Tuvalu

Andrew Bolt, at the Herald Sun (Australia), has a great deal of fun reporting on an item recently issue published in New Scientist exploding one of the best known Warmist disaster memes.

How embarrassing. Global warming worriers have gone from warning Tuvalu will drown to wishing it damn well had.

But look at it now. Not drowning, but waving. And, er … growing too?

You remember Tuvalu, of course, even if you’ve never figured quite where it was.

For years this glittering string of atolls has been shoved in your face as the poster islands of the global warming faith – this Eden we were killing with our Western sin.

How often we were told it could be the first Pacific nation to be swallowed by the rising seas caused by our evil gases.

In fact, warned Al Gore in his An Inconvenient Truth, so dire was this danger that “the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand” …

As a British judge later ruled, there was no evidence of climate refugees from the Pacific having to be evacuated to New Zealand or anywhere else to escape rising seas.

But truth has counted for dangerously little in this debate, and warmists told one Tuvaluan tale after another of an endangered Polynesian paradise that grew steadily more mythical.

I don’t just mean that the scare was exploded to preposterous proportions, as in this newspaper report just last year: “More than 75 million people living on Pacific islands will have to relocate by 2050 because of the effects of climate change, Oxfam has warned.”

I mean also that warmists felt entitled to invent complete fantasies for the cause. Take Prof Mohammed Dore, an environmental economist from Canada’s Dore University, who three years ago declared Tuvalu uninhabited already.

“In fact, there is an island called Tuvalu which was completely evacuated and New Zealand accepted all the residents because of sea level rising,” he wrote, much to the surprise of the island’s 12,000 residents, who have actually doubled their number in the past three decades, there being little else to do in the middle of the ocean.

And that’s their real problem. Surrounded by nothing but coconuts and fish, and with no employer other than the Government since the Nauruan phosphate industry died, how were they to get on in this great world?

What luck! Along came the global warming faith, and Tuvaluans must have seen in this greatest cargo cult of all a chance at last to earn a dollar – and maybe even get a visa to a new home in a richer land.

So I wasn’t surprised that Tuvalu’s prime minister in 2003 went to the United Nations to present a bill to the guilty Westerners he insisted were causing the seas to drown his home.

He really laid it on thick: “The threat is real and serious, and is of no difference to a slow and insidious form of terrorism against us.”

And the thick really laid it on here. Whole institutions were devoted to preaching – especially to children – that wicked Westerners were drowning the homes of innocent islanders.

Take professional warming alarmist Rob Gell, the TV weatherman, who in 2008 launched an exhibition at Melbourne’s Immigration Museum dedicated to convincing the gullible that we should take in all these soggy Tuvaluans before the waves lapped over their heads.

It was virtually a “foregone conclusion” that Tuvalu would be uninhabitable “within the next 50 years”, he claimed.

Naturally, Labor signed up to the scare, this being when it still believed man-made warming was “the great moral and economic challenge of our time” – a challenge so moral that any lie could be excused.

It even produced a “Pacific climate change plan” which promised help to global warming “refugees” as they fled low-lying island states such as Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, and Tuvalu.

Said Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese: “The alternative to that is to say, and I don’t think any Australian would accept this, that were going to sit by while people literally drown.”

All of which culminated in the tearful plea from Tuvalu’s delegate, Ian Fry, at the UN’s great warmist gathering at Copenhagen last year – a performance that in every comic respect showed the sham behind the warming scare.

Cut your gases, or we die, he sobbed.

(Ian Fry begins choking up at 3:12 in this 3:38 video)

“I woke up this morning crying, and that’s not easy for a grown man to admit … The fate of my country rests in your hands.”

Wonderful stuff! The crowd went mad with applause.

Yet all this, too, was as fake as Al Gore. Fry is not from Tuvalu, has never lived there, and is not threatened by any rising seas, since the Queanbeyan home of this part-time Australian National University student is 144km from the nearest beach.

And now we know that Tuvalu, far from drowning, is rising from the seas.

It was already clear from the Australian-funded South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project that sea levels in the region were rising only microscopically, much as they’d done for centuries before the invention of the motor car or the light bulb.

BUT now New Scientist reports that however fast the seas are rising, Tuvalu and many other low-lying Pacific islands are so far rising even faster, thanks to coral debris, coral growth, land reclamation and deposits of sediment. Some have grown by as much as a third.

Auckland University’s Associate Prof Paul Kench, one of the two authors of the study, said he compared historical pictures from the past 60 years to satellite images of 27 Pacific islands.

“Eighty per cent of the islands we’ve looked at have either remained about the same or, in fact, (grown) larger,” he said.

(In fact, the real figure is an even more comforting 86 per cent.)

In the Spectator, epidemiologist Paul Reiter debunks the “malaria spreading because of Global Warming” meme popularized by Al Gore, and explains how the repetition in print of empty assertions by small groups of activists can effectively promote complete falsehoods into established fact.

Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, was a masterpiece. Like an elder brother to all humanity, he patiently explained the familiar litany of disasters — droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level rise and the rest — spiced with heartrending personal stories: his baby son’s near-fatal accident, the agony of losing a sister to lung cancer. It was a science lecture crafted by Hollywood. …

In his serious voice, Mr Gore presented a nifty animation, a band of little mosquitoes fluttering their way up the slopes of a snow-capped mountain, and he repeated the old line: Nairobi used to be ‘above the mosquito line, the limit at which mosquitoes can survive, but now…’ Those little mosquitoes kept climbing.

The truth? Nairobi means ‘the place of cool waters’ in the Masai language. The town grew up around a camp, set up in 1899 during the construction of a railway, the famous ‘Lunatic Express’. There certainly was water there — and mosquitoes. From the start, the place was plagued with malaria, so much so that a few years later doctors tried to have the whole town moved to a healthier place. By 1927, the disease had become such a plague in the ‘White Highlands’ that £40,000 (equivalent to about £350,000 today) was earmarked for malaria control. The authorities understood the root of the problem: forest clearance had created the perfect breeding places for mosquitoes. The disease was present as high as 2,500m above sea level; the mosquitoes were observed at 3,000m. And Nairobi? 1,680m.

These details are not science. They require no study. They are history. But for activists, they are an inconvenient truth, so they ignore them. Even if Mr Gore is innocent, his advisers are not. They have been spouting the same nonsense for more than a decade. As scientists, we have repeatedly challenged them in the scientific press, at meetings and in news articles, and we have been ignored.

In 2004, nine of us published an appeal in the Lancet: ‘Malaria and climate change: a call for accuracy’. Clearly, Mr Gore didn’t read it. In 2000, I protested when Scientific American published a major article loaded with the usual misrepresentations. And when I watched his animated mosquitoes, his snow-capped mountain was oddly familiar. It took a few moments to click: the images were virtually identical to those in the magazine. The author of the article, Dr Paul Epstein, features high in Gore’s credits.

Dr Epstein is a member of a small band dedicated to a cause. And their work gains legitimacy, not by scholarship, but by repetition. While they publish their work in highly regarded journals, they don’t write research papers but opinion pieces and reviews, with little or no reference to the mainstream of science. The same claims, the same names; only the order of authors change. I have counted 48 separate pieces by just eight activists. They are myth-makers. And all have been lead authors and/or contributory authors of the prestigious IPCC assessment reports.

Take their contention, for example, that as a result of climate change, tropical diseases will move to temperate regions and malaria will come to Britain. If they bothered to learn about the subject, they would know that in a period climatologists call the Little Ice Age, when Charles II held ice parties on the Thames, malaria — ‘the ague’ — was rampant in the Essex marshes, on a par even with regions in Africa today. In the 18th century, the great systematist Linnaeus wrote his doctorate on malaria in central Sweden. In 1922-23 a massive epidemic swept the Soviet Union as far north as Archangel, on the Arctic circle, killing an estimated 600,000 people. And malaria was only eliminated from the Soviet Union and large areas of Europe in the 1950s, after the advent of DDT. So it’s hardly a tropical disease. And yet when we put this information under the noses of the activists it is ignored: ours is the inconvenient truth.

Rajendra Pachauri

Andrew Bolt compares what Rajendra Pachauri, Chief, UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (whose organization shared the Noble Prize with Albert Gore!) tells the rest of us we have to do to save the earth with what the great man does himself.

(Pay attention, peons. From now on, you have to make sacrifices.)

Hotel guests should have their electricity monitored; hefty aviation taxes should be introduced to deter people from flying; and iced water in restaurants should be curtailed, the world’s leading climate scientist has told the Observer.

Rajendra Pachauri? Hey, if you’re manning the VIP lounge at Heathrow, that name may ring a bell:

Dr Rajendra Pachauri flew at least 443,243 miles on IPCC business in this 19 month period. This business included honorary degree ceremonies, a book launch and a Brookings Institute dinner, the latter involving a flight of 3500 miles.

Remember the news reports (1, 2, 3) about Al Gore’s personal Carbon footprint?

The Nobel Peace Prize really ought to be retitled the Nobel Hypocrisy Prize.

Al Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for giving mankind scientific advice about the earth’s climate, but how good a scientific authority is he really?

Here he is a few days ago talking with Conan O’Brian about geothermal energy.

1:24 video

Quote the Goracle:

“two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, ’cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees”

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John Derbyshire (who majored in mathematics at University College, London) corrects the Nobel laureate.

The geothermal gradient is usually quoted as 25–50 degrees Celsius per mile of depth in normal terrain (not, e.g., in the crater of Kilauea). Two kilometers down, therefore, (that’s a mile and a quarter if you’re not as science-y as Al) you’ll have an average gain of 30–60 degrees — exploitable for things like home heating, though not hot enough to make a nice pot of tea. The temperature at the earth’s core, 4,000 miles down, is usually quoted as 5,000 degrees Celsius, though these guys claim it’s much less, while some contrarian geophysicists have posted claims up to 9,000 degrees. The temperature at the surface of the Sun is around 6,000 degrees Celsius, while at the center, where nuclear fusion is going on bigtime, things get up over 10 million degrees.

If the temperature anywhere inside the earth was “several million degrees,” we’d be a star.

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Of course, there is no real reason for surprise. The Washington Post once looked up Albert Gore’s Harvard record, and reported:

For all of Gore’s later fascination with science and technology, he often struggled academically in those subjects. The political champion of the natural world received that sophomore D in Natural Sciences 6 (Man’s Place in Nature) and then got a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118 his senior year. The self-proclaimed inventor of the Internet avoided all courses in mathematics and logic throughout college, despite his outstanding score on the math portion of the SAT (730). As was the case with many of his classmates, his high school math grades had dropped from A’s to C’s as he advanced from trigonometry to calculus in his senior year.

When John C. Davis, a retired teacher and assistant headmaster at St. Albans, was recently shown his illustrious former pupil’s college board achievement test scores, he inspected them closely with a magnifier and shook his head, chuckling quietly at the science results.

“Four eighty-eight! Terrible” Davis declared upon inspecting the future vice president’s 488 score (out of a possible 800) in physics.

“Hmmmm. Chemistry. Five-nineteen. He didn’t do too well in chemistry.”

Local businessmen Rudy Gavora and Craig Compeau, shivering on a recent -46F day (-43.3C) commissioned local sculptor Steve Dean to convert a 10,000 lb. (4545.45 k.) block of ice into an image of Nobel Prize winner and weather prophet Albert Gore.

8 other businesses chipped in on funding for the sculpture and an associated Global Freezing Contest in which participants get to estimate how much colder or warmer the winter of 08/09 will be than the winter of 47/48 (when the Prophet Albert was born).

Prizes include 300 gallons of heating oil, a heated car seat, and a Ski-doo jacket.

Fairbanks News-Miner story

Las Vegas, Nevada, December 17, 2008.

This year’s winter really seems to have Global Warming theorists on the run. Harold Ambler, at of-all-places Huffington Post, thoroughly rakes Al Gore over the coals. What’s next? Daily Kos??

Mr. Gore has stated, regarding climate change, that “the science is in.” Well, he is absolutely right about that, except for one tiny thing. It is the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind. …

First, the expression “climate change” itself is a redundancy, and contains a lie. Climate has always changed, and always will. There has been no stable period of climate during the Holocene, our own climatic era, which began with the end of the last ice age 12,000 years ago. During the Holocene there have been numerous sub-periods with dramatically varied climate, such as the warm Holocene Optimum (7,000 B.C. to 3,000 B.C., during which humanity began to flourish, and advance technologically), the warm Roman Optimum (200 B.C. to 400 A.D., a time of abundant crops that promoted the empire), the cold Dark Ages (400 A.D. to 900 A.D., during which the Nile River froze, major cities were abandoned, the Roman Empire fell apart, and pestilence and famine were widespread), the Medieval Warm Period (900 A.D. to 1300 A.D., during which agriculture flourished, wealth increased, and dozens of lavish examples of Gothic architecture were created), the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850, during much of which plague, crop failures, witch burnings, food riots — and even revolutions, including the French Revolution — were the rule of thumb), followed by our own time of relative warmth (1850 to present, during which population has increased, technology and medical advances have been astonishing, and agriculture has flourished).

So, no one needs to say the words “climate” and “change” in the same breath — it is assumed, by anyone with any level of knowledge, that climate changes. That is the redundancy to which I alluded. The lie is the suggestion that climate has ever been stable. Mr. Gore has used a famously inaccurate graph, known as the “Mann Hockey Stick,” created by the scientist Michael Mann, showing that the modern rise in temperatures is unprecedented, and that the dramatic changes in climate just described did not take place. They did.

New Orleans, Louisiana, December 11, 2008

It snowed on Tuesday here atop the Blue Ridge in Northern Virginia. We received an inch of accumulation, and it remained on the ground until yesterday afternoon. I remember the balmy weather of last year’s November and December with affection.

Wesley Prudden, in the Washington Times, notes that, as it gets colder, the case for trillions of dollars of expenditure to fight Global Warming, Excuse me! “Climate Change,” gets weaker and weaker.

Turn up the heat, somebody. The globe is freezing. Even Al Gore is looking for an extra blanket. Winter has barely come to the northern latitudes and already we’ve got bigger goosebumps than usual. So far the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports 63 record snowfalls in the United States, 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month. Only 44 Octobers over the past 114 years have been cooler than this last one.

The polar ice is accumulating faster than usual, and some of the experts now concede that the globe hasn’t warmed since 1995. You may have noticed, in fact, that Al and his pals, having given up on the sun, no longer even warn of global warming. Now it’s “climate change.” The marketing men enlisted by Al and the doom criers to come up with a flexible “brand” took a cue from the country philosopher who observed, correctly, that “if you’ve got one foot in the fire and the other in a bucket of ice, on average you’re warm.” On average, “climate change” covers every possibility.

Read the whole thing.

When Barack Obama named the Machiavelli of the democratic left, Rahm Emanuel, as White House Chief of Staff, the move, amounting to the selection of “a wartime consigliere,” was widely interpreted as evidence of the new administration’s intention of pursuing a highly polarized agenda, rather than, as Obama promised throughout his campaign, moving beyond partisanship.

Further signs of President-elect Obama’s intentions will come with ongoing appointments. Transition team chief John Podesta promised major cabinet-level appointments would be announced next month.

US News & World Reports published an unofficial transition flowchart (.pdf), currently circulating within the Beltway, which has some real eye-openers: e.g., Al Gore as “Climate Czar” and druggie-playboy-turned-Conspiracy-Theorist-and-Environmental-Prophet Robert Kennedy, Jr. as head of the EPA.

Robert Kennedy, Jr.

Walter Olson recently sounded the alarm about this possible appointment in Forbes, profiling Kennedy’s recent career promoting scary theories about childhood vaccinations causing Autism (complete with a CDC cover-up shielding the Drug Industry), air pollution causing Down’s Syndrome, and the Republican Party stealing the 2004 election.

The Onion:

Former vice president Al Gore—who for the past three decades has unsuccessfully attempted to warn humanity of the coming destruction of our planet, only to be mocked and derided by the very people he has tried to save—launched his infant son into space Monday in the faint hope that his only child would reach the safety of another world.

“I tried to warn them, but the Elders of this planet would not listen,” said Gore, who in 2000 was nearly banished to a featureless realm of nonexistence for promoting his unpopular message. “They called me foolish and laughed at my predictions. Yet even now, the Midwest is flooded, the ice caps are melting, and the cities are rocked with tremors, just as I foretold. Fools! Why didn’t they heed me before it was too late?”

Al Gore—or, as he is known in his own language, Gore-Al—placed his son, Kal-Al, gently in the one-passenger rocket ship, his brow furrowed by the great weight he carried in preserving the sole survivor of humanity’s hubristic folly.

“There is nothing left now but to ensure that my infant son does not meet the same fate as the rest of my doomed race,” Gore said. “I will send him to a new planet, where he will, I hope, be raised by simple but kindly country folk and grow up to be a hero and protector to his adopted home.”

Lorne Gunter, at the National Post, observes that it’s a case of “Do as Al says, not as Al does.”

On Thursday, former U. S. vice-president Al Gore delivered a major address calling on his country to abandon all fossil fuels within 10 years. By 2018, U. S. electricity and fuel should come entirely from “renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources,” he said. Tickets to the event encouraged attendees to “please use public transit, bicycling or other climate-friendly means” to reach the lecture hall.

So how did Mr. Gore and his retinue arrive? In two Lincoln Town Cars and a full-sized SUV that sat idling with the air conditioners blasting while the Gore party was inside.

It was 34 C (93.2 º F) in Washington. Al Gore can’t be expected to get into an overheated vehicle after he’s worked up a sweat telling others how to save the planet.

Remember, too, the Nobel prizewinning environmentalist lives in a Tennessee mansion that produces a carbon footprint 20 times that of the average American home. A sizeable chunk of his personal fortune comes from royalties on a zinc mine which had to be temporarily closed five years ago in part because the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency ruled it one of the worst-polluting mine sites in America. Illegal toxins were frequently discharged into nearby rivers.

Mr. Gore’s Live Earth benefit concert last summer flew scores of rock bands to stages around the world in carbon-spewing private jets. To cover the emissions from his own frequent use of private jets, Mr. Gore set up a company that buys carbon offsets, so that in effect he is paying himself for his carbon indulgences, writing off the expense on one hand, while pocketing the proceeds on the other.

Apparently if the world is ever to reach the carbon-free future Mr. Gore dreams of, it will have to get there without Al’s help.

APS Governors Questioning Physics & Society Unit

While the ineffable Albert Gore, posing in front of a row of American flags, yesterday advanced the modest proposal that Americans should “move beyond partisan divisions,” and agree to be forced by government to abandon the use of every form of fossil fuel, simply abandoning trillions of dollars of corporate and private infrastructure, and spending even more on brand new windmills and hamster wheels, an outbreak of heresy was discovered within the most prestigious circles of the scientific community itself.

The American Physical Society’s Forum on Physics & Society the same day announced its intention of conducting a debate on Anthropogenic Global Warming, and went so far as to allege the existence of substantial dissent from orthodoxy within the scientific community.

There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution. Since the correctness or fallacy of that conclusion has immense implications for public policy and for the future of the biosphere, we thought it appropriate to present a debate within the pages of P&S concerning that conclusion.

The APS governing board was clearly not happy that one of the Physical Society’s internal units has the effrontery to conduct a debate upon the factual basis of a conclusive political position adopted by the same board last November. The APS web-site is pointedly proclaiming its certainty that mankind was at fault all over again.

The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:

“Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate.”

So there.

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It appears that it was Daily Tech‘s posting proclaiming that The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change, under a headline stating Myth of Consensus Explodes that provoked the APS governing board’s denial of a change of stance.

Albert Gore’s life at college was reputedly the inspiration for Erich Segal’s Love Story. One would think that would constitute enough artistic immortality for anyone, but, no! The horror, the horror….

London Times (6/8):

La Scala in Milan has commissioned a musical version of An Inconvenient Truth, the apocalyptic eco-documentary presented by Al Gore, the former American vice-president.

Gore will be replaced on stage by a cast of tenors and at least one soprano as the story of man-made climate change is told. …

The music is being written by Giorgio Battistelli, whose past operas include works based on the Frankenstein story and on the writings of Jules Verne. The composer believes an operatic treament of Gore’s film will allow people to see the dangers facing the world in a new light.

“Opera makes you reflect. Artists make you see things differently,” he said. “When we see a painting by Francis Bacon or a film by Sydney Pollack, we get a very precise idea of the problems of our century.”

The work is scheduled to be performed in 2011 as part of the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy. “I thought it could be a good idea to deal on this important occasion with a subject that involves not only Italy but the world,” Battistelli, 55, added. “It will be about the tragedy of our present situation. It is a great challenge to write an opera on such an unusual subject. It is certainly not the story of Romeo and Juliet.”

Even the New York Times’ John Tierney is moved to satire.

Dear Mr. Gore,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on my draft of “Verità Inconveniente.” Rest assured that I and the management of La Scala are committed to a serious presentation of your scientific work. I will try to adopt some of your suggestions, but I hope you appreciate the constraints faced by the composer of an opera that is already five hours long.

I agree it would “round out the résumé” of Prince Algorino in the opening scene if he were to sing about his creation of a communications network. But the “Mio magnifico Internet” aria you propose seems to me a distraction — and frankly out of place in an 18th-century Tuscan village. I believe the peasants’ choral celebration of Prince Algorino’s wisdom suffices to establish his virtues.

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.