(h/t Tom Nelson)
Up first is the maker of the excellent film, The Global Warming Swindle, and how he was vilified but ultimately found to be correct:
As it happens, I have made a number of science documentaries debunking irrational scare stories, and the greens have had a whack at me before – scares are the oxygen of the green movement. And I know from experience how illiberal these liberals are. But even I have been stunned by the sustained ferocity of their response to Swindle.
Besides a vitriolic campaign in the press, the instrument of their fury has been Ofcom. A swift internet campaign rallied the troops. Hundreds of complaints were sent off, many using the same phrases and displaying a surprisingly good knowledge of the Ofcom code.
Every line in the film was subjected to scorn. The contributors were all in the pay of baby-strangling capitalists. As for me? I was a member of the special steering committee of the World Congress of Science Producers. I had recently won an award from the British Medical Association for making the best science documentary of the year. But now I was “worse than a child abuser”.
One complaint stood out. It ran to 200 pages and was orchestrated by three “concerned citizens”. It claimed to be peer-reviewed, which it wasn’t. But it was backed by the great and good of the global warming brigade.
Our response was long and detailed: 300 pages, not counting supporting science papers etc. What has been the result?
To heighten the dramatic effect, let’s compare Gore’s beloved Inconvenient Truth with Swindle. The veracity of Al’s film was tested in the High Court, when a lorry driver from Kent baulked at the prospect of his taxes being spent on disseminating it to British schools.
The verdict was a blow to the greens. Mr Justice Burton cited at least nine significant “errors” in Gore’s film. Using words such as “alarmism” and “exaggeration”, the judge said the film couldn’t be sent out to schools without a health warning.
Harrabin wrote a piece admitting he had thought the film was a bit off when he first saw it. Did he indeed? So why didn’t he tell the rest of us? What do we pay him for? And how about all those “scientists” who, to their eternal shame, lined up to heap praise on the film?
Now let’s look at Swindle. The global warmers made buckets of complaints to Ofcom that the science was wrong, that the film contained hundreds of factual errors, falsifications and misrepresentations. It was, in short, unscientific and scurrilous.
How many of these complaints did Ofcom uphold? Not one.
How about the cries from some environazi’s that enough is not being done….because people are getting rich from a market segment created by the very same environazi’s….carbon trading:
But what are we to do? All our policies to date to tackle global warming have been miserable failures. The Kyoto protocol has created a vast carbon market but done little to reduce emissions. The main effect of the EU’s emissions trading scheme has been to transfer about €30bn or more from consumers to Europe’s biggest polluters, the power companies. The EU and US foray into biofuels has, at huge cost, increased greenhouse gas emissions and created a world food crisis, causing starvation in many poor countries.
~~~So are all our efforts doomed to failure? Yes, so long as our governments remain craven to special interests, whether carbon traders or fossil fuel companies. The carbon market is a valuable tool, but must be subordinate to climatic imperatives. The truth is that to prevent runaway greenhouse warming, we will have to leave most of the world’s fossil fuels in the ground, especially carbon-heavy coal, oil shales and tar sands. The fossil fuel and power companies must be faced down.
~~~The answer? Scrap national allocations and place a single global cap on greenhouse gas emissions, applied “upstream” – for instance, at the oil refinery, coal-washing station and cement factory. Sell permits up to that cap in a global auction, and use the proceeds to finance solutions to climate change – accelerating the use of renewable energy, raising energy efficiency, protecting forests, promoting climate-friendly farming, and researching geoengineering technologies. And commit hundreds of billions of dollars per year to finance adaptation to climate change, especially in poor countries.
Here is a typical story we hear about. A layperson see’s Al Gore’s film and becomes a greenie overnight, only to be disappointed in the science later:
In September 2007 I became very concerned about global warming after seeing Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. The film was being screened by our local nature conservation groups; everyone was saying this was an important film. Al Gore showed graphically powerful evidence of the correlation between rising carbon dioxide levels and global temperature rise in the last century. He used a graph which is a “hockey stick” shape, showing a millennium of steady global temperatures, followed by a dramatic temperature rise as the last century progressed. He showed this together with Keeling’s compelling zigzag graph showing rising CO2 levels, to demonstrate graphically how the two had risen together. He showed disasters worldwide, including Hurricane Katrina, which are all apparently getting worse as temperatures rise; he said it had to be manmade CO2 emissions that were the cause of the rising CO2 level, since our emissions was the only thing that had changed. And the rising CO2 must have caused these temperature rises, since, again, there was nothing else. A study by Naomi Oreskes appeared to prove that a complete consensus of scientists were portraying a very serious picture – threatening our whole future – unless we drastically lower our carbon dioxide emissions, and unless we act quickly. Al Gore said that the only scientists doubting this now were either kooks or crooks. It seemed there was no serious scientific dissent from the picture of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW – manmade global warming). The message was then reinforced for me a little later by the top NASA scientist James Hansen’s report about potentially catastrophic levels of polar ice melt. I’ve always checked evidence as I’ve seen so much bad science – but all my checks seemed to confirm Al Gore.
It’s a long story about how she become a uber activist and did her best to refute skeptics, that is until she started checking out the information given by those skeptics:
Suddenly there opened up for me a cascade of doubts concerning the trustworthiness of Al Gore’s claims of scientific consensus over global warming, and the “hockey stick” graph that he used in An Inconvenient Truth (AIT). Al Gore maintained that CO2 is driving temperature change now, and he neatly juxtaposed words and pictures to imply that the geological records showed that CO2 has always driven temperature changes. Whereas in fact, the records show that CO2 lags behind big temperature changes by around 800 years (but on a geological time scale, this lag appears so small that you don’t see it unless you look close). Gore made claims of “extreme conditions”… (serious sea level rise, serious droughts here, serious floods there, more tornadoes, more serious hurricanes like Katrina, glaciers melting fast, ice-sheets cracking up, the Gulf Stream shutting down, heatwaves killing people) …and other “plagues”… (tropical diseases spreading, lakes drying out, polar bears dying out) already happening and likely to getting worse, …as a result of global warming. He calls carbon dioxide a pollutant. I discovered that…
… every single claim of An Inconvenient Truth can be refuted as cherrypicking, false, or otherwise critically misleading, as has been shown particularly well by Monckton’s “35 Errors in AIT” [2], “Falsehoods in Gore’s AIT” by Wm Johnson [3], and “Convenient Fibs” by Prof. Rossiter [4]. Here was weighty, informed evidence on all counts against Al Gore, that I could not refute.
~~~Everywhere I now looked, I was seeing the evidence differently. How could I have been so mistaken before? Was I really that mistaken? How could Al Gore be so mistaken? How could he have slipped through the checks and balances of Science, if he really was that misleading or misled? How could so many worthy scientists be so mistaken? Perhaps, if I looked harder, I’d find that science did have answers after all? For a while I bounced uncomfortably from one side to the other as challenge after challenge appeared. But every time I dug deeper, I found fraud and bad science, and more and more proof of no AGW. But what does this say about those who have knowingly promoted an empty, misleading, expensive science where the prime evidence disappears in every direction? It’s The Emperor’s New Clothes!
The Global Myth by Edmund Contoski:
During the 20th century, the earth warmed 0.6 degree Celsius (1 degree Fahrenheit), but that warming has been wiped out in a single year with a drop of 0.63 degree C. (1.13 F.) in 2007. A single year does not constitute a trend reversal, but the magnitude of that temperature drop — equal to 100 years of warming — is noteworthy. Of course, it can also be argued that a mere 0.6 degree warming in a century is so tiny it should never have been considered a cause for alarm in the first place. But then how could the idea of global warming be sold to the public? In any case, global cooling has been evident for more than a single year. Global temperature has declined since 1998. Meanwhile, atmospheric carbon dioxide has gone in the other direction, increasing 15–20%. This divergence casts doubt on the validity of the greenhouse hypothesis, but that hasn’t discouraged the global warming advocates. They have long been ignoring far greater evidence that the basic assumption of greenhouse warming from increases in carbon dioxide is false.
~~~Why is it that the global warming advocates are unfazed by any contrary evidence, no matter how strong? All their claims of disasters from global warming have been debunked. All their computer models have been shown to be false, to be based on flawed assumptions, incapable of being reconciled with the observable facts. Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic and a university professor before he became president, is the author of a book on global warming and has spoken often on the subject. He says, “What frustrates me is the feeling that everything has already been said and published, that all rational argument has been used, yet it does not help.” It does not help because global warming alarmism is not based on rational argument. It is not based on science. It is not based on reality. It is based on political ideology. If rational argument doesn’t fit, then phony arguments must be invented: the spread of malaria, the loss of biological diversity, polar bears disappearing, etc. If computer models can predict disaster scenarios only by programming unrealistic assumptions, then that will be done. If global warming does not fit the observable temperature measurements, then a new “reality” must be invented to fit the ideology: the actual temperature records must be altered or dismissed. The global warming advocates are not disturbed by all this because, in their view, ideology trumps reality.
Patrick Moore, a cofounder and director of Greenpeace, resigned because of its “trend toward abandoning scientific objectivity in favor of political agendas.” After the failure of communism, he says, there was little public support for collectivist ideology. In his view, a “reason environmental extremism emerged was because world communism failed, the [Berlin] wall came down, and a lot of peaceniks and political activists moved into the environmental movement bringing their neo-Marxism with them and learned to use green language in a very clever way to cloak agendas that actually have more to do with anticapitalism and antiglobalism than they do anything with ecology or science.”
“I think if we don’t overthrow capitalism, we don’t have a chance of saving the world ecologically,” said Judi Bari, principal organizer of Earth First!
~~~Do you ever wonder how communism could last for 70 years in Russia? Surely there was plenty of evidence, for decades, that the system was failing: food shortages, declining life expectancy, increased infant mortality, low standards of living, primitive hospitals, and sanitation facilities lagging far behind those in Western Europe and America — not to mention pollution far worse than in the West. But to diehard communists, the facts did not matter. All the observable negatives of collectivism were trumped by ideology. The same is true of the ideology behind global warming.
Tom Nelson on John Edwards hypocrisy:
Edwards calls global warming ‘great moral test’ –
NEW ORLEANS – Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards on Saturday called reversing global warming a “great moral test” and said the next president needs to stand up to industries resisting change.
“This is the great moral test of our generation. Are we actually going to leave this planet and America better for our children than we found it?” Edwards said at an environmental rally in New Orleans.
“Why have we not addressed the issue of climate change and global warming?” Edwards said. “I’ll tell you why, no question about it: oil companies, gas companies, power companies and the lobbyists in Washington, D.C. We have to have a president who will stand up to these people.”
LiveLeak.com – John Edwards: March 13th Bennett College
Edwards on Global Warming: ‘This is an emergency’ ‘It’s a frightening thing’ ‘It’ll make world war look like like heaven’
Check out some facts in this article:
We Aren’t Responsible for Rising Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide: A Note from Alan Siddons
And here is a good article that display just how much the science is NOT settled:
What you hear about global warming can vary as much as, well, the weather. One day, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is quoted saying: “We simply must do everything we can in our power to slow down global warming before it is too late. The science is clear. The global warming debate is over.”
Another day, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum says this: “Americans are coming to understand that global temperatures have actually cooled over the last 10 years and are predicted to continue cooling over the next 10.”
On another day, dozens of papers proclaim that the sun is at fault, since the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research demonstrated that the sun has burned brighter in the last 60 years than any time in the last 1,100 years, or 8,000 years, depending on the news source.
Most climatologists maintain that global warming is real and human activity is likely the major contributor. They believe that as we release more CO2 into the atmosphere, the planet will get hotter. (ed. Most? Puhlease….)
The contradictory statements tend to cluster around a couple of sticking points: the heating trend over the last few years, the influence of the sun, and the lessons from the distant past.
Where there’s good agreement is laid out by MIT meteorology professor Richard Lindzen, a critic of Al Gore and others he considers alarmists. In an editorial for the Wall Street Journal several years ago called “Climate of Fear,” he wrote that he agrees that global temperature has risen about a degree (Celsius) since the late 19th century.
He also agrees with most other climatologists that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by about 30 percent over the same period, and that CO2 should contribute to future warming, thanks to basic atmospheric physics.
Lindzen, however, said in a recent interview that the carbon dioxide buildup may not be causing the current warming trend, and it therefore may not play a significant role in the future climate.
And the trend may already have turned around, he said. “If you look from 1995 you don’t see any change that could be regarded as statistically significant . . . . For the last 13 or 14 years nothing has been happening.”
On that note comes this poll with some interesting numbers:
Only 25% (question 2) of those surveyed thought that global warming was the world’s single biggest environmental problem (multiple responses accepted). This is down from 33% last year.
Only 30% (question 3) trust the things that scientists say about the environment “completely” or “a lot”.
Only 33% (question 8) thought that a rise in the world’s temperatures was caused by “things people do”, down from 41% last year.
Only 33% (question 18) thought that “most scientists” agree with one another about the causes of global warming, and only 33% thought that “most scientists” agree with one another about how much of a threat global warming poses.
Ah yes, but the science is settled eh?
See author page
while I don’t usually come on here and criticize, the truth of the matter is this destruction of the environment for oil thing and global warming is real. when you hire scientist to pad facts then hey they are going to give you want to hear. The fact is human beings are destroy the environment in more ways than in global warming the destruction of natural habitats isn’t just going to affect us, on the weather front, but on the biological/medical realm. that is something you can’t try to brush unders the rug. when more people start becoming infected with emerging viruses, when the irritating abuse of antibiotics send the medical system back to the stone age, then you won’t be so smug. It may take much longer for industrialist to turn our planet into it’s sister planet venus, but virus and bacterial don’t take that long to evolve. because death means nothing to them, but try, try, try, again. Personally i would have thought Saudi Arabia and friends blowing up the twin towers would have give you a practical reason to move away from oil and stop being so darn destructive, but it seem to me that people having your by the balls and keeping us from punishing these country and truly putting our foot into these peoples industry ad the means in which the fund terrorist operations has no effect on you. So how about bleeding out of every orphus in you body, or watching your entire family die in a manner of hours and knowing you will be next, sound to you. the bubonic plague, yellow fever, ebola, are all diseases that appeared after 1. increased mobilization and shipping things back and for the between countries, and the destruction of rain Forrest. Just like with AIDS it only takes one person, to spread a disease though out a large population, and considering the fact that you can just hop on plane these days means that the likely hood of richest man in the world who flies from port to port without complications can bring home a hum dinger. and Germs don’t attack you for mundane reasons, they do it to survive and thrive, and are very very democratic. So be smug if you like. I can’t tell you when global warming clearly reveals it self, but can tell you that right now in you news papers, there are potential deadly disease popping up everywhere all because you are destructive, irresponsible, negligent, proudly ignorant to the facts, and greedy. Keep chopping stuff down, keep destroying natural habitats of specialize creatures that carry these disease, and they will end up at your front door. I believe in God and I believe that he has placed with in this planet biological agents to lay low creatures who reach exceeds their grasp, and for all the Evangelicals out there, do you really thing that a god would approve of you destroying this wonderful home that he built for you. studying evolution actually come in handy because it explains to you why polar bears are white white grizzly are brown, the one that eats more lives, and there are viruses that are cousins to African and south American diseases, just waiting for you to chop a tree down, that produces the right flower, that produces the nectar that one specialized butterfly likes to eat, you get rid of the trees, kill off the butterfly, and then you start looking really darn tasty. republicans tick me off for the same reason the democrats are, our economy is so badly screwed that if they pick the wrong president it could affect me, so who do they pick a black man with zero experience who lies on a countinuing bases. and the same goes with you. You do stupid crap that can effect me. You share this home with 6.8 billion people, an what you do effects me, I do not look forward to catching something, just because you have not regard for anything alive except and unborn fetus, doesn’t mean the rest of us want to catch something horrible. Personally i wish we could send you to another planet that you could exploit the heck out of til your little hearts were content, unfortunately that is not currently and option. Once again I must press the point upon you Jesus is not going to rapture people who trash his fathers planet, look in the gospels, he goes berserk when people disrespect his father house. to destroy this special life giving planet just so a handful of people can get rich is not less disrespectful than turning a temple into a market place. think on it. Distroying the enviroment is disrespectful to god and a sin.
Democratgirl – what in the world are you babbling about? Considering your inability to spell correctly, use proper grammar, or even break up your diatribe into paragraphs, I am inclined to believe that your education was lacking in areas other than the obvious (science.) The gist of this article is that belief in global warming is essentially a false religion, lacking in basic facts, whose adherents must resort to ad hominem attacks since they are not supported by science. And then you come along, and completely prove the author’s point! And what’s with attacking evangelicals? Do you really consider them the worst environmental offenders? Seriously – try to argue with the facts of the article if you can, and if you can’t, then take your ant-capitalist screed elsewhere.
As cited by Martin Durkin, the documentary filmmaker of ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’, ” scares are the oxygen of the green movement.”
Democratgirl must be verrrryyyy scared.
Open your mind D.G. You’ve been lied to for too long!
Democratgirl: Wow! I guess you about covered it all.
The sad part is that people will so willingly accept a philosophy that has no basis in fact.
Tidemonster, thank you for saving me the time to respond to democratgirl…good job.
Interesting perspective, democratgirl, and you accurately describe some of the catch-22 aspects of modern society.
1) Our medical technology, which has advanced by leaps and bounds over the past 100 years, is largely responsible for the huge population growth. Diseases like Malaria and plague used to wipe out entire populations, now they barely register. Even AIDS and Bird Flu have been effectively contained.
2) Our transportation technology is also responsible. When people in East Africa can’t grow enough food, we can ship it there from anywhere in the world, dirt cheap.
3) Communications has also had an effect. 200 years ago, would anyone have cared that millions in East Africa were starving to death because of war and famine? Would they even have known? Now we have TV showing every crying, starving baby.
Communications, Transportation, and Medicine have effectively wiped out the Darwinian impact of nature on the human race. In the old days, only the strongest infants survived to become adults – maybe one in four. If you lived in a place that could not produce enough food, people starved to death until equilibrium was again found. Nature finds a balance.
But frankly I don’t particularly want to live like in the “good ‘ol days” you seem to like so much. I like the fact that if my children get sick, I have someone better than a village shaman to take care of them. I like being able to see the world. I like having air conditioning in the summer months and heat in the winter. I like the fact that if the local crops go bad due to floods or drought, we won’t starve in winter – we just buy it from a neighboring country.
If there is anything that should be done, it’s to bring the birth rate under control. But how do you do that? China is a communist dictatorship with ruthless control. They implemented draconian birth control methods 30 years ago with one family, one child, and now their population is 60% greater than what it was back then. If the Chinese can’t control their population, how will we do it? Forced sterilization? That would be fun when all the minorities and special interest groups start accusing us evil white people of targeting them more than anyone else.
You need to face something. The answer to this problem is MORE energy, not less. More energy allows more productive farming, transportation of more food where it’s needed, labor where it’s needed, etc.
There is no substitute for oil for many transportation uses. An electric-powered 747? I don’t think so. Hydrogen power? Fine in theory, but you have a huge weight problem for hydrogen storage, not to mention that usable hydrogen requires a lot more energy in its own production than you get out of it. How about ships? The only way to power ships is either with oil or nuclear, and nuclear plants are terribly expensive to install in a simple container ship.
There is a solution, long term. Fusion energy. Absolutely clean. The fuel is in unlimited supply in seawater. The waste is water. No polution, no limits. But it’s all theory at the moment, and it will take at least 50 years to figure out the engineering, at the current pace.
But your solution (and Obama’s by the way) of simply dailing back our usage and destroying our economy, while other countries like China and India make no such efforts, putting millions out of work and reintroducing starvation into a country that pretty much eliminated it decades ago, no thanks.
And if you would ask for all the details, you would know that if the Kyoto Protocols were ratified and followed completely, with a 30% decrease in worldwide emissions, it would result in a 0.28% net decrease in the level of greenhouse gases? Sorry, but I am not willing to destroy the economy for an insignificant change.
In any case, the idea that this global warming thing is permanent is stupid. But it is great business. Why do you think Al Gore promotes Carbon Offsets? Because he owns several companies that sell them! It’s a scam – tell people they are sick and sell them the snake oil. The UN is in on it because it’s an excellent propaganda tool to slow the industrialized powers down and “redistribute” wealth to poorer countries. Scientists get on board because if they sing the company song, they get grants and budgets. It’s all a business to make themselves rich at your expense.
Drill here, drill now. And invest in Fusion research.
If Democrat Girl really wants to save the planet she can set an example and sign up with this group:
http://www.vhemt.org/
“…take your ant-capitalist screed elsewhere” — democratgirl
It’s their blog. You, however, are just dropping by, little miss “elsewhere,” or should I just call you “your silliness?”
“There is a solution, long term. Fusion energy. Absolutely clean. The fuel is in unlimited supply in seawater. The waste is water. — Dreadnaught
Actually, the “waste” is Helium, an inert (chemically unreactive) gas. I don’t know how much would be produced, or if it could present any problem in large quantities (it’s so light weight and so unreactive that it slowly evaporates into space, so accumulation shouldn’t be a problem even if large amounts were produced). Also, liquid helium is very useful.
But we need to invest in other sources of energy, like solar power. We have vast supplies out West where it’s seldom cloudy.
We also have the technology to burn coal with a minimum of polution. And, when was the last time you heard of a nuclear accident? We need more nuclear plants, the technology for which is much safer now than it was when existing plants were built.
Sure, the technology to make fusion an economically viable source of energy may one day exist, and we should pursue it. But we need to invest in other sources where the technology ALREADY exists, and which would bring us relief in the near future.