Checking the global warming alarmists' statistics

Rational Optimist spots the USA Today scare story that

'If the entire Greenland ice sheet melted, which is not predicted, scientists estimate that global sea levels would rise about 20 feet, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.'

and explains the slight problem:

'what percentage of its ice mass is Greenland losing each year, so how long have we got before the 20 feet engulf us all?

The new study says Greenland lost 385 cubic miles between 2002 and 2009. Sounds a lot.

Greenland has 700,000 cubic miles of ice. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_ice_sheet)

So it's losing 1% per century, 0.01% per year. Funny that number never appeared in the news reports.'

.01% per year, that seems less scary...

Carbon offsetting, Australian style

Read this report and wonder at the minds that decide that:

"paying people millions of dollars to do a sensible thing that they have always done, and then say its a carbon credit, because if they didn't do what they had always done then there would be more fire, so by making fire, they are reducing it."

More IPCC bogus claims, when will this end?

The Times reports that:

"A STARTLING report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its 2007 benchmark report that even a slight change in rainfall could see swathes of the rainforest rapidly replaced by savanna grassland.

The source for its claim was a report from WWF, an environmental pressure group, which was authored by two green activists. They had based their “research” on a study published in Nature, the science journal, which did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning. This weekend WWF said it was launching an internal inquiry into the study.

This is the third time in as many weeks that serious doubts have been raised over the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change. Two weeks ago, after reports in The Sunday Times, it was forced to retract a warning that climate change was likely to melt the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. That warning was also based on claims in a WWF report. "

And still the IPCC, the BBC and most politicians still claim that global warming is 'settled science'. When will they learn? When the money stops being funnelled to it?

Climate Change

The following report is seriously worrying:

"There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and Russia in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be heating up. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the warming trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

[...]

“The world’s food-producing system,” warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, “is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago.”

[...]

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. [...] The scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality. "

Scary stuff indeed, there is just one problem, that was taken from My Pet Jawa who has carefully substituted each instance of "global cooling" in the original article with "global warming" rhetoric. Convincing isn't it? You can read the original 1975 Newsweek article "The Cooling World" here.

My Pet Jawa concludes that:

"This is the same dire, doomsday-riddled pap we were being fed during the last catastrophic climate change" era not more than 35 years ago. Same rhetoric. Same "evidence." Same hysteria. Completely bogus on all counts.

But THIS TIME, they're right, dammit! Algore said so!"

I say, as I have said before,

"Global Warming or Man Made Climate Change it makes no difference, they are a con. Look around the web, find the truth and spread the word."

A little Global Warming Test

Do take it, you know it makes sense...

The test is HERE.

One of the "Global Elders" show backbone? Sorry, false alarm!

I blogged back in July about the formation of the "Global Elders" a group set-up by Nelson Mandela of "12 wise men and women" to address global problems by offering expertise and guidance.

An AP Headline gave me some hope that at least one of the Global Elders might have managed to grow a backbone, the headline was "Jimmy Carter faces down Darfur officials". Wow Jimmy Carter stands up to a Muslim government, now that would be worth a headline. Unfortunately the article itself reports a different story.

Here's the story
"KABKABIYA, Sudan - Former President Carter got in a shouting match Wednesday with Sudanese security services who blocked him from a town in Darfur where he was trying to meet with refugees from the ongoing conflict. ...

“You can’t go. It’s not on the program!” the local security chief, who only gave his first name as Omar, yelled at Carter, who is in Darfur as part of a delegation of respected international figures known as “The Elders.”

“We’re going to anyway!” an angry Carter retorted as a crowd began to gather. “You don’t have the power to stop me.”

“I’ll tell President Bashir about this,” Carter said, referring to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir."

Well done that man, you tell then Jimmy...


"Carter later agreed to a compromise by which tribal representatives would be brought to him at another location later Wednesday. But the refugee delegates never showed up."

A compromise that meant the local Muslim officials got exactly what they wanted, I wonder what fate befell the refugee delegates?


Well done Jimmy, you are as effective as you ever were.

The "Global Elders"

Nelson Mandela has setup a group of "12 wise men and women" to address global problems by offering expertise and guidance. Let's have a look at the members and the baggage that they will bring to the problem of conflict resolution, the "comments" are taken mostly from their Wikipedia entries, not the usual depth of research but less controversial than others:

Present at the launch:
Nelson Mandela - the former President of South Africa (and living totem) - Outspoken opponent of the United States involvement in Iraq ""What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust." and "If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care." Nelson Mandela has also kept quiet about the atrocious activities of Robert Mugabwe's government in Zimbabwe.

Graca Machel - Nelson Mandela's wife - widow of Samora Machel, the former Mozambican president and ANC ally of Nelson Mandela.

Desmond Tutu - Archbishop of South Africa - Tutu has criticised human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, calling Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe a "caricature of an African dictator", and criticising the South African government's policy of quiet diplomacy towards Zimbabwe. He also warned of corruption shortly after the election of the African National Congress government of South Africa, saying that they "stopped the gravy train just long enough to get on themselves." Tutu is, nonetheless, an active and prominent proponent of the campaign for divestment from Israel, and has likened Israel's treatment of Palestinians to the treatment of Black South Africans under apartheid. Tutu has made some controversial statements involving Israel. In 1988, he was quoted as saying that Zionism has "very many parallels with racism", Speaking in a Connecticut church in 1984, Tutu said that "the Jews thought they had a monopoly on God; Jesus was angry that they could shut out other human beings." In the same speech, he compared the features of the Temple in Jerusalem, Judaism's holiest site, to the features of the apartheid system. In conversations during the 1980s with the Israeli ambassador to South Africa, Eliahu Lankin, Tutu "refused to call Israel by its name, he kept referring to it as Palestine," Lankin recalled. During a 1989 trip to Israel's Yad Vashem museum, Tutu said, "We pray for those who made it happen, help us to forgive them and help us so that we in our turn will not make others suffer." The Simon Wiesenthal Center called the statement “a gratuitous insult to Jews and victims of Nazism everywhere.” In another instance, Tutu said "You might even say that the gas chambers made for a neater death" than South Africa's resettlement policies. Some Jews objected the remark, arguing that the evils of apartheid had never extended to systematic annihilation of the blacks and pointing out that no rabbi in Nazi Germany was extended the freedom to criticize the regime as Archbishop Tutu had. Tutu's response was to describe this "as a kind of Jewish arrogance." "Jews seem to think that they have cornered the market on suffering," he said to interviewers

Jimmy Carter - Former President of the USA - Carter visited Cuba in May 2002 and met with Fidel Castro. He was allowed to address the Cuban public on national television with a speech that he wrote and presented in Spanish. This made Carter the first President of the United States, in or out of office, to visit the island since the Cuban revolution of 1959.

A popular petition resulted in Venezuela holding a recall election on August 15, 2004, and Carter was there to observe it. European Union observers had declined to participate, saying too many restrictions were put on them by the Chávez administration. A record number of voters turned out to defeat the recall attempt with a 59% "no" vote. The Carter Center "concluded the results were accurate." On the afternoon of August 16, 2004, the day after the vote, Carter and Organization of American States (OAS) Secretary General César Gaviria gave a joint press conference in which they endorsed the preliminary results announced by the National Electoral Council. The monitors' findings "coincided with the partial returns announced today by the National Elections Council" said Carter, while Gaviria added that the OAS electoral observation mission's members had "found no element of fraud in the process". Directing his remarks at opposition figures who made claims of "widespread fraud" in the voting, Carter called on all Venezuelans to "accept the results and work together for the future". However, a Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates (PSB) exit poll had predicted that Chávez would lose by 20%, and when the election results showed him to have won by 20% Schoen commented, "I think it was a massive fraud". US News and World Report offered an analysis of the polls, indicating "very good reason to believe that the (Penn, Schoen & Berland) exit poll had the result right, and that Chávez's election officials — and Carter and the American media — got it wrong". The Schoen exit poll and the government's programming of election machines became the basis of claims of election fraud. In March 2004, Carter condemned George W. Bush and Tony Blair for waging an unnecessary war "based upon lies and misinterpretations" in order to oust Saddam Hussein. He claimed that Blair had allowed his better judgment to be swayed by Bush's desire to finish a war that George H. W. Bush (his father) had started.In his book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, published in November 2006, Carter states that "Israel's continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land." While he recognizes that Arab citizens in Israel proper have equal rights, he declares that Israel's current policies in the Palestinian territories constitute "a system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land, but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights." While some have praised Carter for speaking honestly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, others have accused him of anti-Israeli bias and of making significant factual errors and misstatements in the book.

Kofi Annan - former Secretary General of the United Nations - Oil-for-Food Program
and Conflict between the United States and the United Nations, I need say no more.

Muhammad Yunus - Nobel laureate economist and founder of the Bangladeshi Grameen Bank - Someone who has actually achieved something in the world outside of politics

Mary Robinson - former President of Ireland - Concerned with Human Rights since her fall from power. shortly before the September 11 attacks, as the UN’s High Commissioner on Human Rights, she presided over the infamous antisemitic conference in Durban, South Africa, with the Orwellian title “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.” "The hate literature distributed during the NGO conference included caricatures of Jews with hooked noses, Palestinian blood on their hands, surrounded by money, and Israelis wearing Nazi emblems. At the Government Conference, there was daily distribution by NGO participants of literature reading “Nazi-Israeli apartheid,” while inside the drafting committees, states such as Syria and Iran objected to the inclusion of antisemitism or the Holocaust on the grounds that antisemitism was a “complicated,” “curious,” and “bizarre” concept, and reference to the Holocaust would be imbalanced or “favoritism.”

Meanwhile, outside the conference hall, as one delegate reported in the Los Angeles Times, he and other representatives of Jewish groups were subjected to taunts and physical intimidation. At one point, thousands of South African Muslim demonstrators marched bearing banners proclaiming “Hitler should have finished the job.”

Thus, success on the political battlefield was to be accomplished by utilizing the language of human rights to demonize, and then dismember, the opponent. In this way, the Durban Conference provided rampant antisemitism with a global platform under UN auspices, in a conference allegedly against racism and xenophobia. It also revealed the malevolent antisemitism underlying the campaign to delegitimize the state of Israel." From http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp468.htm



Invited to join but not present or yet confirmed:
Li Zhaoxing - former Foreign Minister of China - Let's just say Falun Gong, supression of human rights and Tibet

Ela Bhatt - Indian activist - founder of India's Self-Employed Women's Association and a respected leader of the international labour, cooperative, women, and micro-finance movements. A great fighter against poverty and the oppression of women.

Gro Harlen Bruntland - former Prime Minister of Norway and director of the World Health Organisation - now very concerned with sustainable development

An empty chair will be at all meetings, reserved for Aung San Suu Kyi - the elected leader of Burma/Myanmar who has been under house arrest almost continuously since her 1990 victory.


So that's a collection of almost completely left of centre people with received opinion views of the USA, Israel and most other matters, Tibet might be a sore point so that will be brushed under the carpet whilst they concentrate on the really major issue in the world - Palestine and I think we can see how unbiased they will be on that issue.


Here's an image that Theo Spark has brought to my attention regarding this matter -