US Senate Environmental and Pubic Works Committee:

The UN global warming conference currently underway in Poland is about to face a serious challenge from over 650 dissenting scientists from around the globe who are criticizing the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore. Set for release this week, a newly updated U.S. Senate Minority Report features the dissenting voices of over 650 international scientists, many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN. The report has added about 250 scientists (and growing) in 2008 to the over 400 scientists who spoke out in 2007. The over 650 dissenting scientists are more than 12 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.

Read the whole thing.

Clara Moskowitz describes how Hollywood updates message Sci Fi cinema. In the end, audiences will find that Keanu Reeves is no Michael Rennie.

If aliens ever visit Earth, they’ll be coming to reprimand us for bad behavior.

That’s the premise of the 1951 classic sci-fi film “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” as well as the brand-new Fox remake of the same name, in theaters Friday. In the intervening 50 years, humanity hasn’t gotten any better, the filmmakers seem to conclude — we’ve just switched to new transgressions.

In the mid 20th century our most pressing concern about ourselves was the threat of humans annihilating each other with nuclear weapons. The original film follows Klaatu, a human-looking alien who comes to Earth with his bodyguard robot Gort, to warn people to cease and desist with the nukes before we contaminate the rest of the Galaxy with them.

The new version of the film focuses on a more contemporary preoccupation: the threat of climate change and environmental degradation. The new Klaatu, played by Keanu Reeves, couldn’t care less if we blew ourselves to bits, but would we mind not taking out the rest of the species on Earth, as well as our rare habitable planet, with us? ..

..It falls to astrobiologist Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) and her stepson Jacob (Jayden Smith, son of Will Smith) to convince Klaatu that humans aren’t beyond redemption, that we really can change our gas-guzzling, trash-dumping ways.

“In re-imagining this picture, we had an opportunity to capture a real kind of angst that people are living with today, a very present concern that the way we are living may have disastrous consequences for the planet,” (deep-thinker Keanu) Reeves said. “I feel like this movie is responding to those anxieties. It’s holding a mirror up to our relationship with nature and asking us to look at our impact on the planet, for the survival of our species and others.”

In a sign of its own commitment to change, Fox designated “The Day the Earth Stood Still”as its first “green” production. Though some trees were doubtless harmed in the making of this film, the studio endeavored to produce the picture with the smallest possible environmental impact. That meant less paper printing of photo stills for the art department, the use of recyclable materials and biodegradable products to create sets and props, and lumber from sustainably-managed forests.

The studio even enforced an “idle-free mandate,” whereby any member of the crew sitting in a production vehicle for more than three minutes had to cut the engine rather than idle while waiting.

In another grand gesture, Fox plans to transmit the entire film into space on Friday via dish antenna through the Orlando, Fla.-based Deep Space Communications Network firm. In what the studio is calling “the world’s first galactic motion picture release,” the movie will be broadcast in the direction of the closest star system, Alpha Centauri, where eager aliens waiting with popcorn could view it by 2012, when the signal arrives.

Some might suggest that physically transmitting the complete set of distribution prints into deep space would be even better.

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Beef and dairy cattle and hogs are part of the cycle of life. They breathe in oxygen and breathe out CO2, and their digestion of food produces methane as well. Living animals, at least domestic ones, from the perspective of environmentalists, thus constitute a major source of greenhouse gas air pollution, and consequently need to be taxed in order to discourage bovine respiration and porcine flatulence.

The EPA’s proposed addition of “greenhouse gases” under the Clean Air Act would amount to the imposition of major new taxes on domestic agriculture and on American consumers.

The American Farm Bureau offers some figures and notes that taxing US beef and pork production will only move that production outside US borders.

Most livestock and dairy farmers would not be able to pass along the costs incurred under this plan,” said Mark Maslyn, AFBF executive director of public policy. “Steep fees associated with this action would force many producers out of business. The net result would likely be higher consumer costs for milk, beef and pork,” said Maslyn, in comments submitted to EPA.

According to Agriculture Department figures, any farm or ranch with more than 25 dairy cows, 50 beef cattle or 200 hogs emits more than 100 tons of carbon equivalent per year, and thus would need to obtain a permit under the proposed rules. More than 90 percent of U.S. dairy, beef and pork production would be affected by the proposal, Maslyn noted.

Permit fees vary from state to state but EPA sets a “presumptive minimum rate” for fees. For 2008-2009, the rate is $43.75 per ton of emitted greenhouse gases. According to Maslyn, the proposed fee would mean annual assessments of $175 for each dairy cow, $87.50 for each head of beef cattle and $20 for each hog.

In addition, Maslyn said the proposed rules would be ineffective because of the global nature of greenhouse gases. “Reduction of a ton of greenhouse gases anywhere will make a difference, but if a ton is removed in Iowa and replaced by a ton in China, then no net effect occurred,” he said. “A livestock tax and regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act will impose restrictions and added costs on the U.S. economy without reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Christopher Booker expresses well-justified alarm at President-Elect Obama’s continuing expressions of commitment to the Global Warming fantasy.

If the holder of the most powerful office in the world proposed a policy guaranteed to inflict untold damage on his own country and many others, on the basis of claims so demonstrably fallacious that they amount to a string of self-deluding lies, we might well be concerned. The relevance of this is not to President Bush, as some might imagine, but to a recent policy statement by President-elect Obama.

Tomorrow, delegates from 190 countries will meet in Poznan, Poland, to pave the way for next year’s UN conference in Copenhagen at which the world will agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. They will see a video of Mr Obama, in only his second major policy commitment, pledging that America is now about to play the leading role in the fight to “save the planet” from global warming.

Mr Obama begins by saying that “the science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear”. “Sea levels,” he claims, “are rising, coastlines are shrinking, we’ve seen record drought, spreading famine and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”

Far from the science being “beyond dispute”, we can only deduce from this that Mr Obama has believed all he was told by Al Gore’s wondrously batty film An Inconvenient Truth without bothering to check the facts. Each of these four statements is so wildly at odds with the truth that on this score alone we should be seriously worried. …

Alarming though it may be that the next US President should have fallen for all this claptrap, much more worrying is what he proposes to do on the basis of such grotesque misinformation. For a start he plans to introduce a “federal cap and trade system”, a massive “carbon tax”, designed to reduce America’s CO2 emissions “to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 per cent by 2050”. Such a target, which would put America ahead of any other country in the world, could only be achieved by closing down a large part of the US economy.

Mr Obama floats off still further from reality when he proposes spending $15 billion a year to encourage “clean energy” sources, such as thousands more wind turbines. He is clearly unaware that wind energy is so hopelessly ineffective that the 10,000 turbines America already has, representing “18 gigawatts of installed capacity”, only generate 4.5GW of power, less than that supplied by a single giant coal-fired power station.

He talks blithely of allowing only “clean” coal-fired power plants, using “carbon capture” – burying the CO2 in holes in the ground – which would double the price of electricity, but the technology for which hasn’t even yet been developed. He then babbles on about “generating five million new green jobs”. This will presumably consist of hiring millions of Americans to generate power by running around on treadmills, to replace all those “dirty” coal-fired power stations which currently supply the US with half its electricity.

If this sounds like an elaborate economic suicide note, for what is still the earth’s richest nation, it is still not enough for many environmentalists. Positively foaming at the mouth in The Guardian last week, George Monbiot claimed that the plight of the planet is now so grave that even “sensible programmes of the kind Obama proposes are now irrelevant”. The only way to avert the “collapse of human civilisation”, according to the Great Moonbat, would be “the complete decarbonisation of the global economy soon after 2050”.

For 300 years science helped to turn Western civilisation into the richest and most comfortable the world has ever seen. Now it seems we have suddenly been plunged into a new age of superstition, where scientific evidence no longer counts for anything. The fact that America will soon be ruled by a man wholly under the spell of this post-scientific hysteria may leave us in wondering despair.

Read the whole thing.

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.

The Telegraph describes how Global Warming manages to keep setting new temperature records, even in the face of colder weather.

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

Yet last week’s latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen’s methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising “very much faster” than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.

Robert Carter, in Quadrant Magazine, provides an excellent tour d’horizon of the scientific realities and politics of alleged Anthropogenic Climate Change.

Climate change knows three realities: science reality, which is what working scientists deal with every day; virtual reality, which is the wholly imaginary world inside computer climate models; and public reality, which is the socio-political system within which politicians, business people and the general citizenry work.

The science reality is that climate is a complex, dynamic, natural system that no one wholly comprehends, though many scientists understand different small parts. So far, science provides no unambiguous evidence that dangerous or even measurable human-caused global warming is occurring.

The virtual reality is that computer models predict future climate according to the assumptions that are programmed into them. There is no established Theory of Climate, and therefore the potential output of all realistic computer general circulation models (GCMs) encompasses a range of both future warmings and coolings, the outcome depending upon the way in which they are constructed. Different results can be produced at will simply by adjusting such poorly known parameters as the effects of cloud cover.

The public reality in 2008 is that, driven by strong environmental lobby groups and evangelistic scientists and journalists, there is a widespread but erroneous belief in our society that dangerous global warming is occurring and that it has human causation.

Read the whole thing.

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Hat tip to Bird Dog.

TG Daily:

Scientists at MIT have recorded a nearly simultaneous world-wide increase in methane levels. This is the first increase in ten years, and what baffles science is that this data contradicts theories stating man is the primary source of increase for this greenhouse gas. It takes about one full year for gases generated in the highly industrial northern hemisphere to cycle through and reach the southern hemisphere. However, since all worldwide levels rose simultaneously throughout the same year, it is now believed this may be part of a natural cycle in mother nature – and not the direct result of man’s contributions.

The two lead authors of a paper published in this week’s Geophysical Review Letters, Matthew Rigby and Ronald Prinn, the TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science, state that as a result of the increase, several million tons of new methane is present in the atmosphere.

Peter Hannaford reports in the American Spectator.

Months had passed since we last talked with Ms. Henny-Penny, whose famous declaration — “the sky is falling!” — electrified the world. At the time, her barnyard colleagues quickly fell into line with her, save one, Chicken Little, who demurred. When last Ms. H-P and I talked, she scoffed at her former friend as a “denier.”

So, the other day I called her to see how she was doing as the recording secretary of what was now the Holy Order of the Sky is Falling, the Hon. Al Gore, pontiff.

“I’m fine,” she said, “but more importantly, Mr. Gore pontificated at a recent gathering in Washington and it was thrilling. He said we could switch all of the nation’s electricity production to wind, solar and other carbon-free sources within 10 years.” Does he have any experts to back up that assertion, I asked. “Oh yes,” she said. “Just the other day Nancy Pelosi at a news conference said the very same thing.”

“Hmm,” I replied. “Solar power now provides one-tenth of one percent of our electricity, with wind not much more. How do you propose to accomplish this feat?” “That’s easy,” she said, “Everyone will follow our motto: a windmill on every automobile and a solar panel on every roof.”

I reminded her that experts have estimated it would take about $100,000 to make the average house capable of getting 100 percent of its electricity from solar panels and that wind technology for automobiles was a gleam in her eye. How would she pay for all this?

“That’s not so hard as it sounds,” she said with a chuckle (or cluckle). Once President Obama is in office, Pontiff Gore will simply ask him to increase the windfall profits tax on oil production, the corporation taxes, the Social Security taxes and the income tax rates beyond what he’s already said he would do. As for wind-driven car, we’ll just ask Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to pass bills requiring it. American ingenuity will do the rest.”

Read the whole thing.

Or maybe you won’t have to. A jury in Britain last Wednesday, encouraged by extreme partisan testimony from chief fraudster James Hansen himself, exonerated Greenpeace vigilantes who vandalized a coal-fired powerplant.

The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.

Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a “lawful excuse” to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate change. The defence of “lawful excuse” under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 allows damage to be caused to property to prevent even greater damage – such as breaking down the door of a burning house to tackle a fire.

The not-guilty verdict, delivered after two days and greeted with cheers in the courtroom, raises the stakes for the most pressing issue on Britain’s green agenda and could encourage further direct action.

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How could any jury reach such a preposterous conclusion? Testimony from witch doctors on top of a prolonged steady diet of false information from the mainstream media, as in this typical example from the Telegraph.

Recent events have seen the scare campaign over global warming descend to the level of a Monty Python sketch.

Much publicity was given, for instance, to Lewis Gordon Pugh, who set out to paddle a kayak to the Pole to demonstrate the vanishing of the Arctic ice. At 80.5 degrees north, still 600 miles short of his goal, he met with ice so thick that he and his fossil-fuelled support ship had to turn back.

But this did not prevent him receiving a congratulatory call from Gordon Brown, nor boasting that he had travelled “further north than anyone has kayaked so far”.

It took the admirable Watts Up With That blog, run by the American meteorologist Anthony Watts, to point out that in 1893 the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen found the Arctic so ice-free that he was able to kayak above 82 degrees north, 100 miles nearer the Pole than our hapless campaigner against “unprecedented global warming”.

The Telegraph reports that Britain’s historic Royal Navy, which so long successfully defended the island nation from Continental invasion, is proving centuries later also in retrospect an effective defense against junk science.

Scientists have uncovered a treasure trove of meteorological information contained in the detailed logs kept by those on board the vessels that established Britain’s great seafaring tradition including those on Nelsons’ Victory and Cook’s Endeavour.

Every Royal Naval ship kept a detailed record of climate including air pressure, wind strength, air and sea temperature and major meteorological disturbances.

A group of academics and Met Office scientists has unearthed the records dating from the 1600s and examined more than 6,000 logs, which have provided one of the world’s best sources for long-term weather data.

Their studies have raised questions about modern climate change theories. A paper by Dennis Wheeler, a geographer based at Sunderland University, recounts an increasing number of summer storms over Britain in the late 17th century.

Many scientists believe that storms are caused by global warming, but these were came during the so-called Little Ice Age that affected Europe from about 1600 to 1850.

The records also suggest that Europe saw a spell of rapid warming, similar to that experienced today, during the 1730s that must have been caused naturally.

Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,
Strike et when your powder’s runnin’ low;
If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven,
An’ drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.

–Sir Francis Drake, according to Henry Newbolt.

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.”