Green is For Danger

From Galileo Blogs on Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth:

• The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming. The Government’s expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.
• The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.
• The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that it was “not possible” to attribute one-off events to global warming.
• The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that this was not the case.
• The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.
• The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age. The Claimant’s evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.
• The film blames global warming for species losses including coral reef bleaching. The Government could not find any evidence to support this claim.
• The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7m causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.
• The film claims that rising sea levels has caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand. The Government are unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.

The modern environmentalist movement is just a bunch of reds who have dyed their stripes green.

Here’s more from elsewhere:

Junk Science: The Ultimate Global Warming Challenge — $125,000 will be awarded to the first person to prove, in a scientific manner, that humans are causing harmful global warming.

TCS Daily: Gore Dodges Calls to Debate

“Gore’s reluctance to go toe-to-toe with global warming skeptics may have something to do with the – from the standpoint of climate change alarmists – unfortunate outcome of a global warming debate in New York last March. In the debate, a team of global warming skeptics composed of MIT scientist Richard Lindzen, University of London emeritus professor of biogeology Philip Stott, and physician-turned novelist/filmmaker Michael Crichton handily defeated a team of climate alarmists headed by NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt. Before the start of the nearly two-hour debate, the audience of several thousand polled 57.3 percent to 29.9 percent in favor of the proposition that global warming is a “crisis.” At the end of the debate, the numbers had changed dramatically, with 46.2 percent favoring the skeptical point of view and 42.2 percent siding with the alarmists.”

Australian Financial Review (PDF paper):

One of the more vocal local dissidents is Bob Carter, a research professor and former head of the School of Earth Sciences at James Cook University in Townsville. He says that there is no established theory of climate as there is, say, of gravity and planentary motion, which can be used to make predictions.

“We have a hypothesis that increases in carbon dioxide increase temperatures, but that hypothesis fails all tests. Global average temperatures are known to have varied little since 1997 – just moving up and down – but in that same period carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by 15 parts per million or 4 per cent.”

Stewart Franks, an associate professor in hydroclimatogy at the University of Newcastle, says the alarm over climate has grown sharply in the past 10 years, “but in that time temperatures have been stable, so it’s a case of never mind the evidence”.

Global Warming Hoax: A constant monitoring of all climate-change related news

Science Magazine:

Lowell Stott,^1* Axel Timmermann,² Robert Thunell³

¹ Department of Earth Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA.
² International Pacific Research Center (IPRC), School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA.
³ Department of Geological Sciences, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA.

“We determined the chronology of high- and low-latitude climate change at the last glacial termination by radiocarbon dating benthic and planktonic foraminiferal stable isotope and magnesium/calcium records from a marine core collected in the western tropical Pacific. Deep-sea temperatures warmed by 2°C between 19 and 17 thousand years before the present (ky B.P.), leading the rise in atmospheric CO₂ and tropical–surface-ocean warming by 1000 years. The cause of this deglacial deep-water warming does not lie within the tropics, nor can its early onset between 19 and 17 ky B.P. be attributed to CO₂ forcing. Increasing austral-spring insolation combined with sea-ice albedo feedbacks appear to be the key factors responsible for this warming.”

Wall Street Journal: Global Warming Delusions

“Global warming doesn’t matter except to the extent that it will affect life — ours and that of all living things on Earth. And contrary to the latest news, the evidence that global warming will have serious effects on life is thin. Most evidence suggests the contrary.

You might think I must be one of those know-nothing naysayers who believes global warming is a liberal plot. On the contrary, I am a biologist and ecologist who has worked on global warming, and been concerned about its effects, since 1968. I’ve developed the computer model of forest growth that has been used widely to forecast possible effects of global warming on life — I’ve used the model for that purpose myself, and to forecast likely effects on specific endangered species.

I’m not a naysayer. I’m a scientist who believes in the scientific method and in what facts tell us. I have worked for 40 years to try to improve our environment and improve human life as well. I believe we can do this only from a basis in reality, and that is not what I see happening now. Instead, like fashions that took hold in the past and are eloquently analyzed in the classic 19th century book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” the popular imagination today appears to have been captured by beliefs that have little scientific basis.

Some colleagues who share some of my doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate. They tell me that my belief in open and honest assessment is naïve. “Wolves deceive their prey, don’t they?” one said to me recently. Therefore, biologically, he said, we are justified in exaggerating to get society to change.”

Arthur B. Robinson, Noah E. Robinson, and Willie Soon
Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine:

“Predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in hydrocarbon use and minor greenhouse gases like CO2 do not conform to current experimental knowledge.

While CO2 has increased substantially, its effect on temperature has been so slight that it has not been experimentally detected. The computer climate models upon which “human-caused global warming” is based have substantial uncertainties and are markedly unreliable. This is not surprising, since the climate is a coupled, non-linear dynamical system. It is very complex.”

For those Greenies who love a consensus to prove their beliefs, here’s a consensus of scientists holding the opposing, non-alarmist view:

Over 19,000 American scientists have signed a petition that states:

“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”