Global Warming Responses
"Apocalypse Never" – Michael Shellenberger Talks With Dennis Prager
Published July 8, 2020 by Papa Giorgio
Dennis Prager had Michael Shellenberger on his show to discuss his new book entitled "Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All" (Amazon: ). In an article by Michael, you see him transitioning into a "Bjorn Lomborg" type of category. Here is the opening paragraph of that article:
On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It's just not the end of the world. It's not even our most serious environmental problem. (ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRESS)
Facts through reason and common sense have made it through to this gentleman, and this is nice to hear. In another review of the book, it is noted that Mr. Shellenberger is a long time environmentalist and contributed "rationalism [that] is in woefully short supply in present day environmental discourse. Michael Shellenberger's Apocalypse Never succeeds in providing a welcome boost" Here is the opening of that review:
The way to a cleaner, sustainable planet is not to eliminate fossil fuels and nuclear power, but rather to expand their use, especially in developing countries to bring economic growth and prosperity, the way such sources did for the developed world.
This is one of the primary themes in the new book, Apocalypse Never, written not by a "climate denier" or "corporate shill." Instead, author Michael Shellenberger is a 30-year environmental activist with street cred in various causes including saving California's redwood forests and co-founding a "progressive Democratic, labor-environment push" in 2002 for the New Apollo Project, a renewable energy initiative that long predated the Green New Deal. He also is a Time magazine "Hero of the Environment."…..
(PA PUNDITS – Peter Murphy)
Posted in Democratic Progressivism, Dennis Prager, Energy Policy, Global Warming/Climate Change, Green Religion, Mantras & Myths	Tagged Bjorn Lomborg, Global Warming, Global Warming Responses, Michael Shellenberger
Walrus Haulouts vs Netflix (Updated)
UPDATED VIDEO:
No, Global Warming Doesn't Make Walruses Jump Off Cliffs
…Unfortunately, despite Attenborough's despicable attempts to yank on heartstrings, the population of dangerous polar bears is not falling.
The actual victims here are children young enough to take this crap seriously; ecoanxiety can be a serious psychiatric disorder, as Greta Thunberg demonstrates.
(MOONBATTERY)
Hoo Boy… now Netflix and other Media and environmental orgs are saying Walruses are a proof of Global Warming… except… this phenomenon has been observed for a long, long time. And IS NOT NEW like shown in popular media:
…Hype from the *Netflix/Attenborough 'climate change is gonna destroy the world' fearmongers earlier this year notwithstanding – or the media this summer trying to stir up climate change fever – the US Fish and Wildlife Service determined in October 2017 that the Pacific walrus is not being harmed by climate change and is not likely to be harmed within the foreseeable future (USFWS 2017). The IUCN Red List (2015) lists the Pacific walrus as 'data deficient'.
Large herds onshore are a sign of population health, not climate change, and walruses have come ashore in the Chukchi Sea during the ice-free season in summer and/or fall for more than 100 years (Crockford 2014; Fischbach et al. 2016; Lowrey 1985). Those are the relevant scientific facts….
(WUWT)
Dr Susan Crockford explains why the media coverage and statements by scientists and environmental organisations mislead people about the massive walrus haulout seen in Sept/October 2014. Read Susan Crockford's paper, which refutes claims that Arctic walruses are in distress and danger due to global warming at: On The Beach: Walrus Haulouts Are Nothing New (PDF)
From POLAR BEAR SCIENCE:
I had an opportunity last night to watch the original Netflix 'Frozen Worlds' walrus episode and have some addition thoughts.
One big eye-opener was the final shot of the walrus sequence: a polar bear approaching from the water to feed on the carcasses below the cliff at Cape Kozhevnikov. This is additional proof that polar bears were in the area while the crew were filming. Yet the narrative in the film was silent on the risk to walruses on the cliff from polar bears and not a word was spoken of the hundreds of walruses that had fallen off that very cliff just days before after being spooked by approaching bears.
Oddly, I have also discovered that the Russian scientific advisor to the film, Anatoli Kochnev, wrote a scientific report in 2002 (translated into English) on walrus deaths at two regularly used beach haulouts on Wrangel Island from 1989-1996, when walrus population numbers were much lower than today and summer sea ice extent was higher (Kochnev 2002). He concluded that stampedes initiated by polar bears were responsible for most of the walruses found trampled to death.
This means Kochnev knew that polar bears nearby were a huge risk factor for walrus stampedes over the cliff but went along with the official 'Our Planet' narrative that no polar bears were involved and only lack of sea ice and poor eyesight were to blame for the carnage presented in the Netflix film.
In addition, a Google-translated photo-essay published by Kochnev's friend Yevgeny Basov who had been invited to witness the spectacle at Cape Kozhevnikov in the fall of 2017 (posted 11 November 2017, original link here)(h/t WUWT commenter "it doesn't add up"). The metadata on the photos in this essay shows that Kochnev was there on 16 Septmber 2017 (photo #2) and that walruses were already dying from falls off the cliff on 17 September (photo #22, see below), two days before the 'Our Planet' footage was shot.
This is almost certainly the event reported in The Siberian Times, when 20 polar bears were said to have spooked walruses at the top of the cliff, with hundreds fell to their deaths on the rocks below…..
* Season 1, Episode 2 Frozen Worlds
Posted in Global Warming/Climate Change, Media, Nature, Science	Tagged Biased Media, Global Warming Responses, Netflix, Sea-Ice, Susan Crockford, Walrus Haulout
Glacier National Park Removes "Gone By 2020" Signs
Published January 1, 2020 January 1, 2020 by Papa Giorgio
This video was found on WUWT'S WEBSITE…. "But by 2019 NOT EVEN ONE of the glaciers had disappeared." (See also a previous post on this)
One can see pictures with dates on them, that the glaciers are not shrinking as predicted, in which Roger Roots documents some of the most famous spots the adorn most walls from Glacier National Park (WUWT):
…The average date of first freeze in East Glacier, Montana is September 13th. It is only then that one can assess whether the glaciers are getting bigger or smaller than in previous years.
In September 2015, Lysander Spooner University launched an annual research project aimed at visiting GNP's glaciers every year at their lowest points. This year a small group of us opted to hike to the popular Grinnell Glacier and take a few snapshots on September 16. We hiked the 5.5 miles from the Many Glacier Hotel and arrived at glacier's edge late in the afternoon.
The Grinnell is perhaps the most iconic of two dozen named glaciers in the Park. Untold thousands of people have hiked to it. Millions more have been exposed to government imagery of the Glacier melting away. The nearby Many Glacier Hotel features pictures on its walls showing the Grinnell's decline from the 1880s to 2008. Numerous blog posts and magazine feature stories have also addressed this theme.
Upon our return to the Hotel after visiting the Glacier, we noticed that our brand-new photos appear to show that the Grinnell Glacier has grown slightly from the 2008 images that are displayed on the Hotel walls. There has been no reporting of this in any newspaper or broadcast that we know of. (In fact, all news coverage reports the precise opposite.) The smaller Gem Glacier—which is visible from the valley miles below—also appears to be slightly larger than it is shown in 2008 pictures on display….
ZEROHEDGE note from WUWT's article, the following, with an addition:
….The 'gone by 2020' claims were repeated in the New York Times, National Geographic, and other international news sources. But no mainstream news outlet has done any meaningful reporting regarding the apparent stabilization and recovery of the glaciers in GNP over the past decade. Even local Montana news sources such as The Missoulian, Billings Gazette and Bozeman Daily Chronicle have remained utterly silent regarding this story.
(Note that since September 2015 the author has offered to bet anyone $5,000 that GNP's glaciers will still exist in 2030, in contradiction to the reported scientific consensus. To this day no one has taken me up on my offer. –R.R.)
I live very close to Glacier National Park, and while the media has been saying for years that the glaciers are "disappearing", there has been no significant change in the park's glaciers in the time I have resided here. The news above only reinforces the reality that if the climate is "changing", it is only getting colder, NOT warmer…. – Brandon Smith, Founder of Alt-Market.com
But again, this is nothing new… glaciers have been shrinking (thank gawd) for 20,000 years. And the Scare tactics are nothing new (click pic for link):
Posted in Global Warming/Climate Change, Media	Tagged Anthony Watts, Biased Media, Failed Prophecies, Glacier National Park, Global Warming, Global Warming Responses, WUWT
What I Wasn't Told About Climate Change (Luca Rossi)
Published December 28, 2019 by Papa Giorgio
(Via WATTS UP WITH THAT)
More from GENERATION LIBERTY:
"Since the 1950s, polar bear numbers have increased by around 400%" – Click here.
"water vapour is in fact the most abundant greenhouse gas" – Click here.
"CO2 only makes up 0.04%of the earth's atmosphere" – Click here.
"multiple times in the earth's history where CO2 levels have been higher and temperatures have been lower." Click here, for Berner, et al. 'Geocarb III', a well known geochemical model of ancient CO2 levels showing them to be at vastly higher levels than currently. And here for Finnegan et al. 'The Magnitude and Duration of Late Ordovician–Early Silurian Glaciation' which examines the extent of glaciation during the Late Ordovician period, indicating much lower temperatures than currently.
"I was told 97% of scientists agree that human induced climate change is happening and that the 'science is settled'." Click here.
"500 scientists submitted a letter to the United Nations stressing there is no climate emergency, global warming has not increased natural disasters and the measures to fight climate change deny humans the life-giving benefits of electricity." Read it here.
"Ivar Giaver thinks climate change is a pseudoscience." Click here.
"Al Gore said that humanity had only 10 years left before the world would reach the point of no return." Click here.
"In the 1970s there was scientific consensus that the earth was heading into a period of significant cooling or a possible ice age." Click here.
"In 2009 Prince Charles said we had 8 years to save the world from 'irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse'." Click here.
"Since 1990, 1.2 billion people have overcome extreme poverty." Click here.
"137,000 people have been listen out of poverty everyday, for 25 years." Click here.
"So rather than worrying about the world ending in … 11 years" Click here.
"or was it 18 months?" Click here.
Posted in Education, Global Warming/Climate Change, Nature, Science	Tagged Generation Liberty, Global Warming, Global Warming Responses, Luca Rossi
Flashback: Al Gore vs Reality (11-years ago today)
Published December 13, 2019 December 13, 2019 by Papa Giorgio
CLIMATE DEPOT:
…Deadlines Come and Go
Recently, in 2014, the United Nations declared a climate "tipping point" by which the world must act to avoid dangerous global warming. "The world now has a rough deadline for action on climate change. Nations need to take aggressive action in the next 15 years to cut carbon emissions, in order to forestall the worst effects of global warming, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change," reported the Boston Globe.
But way back in 1982, the UN had announced a two-decade tipping point for action on environmental issues. Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), warned on May 11, 1982, that the "world faces an ecological disaster as final as nuclear war within a couple of decades unless governments act now." According to Tolba, lack of action would bring "by the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust."
In 1989, the UN was still trying to sell that "tipping point" to the public. According to a July 5, 1989, article in the San Jose Mercury News, Noel Brown, the then-director of the New York office of UNEP was warning of a "10-year window of opportunity to solve" global warming. According to the Herald, "A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of 'eco-refugees,' threatening political chaos."
But in 2007, seven years after that supposed tipping point had come and gone, Rajendra Pachauri, then the chief of the UN IPPC, declared 2012 the climate deadline by which it was imperative to act: "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced his own deadline in August 2009, when he warned of "incalculable" suffering without a UN climate deal in December 2009. And in 2012, the UN gave Planet Earth another four-year reprieve. UN Foundation president and former U.S. Senator Tim Wirth called Obama's re-election the "last window of opportunity" to get it right on climate change.
Heir to the British throne Prince Charles originally announced in March 2009 that we had "less than 100 months to alter our behavior before we risk catastrophic climate change." As he said during a speech in Brazil, "We may yet be able to prevail and thereby to avoid bequeathing a poisoned chalice to our children and grandchildren. But we only have 100 months to act."
To his credit, Charles stuck to this rigid timetable—at least initially. Four months later, in July 2009, he declared a ninety-six-month tipping point. At that time the media dutifully reported that "the heir to the throne told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists at St James's Palace last night that he had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world. And in a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and that the 'age of convenience' was over."
At the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, Charles was still keeping at it: "The grim reality is that our planet has reached a point of crisis and we have only seven years before we lose the levers of control."
As the time expired, the Prince of Wales said in 2010, "Ladies and gentlemen we only—we now have only 86 months left before we reach the tipping point."
By 2014, a clearly exhausted Prince Charles seemed to abandon the countdown, announcing, "We are running out of time. How many times have I found myself saying this over recent years?"
In the summer of 2017, Prince Charles's one-hundred-month tipping point finally expired.26 What did Charles have to say? Was he giving up? Did he proclaim the end times for the planet? Far from it. Two years earlier, in 2015, Prince Charles abandoned his hundred-month countdown and gave the world a reprieve by extending his climate tipping point another thirty-five years, to the year 2050!
A July 2015 interview in the Western Morning News revealed that "His Royal Highness warns that we have just 35 years to save the planet from catastrophic climate change." So instead of facing the expiration of his tipping point head on, the sixty-nine-year-old Charles kicked the climate doomsday deadline down the road until 2050 when he would be turning the ripe age of 102. (Given the Royal Family's longevity, it is possible he may still be alive for his new extended deadline.)
Former Irish President Mary Robinson issued a twenty-year tipping point in 2015, claiming that global leaders have "at most two decades to save the world."
Al Gore announced his own ten-year climate tipping point in 2006 and again in 2008, warning that "the leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis." In 2014, with "only two years left" before Gore's original deadline, the climatologist Roy Spencer mocked the former vice president, saying "in the grand tradition of prophets of doom, Gore's prognostication is not shaping up too well."
Penn State Professor Michael Mann weighed in with a 2036 deadline. "There is an urgency to acting unlike anything we've seen before," Mann explained. Media outlets reported Mann's made a huge media splash with his prediction, noting "Global Warming Will Cross a Dangerous Threshold in 2036."
Other global warming activists chose 2047 as their deadline, while twenty governments from around the globe chose 2030 as theirs, with Reuters reporting that millions would die by 2030 if world failed to act on climate: "More than 100 million people will die and global economic growth will be cut by 3.2% of GDP by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday. As global avg. temps rise due to ghg emissions, the effects on the planet, such as melting ice caps, extreme weather, drought and rising sea levels, will threaten populations and livelihoods, said the report conducted by the humanitarian organization DARA."
As we saw in chapter five, top UK scientist Sir David King warned in 2004 that that by 2100 Antarctica could be the only habitable continent.
Tipping point rhetoric seems to have exploded beginning in 2002. An analysis by Reason magazine's Ron Bailey found that tipping points in environmental rhetoric increased dramatically in that year…..
Posted in Global Warming/Climate Change, Humor	Tagged Al Gore, Global Cooling, Global Warming, Global Warming Responses, Jay Leno, U.N.
Earth-Day Fails! Prince EA's Video is Full of Hot Air
(Originally Posted Apr 22, 2015 | New Audios)
I wanted to play the video in whole, then go through 6-points it makes to shed more light on them.
Okay, lets deal with them in order.
Deforestation [below/left]
Native-Americans
China v. Sarah Palin
Ice Melting
An external point-by-point critique:
5 Basic Facts The 100 Million View Environmental Rap Video Got Wrong
(I recently added to this next section)
Prince EA's mentioning that a future generation of people will not know what trees are is JUST LIKE people telling us kids will not know what snow is like:
Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past
Britain's winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.
Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain's culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.
However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".
"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.
Funny thing is, some record breaking snow-fall followed in the years after… so much so that kids wished they forgot what it was.
But in all seriousness we are seeing similar dire predictions fail about the deforestation of trees. Keep in mind this is not a polemic proving all stories of deforestation false. I merely wish to bring some balance to the issue. For instance, in the Amazon, well over 95% of deforestation comes from cattle ranching, commercial agriculture, and infrastructure improvements. Less than 5% is from legal and illegal logging. Take note as well that The New York Times makes the point that,
"…for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster."
I love balance.
William Shatner, Captain Kirk of Star Trek fame, mentioned in a National Geographic video that, "rainforests [are] being cleared at the rate of 20 football fields per minute." If this were truly the case, the forests would have been completely wiped out years ago. In Prince EA's video he said 40 football fields! In an interview with Dr. Evaristo Eduardo de Miranda (one of the world's leading experts on deforestation in the Amazon, is a professor of ecology at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest institution of higher learning, and president of ECOFORCE, a private, nonprofit, environmental research/educational institution), he was asked where these numbers come from:
Q. There have been many reports by environmental groups in the U.S. claiming that the Amazon rain forest is being destroyed at a frightening pace. Many conflicting statistics are given concerning the alleged rate of destruction — 4 million hectares per year, 8 million hectares per year, 50,000 acres per day, etc. What are the facts and where are these statistics coming from?
A. A good example of this is the report released at the Earth Summit by the FAO [United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization]. FAO claims that the world tropical deforestation rate is 16.9 million hectares per year. FAO has up to the present been still using their discredited 8 million hectares per year rate for deforestation in Brazil. But when pressed at the summit they conceded to the 2.1 million hectares annually that the INPE, the Brazilian national space agency, has asserted is the real rate. This is an admission that they were inflating the deforestation rate by nearly 300 percent.
But they also said that deforestation for all of South America is 6.9 million hectares annually, which raises an obvious problem. Since Brazil has 70 percent of South America's tropical forests, it would be incredible to suggest that other countries are deforesting at the levels necessary for the FAO figures to be valid. If you subtract the 2.1 million [Brazilian hectares] from the [FAO's] 6.9 million, you have 4.8 million hectares being cut down annually in the 30 percent of South American tropical forests outside of Brazil. That is far greater than any data shows.
There is a similar problem with their annual 16.9 million hectares statistic for world deforestation. If you subtract Brazil's 2.1 million, then you must ask who deforests the other 14.8 million hectares. When they were asked these questions, the FAO could not answer. They could not break the numbers down country by country or show any other means by which they arrived at this figure.
Q. No maps, no satellite photos, no national data ? Where did they conjure up these figures?
A. They were put in a very bad light because they could produce nothing to substantiate these fantastic figures. This is an important example, because if the FAO cannot sustain these numbers, then you can imagine that these eco-groups — the NGOs [Non-Governmental Organizations] — could not either. They always use these big numbers to make sensational news stories, but they never can break the aggregate numbers down to show where they come from, and they never produce maps with alleged areas of deforestation specified so that they can be independently verified.
One comment from the inter-webs noted: "The Amazon is just fine, as the people are moving out of the jungle to the cities and the jungle is raging back quite nicely. It's in Indonesia and the area that the forests are being cut down for palm oil/biofuel productions." Yep
In fact, the co-founder and long-time director of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, said: "All these save-the-forests arguments are based on bad science…. They are quite simply wrong… [Phillip Stott and I] found that the Amazon rainforests is more than 90% intact. We flew over it and met all the environmental authorities. We studied satellite pictures of the entire area." Phillip Stott, who has 30 years of studying tropical forests under his belt as well as being professor of biogeography at London University mentioned that, "there are now still – despite what humans have done – more rainforests today than there were 12,000 years ago."
Conventional wisdom is often challenged as well by climatologists and specialists in their field. The NEW YORK TIMES passes along the complexity of an issue most people take for granted:
…Deforestation accounts for about 20 percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide. The assumption is that planting trees and avoiding further deforestation provides a convenient carbon capture and storage facility on the land.
That is the conventional wisdom. But the conventional wisdom is wrong.
Planting trees and avoiding deforestation do offer unambiguous benefits to biodiversity and many forms of life. But relying on forestry to slow or reverse global warming is another matter entirely.
The science says that spending precious dollars for climate change mitigation on forestry is high-risk: We don't know that it would cool the planet, and we have good reason to fear it might have precisely the opposite effect. More funding for forestry might seem like a tempting easy win for the world leaders at the United Nations, but it's a bad bet.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN gets a bit more detailed regarding the above. But this is a very complicated issue… especially since chopping down massive forests is being posited as a boon to fight "global warming" – to wit:
…A 2007 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that global-scale deforestation would result in a net cooling, as the changes in albedo and evaporation would overwhelm the impact of all that carbon being released into the atmosphere. But that doesn't mean we should go about chopping down every tree we can—on the whole, preserving tropical forests and even adding more trees in the equatorial latitudes will be beneficial for the climate, not to mention the biodiversity that depends on rainforests. But large-scale reforestation or afforestation projects in the north may not be the best idea, as Lee says:
People are debating whether afforestation is a good idea in high latitudes. If you plant trees you sequester carbon, which is a benefit to the climate system. At the same time, if you plant trees you warm the landscape because trees are darker compared to other vegetation types. So they absorb solar radiation.
The study is another reminder of just how devilishly complicated the climate system really is….
(TIME)
Yale study shows deforestation causes cooling
Combined climate and carbon-cycle effects of large-scale deforestation (PNAS)
Like I said – challenging conventional wisdom. In reality, what throws many of these studies of deforestation off is the urban heat island effect and rural cold island effect. For more on this see Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy's (bio) book/chapter: "Climate Change: Myths & Realities", 2008 — Chapter 7: Ecological changes.
The second point I wish to comment on, and it is Prince EA's mentioning of the Native-Americans. I do not doubt that Prince was taught these things in school. However, like many other issues cornered in the monopoly of the government, balance is needed.
For instance, I wrote a response to an in-class supplement to my sons elementary class lesson [he is now married and lives in Florida] about HOW the Settlers treated the New World versus how the Indians treated it. I made sure each parent got a copy and this engendered a visit to see the principle. Here is a quote from that post:
From James Fenimore Cooper to Dances with Wolves and Disney's Pocahontas, American Indians have been mythologized as noble beings with a "spiritual, sacred attitude towards land and animals, not a practical utilitarian one."[16] Small children are taught that the Plains Indians never wasted any part of the buffalo. They grow up certain that the Indians lived as one with nature, and that white European settlers were the rapists who destroyed it.
In The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, Shepard Krech III, an anthropologist at Brown University, strips away the myth to show that American Indians behaved pretty much like everyone else. When times were bad they used the whole buffalo. When times were good, "whole herds" of buffalo might be killed only for their tongues or their fetuses.[17] Although American Indians adapted to their environment and were intimately familiar with it, they had no qualms about shaping it to their needs.
Indians set fires to promote the growth of grasses and make land more productive for the game and plants that they preferred. Sometimes fire was used carefully. Sometimes it was not. Along with the evidence that Indians used fire to improve habitat are abundant descriptions of carelessly started fires that destroyed all plant life and entire buffalo herds.[18]
Nor were American Indians particularly interested in conserving resources for the future. In the East, they practiced slash and burn agriculture. When soils became infertile, wood for fuel was exhausted, and game depleted, whole villages moved.[19] The Cherokee, along with the other Indians who participated in the Southern deerskin trade, helped decimate white-tailed deer populations.[20] Cherokee mythology believed that deer that were killed in a hunt were reanimated.
In all, contemporary accounts suggest that many Indians treated game as an inexhaustible resource. Despite vague hints in the historical records that some Crees may have tried to conserve beaver populations by allocating hunting territories and sparing young animals, Krech concludes that it was "market forces in combination with the Hudchild's Bay Company policies [which actively promoted conservation]" that "led to the eventual recovery of beaver populations."[21]
Those who blame European settlers for genocide because they introduced microbes that ravaged native populations might as well call the Mongols genocidal for creating the plague reservoirs that led to the Black Death in Europe.[22] Microbes travel with their hosts. Trade, desired by Indians as well as whites, created the pathways for disease.
[16] Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, W.W. Norton & Company; New York: NY (1999), p. 22.
[22] For a discussion of the effect of the Mongol invasions and their effect on European epidemiology see, William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, Doubleday; New York, NY (1977).
These little historical facts changes the narrative just a tad, doesn't it? Like when the Iroquois directed their most furious attacks against the Hurons during the Beaver Wars. One Jesuit missionary wrote, "it is the design of the Iroquois to capture all the Hurons, if it is possible; to put the chiefs and great part of the nation to death, and with the rest to form one nation and one country." American Indians, alongside the Settlers, accelerated their hunting of the American Bison (Buffalo) that contributed to the near extinction of this plains beast. All in the name of the Mighty Buck! (READ MORE)
POLAR BEAR BREAK
(An UPDATED POST on an old one can be found showing the bottom line is that the current population is at record highs.) While not dealt with well in Prince EA's video, his presentation shows a computerized Polar Bear[s] walking in the background while intimating extinction or low numbers. Again, he probably learned about this in school, so you cannot really blame him fully. He is the product of indoctrination. However, this just isn't the case. In fact, there are a record number of Polar Bears. Here Is The Bottom Line:
1) It confirms the global population size I published in May 2015 (20,129-32,558; average 26,344). See the graph below, now amended to reflect this point. If global numbers do decline over the next 35 years, it will be from a high point not previously acknowledged by the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG).
2) The current population trend is listed as: ? Unknown. [NOT declining – if anyone claims it is, send them here: IUCN Red List U. maritimus]
For the latest – see: FAILED AMSTRUP POLAR BEAR PREDICTIONS HAVE CLIMATE CHANGE COMMUNITY IN A PANIC
(MS) WINNIPEG, Canada (Globe and Mail 4/2012) The number of bears along the western shore of Hudson Bay, believed to be among the most threatened bear subpopulations, stands at 1,013 and could be even higher, according to the results of an aerial survey released Wednesday by the Government of Nunavut. That's 66 per cent higher than estimates by other researchers who forecasted the numbers would fall to as low as 610 because of warming temperatures that melt ice faster and ruin bears' ability to hunt. The Hudson Bay region, which straddles Nunavut and Manitoba, is critical because it's considered a bellwether for how polar bears are doing elsewhere in the Arctic.
But many Inuit communities said the researchers were wrong. They said the bear population was increasing and they cited reports from hunters who kept seeing more bears. Mr. Gissing said that encouraged the government to conduct the recent study, which involved 8,000 kilometres of aerial surveying last August along the coast and offshore islands.
Mr. Gissing said he hopes the results lead to more research and a better understanding of polar bears. He said the media in southern Canada has led people to believe polar bears are endangered. "They are not." He added that there are about 25,000 polar bears across Canada's Arctic. "That's likely the highest [population level]there has ever been."
[Editors note: perhaps to 27,000-32,000?]
Again, this throws a monkey wrench into the narrative, and makes the next proposition trues if the counter proposition can be true:
Look, it is simple:
Either polar bears are dying because of CO2 emissions via man ~ hence, we should stopproducing high levels of CO2;
or [following the train of thinking FROM Al Gore],
Polar bears are at their highest recorded population levels because of CO2 emissions via man, hence, we should produce high levels of CO2.
If "a," why not "b"?
Truth About Stranded Polar Bears Image
FOX NEWS & SEA LEVEL RISE
Want to move on quick over this section? Here is my response to a Starbucks patron (of which I count myself) when they bring up sea rise:
"I believe in sea rise? Hell, 10,000 years ago it was 350ft lower. That is how the American Indian populated the continent."
Mic Drop!
This was interesting because he calls out a news network. Good for him! He is wrong, but I like his style. This section I will deal with sea level rise in general, and then deal with the Bangladesh portion of Prince EA's claims. The general sea rise refutation of the school-house session can be seen here, but let us look at a graph:
I wanted to draw the people who believe this (rising oceans) attention to a very old photograph compared to a new one to compare La Jolla (California) sea levels from 1871 to Now (REAL CLIMATE SCIENCE):
Also, Photographs show no change in Sydney sea level over the last 130 years (REAL CLIMATE SCIENCE):
But what interested me was his mentioning Bangladesh specifically… wrapped up in a challenge to Fox News.
Woa Whoa! Throwin' down the gauntlet. I am going to answer this from various sources, but as you will see, this is another fail on the eco-fascists side. Here is a conservative source first:
It's hard to believe that it's been more than a month since the latest example of intellectual collapse at the IPCC. Now added to the fraudulent claims about Amazon rain forests, African crop harvests, and Himalayan glaciers comes the exposure of a very large error in the UN body's warnings about flooding in Bangladesh. Turns out that the scientists screeching about the cataclysmic effects of sea-level rises forgot to consider sedimentary deposits (via Yid with Lid):
Scientists in Bangladesh posed a fresh challenge to the UN's top climate change panel Thursday, saying its doomsday forecasts for the country in the body's landmark 2007 report were overblown.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), already under fire for errors in the 2007 report, had said a one-metre (three-foot) rise in sea levels would flood 17 percent of Bangladesh and create 20 million refugees by 2050.
The claim helped create a widespread consensus that the low-lying country was on the "front line" of climate change, but a new study argues the IPCC ignored the role sediment plays in countering sea level rises. …
But IPCC's prediction did not take into account the one billion tonnes of sediment carried by Himalayan rivers into Bangladesh every year, which are crucial in countering rises in sea levels, the study funded by the Asian Development Bank said.
"Sediments have been shaping Bangladesh's coast for thousands of years," said Maminul Haque Sarker, director of the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS), who led research for the study.
Even if the sea level rises that far — a claim which is itself greeted with increasing skepticism — most of the coastline for Bangladesh won't be affected.
WHAT'S UP WITH THAT calls this Bangladesh "THE POSTER CHILD," and here is the end of their report:
Deltas are formed at the boundary of rivers and oceans. The rivers that build deltas flow to low and slowly sinking parts of the crust, where large volumes of sediment are being deposited. They will always be in balance with sea level but almost by definition increase in size, if rivers are allowed to follow their course. Deltas, by their very nature are building out and up. They also tend to flood frequently and seasonally, often with disastrous effects on the inhabitants. People living in deltas should learn to swim, have a boat and generally be aware of what can happen. Sea level rise is not an issue in large deltas; they have been proven to be able to keep up with any sea level rise. Flooding disasters are seasonally the result of excessive run-off, and occasionally due to unfortunate storm surges that result in breaks through natural barriers, but this has nothing to do with sea level rise. Bangladesh will be there, even if all the ice in the world has melted, with its people still fighting floods while farming the fertile floodplains.
Scientific American also takes a wholly different course and shows that current flooding is caused in big part to the Bangladeshi's themselves:
Man-made flood protections, not climate change, are the main culprit in sea-level rise in southwest Bangladesh, according to new research conducted for the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research.
The report from a team of scientists at Vanderbilt University is the first part in a wide-ranging, $7.5 million analysis of environmental stress and human migration scenarios in the low-lying South Asian nation.
Published this week in Nature Climate Change, the initial study finds that embankments constructed since the 1960s are primarily to blame for lower land elevations along the Ganges-Brahmaputra River Delta, with some areas experiencing more than twice the rate of the most worrisome sea-level rise projections from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
OF COURSE the magazine then goes on to assert Climate Disruption is still a threat to Bangladesh (towing the line is tough!). But this problem is moot because they gain land from the delta and the flooding is mainly "man-made," so are the solutions [technology].
CHINA vs SARAH PALIN
WOW, another challenge. Good for you Prince EA! But again, your understanding is wrong.
The Atlantic Monthly has a VERY interesting article I read a few years back. They note that in reality the pollution in China is at our 1980-levels.
Does China, in short, truly deserve its reputation as an environmental pariah?
Ramon Guardans, a biologist who studies air pollution and co-chairs a global monitoring plan on toxic chemicals for the United Nations Environment Program, is skeptical.
"The air concentrations of several pollutants in sites in China are certainly comparable to the levels observed in heavily industrialized areas in Europe and North America before the 1970's," he wrote by email. But pound for pound, person for person these pollutant emissions were, and generally still are, much greater than China's.
"So in relation to the population density we see in China," Guardans continues, "the U.S. and Europe did a much dirtier job industrializing."
Beijing just happens to be, similar to Los Angeles, in a geographical bind. Bloomberg makes this point as well around the same time the Atlantic Monthly does:
Why is Beijing susceptible to these episodes? First, and uncontrollable by the authorities, are the peculiarities of Beijing's geography. In particular, the capital is surrounded by mountain ranges that lead to the unfortunate phenomenon of an inversion layer—cold air settles on top of a warmer air mass, trapping the pollutants inside. This is the same problem that bedevils Los Angeles.
Beyond the misfortune of geography, though, lie a number of factors that have everything to do with China's policies….
China is blessed and cursed with the world's largest coal reserves, which means that the country sources some 80 percent of its electricity from burning coal—and much of that coal is of lower quality and highly polluting.
But as I have clearly shown… wind and solar energy is no cleaner. And the dream in peoples heads is truly just that, a dream… I mean when Google caves, you know the end-is-nigh.
"Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race."
I must say I'm personally surprised at the conclusion of this study. I genuinely thought that we were maybe a few solar innovations and battery technology breakthroughs away from truly viable solar power. But if this study is to be believed, solar and other renewables will never in the foreseeable future deliver meaningful amounts of energy.
And bio-fuels cause, literally, food riots and starvation in poor countries and raise the price of food which hurt the poorer people in the more well off nations: Ethanol is killing children around the world… Democrats! It takes 450lbs of Corn to fill one SUV tank… that is a years worth of food for multiple children, not to mention the rise of corn-based food for the poor worldwide. (SEE MORE)
Here is another fail on the part of the doomsayers who speak with a tongue very similar to the eschatology handed us at the most fiery southern Baptist church.
Prince EA is just relying on others work that have been either proven wrong or fraudulant in nature. Here for instance we see some predictions simlar to Prince's:
"Peter Wadhams, who heads the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge… believes that the Arctic is likely to become ice-free before 2020 and possibly as early as 2015," (YALE ENVIRONMENT 360 REPORTED IN 2012). Yet government data shows that arctic sea ice has increased since then….
Here I will post information from a PREVIOUS POST about Polar Bear population levels, in which I point the following out:
Recent Population Increase Partly Due To Lots of Sea-Ice
Canada (CBC News via the Canadian Coast Guard, 3/2014) [ARCTIC Sea Ice] The Canadian Coast Guard is pleading with merchant ships to plan their voyages well in advance this year as the organization's icebreaker fleet confronts some of the worst ice conditions on the Atlantic Ocean in decades.
"Plan your voyage and we'll all get through this," said Mike Voight, the Atlantic region's director of programs. "We've got a pretty bad or challenging ice year."
The Canadian Ice Service, an arm of Environment Canada, said there is 10 per cent more ice this year compared to the 30-year average.
"We probably haven't seen a winter this bad as far as ice for the past 25 years," said Voight, referring to both the amount and thickness of the ice….
The American Geophysical Union (AGU) Abstract (12/2014) [ARCTIC sea ice] Despite a well-documented ~40% decline in summer Arctic sea ice extent since the late 1970's, it has been difficult to estimate trends in sea ice volume because thickness observations have been spatially incomplete and temporally sporadic. While numerical models suggest that the decline in extent has been accompanied by a reduction in volume, there is considerable disagreement over the rate at which this has occurred. We present the first complete assessment of trends in northern hemisphere sea ice thickness and volume using 4 years of measurements from CryoSat-2. Between autumn 2010 and spring 2013, there was a 14% and 5% reduction in autumn and spring Arctic sea ice volume, respectively, in keeping with the long-term decline in extent. However, since then there has been a marked 41% and 9% recovery in autumn and spring sea ice volume, respectively, more than offsetting losses of the previous three years. The recovery was driven by the retention of thick ice around north Greenland and Canada during summer 2013 which, in turn, was associated with a 6% drop in the number of days on which melting occurred – climatic conditions more typical of the early 1990's. Such a sharp increase in volume after just one cool summer indicates that the Arctic sea ice pack may be more resilient than has been previously considered.
Talking About Weather (7/2014) [ANTARCTIC sea ice] Antarctic sea ice has hit its second all-time record maximum this week. The new record is 2.112 million square kilometers above normal. Until the weekend just past, the previous record had been 1.840 million square kilometers above normal, a mark hit on December 20, 2007, as I reported here, and also covered in my book.
Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, responded to e-mail questions and also spoke by telephone about the new record sea ice growth in the Southern Hemisphere, indicating that, somewhat counter-intuitively, the sea ice growth was specifically due to global warming.
Let us compare this to Al Gore saying the northern ice-caps will be gone
NewsBusters makes the point another way, in that the "media" is derelict in their duty:
The same year that former Vice President Al Gore predicted that the Arctic sea ice could be completely gone, Arctic ice reached its highest level in two years, according to a report by theDanish Meteorological Institute.
According to that report, which was cited by the Daily Mail (UK) on Aug. 30, "[t]he Arctic ice cap has expanded for the second year in a row." The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)confirmed this trend, but didn't go into as much detail as the Danish Meteorological Institute.
But an examination of ABC, CBS and NBC news programs since the Daily Mail story was published found that all three networks ignored news that Arctic sea ice was at a two-year high….
Remember, you can lead a horse to water but cannot make it drink.…read it all at Fox News.
"The West Antarctic ice sheet sits on bedrock which is below sea level. It formed during the ice age but the sea level rose 12,000 years ago and has been chipping away at it ever since. What happens to ice which sits on rock which is below sea level? Hint: it has nothing to do with CO2." This is a comment from Real Science's FLASHBACK to 1932 and how the ICe-Sheets were melting then (to the right).
I hate to break it to Prince EA, but that rocket to find other worlds would have to be powered by (in part) fossil fuels to break earths gravitational force. Not to mention the massive amount of energy (fossil fuels again) And often times the left kills innovation in areas (like nuclear) for ideological reasons. Keeping us dependent on fossil fuels.
You see, all of the above "sounds good," and grand. But as Thomas Sowell says, liberals — unlike conservatives — do not ask three simple questions:
compared to what?
at what cost?
what hard-evidence do you have?
FOR INSTANCE, as an example, Google came to the logical conclusion that such endeavors with alternative fuels is unattainable:
We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today's renewable energy technologies simply won't work; we need a fundamentally different approach.
Google Joins the Common Sense Crew On Renewable Energies ~ Finally! (RPT)
What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change (SPETRUM)
Shocker: Top Google Engineers Say Renewable Energy 'Simply won't work' (WATTS UP WITH THAT)
Polluting the Beauty and Cleanliness Of Our World With Renewable Energy (RPT)
Wind and Solar More Harmful To Environment Than Helpful (RPT)
Posted in Enviromentalism, Global Warming/Climate Change, Thomas Sowell	Tagged Biofuels, China, Earth Day, Eco-Responses, Fox News, Global Warming, Global Warming Responses, Native-Americans, Polar Bears, Prince EA, Sarah Palin, Sea Levels, Solar Energy, Wind Energy	1 Comment
Are We Doomed? (John Stossel)
Published November 21, 2019 by Papa Giorgio
Climate alarmists spread myths and declare impending doom.
Posted in Global Warming/Climate Change, John Stossel, Mantras & Myths, Nature, Science	Tagged Global Warming, Global Warming Responses, Liberal Mantra
Average Temperatures and Sea Level Rise
EDITOR'S RANT: I just think it is sad that people do not realize — in general — that we have been warming for 10,000 years [assuming the broadly accepted ages of geology and the ice-age]. I mean, sea levels stood 350 to 400 feet lower than today — 10,000 years ago. If you run the numbers (see: ICE-AGE NOW), you'll find that sea levels have been rising an average of .42 to .48 inches (just under half-an-inch) per year for the past 10,000 years. Rising sea levels have been the norm, in other words, for 10,000 years. (Here is a short video of 4-climate guys discussion the issues: YOUTUBE).
"In a House Science, Space, and Technology Committee hearing on climate change, under questioning by Mo Brooks, Alabama District Five, four members of a bipartisan panel of climate science experts all admitted that humans are not responsible for the Earth's global warming that has occurred over the past 20,000 years," Limbaugh stated. "Why the past twenty thousand years? Because that is when the Earth's last glacial maximum occurred. The point is… well the points are these: average global temperatures were roughly eleven degrees Fahrenheit colder than they are today, 20,000 years ago. Stated differently, global temperatures have risen on average, one half a degree Fahrenheit every one hundred years for the past twenty thousand years. Sea levels, sea levels were roughly four hundred and ten feet lower 20,000 years ago than they are today. This is according to the United States Geological Survey, which the global warming crowd loves and cites often. Stating this a different way, sea levels have risen on average roughly two feet per century over the past 20,000 years— roughly double the global warming advocates' claimed average sea level rise of one foot per century since 1993." (RUSH)
Also this article has some good "average" information: "Climate Alarmists Foiled: No U.S. Warming Since 2005" (REAL CLEAR ENERGY)
When American climate alarmists claim to have witnessed the effects of global warming, they must be referring to a time beyond 14 years ago. That is because there has been no warming in the United States since at least 2005, according to updated data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)…
…There is also good reason to believe U.S. temperatures have not warmed at all since the 1930s. Raw temperature readings at the preexisting stations indicate temperatures are the same now as 80 years ago. All of the asserted U.S. warming since 1930 is the product of the controversial adjustments made to the raw data. Skeptics point out that as the American population has grown, so has the artificial warming signal generated by growing cities, more asphalt, more automobiles, and more machinery…
Posted in Global Warming/Climate Change, Sciences	Tagged Global Warming, Global Warming Responses, Sea Levels
90% Of Weather Stations Failed
Published September 4, 2019 September 4, 2019 by Papa Giorgio
For some reason the original uploads are in two parts, I combined them… the resolution is bad so I merely shrunk it as the main ideas are still sound:
(From the original video description) Anthony Watts is as interesting a person as you will meet in a lifetime. It was my pleasure to have him come to our KUSI News studio for an interview for my recent "Global Warming: Meltdown" program. Not only did I interview him, but most importantly, he presented his entire SURFACESTATIONS.ORG Powerpoint presentation as an answer to my second question. Anthony Watts is an American broadcast weather presenter (AMS sealholder retired), editor of the blog "Watts Up With That?", owner of the weather graphics company It Works, and founder of the SurfaceStations.org project that documents the siting of weather stations across the United States. He is a meteorologist for KPAY-AM radio. (Part 1: https://youtu.be/ZzLNQV3dmcI | Part 2: https://youtu.be/x8vlFZlFWKw)
This is an updated segment from an older post from December of 2014, titled: IS 2014 THE HOTTEST YEAR? NO (PART 2 OF A SERIES). A recent inclusion of the hard work done by Anthony Watts over at WATTS UP WITH THAT? is included in the article from Commentary, linked below:
EQUIPMENT FAIL
Here is a recent mention of the below in COMMENTARY MAGAZINE (added here 9-4-19, emphasis added here):
…A STUDY by meteorologist Anthony Watts found that almost 90 percent of the 1221 weather stations in the U.S. did not meet the National Weather Service's setting standards, which requires that they be at least 100 feet from any artificial heat source or radiating surface. You can see some of the most egregious violators HERE. To deal with this defective information, climate scientists, have "adjusted" the data to solve this problem. Invariably, these adjustments have made earlier data show lower temperatures, and recent data show higher ones.
To develop reliable data, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) placed 114 state-of-the-art weather stations relatively evenly spaced about the lower 48 states. They were carefully sited to be away from urban areas, which are heat islands, airports, which can be affected by jet exhaust, etc.
The system became operative in 2005. Now, realclearenergy.com is REPORTING that there has been no increase in average temperatures in the continental United States over the last 14 years, as measured by these new stations. If anything, overall temperatures are slightly cooler than they were….
HERE IS THE LATEST EXAMPLE (BELOW)
Here are some examples of fudged data because of sub-standard equipment:
You'd think the answer would be obvious, but here we have a NOAA operated USHCN climate station of record providing a live experiment. It always helps to illustrate with photos. Today I surveyed a sewage treatment plant, one of 4 stations surveyed today (though I tried for 5) and found that for convenience, they had made a nice concrete walkway to allow servicing the Fisher-Porter rain gauge, which needs a paper punch tape replaced one a month.
Here is what you see in visible light:
Here is what the infrared camera sees:
Note that the concrete surface is around 22-24°C, while the grassy areas are between 12-19°C
This station will be rated a CRN5 by this definition from the NOAA Climate Reference Network handbook, section 2.2.1:
Class 5 (error >~= 5C) – Temperature sensor located next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface."
More than half of the stations the NOAA use are tainted or wrongly placed equipment.
Posted in Global Warming/Climate Change, Media, Pundits & Personalities, Science, Technology	Tagged Anthony Watts, Biased Media, Global Warming Responses, John Coleman, NOAA, weather stations
Compiling My Videos Of Freeman Dyson
Published August 31, 2019 by Papa Giorgio
Renown physicist Freeman Dyson says CO2 does not worry him… montage
The climate models used by alarmist scientists to predict global warming are getting worse, not better; carbon dioxide does far more good than harm; and President Obama has backed the "wrong side" in the war on "climate change."
So says one of the world's greatest theoretical physicists, Dr Freeman Dyson, the British-born, naturalised American citizen who worked at Princeton University as a contemporary of Einstein and has advised the US government on a wide range of scientific and technical issues.
In an interview with Andrew Orlowski of The Register, Dyson expressed his despair at the current scientific obsession with climate change which he says is "not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to the obvious facts."
This mystery, says Dyson, can only partly be explained in terms of follow the money. Also to blame, he believes, is a kind of collective yearning for apocalyptic doom.
It is true that there's a large community of people who make their money by scaring the public, so money is certainly involved to some extent, but I don't think that's the full explanation.
It's like a hundred years ago, before World War I, there was this insane craving for doom, which in a way, helped cause World War I. People like the poet Rupert Brooke were glorifying war as an escape from the dullness of modern life. [There was] the feeling we'd gone soft and degenerate, and war would be good for us all. That was in the air leading up to World War I, and in some ways it's in the air today.
Dyson, himself a longstanding Democrat voter, is especially disappointed by his chosen party's unscientific stance on the climate change issue.
It's very sad that in this country, political opinion parted [people's views on climate change]. I'm 100 per cent Democrat myself, and I like Obama. But he took the wrong side on this issue, and the Republicans took the right side…..
He concludes:
"I am hoping that the scientists and politicians who have been blindly demonizing carbon dioxide for 37 years will one day open their eyes and look at the evidence."
(BREITBART)
Also read this YALE INTERVIEW of Dr. Dyson
Posted in Global Warming/Climate Change, Nature, Science	Tagged CO2, Freeman Dyson, Global Warming Responses
Amazon Fires (Climate Depot)
Published August 31, 2019 August 31, 2019 by Papa Giorgio
The following is from the voluminousness collecting of CLIMATE DEPOT, saved here for use as DEPOT'S front-page often changes to refute the latest scare. Enjoy yhe many links and info below… there is a video at the bottom of Marc Morano discussing the issue PRIOR to the G7.
The Amazon rainforest is not the "lungs of the Earth" – It does NOT produce 20 per cent of the world's oxygen. The Amazon rain forest is a closed system that uses all its own oxygen and carbon dioxide.
AMAZON IS NOT THE 'LUNGS OF THE EARTH' SAY SCIENTISTS (NEWSMAX):
Some experts say claims that the Amazon fires are burning "Earth's lungs" and threatening the planet's oxygen supply are false, reports Fox News.
The assertion has caught traction as celebrities, environmentalists and political leaders have blamed Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for destroying the world's largest rainforest, which they say is the "lungs of the world."
"The Amazon rain forest — the lungs which produce 20% of our planet's oxygen — is on fire," tweeted French President Emanuel Macron.
"The lungs of the Earth are in flames," said actor Leonardo DiCaprio.
"The Amazon Rainforest produces more than 20% of the world's oxygen," tweeted soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo.
Dan Nepstad, president and founder of Earth Innovation Institute, told Forbes there's no science behind the claims.
"The Amazon produces a lot of oxygen but it uses the same amount of oxygen through respiration so it's a wash," he said.
Scott Denning, professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, says the fires don't threaten the planet's oxygen supply.
"Forest plants produce lots of oxygen, and forest microbes consume a lot of oxygen. As a result, net production of oxygen by forests — and indeed, all land plants — is very close to zero," Denning wrote Tuesday in a SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN essay…. TO WIT…
The resurgence of forest clearing in the Amazon, which had decreased more than 80% following a peak in 2004, is alarming for many reasons. Tropical forests harbor many species of plants and animals found nowhere else. They are important refuges for indigenous people, and contain enormous stores of carbon as wood and other organic matter that would otherwise contribute to the climate crisis.
Some media accounts have suggested that fires in the Amazon also threaten the atmospheric oxygen that we breathe. French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted on Aug. 22 that "the Amazon rain forest—the lungs which produces 20% of our planet's oxygen—is on fire."
The oft-repeated claim that the Amazon rainforest produces 20% of our planet's oxygen is based on a misunderstanding. In fact nearly all of Earth's breathable oxygen originated in the oceans, and there is enough of it to last for millions of years. There are many reasons to be appalled by this year's Amazon fires, but depleting Earth's oxygen supply is not one of them.
OXYGEN FROM PLANTS
As an atmospheric scientist, much of my work focuses on exchanges of various gases between Earth's surface and the atmosphere. Many elements, including oxygen, constantly cycle between land-based ecosystems, the oceans and the atmosphere in ways that can be measured and quantified.
Nearly all free oxygen in the air is produced by plants through photosynthesis. About one-third of land photosynthesis occurs in tropical forests, the largest of which is located in the Amazon Basin.
But virtually all of the oxygen produced by photosynthesis each year is consumed by living organisms and fires. Trees constantly shed dead leaves, twigs, roots and other litter, which feeds a rich ecosystem of organisms, mostly insects and microbes. The microbes consume oxygen in that process.
Forest plants produce lots of oxygen, and forest microbes consume a lot of oxygen. As a result, net production of oxygen by forests—and indeed, all land plants—is very close to zero.
Even though plant photosynthesis is ultimately responsible for breathable oxygen, only a vanishingly tiny fraction of that plant growth actually adds to the store of oxygen in the air. Even if all organic matter on Earth were burned at once, less than 1% of the world's oxygen would be consumed.
In sum, Brazil's reversal on protecting the Amazon does not meaningfully threaten atmospheric oxygen. Even a huge increase in forest fires would produce changes in oxygen that are difficult to measure.
WUWT FIRES POSTS
L A Times Amazon Fire Anti-Science Propaganda Revisited
Selective and Misplaced Outrage at Brazil's President Bolsonaro over Amazonian Fires
CLIMATE DEPOT STUFF….
NASA: GLOBAL WILDFIRES DROP BY 25% SINCE 2003 – PLUS STUDY FINDS EARTH'S TREE COVER INCREASED BY 7% SINCE 1982
"Since NASA satellites program MODIS began collecting measurements there has been a decrease in the total number of square kilometers burned each year. Between 2003 and 2019, that number has dropped by roughly 25 percent." –NASA Earth Observatory, August 2019
"News reports about the Amazon fires strike a fear that one of the last great forests is disappearing. That's completely untrue. Forests are making a comeback! More precisely, the tree cover of the planet is increasing. Since 1982, a recent peer-reviewed paper in Nature suggests, the planet's tree cover increased by 2.24 million km2 (an increase of roughly 7%)." –Vincent Geloso, American Institute for Economic Research, 26 August 2019
YOU HAVE BEEN AMAZON.CONNED – NASA: AMAZON RAINFOREST BURNING AT 'BELOW AVERAGE' RATES, WORST SINCE 2010 – FIRES MOSTLY FARMS, NOT FORESTS – BOLIVIA'S 'SOCIALIST' WILDFIRES IGNORED
NASA: Amazon Is Burning At 'Below Average' Rates
Update: NASA: Uptick in Amazon Fire Activity in 2019 – August 19, 2019: "With the fire season in the Amazon approaching its midpoint, scientists using NASA satellites to track fire activity have confirmed an increase in the number and intensity of fires in the Brazilian Amazon in 2019, making it the most active fire year in that region since 2010."
Amazon rainforest fires at record high levels? 'This is a blatant lie' – Fires 'nowhere close to a record so far in 2019'-"The NY Times claims 2019 fires are way up, over 2018. That is correct. What they don't say, is that about 1/2 the years BEFORE 2019 are higher, and about 1/2 are lower. Cherry picking of the first order."
FALSE ALARM: AMAZON BURNING IS MOSTLY FARMS, NOT FORESTS
Bolivia's Wildfires Ignored By The BBC – The Reason? 'Evo Morales is a socialist, unlike Brazil's Bolsonaro' –Of course, Evo Morales is a socialist, unlike Brazil's Bolsonaro. But I am sure that had nothing to do with the BBC's lack of interest in this story!
Wash Post shoddy Amazon fire reporting: Resorts to anecdotal 'memories' instead of actual scientific data: 'I cannot remember any other big fire' & the highest 'I have ever seen'
AMAZON FIRES – A BIG, FAT NOTHINGBURGER OF A #FAKENEWS SCARE STORY
The fires are mainly in agricultural areas as farmers prepare their land for planting. The land was cleared in the past.
An informative article and very informative map by NYT on Amazon fires. Map shows that fires in previously cleared land. Nothing new. Furore is yet another fraud by enviro activists. TWITTER PIC
So why are there so many fires? "Natural fires in the Amazon are rare, and the majority of these fires were set by farmers preparing Amazon-adjacent farmland for next year's crops and pasture," soberly explains The New York Times. "Much of the land that is burning was not old-growth rain forest, but land that had already been cleared of trees and set for agricultural use."
It is routine for farmers and ranchers in tropical areas burn their fields to control pests and weeds and to encourage new growth in pastures. What about deforestation trends? Since the right-wing nationalist Jair Bolsonaro became Brazil's president, rainforest deforestation rates have increased a bit, but they are still way below their earlier highs:
ENVIRONMENTALIST SHELLENBERGER: WHY EVERYTHING THEY SAY ABOUT THE AMAZON, INCLUDING THAT IT'S THE 'LUNGS OF THE WORLD,' IS WRONG
While the number of fires in 2019 is indeed 80% higher than in 2018, it's just 7% higher than the average over the last 10 years ago.
SCIENTISTS PUSH BACK ON 'EXAGGERATED' AMAZON FIRE CLAIMS – 'FIRES ARE BEING USED TO CRUSH BOLSONARO POLITICALLY AND VILIFY HIM'
Marc Morano: "The Brazilian president has been labeled a 'climate denier' by the media, thus he must be stopped. The Amazon fires are being used to crush Bolsonaro politically and vilify him. The fires in Bolivia are being ignored by the media because Bolivia's government is socialist and does not fit the narrative of evil 'right-wing,'" Mr. Morano said. "Bolivia is protected from media criticism because they are the politically correct political leaders." …
Climate scientist Roy Spencer had another term for the fires: "normal agriculture." I think the media focus on this is misplaced and exaggerated, as is virtually every weather-related story that appears these days," said Mr. Spencer, a former NASA scientist who does consulting on global crop-market forecasting."The driest years in Brazil will have the most fires set by farmers," the professor at the University of Alabama at Huntsville said in an email. "That isn't a climate story, it's normal agriculture in a country where 50 million people living in poverty are trying to survive." …
Environmentalist Mike Shellenberger: "The photos you saw weren't of today's fires in Brazil – Amazon isn't the "lungs of the world" – Deforestation is 75% below 2004 peak – *Forest* fires not increasing – Fires 7% more than decadal ave. – Here's why everything they say about the Amazon is wrong https://t.co/dQIIwv5DRq
The incidence of fire was higher from 2003 to 2007 and in 2010, during the administration of former Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a member of the Workers' Party, although he received little in the way of an international backlash.
WaPo Key Excerpts: "I cannot remember any other big fire episode like this one," said Vitor Gomes, an environmental scientist at the Federal University of Para.
…Ricardo Mello, head of the World Wide Fund for Nature's Amazon program, struggled to find the words to describe his pessimism on Thursday.
"It's historically — this is highest number [of fires] I've ever seen," he said.
Climate Depot Note: You don't have to "have seen or "remember" past fires based on one or two peoples limited memory and exposure. We have actual scientific data to show us what is happening and the data does not support these false "memories" that the Post cites twice in their feature article.
BRAZIL'S BOLSONARO GETS BLAMED FOR SAME AMAZON FIRES ALSO PLAGUING SOCIALIST BOLIVIA – BUT MEDIA IGNORES!
"The left is doing its level best to blame Brazil's bush fires on Brazil's conservative, Trump-like president, Jair Bolsonaro, and get him thrown out of office…Socialist President Evo Morales has openly encouraged what's known, at least in Venezuela, as "conuco" agriculture, telling subsistance farmers it's fine to set of fires to gather charcoal to sell for fuel or clear the land of brush for planting, and now he's refusing international firefighting help."
"Now Bolivia is robbing them of their rimshot argument. No more Sting and the rainforest man for their "narrative" now. What appears to be a far more desperate and mismanaged situation is going on Bolivia, and we don't see any eurochicken clucking about the "lungs of the world" or sanctioning the socialist hellhole. The European Union and much of the G-7 are focused exclusively on Brazil and putting the screws to Bolsonaro blaming him for a broader temporary weather phenomenon. It's starting to look political and it would be a welcome thing if President Trump sticks up for the man among the clucker. Bolivia makes their hypocrisy show."
DAY AFTER STATING NO LINK, NY TIMES BLAMES AMAZON FIRES ON 'GLOBAL WARMING'
Posted in Enviromentalism, Global Warming/Climate Change	Tagged Amazon Rainforest, Brazil, Climate Depot, Global Warming, Global Warming Responses, Marc Morano
The Famous "Hockey Stick" Loses In Court
Published August 28, 2019 September 1, 2019 by Papa Giorgio
The Supreme Court of British Columbia recently dismissed a defamation lawsuit by celebrity climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann against global warming skeptic climatologist Dr. Tim Ball. Mann must pay the full legal costs to the defendant. The ruling is explosive because it means that Ball's claim that Mann was a scientific fraudster is now supported by the court. (ZERO HEDGE)
A guy named Fred Ricardo will hop on my Facebook Page for this site once in a while and post nonsense… none of it his own, he merely links to items others have written without defending any portion of it. This gives me an opportunity to update an issue (Fred keeps linking to as fact) discussed in the past. That is, the HOCKEY STICK.
The EPOCH TIMES had the best lead up to the decision… but here is a good reckoning by POWERLINE:
Some years ago, Dr. Tim Ball wrote that climate scientist Michael Mann "belongs in the state pen, not Penn State." At issue was Mann's famous "hockey stick" graph that purported to show a sudden and unprecedented 20th century warming trend. The hockey stick featured prominently in the IPCC's Third Assessment Report (2001), but has since been shown to be wrong. The question, in my view, is whether it was an innocent mistake or deliberate fraud on Mann's part. (Mann, I believe, continues to assert the accuracy of his debunked graph.) Mann sued Ball for libel in 2011. Principia Scientific now reports that the court in British Columbia has dismissed Mann's lawsuit with prejudice, and assessed costs against him.
What happened was that Dr. Ball asserted a truth defense. He argued that the hockey stick was a deliberate fraud, something that could be proved if one had access to the data and calculations, in particular the R2 regression analysis, underlying it. Mann refused to produce these documents. He was ordered to produce them by the court and given a deadline. He still refused to produce them, so the court dismissed his case.
The rules of discovery provide that a litigant must make available to opposing parties documents that reasonably bear on the issues in the case. Here, it is absurd for Mann to sue Ball for libel, and then refuse to produce the documents that would have helped to show whether Ball's statement about him–he belongs in the state pen–was true or false. The logical inference is that the R2 regression analysis and other materials, if produced, would have supported Ball's claim that the hockey stick was a deliberate fraud on Mann's part.
Mann says that his lawyers are considering an appeal. He can appeal to his heart's content, but there is not a court in North America that will allow a libel case to proceed where the plaintiff refuses to produce the documents that may show whether the statements made about him were true or false.
Mann responded to the dismissal of his lawsuit in typically mean-spirited and dishonest fashion: "The dismissal involved the alleged exercise of a discretion on [sic] the Court to dismiss a lawsuit for delay." The dismissal was for failure to obey a court order, and the delay went on for eight years……
Other stories regarding this are here:
WUWT: "UPDATE – Dr. Tim Ball wins @MichaelEMann lawsuit – Mann "hides the decline" AGAIN
LIBERTARIAN HUB: Creator Of Global-Warming'S Infamous "Hockey Stick" Chart Loses 'Climate-Science' Lawsuit
BREITBART: Michael 'Hide the Decline' Mann Loses Defamation Lawsuit
AMERICAN THINKER: Michael Mann, creator of the infamous global warming 'hockey stick,' loses lawsuit against climate skeptic, ordered to pay defendant's costs
CLIMATE DISPATCH: Breaking: Dr. Tim Ball Defeats Michael 'Hockey Stick' Mann's Climate Lawsuit
Yes, that graph has no evidence to support it. And, not only that, but NASA is being challenged legally to review and change their position on the 97% "consensus" often cited (by Fred as well). THE NEWS TALKERS notes the challenge:
"The claim that 97% of climate scientists believe humans are the primary cause of global warming is simply false," CEI attorney Devin Watkins said in a statement. "That figure was created only by ignoring many climate scientists' views, including those of undecided scientists. It is time that NASA correct the record and present unbiased figures to the public."
On Tuesday, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) sent NASA a formal complaint, asking the agency to withdraw the false claim that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that humans are the primary cause of global warming and climate change. The 2013 study purporting to demonstrate that number was fatally flawed and proved no such thing.
According to the CEI complaint , NASA's decision to repeat the false claim violated the Information Quality Act (IQA). Specifically, NASA claimed that "[n]inety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities." The claim appears on the NASA website on the page "Climate Change: How Do We Know?"
The claim traces back to a study led by John Cook entitled " Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature " and published in the journal Environmental Research Letters in 2013…….
I UPDATE MY POST ON CONSENSUS WITH SOME MORE INFO. But I just wanted to get the legal cowardness of Mann on record… because he has no evidence (scientific or historical) to back up his graph.
Here is CLIMATE DISPATCH'S post of AMERICAN THINKER'S post:
….Mann, who poses as a climatologist at Penn State, has had his court case against genuine climate scientist Dr. Tim Ball dismissed, with Mann ordered to pay court costs, for failure to produce supporting evidence to prove his claim that global temperatures took a sharp upward turn when the Industrial Revolution and fossil-fuel use began pouring CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.
He didn't because he can't, and the fact is that the global warning he speaks of is Mann-made, a fantasy based on a career of perpetrating climate fraud, as indicated by NOAA's report that there hasn't been any U.S. warming for nearly a decade and a half and maybe even beyond that.
As noted by James Taylor, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, in a piece for Real Clear Energy:
When American climate alarmists claim to have witnessed the effects of global warming, they must be referring to a time beyond 14 years ago. That is because there has been no warming in the United States since at least 2005, according to updated data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
In January 2005, NOAA began recording temperatures at its newly built U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN). USCRN includes 114 pristinely maintained temperature stations spaced relatively uniformly across the lower 48 states. NOAA selected locations that were far away from urban and land-development impacts that might artificially taint temperature readings…
There is also good reason to believe U.S. temperatures have not warmed at all since the 1930s. Raw temperature readings at the preexisting stations indicate temperatures are the same now as 80 years ago. All of the asserted U.S. warming since 1930 is the product of the controversial adjustments made to the raw data.
The use of properly positioned temperature recording stations coupled with satellite data, a relatively recent innovation that covers the whole Earth, has given us a more realistic picture than computer models that can't even predict the past and fraudulently manipulate raw data from dubious sources.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts documented the inaccuracy of old weather station data used by NASA on his SurfaceStations.org website.
Watts said that "90 percent of them don't meet (the government's) old, simple rule called the '100-foot rule" for keeping thermometers 100 feet or more from biasing influence."
Many of the U.S. stations were in locations such as paved driveways, near rooftop exhaust vents, even near idling jet engines.
In 2016, Mann testified before the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee that actual data didn't really matter because we could actually see climate change happening.
The Washington Times noted both his appearance and at least one contradiction to his claims based, not on computer models, but on actual empirical observation:
Leading climate doomsayer Michael Mann recently downplayed the importance of climate change science, telling Democrats that data and models "increasingly are unnecessary" because the impact is obvious…
Mr. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, spoke before the committee June 17 in Phoenix… Mr. Mann told the panel that "the signal of climate change is no longer subtle, it is obvious," citing hurricanes, flooding in Texas and South Carolina, the California drought and "record heat" in Arizona.
Skeptics have hotly challenged the link between rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and "extreme weather" events, noting, for example, that hurricane activity is on the decline.
A nine-year "hurricane drought" of Category 3 storms starting in 2006 beat the previous mark of eight years from 1861-1868, the longest such streak since such recording began in 1851, according to a May 2015 study by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Mann has proven adept over his career at making controversial, no, fraudulent adjustments made to the raw data.
Mann might be remembered as one of the participants in what Investor's Business Daily dubbed a "tree-ring circus" — the Climategate scandal.
As IBD noted at the time:
Mann was at the heart of the Climate-gate scandal in 2009, when emails were unearthed from Britain's Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. In one email sent to Mann and others, CRU director Philip Jones speaks of the "trick" of filling in gaps of data in order to hide evidence of temperature decline:
"I've just completed Mike's nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline (in global temperatures)," the email read.
It was that attempt to "hide the decline" through the manipulation of data that helped bring down the global warming house of cards.
The graph created by professor Mann and his colleagues carefully selected and manipulated tree-ring data to supposedly prove that air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts — in a pattern resembling a hockey stick — in the 20th century due to man-made greenhouse gases. Mann et al. performed the neat trick of making the Medieval Warm Period (about A.D. 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1600 to 1850) statistically disappear.
As Investor's Business Daily also noted:
The graph relied on data from trees on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia. Here, too, the results were carefully selected. Just 12 trees from the 252 cores in the CRU's Yamal data set were used. A larger data set of 34 tree cores from the vicinity showed no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages. They were not included.
"Hiding the decline" and any actual evidence that global warming hype was nothing more an attempt by climate change scammers to impose what has become a religion.
MIT Professor Richard Lindzen is quoted in the Daily Caller questioning the tenets of this new religion:
Throughout history, governments have twisted science to suit a political agenda. Global warming is no different, according to Dr. Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It has also been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions," writes Lindzen in the fall 2013 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons…
Lindzen compares global warming to past politicized scientific movements: the eugenics movement in the early 20th Century and Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union under Stalin. However, the MIT professor argues that global warming goes even beyond what these past movements in terms of twisting science.
"Global Warming has become a religion," writes Lindzen. "A surprisingly large number of people seem to have concluded that all that gives meaning to their lives is the belief that they are saving the planet by paying attention to their carbon footprint."
The goal is to use climate change as a means to increase government power over every aspect of our lives, what we make, how we make it, what energy we use, what cars we drive, even what food we eat…..
Posted in Global Warming/Climate Change, Legal/Law, Nature, Science	Tagged Consensus, Global Warming Responses, Hockey Stick, Michael Mann, Tim Ball