Global warming?

[TheMercenary]

Imagine that...

India will not sign binding emission cuts-minister

and neither should we...

http://www.reuters.com/article/hotSt...00309720091203

[Undertoad]

India would however accept international verification of reductions if supported by financing and technology transfers.

Everybody's hand is out. Here's China's:

China has been the chief beneficiary of the U.N.’s Clean Development Mechanism, or CDM, which under the Kyoto Protocol set up a system of credits which can be sold and traded, and which are used by companies to offset their own emissions. Some 60% of all globally traded carbon credits originate from China projects.

China’s climate-change regulators have approved 2,232 CDM projects this year through October – but only 663 of those, or just under 30%, have received final approval by the U.N. to issue credits.

The basic idea is that companies in rich countries, to reach their own greenhouse gas quotas back home, pay for carbon abatement projects that wouldn’t have gotten built otherwise in poor countries.

We clean them there so we don't have to clean us here? How about we just clean us here, cut out the middle man.

After all, the US will be blamed unless we both pay to clean them AND clean us:

"What the world is waiting for now is exactly what will be the American commitments to reduce their emissions," Hedegaard said and added the world also wanted to know "what kind of financial contributions would come from the American side."

"There, President Obama could be very helpful if he has something in his pocket ... when he comes to Copenhagen. I think it would be very useful."

And it's not just poor countries with their hand out, here are the Saudis:

As the world's leading oil producer, Saudi Arabia has previously fought attempts to agree curbs on emissions, and has also argued that it should receive financial compensation for "lost" revenue, given that constraints on emissions might restrict oil sales.

The entire thing is now a shameless shakedown. Speaking as an unemployed American, my opening bid is we will clean us up, and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves raw.

[classicman]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Speaking as an unemployed American, my opening bid is we will clean us up, and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves raw.

Fixed that for ya - and I agree!
Its like we are the world friggin bank with the resources to fix everything for everyone. Uh - HELLO!!!! We are having issues here too folks.

[TheMercenary]

Where are all the defenders of China and India now? Poor beat up little developing countries.

[classicman]

I wasn't sure where to put this, but since we had talked about this earlier in this thread ...
Drywall investigation expands into US products

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) -- A federal probe of tainted Chinese drywall has broadened because a small number of homeowners are reporting that American-made drywall is causing some of the same problems: a sickening, sulfurous stench and corroded pipes and wiring.

"We are not limited in the scope of our investigation to just Chinese drywall," said Scott Wolfson, spokesman for the Consumer Products Safety Commission, which is conducting the largest investigation in its history after thousands of homeowners complained and filed lawsuits.

The vast majority of complaints still center on China-made gypsum board imported during the recent U.S. housing boom, when domestic building materials were in short supply. And the commission's investigation is focused mainly on the imported drywall, Wolfson said.

But sporadic reports are surfacing from owners of homes built with American drywall, and the symptoms they report are similar to those reported with the Chinese drywall: a rotten-egg odor that makes occupants sick, corrosion of copper pipes, and ruined TVs and air conditioners.

"We've got a huge problem here, and we just need help," said George Brincku, 48, who bought his southwest Florida house in 2004 and almost immediately began noticing the odd smell, the corrosion of wires and headaches.

When he saw reports about Chinese drywall, he assumed that was the problem with his house - until he called the contractor who installed it.

"I have all 100 percent American-made drywall," Brincku said.

He sent samples to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which found that the wallboard from Brincku's home contained 50 percent gypsum and 50 percent cellulose, an organic compound. Drywall should contain mostly gypsum.

Researchers do not know for certain what causes the chemical reactions, but an MIT scientist said the mixture of gypsum and cellulose in Brincku's wallboard, combined with the humid atmosphere in Florida, was releasing sulfurous gases, causing corrosion of copper, brass and silver.

"The only solution is removal of the drywall," Thomas Eagar, an MIT professor of materials engineering, wrote in his report. He did not return a call from The Associated Press.

Most of the drywall in Brincku's home was made by Charlotte, N.C.-based National Gypsum, which said its own testing found the material from the house contained just 4 percent cellulose.

Link

Rather informative article. I'm sure we'll hear more about this in the future.

[TheMercenary]

Come on you guys who are all defenders of the suppression of the US economy at the expense of the poor pitiful struggling economies of China and India......

I know, we just need more layoffs or more pass through on taxes to the big companies to make you all happy.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Old link gone dead. Here's a new one.

Climate Change and the Death of Science

[TheMercenary]

Ha!

Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/cop...ar-wedges.html

But this crowd gathering here is far worse than just a bunch of hand-wringing Hamlets dithering in Denmark.

Some 40,000 tons of carbon will be spewed getting this crowd together and keeping them in comfort.

That is the daily amount of carbon dioxide produced by 30 of the world's smaller countries, according to UN statistics.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/interna...yvy19b0ZTHaGwO

[classicman]

lol - bet that won't be part of their discussions.

[TheMercenary]

Wonder if Al Gore is flying in on his private jet..

[piercehawkeye45]

Article responding to the recent climate change events

Here is how the story now known as ClimateGate broke: On Nov. 17, an unknown person somehow gained access to a huge cache of emails and data files from the University of East Anglia's climate research unit (CRU) and put them on the Internet. The hacker posted links to the data on prominent climate-skeptic blogs, just weeks before the Dec. 7 start of the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen. Then, the documents were distributed with the ominous preface: "We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents."

The approximately 1,000 emails and 3,000 documents purportedly showed that an elite cabal of climatologists had massaged decades of data to fool the world into believing in the myth of anthropogenic climate change. (The perpetrators offered no explanation why the scientists might want to do this. My best guess: All climatologists secretly despise GDP growth.) The scientists had apparently altered the world's biggest record of global surface temperature readings, trashed discordant evidence, and publicly humiliated climatologists who reached differing conclusions.

Climate blogs went wild. The British press soon glommed onto the story with characteristic maniacal glee. One typical post by James Delingpole in the Daily Telegraph, for instance, read: "If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth ... has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed."

Within a day, the story caught on across the Atlantic -- particularly in the right-wing press. Blogger Matt Drudge banged the drum with headlines declaring a "climate cult." Glenn Beck and other Fox News anchors devoted hours to the story. And on Thursday, two members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (one the head of right-wing outfit Pajamas Media, which sent Joe the Plumber to cover the Middle East peace process) demanded that Al Gore -- whose Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth featured the work of some of the climatologists embroiled in the scandal -- give his award back.

The truth, climate scientists insist, is that the data does nothing to disprove the overwhelming evidence that global warming exists and is caused by humans -- evidenced in multiple data pools and corroborated by thousands of studies. Spencer Weart, a physicist who specializes in the atmosphere and wrote The Discovery of Global Warming, explains, citing glacier and polar cap readings: "Even if you threw out every study from every scientist at East Anglia, it wouldn't change anything. There's 15 different ways to prove without doubt that the world has gotten very warm."

Michael MacCracken, climate-change scientist and former director of the Office of the U.S. Global Change Research Program and now at the Climate Institute in Washington D.C., told Foreign Policy, simply, "I don't think there is any doubt." Yesterday, Climate, among the most respected journals in the field, concurred: "Nothing in the emails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real -- or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the emails."

Still, the CRU emails revealed some entirely unprofessional and possibly illegal behavior, including on the part of the CRU's director, Phil Jones, who has been one of the world's most influential climatologists. The East Anglia scientist asked some staff members to delete emails, which they apparently did; now there is no way to know what data or analysis they contained. He seems to have attempted to keep certain contradictory papers out of a forthcoming report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (They made it in.) And the emails raise questions about the integrity of the world's largest dataset of historical temperature numbers.

The leaking of the ClimateGate cache does mean the scientific community has some questions to answer. But its media footprint has been far greater than the evidence called for -- and that has unfortunate consequences. The scandal has cast a wide spectrum of doubt on climate scientists in general, even those far removed from any accusation of wrongdoing. And it has revealed the extent to which many climate scientists already feel they are forever playing defense.

Many of the climate researchers I contacted for this story seemed so wearied by the whole thing they could barely summon the energy to explain or comment on the incident. For, more than anything, the emails evince Jones and others scientists' almost desperate desire to keep the wagons circled -- not because the science is shaky, but because they feel the field is under siege. Indeed, in the past 20 or 30 years, climate change has become not just a scientific interest, but a lightening-rod political issue.

In 1988, NASA scientist Jim Hansen published one of the first major papers modeling how hot the Earth might get, testifying on Capitol Hill and stirring debate in labs and lecture halls. By 1995, a group of scientists had started vocally dissenting from the emerging consensus on its anthropogenic causes, signing the Leipzig Declaration, which stated: "There does not exist today a general scientific consensus about the importance of greenhouse warming from rising levels of carbon dioxide. On the contrary, most scientists now accept the fact that actual observations from earth satellites show no climate warming whatsoever." (The latter point has since been proven false.) The declaration, down to its pompous name, was meant to be a political statement -- and it helped turn lab-bound climate scientists into political actors on a global stage.

Later that year, the debate turned nasty when the physicist Frederick Seitz took to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to accuse other climate researchers of colluding to bolster the case for anthropogenic global warming in IPCC reports. "In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society," he wrote, damningly, "I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report."

"Then, it was like the siege," says Weart, with "the scientific community rising up against him." Other scientists discredited Seitz by revealing he was on the payroll of tobacco companies while arguing against the carcinogenic effects of second-hand smoke. The dialogue never got any nicer. "In the early emails" -- from the early 1990s -- "I saw rather little political response," Weart says. "[The CRU scientists] were mostly busy criticizing each other. Then as you go forward, you find this increasing frustration and increasing anger as you get towards the present."

And, particularly within the past 10 years, climatologists have faced increasing harassment: constant haranguing emails and hate mail; picketing at conventions; skeptical and inquisitive calls from Capitol Hill and think tanks and blogs; repeated Freedom of Information Act requests for datasets; even death threats. In turn, "scandals" accusing various scientists of falsifying data or colluding for political reasons have ever since arisen at critical decision-making moments, such as during governmental debates on policies like cap-and-trade.

The same thing is happening now, MacCracken says, "because we're getting close to actually doing something significant. And there's a lot of people who seem somehow resistant to change. So if you don't like the message then you go after the messenger. This has been going on for quite some time."

The troubling takeaway is not about the nature of climate change, the science, or the treaties, or even the scandal. It's about the white-hot political pressure bearing down upon this small community of scientific specialists. It seems probable that Jones and his colleagues believed internecine scientific disputes might be used as a cudgel by politically motivated skeptics. His defensiveness, in such a heated and politicized milieu, seems understandable if not defensible. But ultimately, it can't be good for anyone on Earth.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...is_on?page=0,0

[TheMercenary]

Very interesting summary. Thanks.

[classicman]

Many of you are too young to remember, but in 1975 our government pushed "the coming ice age."

Random House dutifully printed "THE WEATHER CONSPIRACY … coming of the New Ice Age." This may be the only book ever written by 18 authors. All 18 lived just a short sled ride from Washington, D.C. Newsweek fell in line and did a cover issue warning us of global cooling on April 28, 1975. And The New York Times, Aug. 14, 1976, reported "many signs that Earth may be headed for another ice age."

OK, you say, that's media. But what did our rational scientists say?

In 1974, the National Science Board announced: "During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade. Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end…leading into the next ice age."

You can't blame these scientists for sucking up to the fed's mantra du jour. Scientists live off grants. Remember how Galileo recanted his preaching about the earth revolving around the sun? He, of course, was about to be barbecued by his leaders. Today's scientists merely lose their cash flow. Threats work.

In 2002 I stood in a room of the Smithsonian. One entire wall charted the cooling of our globe over the last 60 million years. This was no straight line. The curve had two steep dips followed by leveling. There were no significant warming periods. Smithsonian scientists inscribed it across some 20 feet of plaster, with timelines.

Last year, I went back. That fresco is painted over. The same curve hides behind smoked glass, shrunk to three feet but showing the same cooling trend. Hey, why should the Smithsonian put its tax-free status at risk? If the politicians decide to whip up public fear in a different direction, get with it, oh ye subsidized servants. Downplay that embarrassing old chart and maybe nobody will notice.

Sorry, I noticed.

It's the job of elected officials to whip up panic. They then get re-elected. Their supporters fall in line.

Continued

Well there is always the "money side" of the story.

[classicman]

Then there is this.

It's the science scandal of the year. A thousand e-mails and 2,000 other documents were swiped from the server of Britain's Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University and posted on the Web. Many were truly embarrassing to the writers, while others have been quoted out of context and falsely used as "proof" that global warming is "a hoax."

But in one e-mail, a top "warmist" researcher admits it's a "travesty" that "we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment." (Emphasis added.) Further, "any consideration of geoengineering [is] quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not!"

"Geoengineering," as in the Waxman-Markey "cap and trade" bill that passed the House and that the conservative Heritage Foundation estimates will lop $9.4 trillion off the economy? The one that President Barack Obama plans to support at next week's U.N. Climate Change Conference? Yes, that "geoengineering."

As it happens, the writer of that October 2009 e-mail--Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the warmist bible, the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report--told Congress two years ago that evidence for manmade warming is "unequivocal." He claimed "the planet is running a 'fever' and the prognosis is that it is apt to get much worse."

But Trenberth's "lack of warming at the moment" has been going on at least a decade. "There has been no [surface-measured] warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995," observes MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen. "According to satellite data, global warming stopped about 10 years ago and there's no way to know whether it's happening now," says Roy Spencer, former NASA senior scientist for climate studies.

Link

But hey, what does some scientist from NASA know anyway?

[jinx]

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

Article responding to the recent climate change events

Damage control. Pretty weak at that.