It’s been long argued that environmentalism, and especially climate alarmism, is based more on faith that facts. According to the Greens, Man is a destroyer by nature, and his actions should be strictly controlled. It is often said that the Earth would in fact benefit if mankind was eradicated once and for all. On our quest to transform the nature so that it best suits our dirty needs, we pervert and pollute what’s pure and innocent.

Jonah Goldberg has written an interesting article about the difference between environmentalism and conservationism.

At its core, environmentalism is a kind of nature worship. It’s a holistic ideology, shot through with religious sentiment. (…) Environmentalism’s most renewable resources are fear, guilt and moral bullying. Its worldview casts man as a sinful creature who, through the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, abandoned our Edenic past.

Read the entire article on Townhall.com.

The US has Al Gore. UK has James Lovelock. And Australia has Tim Flannery, the author of “The Weather Makers”. Tim Flannery, an expert on global warming, has now revised updated his climate forecast for the world, and it’s much worse than he thought just three years ago.

According to Professor Flannery, climate change is happening so quickly that mankind might need to pump sulphur into the atmosphere to survive. The gas sulphur could be inserted into the earth’s stratosphere to keep out the sun’s rays and slow global warming, a process called global dimming.

“It would change the colour of the sky,” Professor Flannery says in Melbourne’s The Age. “It’s the last resort that we have, it’s the last barrier to a climate collapse.”

Regardless of what happens to future emissions, there is already far too much greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Simply cutting emissions is not enough. Mankind now had to take greenhouse gases out of the air. “The current burden of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is in fact more than sufficient to cause catastrophic climate change,” Professor Flannery says.

Appropriately enough, next to the article in The Age is a Google ad linking to a free book on prophecy from www.the-end.com. The title is “2008 - God’s Final Witness”. I couldn’t possibly imagine a better product placement.

CNN reports that The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is installing a new IBM supercomputer in order to accelerate research into climate change. The supercomputer, known as a Power 575 Hydro-Cluster, is the first in a highly energy-efficient class of machines to be shipped anywhere in the world, with a peak speed of more than 76 teraflops. Does that mean you can call it a “huge flop”?

Read this interesting opinion article by Patrick Michaels in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Why is the news on global warming always bad? Perhaps because there’s little incentive to look at things the other way. If you do, you’re liable to be pilloried by your colleagues. If global warming isn’t such a threat, who needs all that funding? Who needs the army of policy wonks crawling around the world with bold plans to stop climate change?

Thanks to one of the readers on my Swedish blog, I found this interesting paper by Gerhard Gerlich och Ralf D. Tscheuschner:

“Falsification of the atmospheric CO2 greenhouse effects within the frame of physics”

Download the entire text document here - arXiv:0707.1161v3

Abstract:

The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier 1824, Tyndall 1861, and Arrhenius 1896, and which is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism, in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist. Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation. In this paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles are clarified. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 degrees Celsius is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.

source: The Korea Times

Homo sapiens. A fly’s faeces in the vast of the universe? Or a major player - powerful enough to smash and trash the planet we live on? Do we underestimate our influence? Or do we think too highly of ourselves?

In the current climate debate humans are often portrayed as greedy villains who proliferate, exploit and devastate. In order to save the Earth and thereby ourselves from destruction we must turn away from the sin of burning fossil fuels and adopt an environmentally sustainable lifestyle. The latter is defined as anything from refraining from flying to embracing the humble ways of the Amish. Is it fair?

Six and a half billion human beings are accused of jointly polluting the atmosphere to a catastrophic extent. Slowly but surely, we will boil ourselves, melt the ice caps, exterminate all species and put an end to all life on Earth. Are we really that powerful? Or are we just a bunch of megalomaniacs?

When our grandparents were in school it was thought that the universe was very small, perhaps only 5,000 light years across. 500 years ago it was thought that space was only a little bit bigger than the Earth. In modern times, with the power of technology, we are finally starting to grasp the immense size of the universe, and it is much bigger than anyone could have ever imagined. What do we know about all the forces that rule the universe? What do we know about all the mechanisms ruling the climatic system?

The Earth is around 4.5 billion years old and there have been at least four major ice ages in its past. It has withstood asteroids, reverses in polarity and many other truly catastrophic events. The modern form of Homo sapiens first appeared about 100,000 years ago and the Industrial Revolution started in England around 1733 with the first cotton mill. Supporters of AGW claim that in just about 300 years man has managed to strike a deathblow to the Earth’s fragile climate. Reversing the course of things will require total abstinence from fossil fuels.

I don’t have all the facts. Neither do I have all the answers. However, I dare to believe that blaming man for altering the climate and destroying the planet is giving ourselves way too much credit.

I got this wonderful link from a “brother-in-arms”. Enjoy!

New Zealand-based Scoop published today a column by Bill Berkowitz. It is another good report from the recent climate change conference in New York.

Bill Berkowitz also mentions a recent BMI report called “Global Warming Censored: Networks Stifle Debate, Rely on Politicians, Rock Stars and Men-on-the-Street for Science,” written by Dan Gainor, vice president of BMI and Julia A. Seymour. This report is an analysis of 205 network news stories about “global warming” or “climate change” published between July 1, 2007, and Dec. 31, 2007. The authors found that “a meager 20 percent of stories even mentioned there were any alternative opinions to the so-called ‘consensus’ on the issue.”

Here’s a link to the full report.

Bob Spicer et al, from Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, who has examined fern leaves from Central Siberia, says that this today rather unfriendly place 65 million years ago was a lot like modern-day Florida, with lush ferns and lots of rain.

Climate models for the same area had indicated temperatures around zero degrees Celsius (32° F). But Bob Spencer and his colleagues doubt model temperatures match reality. In the age of dinos the world was so different that the models we use for today’s atmosphere cannot mimic it. Go figure. Who said computer models are more reliable than observations?

Read the whole story in New Scientist. Or ask a dinosaur.