Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 11/28/2008 11:07:07 AM PST by Bob Eimiller
Miranda Devine
November 27, 2008
As the Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, an economist, anti-totalitarian and climate change sceptic, prepares to take up the rotating presidency of the European Union next year, climate alarmists are doing their best to traduce him.
The New York Times opened a profile of Klaus, 67, this week with a quote from a 1980s communist secret agent's report, claiming he behaves like a "rejected genius", and asserts there is "palpable fear" he will "embarrass" the EU.
But the real fear driving climate alarmists wild is that a more rational approach to the fundamentalist religion of global warming may be in the ascendancy - whether in the parliamentary offices of the world's largest trading bloc or in the living rooms of Blacktown.
As the global financial crisis takes hold, perhaps people are starting to wonder whether the so-called precautionary principle, which would have us accept enormous new taxes in the guise of an emissions trading scheme and curtail economic growth, is justified, based on what we actually know about climate.
One of Australia's leading enviro-sceptics, the geologist and University of Adelaide professor Ian Plimer, 62, says he has noticed audiences becoming more receptive to his message that climate change has always occurred and there is nothing we can do to stop it.
In a speech at the American Club in Sydney on Monday night for Quadrant magazine, titled Human-Induced Climate Change - A Lot Of Hot Air, Plimer debunked climate-change myths.
"Climates always change," he said. Our climate has changed in cycles over millions of years, as the orbit of the planet wobbles and our distance from the sun changes, for instance, or as the sun itself produces variable amounts of radiation. "All of this affects climate. It is impossible to stop climate change. Climates have always changed and they always will."
His two-hour presentation included more than 50 charts and graphs, as well as almost 40 pages of references. It is the basis of his new book, Heaven And Earth: The Missing Science Of Global Warming, to be published early next year.
Plimer said one of the charts, which plots atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature over 500 million years, with seemingly little correlation, demonstrates one of the "lessons from history" to which geologists are privy: "There is no relationship between CO2 and temperature."
Another slide charts the alternating periods of cooling and warming on Earth, with the Pleistocene Ice Age starting 110,000 years ago and giving way, 14,700 years ago, to the Bolling warm period for 800 years. This in turn gave way to the Older Dryas cooling for 300 years, then the Allerod warming for 700 years, and so on, until the cooling of the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850. Since 1850, we have lived through the "Modern Warming", one of the most stable climate periods in history.
Plimer said some astronomers predict we are headed for a new cooling period.
Plimer said there is a division between those scientists who sit in front of super computers and push piles of data into the mathematical models that drive the theory of climate change, and those who take measurements in the field.
We are not sceptical enough about the data. For instance, Plimer cited differences between results from temperature measuring stations in urban and rural areas. Those in urbanised Chicago, Berkeley, New York, and so on, show temperature rises over the past 150 years, whereas those in the rural US, in Houlton, Albany and Harrisburg (though not Death Valley, California) show equally consistent cooling. "What we're measuring is urbanisation," Plimer said.
To understand the chaotic nature of climate change, we need to consider all the inputs - cosmic radiation, sun, clouds and so on, he said.
There was much more but essentially Plimer's message is that the idea humans cause climate change has become a fundamentalist religion which is corrupting science. It is embedded with a fear of nature and embraced principally by city people who have lost touch with nature.
He likens the debate to the famous 1990s battle he had in the Federal Court, where he accused an elder of The Hills Bible Church in Baulkham Hills of breaching Australia's Trade Practices Act by claiming to have found scientific evidence of Noah's Ark in Turkey.
Plimer says creationists and climate alarmists are quite similar in that "we're dealing with dogma and people who, when challenged, become quite vicious and irrational".
Human-caused climate change is being "promoted with religious zeal … there are fundamentalist organisations which will do anything to silence critics. They have their holy books, their prophet [is] Al Gore. And they are promoting a story which is frightening us witless [using] guilt [and urging] penance."
It is difficult for non-scientists to engage in the debate over what causes climate change and whether or not it can be stopped by new taxes and slower growth, because dissenting voices are shouted down by true believers in the scientific community who claim they alone have the authority to speak.
Quadrant is under fire for publishing articles by sceptics but, as its editor, Keith Windschuttle, said on Monday night, "People who are really confident [of their facts] relish debate."
In any case, ordinary people already have suspicions. The zealotry and one-sidedness of the debate alarmed an 81-year-old Seven Hills pensioner, Denys Clarke, so much that last month, at his own expense, he hired the ballroom at the Blacktown Workers Club for two public forums, titled The Truth About Climate Change. He invited a climate sceptic, the James Cook University professor Bob Carter, a geologist, to speak. More than 300 people attended, some from as far away as Nowra.
Carter, like Plimer and Klaus, has come in for his fair share of vilification. But as Clarke proves, you can't stop people thinking. Yet.
Amusing to listen to college kids explain how we can terraform Mars. We haven’t yet terraformed earth or anything else.
Are we FINALLY seeing some sanity injected into the climate change fiasco?
Amusing to listen to college kids explain how we can terraform Mars. We haven’t yet terraformed earth or anything else.Well, we will certainly be able to SOMEDAY terraform Mars, and when we do we will rely heavily on technologies we develop here on earth to monitor, augment and control any climate change on earth, whether that climate change is caused by our own activity (highly unlikely), caused by natural catastrophe (also unlikely but less so), or the result of natural cycles (highly likely).
We haven’t had to terraform Earth, because it already has a breathable, sustainable atmosphere for us to live in comfortably. We would have to terraform Mars because as it is currently, humans cannot breathe on the surface because it’s not an atmosphere for us to breathe in.
That’s exactly what global warming is: a religion.
Ditto!
A mass movement of ‘True Believers’.
Dangerous to say the least!
Living on Mars will be restricted to living in little metal cans if we get that far.
|
Until we terraform it. ;)
I thought CO2 and Temp were correlated. And CO2 infact lagged Temp. The exact opposite of Al Gore's supposed correlation which had Temp lagging CO2.
It is hard to see how the net emissivity and absorptivity of the atmosphere could change significantly as a result of minute variations in what are nearly trace constituents such as CO2, though it can be modified from time to time by presence of volcanic ash after a major eruption. The heat generation by the radioactive decay inside the Earth is declining at a very tiny rate but constant for all practical purposes on the scale of thousands of years. Solar energy input thus must be the dominant variable, and we know from satellite measurements that it does indeed vary quite a bit. And what are we going to do about that?
Why is this so difficult to understand for many so-called scientists?
Why? Because politics trumps rationality!!
“Plimer says creationists and climate alarmists are quite similar in that “we’re dealing with dogma and people who, when challenged, become quite vicious and irrational”.”
Interesting article.
But I’ve always witnessed the “vicious irrationalism” the author speaks of on the part of those who dogmatically insist that “random mutation” and “natural selection” are fully adequate explanations for the appearance of life and the emergence of different species. This, often without evidence to support their invented scenarios, and just as often ignoring evidence to the contrary.
Just as the mere pointing out of the violence in Islam can earn one the epithet of “racist!” or “hatemonger!” by those who wish to appease, so the mere pointing out of the inadequacies of Darwinism by non-Darwinists (including creationists, though not limited to them) can earn them the epithet of “vicious!” “irrational!” “dogmatic!” by those wishing to obscure.
Living on Mars will be restricted to living in little metal cans if we get that far.In the year 2525? (Just to pick a number at random. I don't think it will take anywhere near that long but just to pick a number that's so far out there that it's inconceivable that Mars won't be fully terraformed by that time.)
And just to give you some perspective on the year 2525, my random pick, a year that seems so far away that it's inconceivable to imagine or make predictions about, it's as far on the forward side of 2008 as 1492 is on the back side. And 1492, thought of in the right way, isn't that long ago, is it?
2525 will be on us before we know it and I'll tell you this, RightWhale, long before that year arrives Mars will be as liveable as Anaheim. Maybe better.
Probably not. We will spend all our money terraforming Terra, and will make not the slightest difference.
Well, since obviously neither of us will live to see the day (I bet it will happen sometime in the 22nd century), all we can do is agree to disagree. I wonder if this thread will still be around to vindicate me...
You don't get grants for research unless GW is in the title of the proposal.
You can't sell carbon offsets if CO2 has a very small net effect.
Now, that wasn't so hard, was it?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.