Cast Amongst The Believers
*
Climate alarmist theory has collapsed’ - Compares Climate Models to the Nigerian e-mail scams
By Dr. William J.R. Alexander, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and a former member of the United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters.
Dr. Alexander’s Key Quote: “I have no more faith in global climate model (GCM) predictions than I have in all those emails from Nigeria advising me that I have won the Lotto, or those proposals from rich widows in Dubai who have just lost their husbands, or from the less frequent emails from my bank asking for details of my banking account. These GCMs are mathematical dinosaurs.”
Excerpt: These alarmist predictions have backfired. Environmental extremism, and now plain terrorism, is causing tremendous damage to the image of science. It is exacerbated by the failure of conscientious scientists to raise the alarm. Remaining silent is a deliberate decision for which they can be held accountable. Climate alarmist theory has collapsed. Where did they get it wrong? The answer is simple. They boarded the wrong vehicle (process models) and headed in the wrong direction (they ignored the road signs). To put it simply, their models replicate the complex atmospheric and oceanic processes and their interactions. For given input assumptions they produce a single set of outputs. The models are fundamentally incapable of detecting changes in these processes. This is why the IPCC has been in existence for 20 years. It has yet to produce statistically believable evidence of progressive climate changes in sub-continental Africa or elsewhere. The best that they can do is to produce model projections of unverifiable and therefore unchallengeable consequences.
This is also why it has to resort to terrorist approaches based on mathematical models instead of an analysis of real world observations. It is intended to create media attention ahead of the Accra conference. The Royal Society adopted the same tactics ahead of the Nairobi conference two years ago. I have no more faith in global climate model (GCM) predictions than I have in all those emails from Nigeria advising me that I have won the Lotto, or those proposals from rich widows in Dubai who have just lost their husbands, or from the less frequent emails from my bank asking for details of my banking account. These GCMs are mathematical dinosaurs. Modern laptops are not only more efficient but they are more understandable. The public no longer have to rely on the edicts of the high priests with their questionable objectives and lack of real world knowledge and experiences. The model-based predictions of the inundation of parts of Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula by rising sea levels are an example.
Environmental terrorism
by Will Alexander
We are now witnessing the descent from climate alarmism, to extremism, to terrorism. The predicted flooding of parts of Cape Town is an example. The public are not easily fooled.
Sunday Times letters to the editor
“Your story that the Cape coastline would disappear in 25 years, would cause alarm and despondency here in Cape Town, but for two things. Firstly, the writer is better known for his political satire and secondly, the study appears to have been written with the help of the South African Weather Bureau, notorious for giving the wrong weather forecasts for the Cape. Is this perhaps the trial run for next year’s April Fool’s day?”
“I believe that global warming is the biggest scientific scam ever. There is no evidence to prove that the current climate variations are not a natural cycle.”
Credibility
While the globe was still warming and environmentalist claims were modest, the IPCC’s case was impregnable. In these modern times the environmentalists fed the media with scare stories in order to advance their cause. The media in turn had little interest in repeating the same warnings month after month. So, climate alarmists were forced to increase the level of alarmism. Environmental terrorism is the result.
Examples are the fraudulent predictions of the destruction of the animals and butterflies of the Kruger National Park, and the imminent loss of our Proteas (South Africa) and Quiver Trees (Namibia) as a result of climate change. These claims are included in the IPCC’s reports where they were accepted without question by the gullible advisory panels.
The latest example is the direct threat to the habitability of South Africa’s coastal areas including flooding of the Cape Town harbour area and the Peninsula towns by a 20 m rise in sea level and two storey high waves. This time even the media were sceptical. A cartoonist in East London’s Daily Despatch illustrated the public reaction in his cartoon. An interesting comment elsewhere is that Bloemfontein is considering appointing a harbourmaster!
These alarmist predictions have backfired. Environmental extremism, and now plain terrorism, is causing tremendous damage to the image of science. It is exacerbated by the failure of conscientious scientists to raise the alarm. Remaining silent is a deliberate decision for which they can be held accountable.
The basic problem goes much deeper. The following is the sequence that drives climate alarmism at both international and national levels.
1.Undesirable emissions (principally carbon dioxide) are discharged into the atmosphere.
2.The emissions create the greenhouse effect.
3.The globe warms as a consequence.
4.The warming results in a number of undesirable effects, including increases in floods, droughts, desertification, and threats to our unique plant and animal species.
5.These pose threats to the habitability of our planet.
Search for proof
Our concern is in Step 5. The direct causes are in Step 4. Where then, should we concentrate our search for evidence? The obvious answer lies in Step 4. Therein lies the proof of the pudding.
If no evidence of adverse consequences can be found in Step 4 then the whole IPCC edifice must collapse. This investigation requires a sound knowledge of the natural, multiyear variability of these processes before changes can be attributed to human activities. This is where I concentrated my efforts during the past 30 years. Despite a diligent study I could find no such evidence.
Unexpected confirmation is in Step 3. Global warming ceased 10 years ago. The globe is now starting to cool.
The vultures are already feasting on the IPCC carcass. At present they are concentrating on Step 2 - the greenhouse effect. The IPCC scientists obviously made a serious mistake when linking increasing carbon dioxide emissions with increasing global temperatures. What is it? What is interesting, is that just as in the real world, these vultures are already squabbling over several alternative reasons for the failure. The alarmists no longer have a case.
Failure of alarmism
Climate is a regional (1), multiyear (2), multi-process (3) phenomenon. Also, in the case of environmental processes, causality (4), has to be demonstrated (5), by concurrent changes (6) in the driving processes (7), typically rainfall (8) and to a lesser extent, temperature (9).
Claims based on observations over a period of less than 30 years, that a single plant or animal species is under stress in a single district, without numerical evidence of concurrent changes in rainfall and temperature, is altogether inadequate proof of climate changes in the wider region. Yet this is the basis for the alarmist claims in the IPCC reports. I have not seen a single report on regional, concurrent, multiyear, multi-process analyses. Our joint paper on this subject is a world first.
Where did they go wrong?
Climate alarmist theory has collapsed. Where did they get it wrong? The answer is simple. They boarded the wrong vehicle (process models) and headed in the wrong direction (they ignored the road signs).
To put it simply, their models replicate the complex atmospheric and oceanic processes and their interactions. For given input assumptions they produce a single set of outputs. The models are fundamentally incapable of detecting changes in these processes. This is why the IPCC has been in existence for 20 years. It has yet to produce statistically believable evidence of progressive climate changes in sub-continental Africa or elsewhere. The best that they can do is to produce model projections of unverifiable and therefore unchallengeable consequences.
This is also why it has to resort to terrorist approaches based on mathematical models instead of an analysis of real world observations. It is intended to create media attention ahead of the Accra conference. The Royal Society adopted the same tactics ahead of the Nairobi conference two years ago.
I have no more faith in global climate model (GCM) predictions than I have in all those emails from Nigeria advising me that I have won the Lotto, or those proposals from rich widows in Dubai who have just lost their husbands, or from the less frequent emails from my bank asking for details of my banking account.
These GCMs are mathematical dinosaurs. Modern laptops are not only more efficient but they are more understandable. The public no longer have to rely on the edicts of the high priests with their questionable objectives and lack of real world knowledge and experiences. The model-based predictions of the inundation of parts of Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula by rising sea levels are an example.
There was a time in my life when spreading alarm and despondency was a punishable offence. Cowardice in the face of the enemy could result in facing a firing squad. I swore an oath of allegiance to my country. Today there are no such legal or moral standards.
Prediction
All the signs point to the failure of the Accra conference to reach a meaningful conclusion. There has been no mention of this conference at all in the South African news media. The gaps are widening on several fronts. I believe that the future existence of the IPCC is under threat. We should have the verdict by the end of this week.
This whole climate change issue is about making sacrifices to avoid serious global consequences. But sacrifices will not fall evenly between the rich and poor nations. Now global cooling has cast serious doubts regarding the effectiveness of any sacrifices. The combination of the two makes a substantial agreement increasingly unlikely.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/4648
Cast amongst the unbelievers, the long discussions with the priests had been excruciating. It had caused great concern in the family, particularly with his mother, that as he turned 13 he began to express doubts. Their family had been ridden with the deep fears and insecurities that came with fundamentalist Christianity; and had swallowed whole the propaganda from the Worldwide Church of God, Herbert W Armstrong and Garner Ted Armstrong. They had been blessed by God, and told the truth, here at the end time. The bottles of stored water mounted in the cupboards. And all was lost, lost, when he couldn't reconcile his own stirrings with the strict proscriptions being hailed down upon them.
Was he really going to go to hell? For what exactly? Why was God so unmerciful, so cruel. Why didn't he care about those he was condemning to death. He wrote his first major poem, about this fearful God and the queues of the condemned. They snaked out through stone pillars and under arching stone walls, they spilled down mythical steps and they kept on coming, hundreds, thousands. There was a strange, stifled chant, more evil than religious. Despair was everywhere. Darkness shrouded the masses. Oh if only they had been good, instead of being here, facing their destiny, their death, their judgement.
Was he really going to die, just like them, just because he had the precocity to doubt. Just because he demanded to be convinced. Just because God didn't make sense to him any more, in his young, adolescent, longing brain. He didn't want to go the church on Saturday's any more. Saturday was yet another point of difference with the mainstream churches. They had chosen Sunday, the Roman day for worshipping the Sun God, and had betrayed the Lord. All around them was corruption. Mini-skirts were creating headlines. The Rolling Stones really were of the devil, even worse than the Beatles. Licentiousness surrounded them.
He would be beaten, yet again, until crying and shivering from the pain, he would be forced into a suit. He would sit in the back of the car, silent, tearful, the welts stinging on his legs and on his back, inside a gale of tears and regret, unable to see any way out of this living nightmare that was his life. He hated the suit he had been forced to wear. He hated his parents, who kept beating him so badly, all because he didn't want to go to church. And he hated God, for being such a fascist, forcing him to believe when he just didn't want to. Why so cruel? What did he care whether he believed or not?
But the belts snaked out until he was forced, literally forced, to recant and don the suit and get in their Holden, and sit in the back with those storms of tears inside him, and watch sadly, sullenly, as the brick green and red colours of the suburbs flowed by, as they exited their narrow winding street with its demonic trees and eternal rusting, its sandstone caves and the heat filled secrets of the bush. The only time he began to rally was when the suburbs became the city, and his interest sparked up. What would it be like to live here, or here, what was it like behind that door, or that one, were they happy?
And after the beatings and the long drive and an insanely boring service, where Ezekiel and Isaiah and a thousand other ancient horrors thundered from the pulpit of the Petersham Town Hall, after the thunderous virtues and the neatly dressed families sitting ram rod strait, their hair combed and their ears clean, after it all his concerned mother would drag him around for a special conference with the priest. He was excruciatingly embarrassed. What business of anyone's were his own myriad doubts?
He sat there and had what he thought were relatively advanced theological discussions, where he set out to prove that God did not make sense, that he shouldn't be imposing all this suffering on mankind, that if he really was a kind and compassionate and all knowing being he wouldn't be inflicting all this pain. The priest quoted scripture, and together with the priest, in a back room of the town hall, the family knelt and prayed for his salvation, for him to be rescued from evil thoughts, from doubt, from the wider world.
He didn't want to be rescued from evil thoughts. He wanted to escape the nightmare that was his life; the beatings, the brutality, the overwhelming despair, the gusts of emotion that crippled him. It was here in these painful days that he developed the philosophy that was to live with him throughout much of his adult life: he didn't want to feel anything at all, because to feel anything was to be hurt.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://wdwnewsletter.com/2008/08/27/disneys-new-hannah-montana-album-features-global-warming-anthem/
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama’s two daughters, Malia, 9, and Sasha, 6, are big fans of Hannah Montana – and maybe there’s a reason why. Teen star Miley Cyrus, known as Hannah Montana in the Disney Channel TV series television of the same name, is now crusading for global warming alarmism. But she admits she isn’t really sure what it means. Disney also owns ABC, a network that often hypes climate change alarmism. On the 15-year-old singer’s recently released album “Breakout,” she sings that she wants America to wake up and deal with global warming. The song, “Wake Up America” is about taking care of the earth:
Oh, can you take care of her
Oh, maybe you can spare her
Several moments of your consideration
Leading up to the final destination
Oh, the earth is calling out,
I wanna learn what it’s all about,
But everything I read – global warming, going green
I don’t know what all this means, but it seems to be saying
Wake up, America, we’re all in this together
It’s our home so let’s take care of it
You know that you want to
You know that you got to wake up, America
Tomorrow becomes a new day and everything you do
Matters, yeah, everything you do matters in some way
Cyrus is one of the current jewels in the Disney crown. But she isn’t alone. Disney purchased ABC in 1995, but the network recently has acquired a taste for global warming coverage.
The network’s weatherman Sam Champion and reporter Bill Blakemore are two of the consistent voices for hyping the issue. A recent Business & Media Institute study of media climate coverage highlighted a particular low in the network’s reporting. The ugliest treatment of a climate skeptic during the study period came from ABC’s Bill Weir on Nov. 18, 2007, “Good Morning America.” He was interviewing Democratic state representative Jim Gooch from Kentucky.
http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=73452
The only way the U.S. energy problem can be solved is to remove the obstacles that caused it. The taxation, regulation, litigation and tax subsidies that government has placed on the back of the American energy industry must be repealed. Free men with private capital in a free market will then be able to build the energy industry we need. Similar action should be taken for our other industries.
As the cost of energy rises, as imported energy becomes a luxury, and as American prosperity falls, the American people are going to become very unhappy. Current fuel prices are only a taste of the inevitable privations that are coming.
There is only one, simple, central question in the energy debate: As their suffering increases, will the American people realize that their diminishing prosperity is the direct result of the taxation, regulation and litigation their government has created?
Will American voters throw out the politicians who are still creating more of this tyranny and replace them with representatives who will repeal the laws that are impoverishing them?
If they do, if they restore the fundamental human right of freedom to produce to the American people, the needed U.S. energy capacity can be built in record time – without the expenditure of a single dollar of tax money.
If, on the other hand, Americans are convinced by the demagoguery of self-interested politicians who urge them to hate industrial producers such as oil companies, use tax money for useless and wasteful schemes such as the ethanol debacle, and blame their troubles on essential free market institutions such as commodity markets –
If they allow continued oppressive regulation of energy producers, continued regulatory prevention of nuclear power plant construction and of oil and gas exploration and development –
If they allow the dead hand of government to continue to drive industry away from the United States –
Then the great experiment in human freedom begun in the United States more than two centuries ago is over.
As our human right to produce dies, killed by the dead hand of government tyranny, so will die the prosperity and remaining freedom of our country.
Winston Churchill said that Americans always do the right thing – after they have tried everything else first. In allowing our politicians to stifle American industry for more than 30 years with tyrannical taxation, regulation and litigation, we have completed the "everything else."
It is now time for us to do the right thing.
http://www.stillwater-newspress.com/local/local_story_239112827.html
Go slow on climate control
State group says economic costs will be too high
Jacob Longan - NewsPress
Americans For Prosperity is an organization that says it is non-partisan and non-political but admits to having a conservative message.
That message was on display Monday when the group held a forum called “Beating Climate Alarmism: Cost is the Key” at the Stillwater Community Center.
The group was represented by Stuart Jolly and Pam Pollard, the state director and associate state director.
Also speaking was U.S. Rep. Frank Lucas, a Republican who represents Oklahoma’s Third District.
The forum was about what AFP calls the “dangerous” Warner-Lieberman Climate Security Act. The Senate bill introduced by Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and John Warner, R-Va., is designed to reduce carbon emissions through a cap-and-trade system that would set a limit on the emissions of a company with businesses that are going to exceed their limit able to buy more credits on Wall Street.
Pollard said the point of the forum was to explain the issue in a way people could understand.
Her first complaint was with the name of the act.
“Anything that has to do with security we immediately think about national security, 9/11, oh my goodness, that’s something we have to do!” Pollard said. “I personally take offense to that and think they are trying to deceive the average voter who doesn’t have the ability — may not be connected into all the blogs, all the networks to get this information.”
Jolly called it a hidden tax as increased costs will be passed on to consumers.
The presentation showed estimates for how the law would affect Oklahoma by 2020 if it were passed. It estimated 21,000 job losses, disposable incomes dropping $2,625, energy prices rising 147 percent, etc.
“Climate hysteria is the biggest threat to freedom and prosperity in the United States right now,” Jolly said. “Legislators around the country are passing laws based on global warming and it is getting worse.”
He said he would not debate the science of global warming but added, “They are increasing taxes based on data that may not be true.”
Lucas took a similar position.
“The bottom line remains, before you embark on something as aggressive as cap and trade, you need to make sure the facts are accurate, you need to know the goals you intend to achieve actually will do something positive and then you’ve got to do one other little thing,” Lucas said. “You’ve got to make sure the whole world plays by the same rules. Right now, that’s not the case. That’s absolutely not the case.”
He added, “Pretend for a moment that the global warming advocates are completely right. Pretend for a moment that the concept of cap-and-trade is right. It should frighten you that the bureaucratic federal government would set down and allocate among the various industries, various sections of the country, who got to use energy and who did not and that the federal government would decide who would pay for the privilege of using more energy and how the money would be transferred between various parts of the country.”
Countryside near Dungog, NSW, Australia.
Climate alarmist theory has collapsed’ - Compares Climate Models to the Nigerian e-mail scams
By Dr. William J.R. Alexander, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and a former member of the United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters.
Dr. Alexander’s Key Quote: “I have no more faith in global climate model (GCM) predictions than I have in all those emails from Nigeria advising me that I have won the Lotto, or those proposals from rich widows in Dubai who have just lost their husbands, or from the less frequent emails from my bank asking for details of my banking account. These GCMs are mathematical dinosaurs.”
Excerpt: These alarmist predictions have backfired. Environmental extremism, and now plain terrorism, is causing tremendous damage to the image of science. It is exacerbated by the failure of conscientious scientists to raise the alarm. Remaining silent is a deliberate decision for which they can be held accountable. Climate alarmist theory has collapsed. Where did they get it wrong? The answer is simple. They boarded the wrong vehicle (process models) and headed in the wrong direction (they ignored the road signs). To put it simply, their models replicate the complex atmospheric and oceanic processes and their interactions. For given input assumptions they produce a single set of outputs. The models are fundamentally incapable of detecting changes in these processes. This is why the IPCC has been in existence for 20 years. It has yet to produce statistically believable evidence of progressive climate changes in sub-continental Africa or elsewhere. The best that they can do is to produce model projections of unverifiable and therefore unchallengeable consequences.
This is also why it has to resort to terrorist approaches based on mathematical models instead of an analysis of real world observations. It is intended to create media attention ahead of the Accra conference. The Royal Society adopted the same tactics ahead of the Nairobi conference two years ago. I have no more faith in global climate model (GCM) predictions than I have in all those emails from Nigeria advising me that I have won the Lotto, or those proposals from rich widows in Dubai who have just lost their husbands, or from the less frequent emails from my bank asking for details of my banking account. These GCMs are mathematical dinosaurs. Modern laptops are not only more efficient but they are more understandable. The public no longer have to rely on the edicts of the high priests with their questionable objectives and lack of real world knowledge and experiences. The model-based predictions of the inundation of parts of Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula by rising sea levels are an example.
Environmental terrorism
by Will Alexander
We are now witnessing the descent from climate alarmism, to extremism, to terrorism. The predicted flooding of parts of Cape Town is an example. The public are not easily fooled.
Sunday Times letters to the editor
“Your story that the Cape coastline would disappear in 25 years, would cause alarm and despondency here in Cape Town, but for two things. Firstly, the writer is better known for his political satire and secondly, the study appears to have been written with the help of the South African Weather Bureau, notorious for giving the wrong weather forecasts for the Cape. Is this perhaps the trial run for next year’s April Fool’s day?”
“I believe that global warming is the biggest scientific scam ever. There is no evidence to prove that the current climate variations are not a natural cycle.”
Credibility
While the globe was still warming and environmentalist claims were modest, the IPCC’s case was impregnable. In these modern times the environmentalists fed the media with scare stories in order to advance their cause. The media in turn had little interest in repeating the same warnings month after month. So, climate alarmists were forced to increase the level of alarmism. Environmental terrorism is the result.
Examples are the fraudulent predictions of the destruction of the animals and butterflies of the Kruger National Park, and the imminent loss of our Proteas (South Africa) and Quiver Trees (Namibia) as a result of climate change. These claims are included in the IPCC’s reports where they were accepted without question by the gullible advisory panels.
The latest example is the direct threat to the habitability of South Africa’s coastal areas including flooding of the Cape Town harbour area and the Peninsula towns by a 20 m rise in sea level and two storey high waves. This time even the media were sceptical. A cartoonist in East London’s Daily Despatch illustrated the public reaction in his cartoon. An interesting comment elsewhere is that Bloemfontein is considering appointing a harbourmaster!
These alarmist predictions have backfired. Environmental extremism, and now plain terrorism, is causing tremendous damage to the image of science. It is exacerbated by the failure of conscientious scientists to raise the alarm. Remaining silent is a deliberate decision for which they can be held accountable.
The basic problem goes much deeper. The following is the sequence that drives climate alarmism at both international and national levels.
1.Undesirable emissions (principally carbon dioxide) are discharged into the atmosphere.
2.The emissions create the greenhouse effect.
3.The globe warms as a consequence.
4.The warming results in a number of undesirable effects, including increases in floods, droughts, desertification, and threats to our unique plant and animal species.
5.These pose threats to the habitability of our planet.
Search for proof
Our concern is in Step 5. The direct causes are in Step 4. Where then, should we concentrate our search for evidence? The obvious answer lies in Step 4. Therein lies the proof of the pudding.
If no evidence of adverse consequences can be found in Step 4 then the whole IPCC edifice must collapse. This investigation requires a sound knowledge of the natural, multiyear variability of these processes before changes can be attributed to human activities. This is where I concentrated my efforts during the past 30 years. Despite a diligent study I could find no such evidence.
Unexpected confirmation is in Step 3. Global warming ceased 10 years ago. The globe is now starting to cool.
The vultures are already feasting on the IPCC carcass. At present they are concentrating on Step 2 - the greenhouse effect. The IPCC scientists obviously made a serious mistake when linking increasing carbon dioxide emissions with increasing global temperatures. What is it? What is interesting, is that just as in the real world, these vultures are already squabbling over several alternative reasons for the failure. The alarmists no longer have a case.
Failure of alarmism
Climate is a regional (1), multiyear (2), multi-process (3) phenomenon. Also, in the case of environmental processes, causality (4), has to be demonstrated (5), by concurrent changes (6) in the driving processes (7), typically rainfall (8) and to a lesser extent, temperature (9).
Claims based on observations over a period of less than 30 years, that a single plant or animal species is under stress in a single district, without numerical evidence of concurrent changes in rainfall and temperature, is altogether inadequate proof of climate changes in the wider region. Yet this is the basis for the alarmist claims in the IPCC reports. I have not seen a single report on regional, concurrent, multiyear, multi-process analyses. Our joint paper on this subject is a world first.
Where did they go wrong?
Climate alarmist theory has collapsed. Where did they get it wrong? The answer is simple. They boarded the wrong vehicle (process models) and headed in the wrong direction (they ignored the road signs).
To put it simply, their models replicate the complex atmospheric and oceanic processes and their interactions. For given input assumptions they produce a single set of outputs. The models are fundamentally incapable of detecting changes in these processes. This is why the IPCC has been in existence for 20 years. It has yet to produce statistically believable evidence of progressive climate changes in sub-continental Africa or elsewhere. The best that they can do is to produce model projections of unverifiable and therefore unchallengeable consequences.
This is also why it has to resort to terrorist approaches based on mathematical models instead of an analysis of real world observations. It is intended to create media attention ahead of the Accra conference. The Royal Society adopted the same tactics ahead of the Nairobi conference two years ago.
I have no more faith in global climate model (GCM) predictions than I have in all those emails from Nigeria advising me that I have won the Lotto, or those proposals from rich widows in Dubai who have just lost their husbands, or from the less frequent emails from my bank asking for details of my banking account.
These GCMs are mathematical dinosaurs. Modern laptops are not only more efficient but they are more understandable. The public no longer have to rely on the edicts of the high priests with their questionable objectives and lack of real world knowledge and experiences. The model-based predictions of the inundation of parts of Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula by rising sea levels are an example.
There was a time in my life when spreading alarm and despondency was a punishable offence. Cowardice in the face of the enemy could result in facing a firing squad. I swore an oath of allegiance to my country. Today there are no such legal or moral standards.
Prediction
All the signs point to the failure of the Accra conference to reach a meaningful conclusion. There has been no mention of this conference at all in the South African news media. The gaps are widening on several fronts. I believe that the future existence of the IPCC is under threat. We should have the verdict by the end of this week.
This whole climate change issue is about making sacrifices to avoid serious global consequences. But sacrifices will not fall evenly between the rich and poor nations. Now global cooling has cast serious doubts regarding the effectiveness of any sacrifices. The combination of the two makes a substantial agreement increasingly unlikely.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/4648
Cast amongst the unbelievers, the long discussions with the priests had been excruciating. It had caused great concern in the family, particularly with his mother, that as he turned 13 he began to express doubts. Their family had been ridden with the deep fears and insecurities that came with fundamentalist Christianity; and had swallowed whole the propaganda from the Worldwide Church of God, Herbert W Armstrong and Garner Ted Armstrong. They had been blessed by God, and told the truth, here at the end time. The bottles of stored water mounted in the cupboards. And all was lost, lost, when he couldn't reconcile his own stirrings with the strict proscriptions being hailed down upon them.
Was he really going to go to hell? For what exactly? Why was God so unmerciful, so cruel. Why didn't he care about those he was condemning to death. He wrote his first major poem, about this fearful God and the queues of the condemned. They snaked out through stone pillars and under arching stone walls, they spilled down mythical steps and they kept on coming, hundreds, thousands. There was a strange, stifled chant, more evil than religious. Despair was everywhere. Darkness shrouded the masses. Oh if only they had been good, instead of being here, facing their destiny, their death, their judgement.
Was he really going to die, just like them, just because he had the precocity to doubt. Just because he demanded to be convinced. Just because God didn't make sense to him any more, in his young, adolescent, longing brain. He didn't want to go the church on Saturday's any more. Saturday was yet another point of difference with the mainstream churches. They had chosen Sunday, the Roman day for worshipping the Sun God, and had betrayed the Lord. All around them was corruption. Mini-skirts were creating headlines. The Rolling Stones really were of the devil, even worse than the Beatles. Licentiousness surrounded them.
He would be beaten, yet again, until crying and shivering from the pain, he would be forced into a suit. He would sit in the back of the car, silent, tearful, the welts stinging on his legs and on his back, inside a gale of tears and regret, unable to see any way out of this living nightmare that was his life. He hated the suit he had been forced to wear. He hated his parents, who kept beating him so badly, all because he didn't want to go to church. And he hated God, for being such a fascist, forcing him to believe when he just didn't want to. Why so cruel? What did he care whether he believed or not?
But the belts snaked out until he was forced, literally forced, to recant and don the suit and get in their Holden, and sit in the back with those storms of tears inside him, and watch sadly, sullenly, as the brick green and red colours of the suburbs flowed by, as they exited their narrow winding street with its demonic trees and eternal rusting, its sandstone caves and the heat filled secrets of the bush. The only time he began to rally was when the suburbs became the city, and his interest sparked up. What would it be like to live here, or here, what was it like behind that door, or that one, were they happy?
And after the beatings and the long drive and an insanely boring service, where Ezekiel and Isaiah and a thousand other ancient horrors thundered from the pulpit of the Petersham Town Hall, after the thunderous virtues and the neatly dressed families sitting ram rod strait, their hair combed and their ears clean, after it all his concerned mother would drag him around for a special conference with the priest. He was excruciatingly embarrassed. What business of anyone's were his own myriad doubts?
He sat there and had what he thought were relatively advanced theological discussions, where he set out to prove that God did not make sense, that he shouldn't be imposing all this suffering on mankind, that if he really was a kind and compassionate and all knowing being he wouldn't be inflicting all this pain. The priest quoted scripture, and together with the priest, in a back room of the town hall, the family knelt and prayed for his salvation, for him to be rescued from evil thoughts, from doubt, from the wider world.
He didn't want to be rescued from evil thoughts. He wanted to escape the nightmare that was his life; the beatings, the brutality, the overwhelming despair, the gusts of emotion that crippled him. It was here in these painful days that he developed the philosophy that was to live with him throughout much of his adult life: he didn't want to feel anything at all, because to feel anything was to be hurt.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://wdwnewsletter.com/2008/08/27/disneys-new-hannah-montana-album-features-global-warming-anthem/
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama’s two daughters, Malia, 9, and Sasha, 6, are big fans of Hannah Montana – and maybe there’s a reason why. Teen star Miley Cyrus, known as Hannah Montana in the Disney Channel TV series television of the same name, is now crusading for global warming alarmism. But she admits she isn’t really sure what it means. Disney also owns ABC, a network that often hypes climate change alarmism. On the 15-year-old singer’s recently released album “Breakout,” she sings that she wants America to wake up and deal with global warming. The song, “Wake Up America” is about taking care of the earth:
Oh, can you take care of her
Oh, maybe you can spare her
Several moments of your consideration
Leading up to the final destination
Oh, the earth is calling out,
I wanna learn what it’s all about,
But everything I read – global warming, going green
I don’t know what all this means, but it seems to be saying
Wake up, America, we’re all in this together
It’s our home so let’s take care of it
You know that you want to
You know that you got to wake up, America
Tomorrow becomes a new day and everything you do
Matters, yeah, everything you do matters in some way
Cyrus is one of the current jewels in the Disney crown. But she isn’t alone. Disney purchased ABC in 1995, but the network recently has acquired a taste for global warming coverage.
The network’s weatherman Sam Champion and reporter Bill Blakemore are two of the consistent voices for hyping the issue. A recent Business & Media Institute study of media climate coverage highlighted a particular low in the network’s reporting. The ugliest treatment of a climate skeptic during the study period came from ABC’s Bill Weir on Nov. 18, 2007, “Good Morning America.” He was interviewing Democratic state representative Jim Gooch from Kentucky.
http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=73452
The only way the U.S. energy problem can be solved is to remove the obstacles that caused it. The taxation, regulation, litigation and tax subsidies that government has placed on the back of the American energy industry must be repealed. Free men with private capital in a free market will then be able to build the energy industry we need. Similar action should be taken for our other industries.
As the cost of energy rises, as imported energy becomes a luxury, and as American prosperity falls, the American people are going to become very unhappy. Current fuel prices are only a taste of the inevitable privations that are coming.
There is only one, simple, central question in the energy debate: As their suffering increases, will the American people realize that their diminishing prosperity is the direct result of the taxation, regulation and litigation their government has created?
Will American voters throw out the politicians who are still creating more of this tyranny and replace them with representatives who will repeal the laws that are impoverishing them?
If they do, if they restore the fundamental human right of freedom to produce to the American people, the needed U.S. energy capacity can be built in record time – without the expenditure of a single dollar of tax money.
If, on the other hand, Americans are convinced by the demagoguery of self-interested politicians who urge them to hate industrial producers such as oil companies, use tax money for useless and wasteful schemes such as the ethanol debacle, and blame their troubles on essential free market institutions such as commodity markets –
If they allow continued oppressive regulation of energy producers, continued regulatory prevention of nuclear power plant construction and of oil and gas exploration and development –
If they allow the dead hand of government to continue to drive industry away from the United States –
Then the great experiment in human freedom begun in the United States more than two centuries ago is over.
As our human right to produce dies, killed by the dead hand of government tyranny, so will die the prosperity and remaining freedom of our country.
Winston Churchill said that Americans always do the right thing – after they have tried everything else first. In allowing our politicians to stifle American industry for more than 30 years with tyrannical taxation, regulation and litigation, we have completed the "everything else."
It is now time for us to do the right thing.
http://www.stillwater-newspress.com/local/local_story_239112827.html
Go slow on climate control
State group says economic costs will be too high
Jacob Longan - NewsPress
Americans For Prosperity is an organization that says it is non-partisan and non-political but admits to having a conservative message.
That message was on display Monday when the group held a forum called “Beating Climate Alarmism: Cost is the Key” at the Stillwater Community Center.
The group was represented by Stuart Jolly and Pam Pollard, the state director and associate state director.
Also speaking was U.S. Rep. Frank Lucas, a Republican who represents Oklahoma’s Third District.
The forum was about what AFP calls the “dangerous” Warner-Lieberman Climate Security Act. The Senate bill introduced by Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and John Warner, R-Va., is designed to reduce carbon emissions through a cap-and-trade system that would set a limit on the emissions of a company with businesses that are going to exceed their limit able to buy more credits on Wall Street.
Pollard said the point of the forum was to explain the issue in a way people could understand.
Her first complaint was with the name of the act.
“Anything that has to do with security we immediately think about national security, 9/11, oh my goodness, that’s something we have to do!” Pollard said. “I personally take offense to that and think they are trying to deceive the average voter who doesn’t have the ability — may not be connected into all the blogs, all the networks to get this information.”
Jolly called it a hidden tax as increased costs will be passed on to consumers.
The presentation showed estimates for how the law would affect Oklahoma by 2020 if it were passed. It estimated 21,000 job losses, disposable incomes dropping $2,625, energy prices rising 147 percent, etc.
“Climate hysteria is the biggest threat to freedom and prosperity in the United States right now,” Jolly said. “Legislators around the country are passing laws based on global warming and it is getting worse.”
He said he would not debate the science of global warming but added, “They are increasing taxes based on data that may not be true.”
Lucas took a similar position.
“The bottom line remains, before you embark on something as aggressive as cap and trade, you need to make sure the facts are accurate, you need to know the goals you intend to achieve actually will do something positive and then you’ve got to do one other little thing,” Lucas said. “You’ve got to make sure the whole world plays by the same rules. Right now, that’s not the case. That’s absolutely not the case.”
He added, “Pretend for a moment that the global warming advocates are completely right. Pretend for a moment that the concept of cap-and-trade is right. It should frighten you that the bureaucratic federal government would set down and allocate among the various industries, various sections of the country, who got to use energy and who did not and that the federal government would decide who would pay for the privilege of using more energy and how the money would be transferred between various parts of the country.”
Countryside near Dungog, NSW, Australia.
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