Many leftish groups have for years had a curious opposition to advertising.  Ralph Nader and his PIRG groups always made it a particular issue.  This always struck me as inherently insulting, as the "logic" behind their opposition to advertising is that people are all dumb, unthinking, programmable robots who launch off and buy whatever they see advertised on TV.

The global warming hysteria kind of sucks all the oxygen out of every other goofy leftish issue out there, so now its necessary to link your leftish cause to global warming.  So it is no surprise to find out that advertising apparently causes global warming:

AUSTRALIAN television advertising is producing as much as 57 tonnes of carbon dioxide per hour, and thirty second ad breaks are among the worst offenders, according to audit figures from pitch consultants TrinityP3.

Carbon emissions are particularly strong during high-rating programs such as the final episodes of the Ten Network’s Biggest Loser, which produced 2135kgs per 30 second ad, So You Think You Can Dance at 2061kg for every 30 seconds, closely followed by the Seven News 6pm news at 1689kg and Border Security at 1802kg.

TrinityP3 managing director Darren Woolley said emissions are calculated by measuring a broadcasters’ power consumption and that of a consumer watching an ad on television in their home, B&T Magazine reports.

“We look at the number of households and the number of TVs, and then the proportion of TVs that are plasma, LCD or traditional, and calculate energy consumption based on those factors,” Woolley said.

TrinityP3 is formalising a standard carbon footprint measurement of advertising, which it claims will be the first of its kind.

“Most companies have been obliged to think through their strategies on reducing carbon emissions and they need to remember that their marketing strategies do have an environmental impact that needs to be included. This is not something that is easily able to be measured,” Mr Woolley said.

“Reality television is interesting as the more viewers and voters that tune in, the higher the carbon footprint. The more people vote, the more it adds to the CO2 in the atmosphere.

Note that, oddly, the 54 minutes an hour of regular programming is OK, it’s only the 6 minutes of advertising that has a carbon footprint.  That’s OK, though, because I am going to start turning off the TV during advertisements and go out and sit in my idling SUV and listen to my commercial-free satellite radio instead.

Many leftish groups have for years had a curious opposition to advertising.  Ralph Nader and his PIRG groups always made it a particular issue.  This always struck me as inherently insulting, as the "logic" behind their opposition to advertising is that people are all dumb, unthinking, programmable robots who launch off and buy whatever they see advertised on TV.

The global warming hysteria kind of sucks all the oxygen out of every other goofy leftish issue out there, so now its necessary to link your leftish cause to global warming.  So it is no surprise to find out that advertising apparently causes global warming:

AUSTRALIAN television advertising is producing as much as 57 tonnes of carbon dioxide per hour, and thirty second ad breaks are among the worst offenders, according to audit figures from pitch consultants TrinityP3.

Carbon emissions are particularly strong during high-rating programs such as the final episodes of the Ten Network’s Biggest Loser, which produced 2135kgs per 30 second ad, So You Think You Can Dance at 2061kg for every 30 seconds, closely followed by the Seven News 6pm news at 1689kg and Border Security at 1802kg.

TrinityP3 managing director Darren Woolley said emissions are calculated by measuring a broadcasters’ power consumption and that of a consumer watching an ad on television in their home, B&T Magazine reports.

“We look at the number of households and the number of TVs, and then the proportion of TVs that are plasma, LCD or traditional, and calculate energy consumption based on those factors,” Woolley said.

TrinityP3 is formalising a standard carbon footprint measurement of advertising, which it claims will be the first of its kind.

“Most companies have been obliged to think through their strategies on reducing carbon emissions and they need to remember that their marketing strategies do have an environmental impact that needs to be included. This is not something that is easily able to be measured,” Mr Woolley said.

“Reality television is interesting as the more viewers and voters that tune in, the higher the carbon footprint. The more people vote, the more it adds to the CO2 in the atmosphere.

Note that, oddly, the 54 minutes an hour of regular programming is OK, it’s only the 6 minutes of advertising that has a carbon footprint.  That’s OK, though, because I am going to start turning off the TV during advertisements and go out and sit in my idling SUV and listen to my commercial-free satellite radio instead.

  A reader sent me a heads-up to an article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society ($, abstract here) titled "Climate Change Education and the Ecological Footprint".  The authors express concern that non-science students don’t sufficiently understand global warming and its causes, and want to initiate a re-education program in schools to get people thinking the "right" way.

So, do climate scientists want to focus on better educating kids in details of the carbon cycle?  In the complexities in sorting out causes of warming between natural and man-made effects?  In difficulties with climate modeling?  In the huge role that feedback plays in climate forecasts?

Actually, no.  Interestingly, the curriculum advocated in the Journal of American Meteorology has very little to do with meteorology or climate science.  What they are advocating is a social engineering course structured around the concept of "ecological footprint."  The course, as far as I can tell, has more in common with this online kids game where kids find out what age they should be allowed to live to based on their ecological footprint.

Like the Planet Slayer game above, the approach seems to be built around a quiz (kind of slow and tedious to get through).  Like Planet Slayer, most of the questions are lifestyle questions – do you eat meat, do you buy food from more than 200 miles away, how big is your house, do you fly a lot, etc.  If you answer that yes, you have a good diet and a nice house and travel a bit and own a car, then you are indeed destroying the planet.

I could go nuts on a rant about propoganda in government monopoly schools, but I want to make a different point [feel free to insert rant of choice here].  The amazing thing to me is that none of this has the first thing to do with meteoroogy or climate science.  If there were any science at all in this ecological footprint stuff, it would have to be economics.  What does meteorology have to say about the carrying capacity of the earth?  Zero.  What does climate science have to say about the balance between the benefits of air travel and the cost of the incremental warming that might result from that air travel?  Zero. 

Take one example – food miles.  I live in Phoenix.  The cost to grow crops around here (since most of the agricultural water has to be brought in from hundreds of miles away) is high.  The cost is also high because even irrigated, the soil is not as productive for many crops as it is in, say, Iowa, so crops require more labor, more fertilizer, and more land for the same amount of yield.  I could make a really good argument that an ear of corn trucked in from Iowa probably uses less resources than an ear of corn grown withing 200 miles of where I live.  Agree or disagree, this is a tricky economics question that requires fairly sophisiticated analysis to answer.  How is teaching kids that "food grown within 200 miles helps save the planet" advancing the cause of climate science?  What does meteorology have to say about this question?

I am sorry I don’t have more excerpts, but I am lazy and I have to retype them by hand.  But this is too priceless to miss:

Responding to the statement "Buying bottled water instead of drinking water from a faucet contributes to global warming" only 21% of all [San Jose State University] Meteorology 112 students answered correctly.  In the EF student group, this improved to a 53% correct response….  For the statement, "Eating a vegetarian diet can reduce global warming," the initial correct response by all Meteorology 112 students was 14%, while the EF group improved to 80%.

Oh my god, every time you drink bottled water you are adding 0.0000000000000000000000000001C to the world temperature.  How much global warming do I prevent if I paint flowers on my VW van?  We are teaching college meteorology students this kind of stuff?  The gulf between this and my freshman physics class is so wide, I can’t even get my head around it.  This is a college science class?

In fact, the authors admit that their curriculum is an explicit rejection of science education, bringing the odd plea in a scientific journal that science students should be taught less science:

Critics of conventional environmental education propose that curriculum focused solely on science without personal and social connections may not be the most effective educational model for moving toward social change.

I think it is a pretty good sign that a particular branch of science has a problem when it is focused more on "social change" than on getting the science right, and when its leading journal focuses on education studies rather than science.

If I were a global warming believer, this program would piss me off.  Think about it.  Teaching kids this kind of stuff and then sending them out to argue with knowlegeable skeptics is like teaching a bunch of soldiers only karate and judo and then sending them into a modern firefight.  They are going to get slaughtered. 

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) is chairman of the House (Select) Energy Independence and Global Warming Committee.  He sure seems to know his stuff, huh:

A top Democrat told high school students gathered at the U.S. Capitol Thursday that climate change caused Hurricane Katrina and the conflict in Darfur, which led to the “black hawk down” battle between U.S. troops and Somali rebels….

“In Somalia back in 1993, climate change, according to 11 three- and four-star generals, resulted in a drought which led to famine,” said Markey.

“That famine translated to international aid we sent in to Somalia, which then led to the U.S. having to send in forces to separate all the groups that were fighting over the aid, which led to Black Hawk Down. There was this scene where we have all of our American troops under fire because they have been put into the middle of this terrible situation,” he added.

Ugh.

Years ago, when I was studying engineering in college, I had a professor who used to "joke"  (remember, these are engineers, so the bar for the word "joke" is really low) that when he wanted to prove something, it was a real benefit to have only one data point.  That way, he said, you could plot a trend in any direction with any slope you wanted through the point.  Once you had two or three or more data points, your flexibility was ruined.

I am reminded of this in many global warming articles in the press today.  Here is one that caught my eye today on Tom Nelson’s blog.  There is nothing unusual about it, it just is the last one I saw:

Byers said he has decided to run because he wants to be able to look at his children in 20 or 30 years and be able to say that he took action to try to address important challenges facing humanity. He cited climate change as a “huge” concern, noting that this was driven home during a trip he took to the Arctic three weeks ago.

“The thing that was most striking was how the speed of climate change is accelerating—how it’s much worse than anyone really wants to believe,” Byers said. “To give you a sense of this, we flew over Cumberland Sound, which is a very large bay on the east coast of Baffin Island. This was three weeks ago; there was no ice.”

Do you see the single data point:  Cumberland Sound three weeks ago had no ice.  Incredibly, from this single data point, he not only comes up with a first derivative (the world is warming) but he actually gets the second derivative from this single data point (change is accelerating).  Wow!

We see this in other forms all the time:

• We had a lot of flooding in the Midwest this year
• There were a lot of tornadoes this year
• Hurricane Katrina was really bad
• The Northwest Passage was navigable last year
• An ice shelf collapsed in Antarctica
• We set a record high today in such-and-such city

I often criticize such claims for their lack of any proof of causality  (for example, linking this year’s floods and tornadoes to global warming when it is a cooler year than most of the last 20 seems a real stretch). 

But all of these stories share another common problem – they typically are used by the writer to make a statement about the pace and direction of change (and even the acceleration of this change), something that is absolutely scientifically impossible to do from a single data point.  As it turns out, we often have flooding in the Midwest.  Neither tornadoes nor hurricanes have shown any increasing trend over the past decades.  The Northwest Passage has been navigable a number of years in the last century.  During the time of the ice shelf collapse panic, Antarctica was actually setting 30-year record highs for sea ice extent.  And, by simple math, every city on average should set a new 100-year high temperature record every 100 days, and this is even before considering the urban heat island effect’s upward bias on city temperature measurement.

Postscript:  Gee, I really hate to add a second data point to the discussion, but from Cyrosphere Today, here is a comparison of the Arctic sea ice extent today and exactly 20 years ago (click for a larger view)

The arrow points to Cumberland Sound.  I will not dispute Mr. Byers personal observations, except to say that whatever condition it is in today, there seems to have been even less ice there 20 years ago.

To be fair, sea ice extent in the Arctic is down about a million square kilometers today vs. where it was decades ago (though I struggle to see it in these maps), while the Antarctic is up about a million, so the net world anomaly is about zero right now. 

A while back I wrote about a disgusting little online game sponsored by the Australian government via the ABC.  It appears that this game is being promoted in the public schools as well:

Professor Schpinkee’s “date one should die” exercise is meant to be a “fun” experience for primary students of public schools associated with the Australian Sustainability Schools Initiative.” According to a 2007 Schools Environment newsletter, written by the government sustainability officer in New South Wales and sent to schools in this program, teachers are encouraged to lead children to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Planet Slayer website and use Professor Schpinkee’s Greenhouse Calculator. The newsletter refers to the calculator as a “great game for kids.”

My original post has screenshots and more description.  Via Tom Nelson

Apparently a number of papers are "commemorating" today the 20th anniversary of James Hansen’s speech before Congress warning of catastrophic man-made global warming.  So let’s indeed commemorate it.  Here is the chart from the appendices of Hansen’s speech showing his predictions for man-made global warming:

I have helpfully added in red the actual temperature history, as measured by satellite, over the last 20 years (and scale-shifted to match the base anomaly in Hansens graph).  Yes, 2008 has been far colder than 1988.  We have seen no warming trend in the last 10 years, and temperatures have undershot every one of Hansen’s forecasts.  He thought the world would be a degree C warmer in 20 years, and it is not.  Of course, today, he says the world will warm a degree in the next 20 years — the apocalypse never goes away, it just recesses into the future.

This may explain why Hansen’s GISS surface temperature measurements are so much higher than everyone else’s, and keep getting artificially adjusted upwards:  Hansen put himself way out on a limb, and now is using the resources of the GISS to try to create warming in the metrics where none exist to validate his forecasts of Apocalypse. 

By the way, if you want more insight into the "science" led by James Hansen, check out this post from Steve McIntyre on his trying to independently reproduce the GISS temperature aggregation methodology. 

Here are some more notes and scripts in which I’ve made considerable progress on GISS Step 2. As noted on many occasions, the code is a demented mess – you’d never know that NASA actually has software policies (e.g. here or here . I guess that Hansen and associates regard themselves as being above the law. At this point, I haven’t even begum to approach analysis of whether the code accomplishes its underlying objective. There are innumerable decoding issues – John Goetz, an experienced programmer, compared it to descending into the hell described in a Stephen King novel. I compared it to the meaningless toy in the PPM children’s song – it goes zip when it moves, bop when it stops and whirr when it’s standing still. The endless machinations with binary files may have been necessary with Commodore 64s, but are totally pointless in 2008.

Because of the hapless programming, it takes a long time and considerable patience to figure out what happens when you press any particular button. The frustrating thing is that none of the operations are particularly complicated.

Hansen, despite being paid by US Taxpayers and despite all regulations on government science, refused for years to even release this code for inspection by outsiders and to this day resists helping anyone trying to reproduce his mysterious methodologies.

Which in some ways is all irrelevent anyway, since surface temperature measurement is flawed for so many reasons (location biases, urban heat islands, historical discontinuities, incomplete coverage) that satellite temperature measurement makes far more sense, which is why I used it above.  Of course, there is one person who fights hard against use of this satellite methodology.  Ironically, this person fighting use of space technology is … James Hansen, of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies of NASA!  In our next episode, the head of the FCC will be actively fighting for using the telegraph over radio and TV.

What does a good government technocrat do when the public does not support his expensive vision?  Why, he uses the power of the government education monopoly to try to do a little indocrination.  This is the summary from the climate education bill as proposed by Barrack Obama:

Climate Change Education Act – Requires the Director of the National Science Foundation to establish a Climate Change Education Program to: (1) broaden the understanding of climate change, possible long and short-term consequences, and potential solutions; (2) apply the latest scientific and technological discoveries to provide learning opportunities to people; and (3) emphasize actionable information to help people understand and to promote implementation of new technologies, programs, and incentives related to energy conservation, renewable energy, and greenhouse gas reduction.

Requires such Program to include: (1) a national information campaign to disseminate information on and promote implementation of the new technologies, programs, and incentives; and (2) a competitive grant program to provide grants to states, municipalities, educational institutions, and other organizations to create materials relevant to climate change and climate science, develop climate science kindergarten through grade 12 curriculum and supplementary educational materials, or publish climate change and climate science information.

That fabled multiple-levels-of-editorial-review is at work again at CBS, this time with the story heaadlined "Seismic Activity 5 Times More Energetic Than 20 Years Ago Because Of Global Warming."  Now, only a journalism major who had assiduously avoided taking any science and math classes in his/her life could have possibly found this reasonable.  Half degee changes in atmospheric temperatures are hardly likely to affect seismic activity (the subject of the article, Dr. Tom Chalko, has also written that global warming might make the Earth explode).  Had CBS actually approached any other scientist in the world in any specialization for some kind of comment on the article, they would have likely been told that it made no sense.  But, of course, MSM editorial policy is not to ask for dissenting views in global warming alarmism articles.

Well, it appears CBS has walked away from the story without comment.  Anthony Watt has the whole story, including screen caps of the original article. 

I could probably fill this blog with examples of fact-challenged alarmism, but this one is so easy to debunk it is just staggering.  I am going to make the dangerous assumptions that the WWF is not just outright lying.  If that is true, this is a great example of how popular perception and hysteria substitute for facts and observations.  The WWF is just so convinced this is going on, no one even bothers to check to see if it is true.  First the story, from here, via Tom Nelson:

According to a recent report, endangered migratory whales will have reduced feeding areas due to the shrinkage of Antarctic sea ice from global warming.

The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) said this could threaten the species. The report, “Ice Breaker – Pushing the boundaries for Whales” says whales will soon have to travel up to 310 miles further south in search of food because the ice will retreat up to 30 percent in some areas.

The study also says the whales’ food supply will be further reduced because of the balance between cold sea ice and warmer sea water which causes an up swelling of nutrients that could further contract.

WWF officer Heather Sohl said, "Essentially, what we are seeing is that ice-associated whales such as the Antarctic minke whale will face dramatic changes to their habitat over little more than the lifespan of an individual whale."

OK, two problems with this.  First, the even the IPCC predicts Antarctic ice to grow, not shrink, even under a strong global warming case.  Note the Antarctic is below zero, actually contributing to a sea level drop and mitigating Greenland melting.

And, there is that problem of reality introding, because in fact Antarctica has been hitting 30-year highs for sea ice extent over the past year:

I will leave it to y’all in the comments to decide if they are outright lying or if they are just ignorant.

Via Tom Nelson, this guy is certainly a fine example of enlightened scientific discourse:

Climate "skepticism" is not a morally defensible position. The debate is over, and it’s been over for quite some time, especially on this blog.

We will delete comments which deny the absolutely overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, just as we would delete comments which questioned the reality of the Holocaust or the equal mental capacities and worth of human beings of different ethnic groups. Such "debates" are merely the morally indefensible trying to cover itself in the cloth of intellectual tolerance.

Wow.  It is amazing that the discussion of how trace atmospheric gasses might affect global temperature, and whether the climactic reaction to this is one of positive or negative feedback, has become a moral rather than a scientific question. 

Though this may be obvious to readers, its worth repeating once in a while the chain of reasoning that must all be true for dramatic government action to be justified in reducing CO2.  That chain is roughly as follows:

1. Can the presence of CO2 be shown in a lab to increase absorption of incoming radiation?
2. If so, can trace amounts (370ppm) of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere be enough to absorb meaningful amounts of radiation and if so, how much?
3. If CO2 in the atmosphere tends to provide a heating effect, do feedback effects (e.g. water vapor) tend to amplify (positive feedback) or damp (negative feedback) the resulting temperature change
4. What would the effect of the temperature changes be, both negative AND positive.  Undoubtedly some things would be worse, while others, like longer growing seasons, would be better
5. How are other natural effects, such as the sun, changing the climate and global temperatures, and how large are these effects compared to man’s.
6. If the effects in #4 are net negative, and they are large enough even to be recognizable against the backdrop of natural variations in #5, do they outweigh the substantial costs, in terms of increased poverty, slowed development, lost wealth, etc. in substantial CO2 abatement.

The answer to #1 is yes, it is settled science. 

The answer to #2 is probably yes, though the amount is in some doubt, but everyone (even the IPCC) agrees it is probably less than a degree per century. 

Most of the warming in forecasts (2/3 or more in the IPCC cases) comes from positive feedback in #3, but we really know nothing here, except that most systems are driven by negative feedback.  In other words, this is so unsettled we don’t even know the sign of the effect.  (Video here)

#4 is the focus of a lot of really, really bad science.  The funding mechanism at universities has forced many people to try to come up with a global warming angle for their area of interest, so it causes a lot of people to posit bad things without much proof.  If you want to study grape growing in Monterrey County, you are much more likely to get funded if you say you want to study "the negative effects of global warming on grape growing in Monterrey County."  Serious science is starting to debunk many of the most catastrophic claims, and history tells us that the world has thrived in periods of warmer climates.  Even the IPCC, for example, projects only minimal sea level rise over the next century as increases in Antarctic ice offset melting in Greenland.  (more here)

We are beginning to understand that natural variability is pretty high in #5.  Alarmist might be call "sun variability deniers" as they refuse to admit that Mr. Sun might have substantial effects on the Earth.  They are kind of in a hole, though.  They are trying to simultaneously claim in #3 that the climate is dominated by positive feedback, but the same time in #5 claim the climate without man is really, really stable.  These two in tandem make no sense. 

And in #6, nobody knows the answer, but a few serious looks at the problem have shown that aggressive CO2 abatement programs could have catastrophic effects on world poverty.  Which is ironic, since the best correlation with severe weather death rates in the world is not CO2 level but wealth and poverty reduction.  No matter how many storms there are, as poverty has declined in a certain region, so have severe weather deaths, even while CO2 has been increasing.  So one could easily argue that CO2 abatement programs will increase rather than decrease severe weather deaths

So this is the trick people like this blogger use.  They point to good science in #1 and partially in #2 to claim the whole chain of reasoning is "settled science," when in fact there are gaping holes in our knowledge of 3-4-5-6.

As a note, I have never deleted a comment on this site (except for obvious spam), despite many that disagree strongly with my position.

From the Center for American Progress Action Fund via Maggies Farm:

This tragic, deadly, and destructive weather — not to mention the droughts in Georgia, California, Kansas, North Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, North Dakota, and elsewhere across the country — are consistent with the changes scientists predicted would come with global warming. Gov. Chet Culver (D-IA) called the three weeks of storms that gave rise to the floods in his state "historic in proportion," saying "very few people could anticipate or prepare for that type of event." Culver is, unfortunately, wrong. As far back as 1995, analysis by the National Climatic Data Center showed that the United States "had suffered a statistically significant increase in a variety of extreme weather events." In 2007, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that it is "very likely" that man-made global warming will bring an "increase in frequency of hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation." The Nobel Prize-winning panel of thousands of scientists and government officials also found, "Altered frequencies and intensities of extreme weather, together with sea level rise, are expected to have mostly adverse effects on natural and human systems." In 2002, scientists said that "increased precipitation, an expected outcome of climate change, may cause losses of US corn production to double over the next 30 years — additional damage that could cost agriculture $3 billion per year." Scientists have also found that the "West will see devastating droughts as global warming reduces the amount of mountain snow and causes the snow that does fall to melt earlier in the year."

Beyond the fact that these folks could profitably learn about a writing concept called a "paragraph break,"  this analysis is hilariously bad.  The key fact not mentioned is that the first five months of 2008 have been the coldest in decades, both in the US and worldwide, and have been far colder than 2007, which saw much milder weather and fewer tornadoes this time of year (more here).  In fact one could easily, but probably incorrectly since it is such a short period of time, posit that warming would reduce tornadoes, since this year’s cold weather has increased them so much.

Because we have not seen any global warming trend over the last 10 years, alarmists have switched to "climate change" as their bogeyman.  In particular, they argue that global warming will increase severe weather frequency.  There is a lot of evidence that this statement is incorrect, but lets accept it for a minute.  Their theory still requires an intermediate step of warming.  There is no mechanism anyone has ever described where increasing CO2 directly yields increases in severe weather without passing through warming first. 

But this is exactly what they are trying to claim, at least with the masses:  They are in effect claiming that somehow CO2 causes severe weather directly.  But this is simply impossible.  If the world has been colder this year, then severe weather, if it results from temperature change at all, is resulting from the cold weather, not warming.

In fact, the article goes on to imply that crop problems this year are due to man-made effects, that somehow global warming is causing these failures.  But crop problems this year are almost entirely due to cold spring tempertures and late frosts.  You have really got to be a master PR spinner to convert frost and cold issues into a global warming problem.

The whole thing is pretty funny.   More on tornadoes and warming here.

Update:  I could post a zillion of these, but here is one example of what is ailing crops:

Wheat, durum and barley crops are currently one to two weeks behind normal due to cold weather so far this spring, with temperatures 3° to 5°C below normal.

"A continuation of cool weather could lead to delayed development and increased risk of frost damage this fall," said Bruce Burnett, the CWB’s director of weather and market analysis, in the board’s release Thursday.

Update #2:  US Tornado fatalities graphed for the last 100 years:

Or not:

Noel Sheppard’s got the goods on Al Gore.

For years, NewsBusters has contended that Nobel Laureate Al Gore is spreading global warming hysteria to benefit his own wallet.

On Wednesday, despite claims by one of Gore’s representatives two months ago, it was revealed that his Generation Investment Management private equity fund has taken a 9.5 percent stake in a company that has one of the largest carbon credit portfolios in the world.

Can the IRS please tell me how Al Gore can get away with having the nonprofit Alliance for Climate Protection do all the PR heavy lifting for his for-profit investments?

Note that carbon credits are a zero-value asset unless by government fiat they are declared to have some value.  In the absence of global warming legislation and cap-and-trade schemes, this company’s portfolio is worth nothing.  Only the lobbying by Gore and his "non-profits" can make it have value. 

Interestingly, this carbon credit portfolio also has zero value even under alternative CO2 reduction alternatives, such as a carbon tax.  Under a carbon tax, there is much less opportunity for rent-seeking by powerful people like Gore, and carbon credit portfolios are worthless.  Interestingly, Gore proposed a US carbon tax 15 years or so ago.  My guess is that he would no longer support a carbon tax, as it would bankrupt many of his investments.

Tom Nelson really sums up much of the global warming movement in one blog post headline:

Once again, the best way to avoid global warming catastrophe is to do whatever some special interest group already wanted done anyway

Specifically he was referring to this:

“Arguably, the best way to reduce global warming in our lifetimes is to reduce or eliminate our consumption of animal products…"

From the Daily Mail via Tom Nelson.  Note particularly the part in bold. 

The blueprint for the CO2 ‘scrubber’ raises
the prospect of a generation of machines which would help reduce the
billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere
by the use of fossil fuels…. 

The prototype, being built at a laboratory in Tucson, Arizona, by a company called Global Research Technologies, will cost about £100,000 and take about two years to construct. 

The
devices – each nearly the size of a shipping container – would have to
be produced in their millions to soak up human carbon emissions.

The idea is bound to be controversial, with environmentalists seeing
so-called technological solutions to global warming as undermining
attempts to promote greener lifestyles and industries.

Don’t you understand!?  We don’t care about CO2.  It is just a convenient cover for the socialist wealth reduction policies we really want.  If we found a way to produce wealth and energy without CO2, then we would have to find a new Trojan Horse issue.  That is why we oppose nuclear power, and will find something wrong with solar and wind power when they become economic.

Cross-posted from Coyote Blog

The Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) web site has an absolutely horrible kid’s game called "Planet Slayer."  In this game, kids answer lifestyle questions and the program tells them when they should die because they have used up their "fair share" of the world’s resources.  The less politically correct kids are, or the wealthier they are, the sooner they are told they should die.  Accepting the default, average choices in the games tells kids they should die when they are 9 years old.

Yeah, I know you think I am exaggerating.  Because this is likely to get pulled down soon, I will show you a series of screenshots from it.  Whether it gets pulled down or not, a major media company (with all of its famed multiple levels of editorial control) thought this was a good game for kids.  I actually delayed publishing this, because I wanted to make sure this was not some kind of hack or joke site.  But you can get there right from the ABC home page by clicking "science" in the top menu and clicking on the planet slayer game icon at the bottom of the science page.  I still wonder whether it’s a put on – it’s that bad.

Here is the landing page (click on any page to increase the size):

Yep, that little sign does indeed say "find out when you should die."  Here the game is explained:

Here is the first question:

With each question, if you choose any answer that might not indicate that you are a subsistence farmer in Africa living on a $1 a day, your pig gets fatter.  I really encourage you to check out the whole thing.  It is one politically correct litmus test after another.  My pig got slightly fatter, until I got to this one:

Answering that you spend any more than $10,000 AUS (about a 1:1 conversion with US dollars), your pig will get really fat.  The wealthier you are, the more evil you are in a direct relationship.  It is a point I have made for a while:  global warming alarmists consider their preferred solution to environmental issues to be universal poverty. 

There is me, really evil, because I earn a good living.  And, as we can see with this question, since I spend my money on ordinary stuff that I actually want, rather than where the authors would like me to spend it, I really suck.  When you hit the final button, you pig is actually exploded in a bloody mess  (yes, the red is blood).  As it turns out, I should have been strangled at birth:

Hat tip to Watts Up With That.  Really, in some ways this is an awesome game.   Never have I seen such a pure combination of Marxist-style zero-sum economics with science-challenged warming alarmism.

I don’t think I need to bother refuting any of this.  If you are new to the site, you can find a basic refutation of zero-sum economics here and a series of resources on global warming, from a book to free Youtube videos, here.

After 12,241 articles questioning the financial motivations of skeptics, someone finally looked at the financial motivations of alarmists:

Amid its calls for individual sacrifices in the name of the environment and paeans to “green” legislation, the network once again failed to disclose prominently that its parent company stands to get rich off of “environmentalist” laws.

NBC Universal is owned by General Electric, which plays a regular role in this column because of how aggressively the company has hitched its profits to its lobbying successes. GE spends more than any other corporation in America on lobbying the federal government — more than $20 million annually over the past three years — and Green Week and Earth Week probably should be disclosed as lobbying efforts.

In many of GE’s businesses, the profit model appears to be: (1) invest in something for which there isn’t much demand; (2) then lobby to mandate or subsidize it.

Wind turbines are a great example. GE describes itself as “one of the world’s leading wind turbine suppliers.” Absent subsidies, however, there might be no windmill industry, because windmills cannot reliably produce energy, and certainly not as affordably as traditional fuels such as coal.

Germany’s energy agency examined its subsidized wind industry and concluded in 2005: “Instead of spending billions on building new wind turbines, the emphasis should be on making houses more energy efficient.” But making houses more energy efficient doesn’t make GE rich.

GE spends millions lobbying to protect and expand the cornucopia of wind subsidies that includes a “production tax credit” for wind farms, government mandates on utilities to buy wind power and local subsidies. In one case in upstate New York, the GE turbines will be powering a wind farm completed using eminent domain.

GE’s coal gasification, solar power generation, electric cars and biodiesel businesses are the same: Consumers and investors acting with their own money would not patronize these technologies, but Congress, acting with your money, will. GE’s $20 million annual lobbying budget sees to it.

It is important to admit when one has made a mistake.  The great thing about blogging is that it is a real-time media and allows for corrections and update.  So here is mine.

In my book, and numerous times on this blog, I wrote:

Something like 80-85% of the world’s ice is in Antarctica.  And no one really thinks it is melting or going to melt.  In fact, if you look at the marks on the IPCC chart above for the contribution of Antarctic ice to ocean levels, it has a net negative impact, which means the IPCC actually expects the Antarctic ice sheet to grow, not melt.

Whoa, that can’t be right!  Mr. Gore showed those videos of ice retreating in Antarctica.  Well, yes, sort of.  Scientists expect that global warming will make the sea currents that circle Antarctica a bit warmer, leading to more precipitation and more snowfall on the continent.  Besides, Antarctica is so damn cold that raising temperatures a few degrees is not going to melt anything. 

The one exception is the Antarctic Peninsula, which sticks out into the warmer oceans.  This land area, representing about 2% of the Antarctic land mass and even less of its total ice sheet, is expected to warm and lose ice while the other 98% gains ice.

Guess what?  Mr. Gore chose that little 2% to illustrate his movie.  Was he ignorant of the choice he was making, or did he know exactly what he was doing, telling the literal truth (that the peninsula is melting) but leading viewers to the wrong conclusion overall about Antarctic ice?

As shown in bold, for years I have (incorrectly) been saying that Al Gore used footage from ice melting in the Antarctic Penninsula (the only part of Antarctica that is warming rather than cooling) to misleadingly imply that Antarctica was melting.  Well, I was wrong.  In fact, Gore did not use footage from the Antarctic Penninsula, but rather special effects footage from a science fiction movie.

I am sorry that I said Al Gore was guilty of cherry-picking his filming spots to leave the wrong impresion about Antarctic warming.  I should have instead said that Al Gore was guilty of using entirely made-up and fabricated CGI footage to leave the wrong impression about Antarctic warming.

Thank you for the opportunity to come clean and correct this error.

Amy Goodman, producer of something called "Democracy Now" had this to say as she shared the state with James Hansen of NASA the other day:

Goodman blamed the ExxonMobil (NYSE:XOM) for what she insisted was a lack of coverage of the global warming issue for investing in public policy think tanks.

“[E]xxonMobil for example has pumped more than $8 million into 40 think tanks, which then provide so-called experts to the media to dismiss problems as such as global warming,” Goodman said. “These corporate Trojan horses are staples of American broadcasting – both public and private – that helps explain the reluctance of the U.S. media to even cover global warming. The topic gets three times as much coverage in the British newspapers as it does American papers.”

“When global warming does get coverage by the U.S.press, it’s present in false balance with the views of industry-sponsored skeptics,” Goodman said.

I would normally just ignore this woman as living in cloud-coocooland except that so much of the media seems so committed to this "alarmists are out-spent" meme, a theory that made no sense even before Al Gore starting collecting $300 million in advertising money to promote his investment fund promote climate alarmism.  Heck, I have trouble even finding articles that mention the skeptic’s position, much less give it equal time.  The article makes the same observation:

However, unbeknownst to Goodman, a recent Business & Media Institute study found “a meager 20 percent of stories even mentioned there were any alternative opinions to the so-called ‘consensus’ on the issue.” The study suggested there’s a bias that only gives one side of the global warming debate, the alarmist side – not the skeptic side.

It is appropriate that Goodman made her comments along with NASA’s James Hansen.  Hansen is currently looking to set the Guiness record for most media citiations and quotes of a man who claims to be censored.  He also is quite a censor himself, using his government position to go after textbook makers who even mention the skeptic’s position.

Ms. Goodman and Mr. Hansen are very typical fascists.  They define media balance as "100% my position, and no time for the opposition."  Note the definition of media corruption as "false balance."

From La Marguerite, via Tom Nelson.  The comments are so honest and rational, I would fear they were fake if I did not see them in the original:

When I launched the TalkClimateChange forums last year, I was initially worried as to where I would find people who didn’t believe in global warming. I had planned to create a furious debate, but in my experience global warming was such a universally accepted issue that I expected to have to dredge the slums of the internet in order to find a couple of deniers who could keep the argument thriving.

The first few days were slow going, but following a brief write-up of my site by Junk Science I was swamped by climate skeptics who did a good job of frightening off the few brave Greens who slogged out the debate with. Whilst there was a lot of rubbish written, the truth was that they didn’t so much frighten the Greens away – they comprehensively demolished them with a more in depth understanding of the science, cleverly thought out arguments, and some very smart answers. If you want to learn about the physics of convection currents, gas chromatography, or any number of climate science topics then read some of the early debates on TalkClimateChange. I didn’t believe a word of it, but I had to admit that these guys were good.

In the following months the situation hardly changed. As the forum continued to grow, as the blog began to catch traffic, and as I continued to try and recruit green members I continued to be disappointed with the debate. In short, and I am sorry to say it, anti-greens (Reds, as we call them) appear to be more willing to comment, more structured, more able to quote peer reviewed research, more apparently rational and apparently wider read and better informed.

And it’s not just TalkClimateChange. Since we re-launched the forums on Green Options and promoted the “Live Debate“ on Nuclear Power, the pro-nuclear crowd have outclassed the few brave souls that have attempted to take them on (with the exception of our own Matt from TalkClimateChange). So how can this be? Where are all these bright Green champions, and why have I failed to recruit them into the debate? Either it’s down to poor online marketing skills, or there is something else missing.