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blackcat
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 Posted: Wed Apr 09, 2008 4:06 am Post subject: |
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http://www.iraq-war.ru/article/161230
| Quote: | Global Warming gets the Cold Freeze
Global warming hoax exposed by record global cold
By F. William Engdahl, Global Research, April 7, 2008
The media and governmental hype over a danger from global warming that already is allegedly causing the polar icecaps to melt and threaten a global climate catastrophe, looks more and more like the political hype it is. This year to date, snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.
According to the US National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) many American cities and towns have suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was - 0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 average."
China is surviving its most brutal winter in one hundred years. Temperatures in the normally mild south were low for so long that some middle-sized cities went weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.
There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has been hurt as home buyers have stayed home. In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, breaking the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in 1950.
Arctic Ice Melt has Reversed
One of the most dramatic results of the record cold over much of the planet is the reversal of the much-reported melt of the icebergs in the Arctic Ocean. Last autumn the world was alarmed to hear from certain climatologists that the ice in the Arctic had melted to its "lowest levels on record.” What was carefully omitted from those scare stories was the fact that those records only date back as far as 1972, and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.
Now, as a result of the recent record cold weather, the ice is back. According to Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.
What few people know and what the Global Warming lobby seems at pains to keep known is the fact that there is considerable seasonal variation in how much pack ice of the Arctic ice pack covers the Arctic Ocean. Much of the ocean is also covered in snow for about 10 months of the year. The maximum snow cover is in March or April — about 20 to 50 centimeters over the frozen ocean. The thickness is not one of the universal constants, never was.
Admit flawed Climate Model
There is also admission by several intellectually honest climatologists that their predictive models are flawed. Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona, two very prominent climate modellers, recently admitted that the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (as in the fictional movie The Day After Tomorrow) are wrong. In a recent interview Russell said, “It's not ice melt, but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of man-made warming on polar ice melt.” Now that’s very interesting.
When professors Toggweiler and Russell reprogrammed their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator, then back towards it again, the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the recent Arctic warming.
Russian climatologists believe recent weather changes around the globe are results of solar activity and not man-made emissions. Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, calls the argument for man-made climate change "a drop in the bucket." His research shows that now the recent very active solar activity has entered an inactive phase. He advised people to "stock up on fur coats."
Kenneth Tapping of Canada’s National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon. The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.
The Global Warming Geopolitics
The recent Global Warming hysteria is in reality a geopolitical push by leading global elite circles to find a way to get the broader populations to willingly accept drastic cuts in their living standards, something that were it demanded without clear reason by politicians, would spark strikes and protest. The UN’s latest IPCC report on Global Warming calls for diverting a huge 12% of global GDP to “prevent the harmful effects of climate change.” The UN report, for example, estimated that its recommendations to reduce certain manmade emissions would cost about $2,750 per family per year in the price of energy.
Today there are two principal policy options of the Anglo-American power establishment to impose their further control over a world that is rapidly slipping out from under them. We might call them Plan A and Plan B for short.
The first, Plan A, was the option represented by Bush-Cheney and the big oil and military industrial complex behind them. Cheney and his close Houston friend, Matt Simmons, propagated the myth of Peak Oil to lull populations into accepting the inevitability of $100 a barrel or even higher oil prices. In the meantime, the relative strength of the Big Oil and the related US military establishment grew with higher oil prices.
Their global War on Terror provided a cover or pretext to justify military control over the major oil reserves and oil transit passages of the world. From Iraq to Afghanistan to Kosovo, the US and NATO agenda was aimed at future control of the extraordinary economic powers emerging from Russia to China to India to Brazil and Venezuela and beyond. Through China’s effective diplomacy in Africa, many African countries are on the brink of slipping out from under the US or British control into Chinese or more independent status.
If John McCain becomes the next choice of the US power elites to be President, that will signal that that military and oil agenda will escalate, especially as the USA sinks into a severe economic depression in coming months.
The second broad faction of maintaining their control over the greater part of the world economy, Plan B, sees Global Warming and “soft power” as embodied in the organs of the United Nations and IMF and World Bank as the more suitable vehicle to convince people to willingly accept drastic reduction in living standards.
Barack Obama, the apparent choice of the same elites as a “breath of change” to allow them to regroup after the debacle of the Bush-Cheney years, would likely opt for the second faction of the global elite—the Global Warming option to lowering general living standards, ‘Plan B’ of the Anglo-American establishment. In a recent campaign speech in Wallingford Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama replied to a question about Al Gore, the hero of Global Warming. As President, Obama said he would consider putting Al Gore in a Cabinet-level position—or higher. He stated, “I will make a commitment that Al Gore will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this problem. He's somebody I talk to on a regular basis. I'm already consulting with him in terms of these issues but climate change is real."
The two major global factions
Today there are two major factions within the Western political power establishment internationally. They cooperate and share broad elitist goals, but differ fundamentally on how to reach these goals. Foremost is their goal of sharply controlling global economic growth and population growth. The first faction is best described as the Rockefeller Faction. It has a global power base and is today best represented by the Bush family faction which got their start, as I document in my book, as hired hands for the powerful Rockefeller machine. The Rockefeller faction has for more than a century based its power and influence on control of oil and on use of the military to secure that control. It is personified in the man who is since 2001 de facto President in terms of decision-making—Dick Cheney. Cheney was former CEO of Halliburton Corp., which is both the world’s largest oilfield services company (now based in Dubai for tax reasons), and the world’s largest military base constructor.
The second faction might be called the Soft Power Faction. Their philosophy might be summed up that they think its “possible to kill more flies with honey than with vinegar.” Their preferred path to global population control and lowering of the growth rates in China and elsewhere is through promoting the fraud of global warming and imminent climate catastrophe. Al Gore is linked to this faction. So is British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. They see globalist institutions, especially the United Nations, as the best vehicle to advance their agenda of global austerity.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created by the United Nations Environment Programme. Its reports have been demonstrated to be fundamentally flawed in scientific methodology, yet they are aggressively being promoted as revealed truth by the powerful media behind this faction. Others in the circle include billionaire speculator George Soros, parts of the British Royal family and representatives of European “old money.”
With the meteorological evidence of their claims for global warming dissolving as the ice forms anew, it is not surprising that news of the Arctic refreeze and other contrary evidence to their doomsday thesis are kept from mainline international media.
F. William Engdahl is a Research Associate of the Center for Research on Globalization and author of the recently-released book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca). He also author of ‘A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics,’ Pluto Press Ltd. He may be contacted at his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
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© Copyright F. William Engdahl, Global Research, 2008
The url address of this article is: http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=8583
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Yet another sceptic!!
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"The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power and influence. Our sole influence is public outrage. Extract from "Cloud Atlas (page 125) by David Mitchell. |
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uselesseater
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Joined: 21 Sep 2005
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| Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2008 5:17 pm Post subject: |
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| James C wrote: | Blackcat,
Forget what the BBC says, what do you make of the NASA evidence or is this a scam as well? It clearly shows a warming trend regardless of whether this is man made or not? |
Probably, seeing as James Hansen, who is funded by George Soros, is involved.
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www.wytruth.org.uk
www.myspace.com/truthleeds |
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GodSaveTheTeam
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Location: the eyevolution
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blackcat
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| Posted: Sun Apr 20, 2008 8:50 am Post subject: |
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http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/03/16/you-ask-i-provide-nove mber-2nd-1922-arctic-ocean-getting-warm-seals-vanish-and-icebergs-melt /
| Quote: | You ask, I provide. November 2nd, 1922. Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt.
Roger Carr recently wrote in comments:
HELP WANTED: I am trying to purchase (or plunder) a full copy of this story, mentioned here on this forum:
A Washington, D.C. resident John Lockwood was conducting research at the Library of Congress and came across an intriguing headline in the Nov. 2, 1922 edition of The Washington Post: Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt.
The article mentions “great masses of ice have now been replaced by moraines of earth and stones,” and “at many points well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared.”
The original source of the story resurfacing recently was from an Inside the Beltway column of August 14th, 2007. The newspaper article was located in the Library of Congress archives by James Lockwood.
Here is the text of the Washington Post (Associated Press) article:
The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.
Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.
UPDATE:
The source report of the Washington Post article on changes in the arctic has been found in the Monthly Weather Review for November 1922. It is much more detailed than the Washington Post (Associated Press) article. It seems the AP heaviliy relied on the report from Norway Consulate George Ifft, which is shown below. See the original MWR article below and click the newsprint copy for a complete artice or see the link to the original PDF below:
http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/050/mwr-050-11-0589a.pdf |
Like he says - "Its deja vu all over again!!" 
_________________
"The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power and influence. Our sole influence is public outrage. Extract from "Cloud Atlas (page 125) by David Mitchell. |
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James C
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| Posted: Sun Apr 20, 2008 9:39 am Post subject: |
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| blackcat wrote: | | Like he says - "Its deja vu all over again!!" |
Possibly, although this particular subject has been discussed for years now, long before the said article of 14th August 2007.
According to this report (pdf document below) and its author, the warming around Spitzbergen, Norway's northerly island, was isolated and 2/3 of the arctic remained unaffected. It goes on to suggest that the increases in temperature were man-made as a result of the 1st world war. A quite remarkable claim but not being an expert (as none of us are on the subject) I guess it was possible.
Can the "Big Warming" at Spitzbergen from 1918 to 1940 be explained?
More on this subject can be found here. I haven't had time to look at much of this but it suggests that whatever the reason, the WWI theory (above) is only one of several possible answers although in short, climate experts can't quite agree on a single theory. |
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wepmob2000
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| Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2008 8:04 pm Post subject: |
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An old article, but a good one, by a noted scientist and dedicated environmentalist (who's now treated as a pariah by the scientific 'community' for his 'heresy').
| Quote: | by Professor David Bellamy
Daily Mail, July 9, 2004
Whatever the experts say about the howling gales, thunder and lightning we've had over the past two days, of one thing we can be certain. Someone, somewhere - and there is every chance it will be a politician or an environmentalist - will blame the weather on global warming.
But they will be 100 per cent wrong. Global warming - at least the modern nightmare version - is a myth. I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists. But what is really worrying is that the world's politicians and policy makers are not.
Instead, they have an unshakeable in what has, unfortunately, become one of the central credos of the environmental movement. Humans burn fossil fuels, which release increased levels of carbon dioxide - the principal so-called greenhouse gas - into the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to heat up.
They say this is global warming: I say this is poppycock. Unfortunately, for the time being, it is their view that prevails.
As a result of their ignorance, the world's economy may be about to divert billions, nay trillions of pounds, dollars and roubles into solving a problem that actually doesn't exist. The waste of economic resources is incalculable and tragic.
Dreaded
To explain why I believe that global warming is largely a natural phenomenon that has been with us for 13,000 years and probably isn't causing us any harm anyway, we need to take heed of some basic facts of botanical science.
For a start, carbon dioxide is not the dreaded killer greenhouse gas that the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and the subsequent Kyoto Protocol five years later cracked it up to be. It is, in fact, the most important airborne fertiliser in the world, and without it there would be no green plants at all.
That is because, as any schoolchild will tell you, plants take in carbon dioxide and water and, with the help of a little sunshine, convert them into complex carbon compounds - that we either eat, build with or just admire - and oxygen, which just happens to keep the rest of the planet alive.
Increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, double it even, and this would produce a rise in plant productivity. Call me a biased old plant lover but that doesn't sound like much of a killer gas to me. Hooray for global warming is what I say, and so do a lot of my fellow scientists.
Let me quote from a petition produced by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, which has been signed by over 18,000 scientists who are totally opposed to the Kyoto Protocol, which committed the world's leading industrial nations to cut their production of greenhouse gasses from fossil fuels.
They say: 'Predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in minor greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide are in error and do not conform to experimental knowledge.'
You couldn't get much plainer than that. And yet we still have public figures such as Sir David King, scientific adviser to Her Majesty's Government, making preposterous statements such as 'by the end of this century, the only continent we will be able to live on is Antarctica.'
At the same time, he's joined the bandwagon that blames just about everything on global warming, regardless of the scientific evidence. For example, take the alarm about rising sea levels around the south coast of England and subsequent flooding along the region's rivers. According to Sir David, global warming is largely to blame.
But it isn't at all - it's down to bad management of water catchments, building on flood plains and the incontestable fact that the south of England is gradually sinking below the waves.
And that sinking is nothing to do with rising sea levels caused by ice-caps melting. Instead, it is purely related to an entirely natural warping of the Earth's crust, which could only be reversed by sticking one of the enormously heavy ice-caps from past ice ages back on top of Scotland.
Ah, ice ages... those absolutely massive changes in global climate that environmentalists don't like to talk about because they provide such strong evidence that climate change is an entirely natural phenomenon.
It was round about the end of the last ice age, some 13,000 years ago, that a global warming process did undoubtedly begin.
Not because of all those Stone age folk roasting mammoth meat on fossil fuel camp fires but because of something called the 'Milankovitch Cycles,' an entirely natural fact of planetary life that depends on the tilt of the Earth's axis and its orbit around the sun.
Melted
The glaciers melted, the ice cap retreated and Stone Age man could begin hunting again. But a couple of millennia later, it got very cold again and everyone headed south. Then it warmed up so much that water from melted ice filled the English Channel and we became an island.
The truth is that the climate has been yo-yo-ing up and down ever since. Whereas it was warm enough for Romans to produce good wine in York, on the other hand, King Canute had to dig up peat to warm his people. And then it started getting warm again.
Up and down, up and down - that is how temperature and climate have always gone in the past and there is no proof they are not still doing exactly the same thing now. In other words, climate change is an entirely natural phenomenon, nothing to do with the burning of fossil fuels.
In fact, a recent scientific paper, rather unenticingly titled 'Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentrations Over The Last Glacial Termination,' proved it.
It showed that increases in temperature are responsible for increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, not the other way around.
Ignored
But this sort of evidence is ignored, either by those who believe the Kyoto Protocol is environmental gospel or by those who know 25 years of hard work went into securing the agreement and simply can't admit that the science it is based on is wrong.
The real truth is that the main greenhouse gas - the one that has the most direct effect on land temperature - is water vapour, 99 per cent of which is entirely natural.
If all the water vapour was removed from the atmosphere, the temperature would fall by 33 degrees Celsius. But, remove all the carbon dioxide and the temperature might fall by just 0.3 per cent.
Although we wouldn't be around, because without it there would be no green plants, no herbivorous farm animals and no food for us to eat.
It has been estimated that the cost of cutting fossil fuel emissions in line with the Kyoto Protocol would be £76trillion. Little wonder, then, that world leaders are worried. So should we all be.
If we signed up to these scaremongers, we could be about to waste a gargantuan amount of money on a problem that doesn't exist - money that could be used in umpteen better ways: fighting world hunger, providing clean water, developing alternative energy sources, improving our environment, creating jobs.
The link between the burning of fossil fuels and global warming is a myth. It is time the world's leaders, their scientific advisers and many environmental pressure groups woke up to the fact. |
Also rather a good opinion piece that appeared in the Times today.....
| Quote: | From The TimesApril 21, 2008
A world of hemp lingerie? No thanks
Women will be returned to the Dark Ages if the eco-fundamentalists end up having their wayMelanie Reid
Long before we are extinguished by global food shortages or raised sea levels, I predict, we are fated to die of boredom, struck down in our prime by the devastating virus 0157eco-smugness. Doctors will be powerless to stop as the bug invades our minds, causing nervous paralysis leading to eventual seizure. We are doomed, for sure, to terminal ennui brought on by environmental righteousness.
This is the terrible paradox of the environmental movement. The paradox that, if society proceeds down the true path of eco-purity, we may well save the planet; but will simultaneously discover that life is too dull to be worth living on it any more. Women in particular, I fear, will find themselves returned to the Dark Ages.
How can it be otherwise? No skiing, no cars, no travel, no exotic foods, no extravagance, no Hollywood, no wasteful labour-saving devices, no clothes made of anything but recycled plastics and hemp. No more Luxx magazine filled with beautifully engineered, sleek, accessory porn. In their place we will chant a litany of carbon offset, recycling and composting, the buttresses of a new religion that makes radical Islam resemble Methodism.
What is becoming so fascinating about the new puritanism is not just that we are all being brainwashed to accept the inevitability of hair shirts, but also their unquestioned moral worth. That somehow or other, this life of sackcloth and bicycles is going to benefit our souls and make us all better people.
This has been made apparent by the reaction to David Bellamy, the grand old man of botany, who declared recently that the extended spring ski season in Scotland - deep, extensive snow cover, the best in a decade - could be proof that global warming does not exist quite as painted. He pointed out that the global high-temperature record has not been broken for a decade, and temperatures are now flat or falling.
Indeed, the impartial observer might see the harder weather - together with the recent bitterly cold winter in China and the Arctic - as a joyful thing: a sign that maybe things aren't that bad after all.
But oh no. This kind of heresy must be crushed. And Bellamy, the author of a paper called Climate Stability: An Inconvenient Truth, is a dangerous man, an anti-Christ to the prevailing orthodoxy, who must be dealt with as quickly as possible by the eco-thought police.
We should not be surprised when global-warming policy officers and climate-change academics rush to declare that the evidence for pending disaster is “overwhelming”. Nor when they announce, in as menacing a tone as Abu Izzadeen, that we ignore what is happening “at our peril”. These people have, after all, to justify their job titles; the industry of which they are part is worth billions of pounds a year; and for everyone in it to grow and prosper and pay their mortgages, the snow must continue to melt and the seas continue to rise. Just as the makers of aspirin wish you had a headache, the eco-alarmists rather love high temperatures.
My real problem with the eco-alarmists is the pleasure they take in austerity; their evident desire to strip away pleasure. Deep down, they disapprove of skiing, even on a Scottish scale. They dislike colour, excess and fun. They really do want to see us imprisoned in a narrow, grey, scratchy world of recycled car tyres and hemp lingerie (and no, I didn't make that up).
Hence their gleefulness in the economic downturn, because it will mean that people are poorer, and will be forced to do things their way. Slowly but surely, the roundheads will take over the Earth. In their ideal world we will not travel, except by bus; we will read gloomy books like A Short History of the Future (on recycled paper); and luxury will consist of a wind-up MP3 player.
What amuses me, wryly, is how this new religion is following in the path of all traditional ones in its impact on women. Climate change is indeed a feminist issue. Who will be the victims of the eco-smug; of this pious gospel of make-do-and-mend? Why, women - who will have to forgo their washing machines and their dish washers, carry supermarket shopping on the bus, and return to the horror of reuseable nappies.
A group of environmentalists have posted a tuition video called How To Darn A Sock on YouTube, where it has received nearly 8,000 hits. Its popularity has been eclipsed by the short film, How To Sew A Button On, which has been seen by 90,000 people. Funny, isn't it, how women spent centuries escaping from this kind of slave labour, and now it is being sneaked back in under the guise of saving the planet. Women will always suffer in a poorer world.
The environmental movement has become, if not quite a man-made hoax, then at the very least a fashionable bandwagon for very dodgy facts and sharp marketing. How do they know, except by the wildest guesstimate, that British cars emitted 69.9 million tonnes of CO2 last year? How can anyone claim that a £20 “ecobutton” for a computer (the latest gadget for the faithful, to power down the machine when not in use) will save me 135kg of carbon every year? These figures are patently cobblers, just as pictures of lonely polar bears on shrinking icebergs are manipulative sentimentalism.
Meanwhile, we should lift our hats to carbon-management firms, surely the most surreal triumph of modern capitalism, which have created a trade in hypothetical waste; as whimsical as fantasy football. Were we all so clever as to dream that one up.
If we may dream at all. Frankly the thought of life in this smug, dull, joyless, labour-intensive, recycled, fair trade, waste-free world makes a woman yearn to be already dead and buried in her eco-friendly coffin, fertilising some field for methane-free cows. At least that way one can be sure of a rest. |
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TetraGrammatonCleric
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| Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 12:44 pm Post subject: |
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if the elite where really benevolent and concerned about global warming/climate change (as its being referred to now), wouldn't they be giving people tax breaks for installing solar panels on their houses, or investing in more sustainable ways of living, oh and theres the small question of suppression of alternative energy devices that various inventors have come up with throughout history but have been turned down on our behalf..
Nikola Tesla
Viktor Schauberger
Wilhelm Reich
Stan Meyer's water powered car http://www.waterpoweredcar.com/
They all tend to end up suppressed and the inventors killed or driven to insanity for some reason. |
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blackcat
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| Posted: Sat Jun 21, 2008 5:16 am Post subject: |
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http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/06/the-sunspot-mys.html
| Quote: | June 11, 2008
The Sunspot Enigma: The Sun is “Dead”—What Does it Mean for Earth?
Dark spots, some as large as 50,000 miles in diameter, typically move across the surface of the sun, contracting and expanding as they go. These strange and powerful phenomena are known as sunspots, but now they are all gone. Not even solar physicists know why it’s happening and what this odd solar silence might be indicating for our future.
Although periods of inactivity are normal for the sun, this current period has gone on much longer than usual and scientists are starting to worry—at least a little bit. Recently 100 scientists from Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and North America gathered to discuss the issue at an international solar conference at Montana State University. Today's sun is as inactive as it was two years ago, and solar physicists don’t have a clue as to why.
"It continues to be dead," said Saku Tsuneta with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, program manager for the Hinode solar mission, noting that it is at least a little bit worrisome for scientists.
Dana Longcope, a solar physicist at MSU, said the sun usually operates on an 11-year cycle with maximum activity occurring in the middle of the cycle. The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now, Longcope said. The next cycle is just beginning and is expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. But so far nothing is happening.
"It's a dead face," Tsuneta said of the sun's appearance.
Tsuneta said solar physicists aren't weather forecasters and they can't predict the future. They do have the ability to observe, however, and they have observed a longer-than-normal period of solar inactivity. In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period coincided with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700. Coincidence? Some scientists say it was, but many worry that it wasn’t.
Geophysicist Phil Chapman, the first Australian to become an astronaut with NASA, said pictures from the US Solar and Heliospheric Observatory also show that there are currently no spots on the sun. He also noted that the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C.
"This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930," Dr Chapman noted in The Australian recently.
If the world does face another mini Ice Age, it could come without warning. Evidence for abrupt climate change is readily found in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. One of the best known examples of such an event is the Younger Dryas cooling, which occurred about 12,000 years ago, named after the arctic wildflower found in northern European sediments. This event began and ended rather abruptly, and for its entire 1000 year duration the North Atlantic region was about 5°C colder. Could something like this happen again? There’s no way to tell, and because the changes can happen all within one decade—we might not even see it coming.
The Younger Dryas occurred at a time when orbital forcing should have continued to drive climate to the present warm state. The unexplained phenomenon has been the topic of much intense scientific debate, as well as other millennial scale events.
Now this 11-year low in Sunspot activity has raised fears among a small but growing number of scientists that rather than getting warmer, the Earth could possibly be about to return to another cooling period. The idea is especially intriguing considering that most of the world is in preparation for global warming.
Canadian scientist Kenneth Tapping of the National Research Council has also noted that solar activity has entered into an unusually inactive phase, but what that means—if anything—is still anyone’s guess. Another solar scientist, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, however, is certain that it’s an indication of a coming cooling period.
Sorokhtin believes that a lack of sunspots does indicate a coming cooling period based on certain past trends and early records. In fact, he calls manmade climate change "a drop in the bucket" compared to the fierce and abrupt cold that can potentially be brought on by inactive solar phases.
Sorokhtin’s advice: "Stock up on fur coats"…just in case.
Posted by Rebecca Sato
Related posts:
The Milky Way Enigma -How Galactic Forces May Control Life on Earth
The “Little Ice Age” Argument Makes a Comeback: Abrupt Climate Change Goes Both Ways, Warns Scientist
Are Global Warming Models Accurately Predicting Our Future? New Study Reveals the Answer—A Galaxy Interview
Sources:
http://www.montana.edu/cpa/news/nwview.php?article=5982&log
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23584524-11949,00.h tml |
Brrrr....
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"The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power and influence. Our sole influence is public outrage. Extract from "Cloud Atlas (page 125) by David Mitchell. |
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blackcat
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| Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2008 3:11 pm Post subject: |
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/22/climatechange.carbon emissions
| Quote: | Poll: most Britons doubt cause of climate change
Juliette Jowit, environment editor The Observer, Sunday June 22, 2008
The majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans - and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem, according to an exclusive poll for The Observer.
The results have shocked campaigners who hoped that doubts would have been silenced by a report last year by more than 2,500 scientists for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found a 90 per cent chance that humans were the main cause of climate change and warned that drastic action was needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The findings come just before the release of the government's long-awaited renewable energy strategy, which aims to cut the UK's greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent over the next 12 years.
The poll, by Ipsos MORI, found widespread contradictions, with some people saying politicians were not doing enough to tackle the problem, even though they were cynical about government attempts to impose regulations or raise taxes. In a sign of the enormous task ahead for those pushing for drastic cuts to carbon emissions, many people said they did not want to restrict their lifestyles and only a small minority believe they need to make 'significant and radical' changes such as driving and flying less.
'It's disappointing and the government will be really worried,' said Jonathon Porritt, chairman of the government's Sustainable Development Commission. 'They [politicians] need the context in which they're developing new policies to be a lot stronger and more positive. Otherwise the potential for backlash and unpopularity is considerable.'
There is growing concern that an economic depression and rising fuel and food prices are denting public interest in environmental issues. Some environmentalists blame the public's doubts on last year's Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, and on recent books, including one by Lord Lawson, the former Chancellor, that question the consensus on climate change.
However Professor Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, said politicians and campaigners were to blame for over-simplifying the problem by only publicising evidence to support the case. 'Things that we do know - like humans do cause climate change - are being put in doubt,' said Lomborg. 'If you're saying, "We're not going to tell you the whole truth, but we're going to ask you to pay up a lot of money," people are going to be unsure.'
In response to the poll's findings, the Department for the Environment issued a statement: 'The IPCC... concluded the scientific evidence for climate change is clear and it is down to human activities. It is already affecting people's lives - and the impact will be much greater if we don't act now.'
Ipsos MORI polled 1,039 adults and found that six out of 10 agreed that 'many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change', and that four out of 10 'sometimes think climate change might not be as bad as people say'. In both cases, another 20 per cent were not convinced either way. Despite this, three quarters still professed to be concerned about climate change.
Those most worried were more likely to have a degree, be in social classes A or B, have a higher income, said Phil Downing, Ipsos MORI's head of environmental research.
'People are broadly concerned, but not entirely convinced,' said Downing. 'Despite many attempts to broaden the environment movement, it doesn't seem to have become fully embedded as a mainstream concern,' he said.
More than half of those polled did not have confidence in international or British political leaders to tackle climate change, but only just over a quarter think it's too late to stop it. Two thirds want the government to do more but nearly as many said they were cynical about government policies such as green taxes, which they see as 'stealth' taxes. |
| Quote: | | The results have shocked campaigners who hoped that doubts would have been silenced |
I'll bet they're shocked! This idea of the great unwashed being a little less gullible than they though is getting irritating. They'll be rejecting the Lisbon treaty in Ireland next!!!!
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"The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power and influence. Our sole influence is public outrage. Extract from "Cloud Atlas (page 125) by David Mitchell. |
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Mark Gobell
On Gardening Leave
Joined: 24 Jul 2006
Posts: 4529
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| Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2008 6:37 pm Post subject: |
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And to think, on the 274th day of his massively extensive, 418 days of intense understanding of all things DEFRA, Zio Milibrain had already told us that the "climate change debate is now closed".
Awesome intellect.
A ministerial progeny.
Obviously.
Apart from the majestical boy David, has anyone else, ever, in the history of UK Gov, ascended, in a single hop, from Environment to Foreign Secretary before ?
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The Medium is the Massage - Marshall McLuhan. |
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TonyGosling
Editor
Joined: 25 Jul 2005
Posts: 18335
Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
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blackcat
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Posts: 2376
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| Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2008 4:46 pm Post subject: |
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http://www.dailytech.com/Temperature+Monitors+Report+Worldwide+Global+ Cooling/article10866.htm
| Quote: | Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling
Michael Asher (Blog) - February 26, 2008
World Temperatures according to the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction. Note the steep drop over the last year.Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming
Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.
Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.
Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.
Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news. |
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"The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power and influence. Our sole influence is public outrage. Extract from "Cloud Atlas (page 125) by David Mitchell. |
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blackcat
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Posts: 2376
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| Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2008 5:01 am Post subject: |
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/26/climatechange.pollut ion
| Quote: | Oceans clearing greenhouse gases faster than expected
Ian Sample guardian.co.uk, Thursday June 26, 2008
Greenhouse gases over the tropical Atlantic are disappearing faster than expected, according to the first comprehensive measurements taken in the region.
British scientists working at the Cape Verde Observatory on the volcanic island of São Vicente believe chemicals produced by sea spray and tiny marine organisms are speeding up natural processes that destroy the gases.
Detailed measurements taken over a year revealed that levels of one greenhouse gas were substantially lower than climate models predicted.
The observatory, which was recently set up by British, German and Cape Verdean scientists, has given researchers an unprecedented ability to study climate change in one of the most remote regions in the world.
In the tropics, intense UV rays in sunlight trigger reactions that effectively scrub greenhouse gases from the air. Without this natural cleaning process, atmospheric levels of the gases and other pollutants would be substantially higher than they are.
One of the most important cleaning reactions destroys ozone, which contributes to global warming at lower altitudes. A byproduct of the reaction, called hydroxyl, cleans the air even more by breaking down methane, the third most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. The study, led by scientists at Leeds and York Universities, revealed ozone levels over the tropical Atlantic were 50% lower than expected.
Ozone is a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, and is carried down to the tropics from the UK and Europe on trade winds. As the air crosses the ocean, the harsh sunlight reduces ozone levels from around 50 parts per billion (ppb) to 10 ppb, the scientists report in the journal Nature.
To check their readings, the team used a research plane to measure ozone levels at different altitudes over the ocean. Their readings confirmed a major loss of ozone in the remote region.
"At the moment this is a good news story, more ozone and methane being destroyed than we previously thought. But the tropical Atlantic cannot be taken for granted as a permanent sink for ozone," said Alastair Lewis, who led the study at the national centre for atmospheric science in York.
"It may mean that there are sources of methane and ozone that we aren't aware of that the atmosphere has been working away on without us realising it. Or perhaps we've been overestimating how quickly ozone is removed in other parts of the world," Lewis added.
Instruments at the observatory later pointed to an explanation for the rapid destruction of ozone over the ocean. The sensors picked up bromine and iodine oxide, which are produced by sea spray and plankton, and join forces to attack ozone.
Lewis said the discovery should give renewed impetus to programmes that aim to reduce atmospheric methane and low-level ozone. "It's an incentive to get on with cutting our emissions of these gases, because if we do, the atmosphere will scrub them away quicker and we will get the benefits sooner. Carbon dioxide lasts for hundreds of years, while methane lasts only a year or two in the tropics," said Lewis.
Climate scientists will use the findings to fine-tune computer models that attempt to predict future warming. "We now have to get to grips with why this wasn't spotted earlier and ultimately put this into our models so we can improve their accuracy," said Lewis. |
Its gonna be freeeeezing!!!
_________________
"The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power and influence. Our sole influence is public outrage. Extract from "Cloud Atlas (page 125) by David Mitchell. |
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QuitTheirClogs
Trustworthy Freedom Fighter
Joined: 09 Feb 2007
Posts: 630
Location: Manchester
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QuitTheirClogs
Trustworthy Freedom Fighter
Joined: 09 Feb 2007
Posts: 630
Location: Manchester
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| Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2009 8:00 pm Post subject: |
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NASA Headline News: Deep Solar Minimum
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/01apr_deepsolarminimum.htm
April 1, 2009: The sunspot cycle is behaving a little like the stock market. Just when you think it has hit bottom, it goes even lower.
2008 was a bear. There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73%). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008.
Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87%).
In 2008, the sun set the following records:
- a 50-year low in solar wind pressure
- a 12-year low in solar "irradiance"
- a 55-year low in solar radio emissions
All these lows have sparked a debate about whether the ongoing minimum is "weird", "extreme" or just an overdue "market correction" following a string of unusually intense solar maxima.
"Since the Space Age began in the 1950s, solar activity has been generally high," notes Hathaway. "Five of the ten most intense solar cycles on record have occurred in the last 50 years. We're just not used to this kind of deep calm."
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Simon - http://www.patriotsquestion911.com/
David Ray Griffin - 9/11: the Myth & the Reality
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-275577066688213413 |
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QuitTheirClogs
Trustworthy Freedom Fighter
Joined: 09 Feb 2007
Posts: 630
Location: Manchester
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| Posted: Thu Apr 30, 2009 8:45 pm Post subject: |
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Hot summer on the way, predicts Met
Forecasters expect above-average temperatures and warn that weather changes will grow worse
Juliette Jowit, environment editor The Observer, Sunday 8 April 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/apr/08/weather.theobserver
Britain set to enjoy another sizzling summer after new evidence from the Met Office suggested above average temperatures for the season.
As the country basked in warm spring sunshine over the Easter weekend, the new research suggests that it could be time to say goodbye to defining features of British life, like rainy picnics and cloudy sunbathing.
This week the Met Office is expected to reveal that there is a 70 per cent chance summer temperatures will be above the 30-year average of 14.1C.
_________________
Simon - http://www.patriotsquestion911.com/
David Ray Griffin - 9/11: the Myth & the Reality
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-275577066688213413 |
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