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Cooler heads prevail against climate panic
Boston Globe ^ | June 1, 2011 | Jeff Jacoby

Posted on 05/31/2011 11:25:13 PM PDT by neverdem

THE MAY 21 apocalypse foretold by the fundamentalist minister Harold Camping never materialized, but end-of-the-world doomsaying goes on as usual among the global warmists.

Tweet ShareThis “Worst ever carbon emissions leave climate on the brink,’’ a story in The Guardian was breathlessly headlined over the weekend. It reported — hyperventilated might be a better verb — that greenhouse gas...

--snip--

Take the recent increase in global CO2 emissions. Is the Guardian’s panicked anxiety — “Climate on the brink’’ — really a sensible response? Writing in the journal First Things, the distinguished Princeton physicist William Happer makes a compelling case that rising carbon-dioxide levels are neither unprecedented nor anything to fear.

“Carbon is the stuff of life,’’ he points out. “Our bodies are made of carbon.’’ Yes, atmospheric CO2 is higher today than it was before the industrial age — 390 parts per million now vs. 270 ppm then — but there was a time when “CO2 levels were several thousand ppm, much higher than now. And life flourished abundantly.’’ Indeed, greenhouse operators artificially boost CO2 concentrations in order to grow better flowers and fruit.

So why recoil from the modest increase in carbon emissions caused by fossil-fuel use? Because more CO2 means more climate change? Happer shoots down that idea. The earth’s climate is always changing, sometimes dramatically. During the medieval warming of a thousand years ago, temperatures were much higher than they are now; during the Little Ice Age six centuries later they were much lower. “Yet there is no evidence for significant increase of CO2 in the medieval warm period, nor for a significant decrease at the time of the subsequent little ice age.’’

Newsweek’s “stable climate of the last 12,000 years’’ is a myth. So is the notion that higher carbon emissions are a prescription for disaster...

(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Editorial; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: agw; globalwarming; jacoby

1 posted on 05/31/2011 11:25:16 PM PDT by neverdem
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To: neverdem
“Climate on the brink’’
What a bunch of drama queens!
2 posted on 05/31/2011 11:51:18 PM PDT by Impala64ssa
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To: neverdem

So true. Every time some loser lefty on any website mocks Christians over Camping, I simply remind them of their own “religious” zealots.


3 posted on 05/31/2011 11:52:17 PM PDT by Amberdawn
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To: neverdem
Newsweek’s “stable climate of the last 12,000 years’’ is a myth.

How ironic! Newsweek is a myth too!

4 posted on 06/01/2011 12:11:43 AM PDT by VeniVidiVici (Socialism works great until capitalism starts to falter)
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To: neverdem

I actually saw what I assume was a variant of the original “hockey stick” graph last night on NatGeo HD (pretty pictures, awful science). They were doing “Extreme Ice”, showing “researchers” on the Greenland ice sheet mapping some glacier which has allegedly sped up significantly just in the last 10 years. The graph purported to show CO2 concentration over the last 400,000 years, along with temp. There were 4 peaks, the last at 125,000 years ago, and then the most recent “peak” (now) was shown as being twice as high as the other 3. Temp was also shown as lagging behind CO2. They also interviewed a bunch of longhairs posing as scientists, including one from Penn State (first thing through my mind: they couldn’t get Michael Mann?) fretting about how the apparent collapse of these ice sheets was going to displace millions due to the 1+ meter sea level increase. They dragged out the whole “if the Antarctic and Greenland sheets melted completely the sea would go up 60 meters” chestnut, too. The capper was that a lot of the “interviews” were with NatGeo photographers, not actual scientists, the last being some loon who tethered himself to a rock and was photographing chunks of icebergs in the surfline on Iceland’s south coast. He talked about looking at these eroding chunks of ice, and seeing “extinction” (this was the last line in the program, the thing they wanted to leave the audience with).

Talk about drama.


5 posted on 06/01/2011 12:44:21 AM PDT by Little Pig (Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici.)
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To: neverdem

Somebody was listening to Rush yesterday. The Globe editors will never know.


6 posted on 06/01/2011 12:57:28 AM PDT by UnbelievingScumOnTheOtherSide (REPEAL WASHINGTON! -- Islam Delenda Est! -- I Want Constantinople Back. -- Rumble thee forth.)
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To: Little Pig
some loon who tethered himself to a rock and was photographing chunks of icebergs in the surfline on Iceland’s south coast. He talked about looking at these eroding chunks of ice, and seeing “extinction”

I think I could make a living selling ice cubes on the street as being among the 'last relics' of the Earth's last 'living glacier'.
Would I be going too far if I called them 'holy relics'?

"Thank you for your love donation, and may Gaia smile upon you."

7 posted on 06/01/2011 1:13:57 AM PDT by ARepublicanForAllReasons (Borders, laws and language are what define us (USA) as a country. Let's guard them well.)
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To: neverdem

So who is it that is “panicking?” Some people are waving their arms and yelling but they are pushing ideology. They are not panicking. Some people are worried that it all might be true but don’t see the ocean rising in their yards so are not panicking. Some people understand that it is a Communist drive for universal control and are actively fighting it, trying to profit from it, or are just resigned to the thought that their children will live or be killed in a green Communist Utopia. But there does not seem to be any panic outside of the fabrication shops in the media.


8 posted on 06/01/2011 4:04:28 AM PDT by arthurus (Read Hazlitt's "Economics In One Lesson.")
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To: Little Pig

When the weight of the icecap increases due to accretion the glaciers do indeed move faster because the new ice is pushing them outward. When they push into the ocean they calve i.e. pieces, sometimes very large pieces, break off. The more ice is that is piling up in the interior the more is pushing into the ocean and the larger the chunks and the more often they are breaking off.


9 posted on 06/01/2011 4:10:35 AM PDT by arthurus (Read Hazlitt's "Economics In One Lesson.")
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To: arthurus

I know. The show was claiming that Greenland was losing more ice than it gained every year, and the accelerated glaciers were due to increased meltwater that accumulated under them and served as a sort of lubricant allowing the glaciers to “slide” faster (which would be true, though whether it’s actually happening in Greenland is debatable).


10 posted on 06/01/2011 4:29:21 AM PDT by Little Pig (Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici.)
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To: neverdem
Newsweek’s “stable climate of the last 12,000 years’’ is a myth.
Hide The Decline!
11 posted on 06/01/2011 5:09:30 AM PDT by Peet (Leftists think personal liberty is so important it must be carefully rationed.)
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To: neverdem
The author cited in this article: William Hopper, has a very long, but very good essay on the subject. Better to read it in it's entirety. The Truth About Greenhouse Gases
12 posted on 06/01/2011 5:10:20 AM PDT by AFreeBird
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To: AFreeBird

Excuse me. William Happer, not Hopper.


13 posted on 06/01/2011 5:11:29 AM PDT by AFreeBird
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To: neverdem; DollyCali; markomalley; Bockscar; Thunder90; Dr. Bogus Pachysandra; Normandy; ...
 


Beam me to Planet Gore !

14 posted on 06/01/2011 5:23:21 AM PDT by steelyourfaith (If it's "green" ... it's crap !!!)
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To: Little Pig

I predict that in 2091 the exspurts will be predicting that we will run out of coal and oil in a few years, and ‘’reporters’’ will still be licking Clinton’s axx,,,just to stay in the groove.


15 posted on 06/01/2011 5:42:54 AM PDT by Waco (Nominate Palin or forget 2012 you lost)
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To: neverdem

All the alarmists have to do is mask the current cooling trend with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of biased government studies and propaganda from their friends in the media for another 20 years or so... at that time there is fairly good statistical chance that another cyclic warming trend will begin again.

They do have a few loose ends to cover up like the fact that sea levels have been dropping uncharacterisically since approximately 2008. Since sea water loses volume when temperatures decline this may be a proxy for global sea temperature. The oceans hold vastly more heat than the atmosphere and are a much better indicator as to whether the earth is actually warming or cooling. The Argo Bouy Array innitially confirmed this cooling trend, but miraculously this government funded study began cherry picking the data released to once again “hide the decline”.

With record cold data climate currently being recorded all over the world; I think the alarmists are going to have a big challenge ahead of them.

This however is a fight on two fronts for the Alarmists and the bigger threat for them at this time is actually the perfection of fracking for the retrievel of natural gas and crude oil reserves, not to mention the promising new technologies being perfected for recovering natural gas from Methane Hydrates from the Sea Floors. Suddenly the world finds itself with several times the energy reserves previously assumed.

Global Warming Alarmism never really had much to do with the climate. It was really about controlling and taxing the worlds energy resources and redistributing the wealth. Now with new energy resources threatening to come online just as it looked like real shortages were looming... the entire plan is threatened. Look for massive amounts of propaganda to attack fracking and recovering natural gas from methane hydrates. They knew that the climate was cyclic, but I don’t think they counted on vast new energy reserves beign discovered. It’s a disaster.


16 posted on 06/01/2011 1:13:33 PM PDT by fireman15 (Check your facts before making ignorant statements.)
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To: fireman15
This however is a fight on two fronts for the Alarmists and the bigger threat for them at this time is actually the perfection of fracking for the retrievel of natural gas and crude oil reserves...

Luckily, there may be a technical fix that addresses these water worries and does an end run around drilling opponents: gas-fracking. Developed by GasFrac Energy Services in Alberta, Canada, gas-fracking uses liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), which consists mostly of propane, instead of water to crack open shale formations to release oil and natural gas.

17 posted on 06/01/2011 5:57:54 PM PDT by neverdem (Xin loi minh oi)
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