Agmates

Global Warming Alarmist Al Gore and IPCC Chairman Dr. Rajendra Pachauri maintain that anyone who doubts the Global Warming science probably still believes the earth is flat.

So I’ve decided to introduce the community to a few of these ‘flat Earthers’. The second in our ‘flat earthers’ series is Jon Jenkins adjunct professor of virology specialising in computer modelling at Bond University QLD Australia.

In an opinion piece in today’s Australian Newspaper Jenkins starts out:

THE warmaholics are fond of using the phrase “official records going back to 1850″, but the simple facts are that prior to the 1970s, surface-based temperatures from a few indiscriminate, mostly backyard locations in Europe and the US are fatally corrupted and not in any sense a real record.

They are then further doctored by a secret algorithm to account for heat-island effects. Reconstructions such as the infamously fraudulent “hockey stick” are similarly unreliable.

The only precise and reliable temperature recording started with satellite measurements in the 1970s. They show minuscule warming, all in the northern hemisphere, which not only stopped in 2000 but had completely reversed by 2008 (see graph).

Graph Source: The University of Alabama in Huntsville

So you think that is a strong start, but no, the good professor is just getting ‘warmed’ up. Next he looks at those scary rising sea level predictions. Here is what  leader of the Australian Greens Bob Brown was spruking back on the 3rd of October 2008.

“The alternative-waiting for a lead from the rest of the world-will sacrifice the Great Barrier Reef, Ningaloo Reef, Kakadu and the Australian Alps in the short term, and threatens a 10-metre rise in sea levels, obliterating the Sydney Opera House foyer, Melbourne’s Docklands, Hobart’s Salamanca Place and the current habitat of millions of Australians.”

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Jon Jenkins writes:

The warmaholics also contend that global mean temperature and sea level rises are at the upper range of the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change’s projections. Well, no, actually they are not.

Sea level rises since 1900 are of the order of 1-2mm a year, which is indistinguishable from tectonic movement, and the IPCC computer projections are simply completely wrong.

Its a great articles as Jenkins gets stuck in, but I’ll leave you with one more gem,

So that’s the real consensus: about 44 scientist mates who have vested interests in supporting IPCC computer modelling agreed that “we did it”, and this has become the “consensus of thousands of the world’s meteorologists”. Compared with 31,000 (including 341 meteorologists) in the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine petition, the IPCC’s 44 have no right to claim consensus at all.

So which group here is actually the ‘flat earthers’ Gore and Pachauri are pointing at? My mum taught me the if you look closely at people pointing fingers and accusing, there is always 3 fingers pointing back.

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One of the worlds leading Soil Carbon activists and NSW farmer Michael Kiely [pictured] is the  Convener of the Carbon Coalition & Carbon Farming . Today he writes to the Agmates community:

*****

We wish to thank you for the part you played in 2008 to make it the “(Unofficial) Year of Soil Carbon” in Australia.

Your actions – though you may have been unaware of it at the time – helped elevate the issue to the point of consideration. The Government has been forced to take a stand on soil carbon and the Opposition has pushed them into a corner to. Such fun!

The success we had made the year just gone a very happy one for all who understand the value of soil. Your actions gave us the will to persevere. And this is the Year to Persevere as Australia becomes the “Crucible” in which the fate of the issue could be decided for other nations as well, by precedent.

For 2009, to coincide with the run up to the IPCC’s Copenhagen meeting, we would like to be staging a global event in the form of a “Virtual Real Time Webcast Conference”. It could link 5 continents and continue for 24 hours, with all sessions being streamed continuously from the moment they are held – creating a range of blog and discussion groups interactions that could go on for months afterwards.

• Imagine the first nation to speak as the dawn crosses the International Dateline – Tuvalu. An island nation that is sinking beneath the Pacific. The world needs to know about the refugee calamity that could dwarf anything seen before. And conflict between peoples for resources is what leads to genocide. That’s the downside.
• Next comes New Zealand – a country ’saturated’ in soil carbon, according to the scientific establishment.
• Then on to Australia where a new term has been coined for our ancient, degraded soils: “buggered.” But carbon farmers are registering 1% to 2% increases in soil carbon in less than 12 months -it’s all in the biology, the conventional soil scientist’s blindspot.
• Next we have the lead country in this unique global gathering. China can turn on a sixpence, as they demonstrated with the Olympics, and we would have world-beating examples of tillage engineering and mulches, etc
• Then on to South America for a stunning array of world’s best practice tillage and especially Maria Cristina’s pastures that grow so much carbon.
• Next stop Columbus, Ohio….

And on to Copenhagen where China, India and the US jointly announce that they will join the global effort from the next period if they can count the vast amounts of soil carbon they can sequester – in other words they insist on “special case” treatment for soil carbon because of the unique role it can play in buying us time (by sequestering large tonnages over 20-30 years while the low emissions energy alternatives gain critical mass).

“You have got to have a vision,” said William Albrecht. “Unless you do, nature will never reveal herself.”

Cheers

Happy Old Year- Michael

END

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Dr. Martin Hertzberg, is a retired Navy meteorologist with a PhD in physical chemistry. In a letter to the USA Today he savages the Gore-IPCC theory that human activity is causing global warming.

“The overwhelming weight of scientific evidence shows that the Gore-IPCC theory that human activity is causing global warming is false….

The global warming alarmists don’t even bother with data! All they have are half-baked computer models that are totally out of touch with reality and have already been proven to be false….

From the El Nino year of 1998 until Jan., 2007, the average temperature of the earth’s atmosphere near its surface decreased some 0.25 C. From Jan., 2007 until the Spring of 2008, it dropped a whopping 0.75 C.”

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NewScientist freelance journalist Bijal Trivedi [pictured] reckons – ‘Kangaroo burgers could save the planet‘.

Bajil claims:

Worldwide, livestock burps are responsible for 18 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions – more than produced from all forms of transport combined.

As we have pointed out previously this figure of 18% is a complete fabrication conjured up by the IPCC Vegetarian chairman Rajendra Pachauri [pictured] .

The FAO report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, made public last year to world acclaim, states that livestock contributes 18 per cent of the global warming effect, even more than transport.

But buried in the report is the information that deforestation – mainly in the Amazonian rainforest – is included in that figure. Without it, livestock’s contribution falls to less than 12 per cent.

One of the report’s main authors, Pierre Gerber, a Food Agriculture Organization of the United Nations livestock policy officer, has been openly critical of IPCC Chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri and others, saying they had misused the information in the report.

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Bajil’s report goes on to say that two Australian Scientists can save the planet:

There is a simpler alternative. Two Australian biologists say there is a sure-fire way to reduce methane emissions without resorting to complex biotechnology… George Wilson and Melanie Edwards, based at Australian Wildlife Services in Canberra, have calculated that replacing a third of Australia’s sheep and cattle with kangaroos would slash cattle emissions and reduce the nation’s entire greenhouse gas output by 3 per cent.

“It’s not a completely wacky idea,” says Wilson

Why don’t we get rid of all farmers and eat stray dog and road kill. Thats idea’s nealy as ‘wacky’ as getting rid of 9 million cattle and 30 million sheep not to mention a third of all our farmers.

Australia’s Livestock emissions are guesstimated on the 18% lie. If so they are in fact a third less. This means using Wilson & Edwards calculations we could reduce our emissions by 2% and hence the worlds emissions by 0.026 percent.  All we’d have to do to achieve that is get rid of about $7 billion worth of livestock.

Now that’s more than wacky – its insane.

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Syd Walker writes:

Syd Walker

This is not an account of the latest, very contorted international negotiations over climate change. Nor is it about the Rudd Government’s rather dismal progress on climate change policy so far.  If it was, I’d have chosen a different title.

This short essay is a general response to ‘climate change critics’, also known as ‘climate change sceptics’ and ‘climate change deniers‘. For reasons I explain, I prefer to say ‘climate change gamblers’.

Sceptics may well regard me as biased, because I worked for several years as an environmental activist in the past. But these days I work for no interest group and speak for myself alone. I write this simply as one human being to others. I do invite comments and criticisms.

I began lobbying for action on greenhouse emissions about two decades ago. I remember a session with a senior politician in his Canberra office during the late 1980s.

His reply to my initial pitch was what seems to me the basic case of  ‘climate change scepticism’ to this day. It was an argument along these lines:

“there’s no SOLID evidence that human-induced global warming is really happening, so it’s unwise to take action that might have negative economic impacts”

My reply to him at the time was that he’d missed the point.

I tried to summarize what I meant:

1. We know there’s been a STRONG correlation in the geological past between CO2 levels and global temperatures.
2. We ARE increasing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere – and the level of other important greenhouse gases. These measurable and quite rapid changes are not in dispute.
3. Given (1) and (2), the rapid changes were are bringing about in our atmosphere’s composition clearly has the POTENTIAL to cause devastating global changes to our climate. Of course, we don’t know the future with certainty, but we CAN reasonably infer that increasing levels of greenhouse gases increases the RISK of devastating climate change. At the very minimum, there’s no evidence to the contrary.
4. We only have ONE habitable planet.
5. It’s highly risky to conduct a gigantic, uncontrolled experiment on the whole of humanity’s habitat.
6. Even if there are economic downsides to achieving atmospheric stability, they’re offset by potential economic gains; in any case, they’re trivial compared with the potential costs of rapid climate change.

Twenty years later, I see no reason to change any of these propositions.

Personally, I very much hope ‘climate change sceptics’ are right.

(more…)

Agmates believes in sensibly presenting differing opinions on the issues of the day. Then our members can make their own judgments.

Syd Walker [pictured] is a committed Environment and Social Justice advocate and just a bloody good bloke.

Syd is also the Editor of his own Blog Syd Walker and he had asked me if he could publish the environmentalist point of views for the Agamtes community to digest. Syd writes (this article is also published on Syd’s site today):

*****

As our mainstream politicians and major polluting industries are apt to remind us often, Australia is only a bit player when it comes to global greenhouse emissions. We contribute a relatively small proportion of the global total, overshadowed by the USA, Europe, China and other more populous regions of the planet.

On the other hand, Australia’s per capita CO2 emissions are among the highest in the world. Australia’s ‘historical responsibility’ for the increases of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere since industrialization began is also disproportionately high.

Climate Action Network Australia issued a Position Paper called Greenhouse Gas Emission Reduction for Australia in August 2008. It mounted a case for a 40% emissions reduction target for Australia by 2020.

Here’s the nub of CANA’s argument:

The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report concluded that, for 2° to 2.4°C warming scenarios, global emission reductions in the range of 50 percent to 85 percent by 2050 (compared to 2000 levels) are required (36).

To keep global warming well below 2°C, the global community must aim for the upper end of this range. This was confirmed more recently by Martin Parry, Co-Chair of the Working Group II of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, who also highlighted the need for global cuts of 80% by 2050 (37).

Within the global community, the wealthy and developed Annex I countries must respond to these scientific projections with ambitious emission reduction targets. Their combined efforts must result in collective emission reductions by at least the upper end of the 25 to 40% range by 2020, based on 1990 emission levels (38).

The current international climate negotiations are at a crucial stage, where governments must agree on a comprehensive deal that will prevent dangerous climate change. This agreement will be one of the most complicated ever agreed to at an international level.

Australia is in a strong position to play a positive role in influencing these negotiations that will include an agreement on the emission reduction targets.

If Australia is to demonstrate its leadership on climate change, it must set Australian targets that contribute to maintaining global warming as far below 2°C as possible. To achieve this, the Federal Government should adopt the following emission reduction targets, with the majority of emission reductions being delivered domestically:

• 2010 peak emissions, to decline thereafter
• 2020 at least 40 % emission reductions below 1990 levels
• 2050 at least 95 % emission reductions below 1990 levels

Note that even achieving these very ambitious targets, if the IPPC is correct, will still lead to a significant increase in global temperatures (around 2 degrees centigrade by 2050).

(more…)

People on mass across the world are starting to work out that despite the global media hype the sky is not falling.

PARIS – There is both growing public reluctance to make personal sacrifices and a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the major international efforts now underway to battle climate change, according to findings of a poll of 12,000 citizens in 11 countries, including Canada.

The 11 countries surveyed were Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Malaysia, Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States. There were 2,000 respondents surveyed in China, including 1,000 in Hong Kong.

Global warming alarmist will be terribly alarmed by the slump in public support.

Less than half of those surveyed, or 47 per cent, said they were prepared to make personal lifestyle changes to reduce carbon emissions, down from 58 per cent last year.

Only 37 per cent said they were willing to spend “extra time” on the effort, an eight-point drop.

And only one in five respondents – or 20 per cent – said they’d spend extra money to reduce climate change. That’s down from 28 per cent a year ago.

As the wild computer generated predictions of catastrophic climate change produced by the IPCC and global warming alarmists, Al Gore, James Hansen and Co fail to materialize, the general public is working out that there are many real issues that truly require solution.

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Meet the man behind the Labor Governments push to introduce mandatory Internet Filtering in Australia.

Clive Hamilton is the face of the ‘intellectual left’ in Australia and has been advocating since 2003 for a mandatory filtering (read censorship) of the internet.

Hamilton claims the moral high ground of protecting our children against po***ography, even though he knows that it will not work. An article written by Hamilton on the 19th of November on the issue is very revealing:

“The internet has spawned a community of devotees who operate in a cow-boy culture that thinks itself beyond the normal reach of social control, as if they inhabit an independent cyber-nation that applies it own laws in the form of voluntary protocols for those who choose to accept them.”

Note the term ’social control’. Even though the majority of Australians don’t realize it over the past 2 decades Clive Hamilton through his leftist intellectual think tanks The Australia Institute & The Climate Institute have had a not inconsequential impact on Australian society.

Hamilton and the intellectual left have focused on 2 modes of operation: ‘social engineering’ brought about by ’social control’.

Social Engineering:

Clive Hamilton through his left winged Think Tanks, The Australia Institute and The Climate Institute have spent an enormous amount of time developing ‘leftist social engineering’ manifestos.

As a left winged intellectual Hamilton and his think tanks have had (still do) unfettered and open access to ministers in State & Federal Labor governments to influence and indeed initiate policy decisions. That’s the purpose of the think tanks after all.

Social Control: (this is where the internet is a real thorn in Hamiltons side)

Before the widespread uptake of the internet in Australia, when those policies were released by the respective minister, the Australian Mainstream Media, particularly the ABC would turn to and quote Clive Hamilton as an independent commentator on the issue.

The Australian public was unaware that Hamilton in many cases was the back room left winged intellectual who had inspired the policy in the first place.

There are many examples of this, but there is none better than the current Labor policy of mandatory filtering the internet to rid it of ‘unwanted material’. To explain Hamilton’s role in the policy read Syd Walkers excellent article:

Clive Hamilton & I: Getting Personal about S*x, Lies, Hate & Censorship

The internet has empowered ordinary Australians to find their own information from 1,000’s of different sources inside and outside of Australia. For example, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s recent attempts to imply in the mainstream media that countries such as New Zealand, the UK, Scandinavia have mandatory internet filtering is debunked by a simple google search.

Australians no longer can be controlled by manipulation of a handful of Multi-National Media outlets. This really bothers Hamilton. He see’s that he is losing his ’social control’ which is essential to bring about ’social engineering’.

As further evidence of this another recent article by Hamilton on Crikey (sorry no link, subscribers only) railing against criticism of IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pauchauri and my comment is instructive.

14th November 2008

“In the days before independent online media like Agmates, Left winged academics like Hamilton were quoted virtually unchallenged by the mainstream media. He’s clearly upset that those times have changed.

“Duffy’s article recycled uncritically the latest piece of denialist clap-trap circulating on the internet and occasionally breaking in to the serious press.

Although the real scientists soon point out the error the clap-trap continues to circulate, confusing the public and giving the impression that scientists cannot makes up their minds.”

What’s the world coming to Clive? Oh for the good old days when only Clive’s side of the story made it into the ’serious press’.

We can’t tolerate independent media questioning the global warming hysteria can we Clive? We can’t allow proper debate of the issues can we Clive? Worst of all we can’t allow voices of dissent, can we Clive?

Clive has been the darling of the left winged mainstream media for many years with his anti-capitalism and anti-religious views.

END.

Make no bones about it – Clive Hamilton and Labors mandatory internet filtering is designed to win back ’social control’ from the internet. Everything else he has quoted as his reason for promoting the concept is a smoke screen.

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Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is convinced the science on man made global warming is settled. In fact he’s so convinced that the science of the IPCC and NASA’s James Hansen is correct that his number 1 political priority is the introduction of an Emissions Trading Scheme by mid 2010.

The latest science shows that the IPCC’s Climate Change Modelling is grossly overstated..

Climate change may not be as severe as predicted, suggests an international study that shows current modelling of carbon dioxide emissions from soils are overestimated by as much as 20%.

The view, reported in the latest Nature Geoscience journal, is based on a study of Australian soils that finds the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) released by Australian soils is much lower than previously believed.

The finding has major implications for climate change predictions as annual carbon emissions from soils are estimated to be more than all human-made CO2 emissions combined.

The incredibly ironic thing is that one of the reports Co_Authors Dr Evelyn Krull [pictured] , is a scientist at the Australian governments own CSIRO Land and Water. Dr Krull goes on to say:

For Australia, a proportion of 20% charcoal in soils would lead to a 135 teragram (135 billion kilograms) overestimation on a continental scale.

“On an annual basis, an inflated prediction from topsoils alone equates to … 84% of CO2 emissions associated with aviation for Australia using values obtained for 2006,” the paper says.

Surprise, Surprise the research has found that climate change modelling is grossly overstated.

…this means that current scenarios predicted by climate change modeling “are making it look worse than it actually would be”.

This highlights the need for a global initiative to analyse soils worldwide for charcoal content so that modeling can be more accurate, she says.

Beautiful – the climate models are overstated. All the while Rajendra Pachauri, James Hansen, Al Gore, Tim Flannery, Don Henry , Barry Brook & Clive Hamilton of the alarmist cause try to tell us Global Warming is happening faster than the models actually predicted.

The science on man made global warming is settled. Yes right.

Also published On Crikey’s Enviro Blog “Rooted”

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Chairman of the IPCC Rajenda Pachauri [pictured] avoids the inconvenient truth. Sydney Morning Herald journalist Michael Duffy points this out,

Last month I witnessed something shocking. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was giving a talk at the University of NSW. The talk was accompanied by a slide presentation, and the most important graph showed average global temperatures. For the past decade it represented temperatures climbing sharply.

As this was shown on the screen, Pachauri told his large audience: “We’re at a stage where warming is taking place at a much faster rate [than before]“.

Now, this is completely wrong. For most of the past seven years, those temperatures have actually been on a plateau. For the past year, there’s been a sharp cooling.

These are facts, not opinion: the major sources of these figures, such as the Hadley Centre in Britain, agree on what has happened, and you can check for yourself by going to their websites. Sure, interpretations of the significance of this halt in global warming vary greatly, but the facts are clear.

Here, have a look at the graph yourself. It clearly shows its getting hotter and quicker than anyone thought?

Just as well Pachauri is a world leading scientist. I mean if he were a used car salesman and pulled a stunt like that in a sales presentation, would you buy from him?

So it’s disturbing that Rajendra Pachauri’s presentation was so erroneous, and would have misled everyone in the audience unaware of the real situation. This was particularly so because he was giving the talk on the occasion of receiving an honorary science degree from the university.

Remember, this is the Chairman of the IPCC and this is the science that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is relying on as the reason why Australia must embrace an emissions trading scheme to stop global warming?

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