Utter madness.
@ Kitefreak says:
September 14, 2011 at 12:35 pm
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I’ve considered buffalo farts and CO2/methane emissions a number of times. But now that you mention it I wonder (out of academic interest only) how many cows there are in the USA.
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From: http://www.cattlenetwork.com/cattle-news/markets/feeder-cattle/US-cattle-herd-fell-to-record-low-amid-Plains-drought-pricey-corn-125962888.html
As of July 1, 2011:
“The total U.S. cattle herd at the middle of this year fell to a record low as high feed costs discouraged adding animals and severe drought in the Southern Plains forced ranchers to send more cows to slaughter.
As of July 1, the nation’s inventory of all types of cattle and calves fell to 99.69 million head, down 1.4 percent from the same date in 2010, according to a Dow Jones Newswires survey of analysts. That would be the smallest herd for that date since the U.S. Department of Agriculture began compiling a July 1 figure in 1973.”
Evidence of anthropogenic cooling?
Mammoth farts could have stopped the ice age 12,000 years ago
Methane emissions from extinct megafauna, Felisa A. Smith, Scott M. Elliott & S. Kathleen Lyons, Nature Geoscience 3, 374 – 375 (2010) | doi:10.1038/ngeo877
Clearly, since we humans fart and belch the answer is obvious- eliminate humans. All those who subscribe to this view line up first please. What? No takers!
It’s even more insane than that.
Methane actually has a very SMALL absorption spectrum. The usual “20X” meme is arrived at by counting the BURN products (if the CH4 were incinerated, it results in 1xCO2, and 2xH2O) and their profiles.
Totally bogus. Lies all the way down.