Climate of Extremes: Patrick J. Michaels

Patrick J. Michaels: Cato Institute

This article appeared in National Review Online’s Planet Gore page (Jan 30, 2009)

Al Gore’s Climate of Extremes [Patrick J. Michaels]

Ho-hum. On January 28, in the midst of a pelting sleet storm, Al Gore told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the end is nigh from global warming.

He told the Senate that “some scientists” predict up to 11 degrees of warming in the next 91 years (while failing to note that the last 12 have seen exactly none), and that this would “bring a screeching halt to human civilization and threaten the fiber of life everywhere on earth.” Hey folks, this is serious!

Besides having a remarkable knack for scheduling big speeches on remarkably cold or snowy days (it’s known as the “Gore Effect” in journalistic circles), Gore has been incredibly ineffective in bringing his message home.

According to the New York Times, Gore told the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last November, “I feel, in a sense, I’ve failed badly. . . . [T]here is not anything anywhere close to an appropriate sense of urgency [about global warming]. This is an existential threat.”

And fail he has. The Pew Foundation recently asked Americans to choose which of 20 prominent issues is of most importance. They included the economy, crime, education, and, of course, global warming, which came in dead last….(read the rest here)

The video above is part 1 of 3 (be sure to watch all three parts) in which scientist Patrick J. Michaels is interviewed by Jon Caldara, president of The Independence Institute, a Colorado think tank. Patrick J. Michaels and Robert C. Balling, Jr. are the authors of Climate of Extremes, published by The Cato Institute in Jan 2009. Patrick J. Michaels is Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies at The Cato Institute in Washington D.C. Michaels is a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and visiting scientist with the Marshall Institute in Washington, D.C. He is a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. Michaels is a contributing author and reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change….

In the Preface to Climate of Extremes former Virginia State Climatologist Michaels describes how he and other state climatologists were stripped of their titles, and jobs, and told by their governors to “shut up” about the global warming hoax. Something about, in the case of Oregon’s Climatologist, contradictions interfering “with the state’s stated goals to reduce greenhouse gases.’’

Continuing from the Preface:

David Legates, at the University of Delaware, was told by Governor Ruth Ann Minner (D) that he could no longer speakon globalwarming as State Climatologist. His faculty position is a regular tenured line in the geography department. He’s free, as State Climatologist, to say anything about the weather, so long as there’s no political implication…..

Out West, things got even uglier. The Assistant State Climatologist for Washington, Mark Albright, was fired because, despite his boss’s orders, he refused to stop e-mailing—to journalists, to inquiringcitizens, to anyone—the entire snowfall record for the Cascade Mountainsrather than the cherry-picked one. For e-mailing that record,the assistant state climatologist in Washington lost his job.What had started with Oregon’s George Taylor had migratedacross the Columbia River.

For a further account of these shenanigans see NBC & Global Warming Jihad

Patrick J. Michaels and Jon Caldara

For some comic relief listen to Paul Shanklin as Algore singing “Ball of Fire” (courtesy Rush Limbaugh show:

Carbon Dioxide NOT a Pollutant! ‘Tis Necessary for All Life

Science has now proven the following very important points:

• CO2 is definitely not a pollutant. It is a friendly trace gas necessary for all life.
• Human-produced CO2 is a miniscule fraction of a percentage of greenhouse gases.
• 96.5% of all greenhouse gases emit from the oceans, naturally.
• Without CO2, vegetation dies, herbivores die, you die.
• CO2 levels used to be much higher many times in the past.
• Higher temperatures from the sun result in CO2 levels rising long afterwards.
• Rising CO2 is an effect of global warming, not a cause.
• Global warming and cooling is a natural phenomenon.
• The higher the CO2 levels in the atmosphere, the greener our planet becomes.
• Forests and plant life growth has increased by approx 40% over the last 50 years, thanks to CO2.
• Increasing CO2 yields larger food crops. This is beneficial to a growing population.
• The Earth is not currently warming, it is in fact cooling.
• Temperatures in the past have often been much warmer than today.
• Even if it were to happen, a warmer Earth is far better than a colder one, for all life.
• Many scientists believe we are on the brink of another ice age.
• When the planet warms and cools it is purely due to the sun. Not your car.
• Polar ice is now at record levels and still growing.
• Climate changes happen all the time, and have occurred much faster than anything in modern times.
• There has been no increase in extreme weather. In fact, records show the exact opposite.

Read the whole article at I Love Carbon Dioxide

Also see Michell Malkin, June 2008: In Praise of Carbon Dioxide
Here is a You Tube interview with Ann McElhinney, producer and director of “Not Evil Just Wrong”, a feature length documentary now in release:

Carbon Offset Scam: $$ to Assuage the Guilt

Wesleyan Recommends Buying Good Feelings….

Wesleyan is making a green pitch to help well heeled, guilt laden alumni, traveling to the upcoming Reunion/Commencement, feel better about their carbon footprint. The Wesleyan University web site says:

To offset your carbon emissions when traveling to Reunion & Commencement Weekend this year, please visit the Carbonfund.org web site! Use their Auto and Airline calculators to estimate the amount of carbon you will produce in traveling to and from Middletown, and make a donation to Carbonfund’s carbon-reducing projects to offset your impact. (and)

You will notice a new color standing out against the traditional black and red regalia decorating the 176^th graduating class during its commencement ceremony this year: Green. A symbol of our dedication to producing an increasingly sustainable Reunion & Commencement Weekend, all graduating seniors, graduate students, alumni and their families, as well as faculty and staff members, will have the opportunity to don green ribbons indicating their commitment to the Wesleyan Community Climate Agreement and to leading a more environmentally conscientious and sustainable lifestyle in future pursuits.

The Washington Post had an interesting article on Aug 16, 2007 (excerpts):

With a click, a credit card and $99, visitors can pay a Silver Spring nonprofit group, Carbonfund.org, to “offset” a year’s worth of greenhouse-gas emissions. Whatever the customer put into the atmosphere — by flying, driving, using electricity — the site promises to cancel out, by funding projects that reduce pollutant

Sites such as this one, offering absolution from the modern nag of climate guilt, have created a $55 million industry that once would have been beyond the greenest of imaginations. The market for “voluntary carbon offsets” now encompasses dozens of sellers and thousands of buyers, including individuals and corporations.

But in some cases, these customers may be buying good feelings and little else.

A closer look reveals an unregulated market in which some improvements bought by customers are only estimated, extrapolated, hoped-for or nil. Some offsets support projects that would have gone forward anyway. Others deliver results difficult to measure.

Carbonfund.org, for example, has advertised offsets that finance wind farms and tree-planting projects. But some wind farms said the donations haven’t led to anything new….

Blogger Doug Bandow at OpenMarket.org opines:

What a great system. I think I will open a carbon offset business. Pay me, oh, $100 and I will plant a sprig that will eventually become a tree, absorbing the carbon dioxide that you’re causing by getting on an airplane or buying a computer or, especially, driving to work. And I am offering a special deal, today only! A dozen trees for just $1000. How can you beat that? Just send your checks to me, in care of CEI. It is a classic win-win situation: You can feel good about yourself while I can go look for another antique chess set or rare history book.

Feet to the Fire Festival: More Info….

The Wesleyan community will explore its environmental impact through an eco-arts festival called “Feet to the Fire” on May 10 that will feature food, music, art, theater and a premier by a world-renowned choreographer Ann Carlson (pictured above).

Running from noon to 5 p.m. at Veterans Park in Middletown, “Feet to the Fire” will combine the variety of arts performances, interactive exhibits and a farmers market with food from Connecticut vendors. Exhibits coordinated by the Jonah Center for Earth and Art will highlight energy conservation, sustainability and resilient communities.

Ann Carlson, award-winning choreographer, launches a new series of performance works, Planet Next, that envision life on a future earth. The first of these works, “Green Movement,” uses elements of humor and surprise while challenging the audience to intimately confront the realities of their present day existence.

“Feet to the Fire is an extraordinary campus-wide and community exploration of one of the most urgent issues facing our world today,” says Pam Tatge, director of Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts. “The idea that so many students, faculty members, community members, and artists have collaborated to make works for the festival is simply thrilling.”

The event will also feature a sculpture garden, labyrinth, theater, dance, music, poetry, art and performances by Art Farm’s Circus for a Fragile Planet, Marion Belanger, Tom Callinan, Electric Junkyard Gamelan, Green Street Arts Center, Independent Day School, Kalimba Liberian Group, Geoff Kaufman, Jesse Karlsberg, The Middletuners, Mixashawn, Noah Baerman Trio, Oddfellows Playhouse, RJ and the On-the-Spot Jug Band, Susan Romano, Sirius Coyote, Toussaint Liberator, Wesleyan students and more.

The festival is a part of “Feet to the Fire: Exploring Global Climate Change from Science to Art,” an 18-month project that includes research opportunities for a team of students and faculty to explore first-hand the effects of global warming, fieldwork studies in art and science, performances, pedagogical exchanges in existing courses, commissioning of artists and convening of experts.

“All of us working on the Festival are united in the belief that the arts have the potential to help us see and understand the impact of climate change while at the same time assist us in envisioning a sustainable future,” Tatge says.

The project is funded in part by a grant from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters Creative Campus Innovations Grant Program, a component of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Wesleyan’s grant is one of only eight grants given to challenge campus-based performing arts presenters to integrate their programs more organically within the academic environment.

The Festival is co-sponsored by Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts and Environmental Studies Program, the Jonah Center for Earth and Art and the City of Middletown, in collaboration with the Center for Creative Research and the Green Street Arts Center.

Feet to the Fire will take place from noon to 5 p.m. rain or shine. Admission is free and open to the public. The event is located at Veterans Memorial Park in Middletown, located off Newfield Street. For more information and directions call 860-685-3355.

Source: The Wesleyan Connection

Coginchaug River at Veterans Memorial Park (June 2007)….

Climate Facts to Warm To….

Read our new posting today on the page Global Warming Hoax (see sidebar)

Excerpt here:

“There’s been a lot of talk about the impact of the sun and that maybe we’re going to go through or are entering a period of less intense solar activity and this could be contributing to the current cooling.”

Duffy: “Can you tell us about NASA’s Aqua satellite, because I understand some of the data we’re now getting is quite important in our understanding of how climate works?”

Marohasy: “That’s right. The satellite was only launched in 2002 and it enabled the collection of data, not just on temperature but also on cloud formation and water vapour. What all the climate models suggest is that, when you’ve got warming from additional carbon dioxide, this will result in increased water vapour, so you’re going to get a positive feedback. That’s what the models have been indicating. What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite … (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they’re actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you’re getting a negative rather than a positive feedback.”

Duffy: “The climate is actually, in one way anyway, more robust than was assumed in the climate models?”

Marohasy: “That’s right … These findings actually aren’t being disputed by the meteorological community. They’re having trouble digesting the findings, they’re acknowledging the findings, they’re acknowledging that the data from NASA’s Aqua satellite is not how the models predict, and I think they’re about to recognise that the models really do need to be overhauled and that when they are overhauled they will probably show greatly reduced future warming projected as a consequence of carbon dioxide.”

Duffy: “From what you’re saying, it sounds like the implications of this could be considerable …”

Marohasy: “That’s right, very much so. The policy implications are enormous. The meteorological community at the moment is really just coming to terms with the output from this NASA Aqua satellite and (climate scientist) Roy Spencer’s interpretation of them. His work is published, his work is accepted,

Hot It’s Not (Exposing the Gore Fraud)….

Even the MSM is starting to notice the hype and alarmism regarding climate change. To update our previous post (see below) we now find this interesting op-ed by Jeff Jacoby in today’s Boston Globe (1/6/08).

….”2007 to be ‘warmest on record,’ ” BBC News reported on Jan. 4, 2007. Citing experts in the British government’s Meteorological Office, the story announced that “the world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007,” surpassing the all-time high reached in 1998…..But a funny thing happened on the way to the planetary hot flash: Much of the planet grew bitterly cold.….In South America, for example, the start of winter last year was one of the coldest ever observed….. In Buenos Aires, it snowed for the first time in 89 years, while in Peru the cold was so intense that hundreds of people died….University of Oklahoma geophysicist David Deming, a specialist in temperature and heat flow, notes in the Washington Times that “unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007…..Closer to home, 44.5 inches of snow fell in New Hampshire last month, breaking the previous record of 43 inches, set in 1876. And the Canadian government is forecasting the coldest winter in 15 years.…. so relentlessly has the alarmist scenario been hyped, and so disdainfully have dissenting views been dismissed, that millions of people assume Gore must be right when he insists: “The debate in the scientific community is over.”….But it isn’t. Just last month, more than 100 scientists signed a strongly worded open letter pointing out that climate change is a well-known natural phenomenon, and that adapting to it is far more sensible than attempting to prevent it.    (emphasis added)

The “Silver Lining” in Global Warming

The “silver lining” in Global Warming, the Destruction of Conservatism in America….
Far left reporter Dave Lindorff (Wesleyan ’71) writing in the Baltimore Chronicle (12/22/07) opines:

Say what you will about the looming catastrophe facing the world as the pace of global heating and polar melting accelerates. There is a silver lining…..The area that will by completely inundated by the rising ocean—and not in a century but in the lifetime of my two cats—are the American southeast, including the most populated area of Texas, almost all of Florida, most of Louisiana, and half of Alabama and Mississippi, as well as goodly portions of eastern Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina…..
So what we see is that huge swaths of conservative America are set to face a biblical deluge in a few more presidential cycles…..So again, we will see the decline and depopulation of the nation’s vast midsection—noted for its consistent conservatism. Only in the northernmost area, around the Great Lakes (which will be not so great anymore), and along the Canadian border, will there still be enough rain for farming and continued large population concentrations, but those regions, like Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois, are also more liberal in their politics. (emphasis added)

This is nutty stuff folks. This is the most extreme form of climate change alarmism and clearly illustrates the underlying political agenda; i.e anti-capitalism and destruction of conservatism, United Nations usurpation of our national sovereignty, and other far left nostrums. There is recent, albeit limited, evidence that Global Warming has actually ceased. Astrophysicist David Whitehouse writing in “The New Statesman” (U.K.) 12/19/07) states:

With only few days remaining in 2007, the indications are the global temperature for this year is the same as that for 2006 – there has been no warming over the 12 months.

But is this just a blip in the ever upward trend you may ask? No.

The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001. Global warming has, temporarily or permanently, ceased. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming – the greenhouse effect. Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what or else we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly…..For the past decade the world has not warmed. Global warming has stopped. It’s not a viewpoint or a sceptic’s inaccuracy. It’s an observational fact. Clearly the world of the past 30 years is warmer than the previous decades and there is abundant evidence (in the northern hemisphere at least) that the world is responding to those elevated temperatures. But the evidence shows that global warming as such has ceased.

Dr. Whitehouse does not reject the CO2/Greenhouse Gas science. Clearly CO2 emissions are rising but CO2 comprises only an extremely tiny fraction of the earth’s atmosphere. Its present concentration is roughly 390 ppm up from 315 ppm in 1960 when accurate measurements of this sort became feasible. To visualize the quantity of CO2 in our atmosphere, imagine the atmosphere as a 100 yard football gridiron. On this scale Nitrogen (78%) would occupy all of the field down to the 22 yard line; Oxygen (21%), would bring us to the 1 yard line where Argon (1%) would bring us to the final inch line of which only a small fraction of that would signify the volume of CO2! This comparison is mentioned in Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear”; a similar example, using stadium spectators instead of the gridiron, itself can be found here.

An extended discussion of the CO2 problem and related matters can be found at the EcoWorld website. Here, in an interview titled “Beyond Global Warming”, climate scientist Roger Pielke, Sr. throws much light on the subject. He says to blame all of the perceived changes in climate on CO2 emissions is wrong. Important factors being overlooked and/or underreported are changing patterns of land use and land cover. He says:

With respect to extreme weather, a much more important issue than how greenhouse gases are altering our climate is society’s greatly increased vulnerability to extreme weather events – a direct result not of changes in weather but of increased settlement by expanding human populations into low-lying coastal regions, floodplains, and marginal arid land.

Roger Pielke Sr. is a retired professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, Ft. Collins, and a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Since July 2005 he has written and maintained Climate Science, a blog that serves as a scientific forum for dialogue and commentary on climate issues. With William R. Cotton, he is the co-author of Human Impacts on Weather and Climate (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Also please see our recent posting on ConservaCity “Global Warming Hoax Losing Ground”